Last Tuesday evening I attended Ignite #12…
It never ceases to amaze me how amazing the buildings are, in which tech, startup, and hacker events are held. I wrote awhile ago about LeLoop, a Hacker Space located in a squatter space – a beautiful, abandoned office building. This evening I found myself down the street from The Opera, walking into what was clearly the carriage entrance to a wonderful courtyard at one point. Following the signs to Ignite, and joined by my ‘posse’ of tech-geeks (we had all come straight from the Silicon Students event across town), we entered a small class room.
Willy had explained to me what Ignite was on the metro as we had come over – speakers sign up and are given five minutes and a 20 slide maximum to share an idea. The ideas can be about whatever you want, but, more or less, it seems to be in the same spectrum as TED Talks. These aren’t pitches, or plain old life stories, but innovative talks – or at least, that’s the premise.
As we sat in the back of the classroom, I couldn’t help but be more interested in the document of various Wifi usernames and passwords that Willy was sending me than in the topics above. Talks started out with premises such as “the 20th century was the Pre-Google century…” – As if that made any sense.
“Enlighten Us…But Make it Quick.”
While I couldn’t help but make snide comments in the back about the presentations, I also could help but thinking “This is the best idea ever!” I have friends that are Startup Weekend addicts – they go every time one’s going on in France (which, by the way, is like EVERY weekend! W00t second most active Startup Weekend country after the US) – I can TOTALLY see people becoming ‘Ignite Addicts.’ I can tell you that I didn’t enjoy the first event I went to, but I went because it came with an awesome recommendation, and it left me wanting more.
My suggestion: spend the next week or so thinking about an awesome idea, and come to Ignite #13 and rock the house. I think that an event like this provides a great medium for people to bring great ideas forward. Who knows… I might even take the stage for five minutes next time.