Results tagged “scottberkun”

Shh. Come over here. Yeah, over here. Keep your voice down. Tonight is Ignite Seattle, that tech event at CHAC. No, I don't know why you haven't heard much about this one--this is a stealth Ignite, apparently, which is great because every one so far has been packed beyond standing room only, but also great and really fun. There were practically people hanging from the rafters last time in the Upper Level, so, don't like tell a lot of people. Just you and- Shh. Keep it down. Yes, you can bring the other geeks from work, but tell them not to tell anyone else. The Make Challenge is paper airplanes and it starts at 6:30. The first round of talks is Bruce Leban from Google talking about his time in prison, Alex Hopmann talking about airplane engines, Jordan Schwartz about bee-keeping, Karen Anderson on workplace survival tips, Brian McConnel on participatory translation, Candace McNaughton on health hacks, Carl Coryell on nomad tech and Scott Berkun on attention and sex. That starts at 8:30. And then there's another round. Remember, all the talks are five minutes long. Oh, shit. Hey, Ignite Seattle, what's up? We were just talking about the, uh, nice weather. Isn't it, uh, nice?

The premise of last night's technology event Ignite Seattle was simple. Get into groups and spend a half an hour building bridges out of popsicle sticks, stand on them until they break, and then listen to a bunch of super short presentations. It worked. We learned so much about happenings in and around the Seattle tech world we feel like we leveled up like twenty times. Really, we had high expectations --enough so that we became a sponsor-- and those expectations were consistently exceeded: We thought it would be well-attended and it was packed. We thought the geeks would build a few popsicle-stick bridges that could withstand the weight of a team member and almost all of them did (although not the bridge that we helped with - sorry guys). Most importantly, we thought the presentations would be short enough to not get boring and they were universally exciting and full of ideas and we didn't want a single one of them to end so quickly.

Seattle needs real world, technology-focused get togethers. Desperately. Microsoft does some things and so do some of the other larger shops in town but they tend not to be general attendance-type events. There's Mindcamp. There's the Penny Arcade thing, sort of. There might be a few others we're not thinking of right now, but come on, we feel like we should be able to name a dozen or so events.