Ignite Show: Andrew Hyde on The Posting Economy

Andrew Hyde runs Ignite Boulder and works for Techstars. In this week's episode he shares his thoughts at Ignite ATL about the rapid economic shifts that can be caused by user-generated content. Andrew calls this the Posting Economy.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

Ignite Show: Mehal Shah on Winning At Scrabble

Scrabble isn't a game of who can get the best 6 letter words. It's a game of points and squeezing 2 letter terms into corners. In this week's Ignite Show Mehal Shah takes us through clean and sometimes dirty ways to win at Scrabble.

Some of his tips include:

• Thinking of Scrabble as a numbers game, instead of a word game
• Learning how to double the value of every tile you play
• Shutting down the board and holding on to every point you can get
• Learning how to bluff effectively
• Learning how to fake a bluff effectively
• Using your opponents knowledge to trick them
• Using foreign languages to psych out your opponent

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. It was filmed at Ignite Seattle 7 on August 3rd. You can find more Ignite episodes online.

Submit a Talk For Ignite at PICNIC

This year we are going to Ignite PICNIC. PICNIC Network is an excellent conference in Amsterdam that is happening September 23-25. I attended last year and got a lot out of the combination of technology and art (Radar post). Other speakers this year include Nicolas Negroponte, Linda Stone, Kevin Slavin and many others.

PICNIC is a part of the Geeks on a Plane tour. Here's a little more about Ignite @ PICNIC:

Ignite comes to PICNIC Amsterdam 2009! In partnership with Brady Forrest of O'Reilly Media, we present Ignite@PICNIC - a series of five-minute talks where the audiences takes over the stage. We'll select 10 talks for you to enjoy while relaxing at PICNIC '09.

In times of peril and uncertainty, the creative and innovative minds that emerge as leaders of change. Countless opportunities are emerging for social, cultural, educational and business entrepreneurs to re-engineer our future. What are the challenges we face? What can the PICNIC audience do about them? We'll be looking for some Ignite talks that identify problems and/or provide solutions. If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? Started in 2006 by Brady Forrest, Technology Evangelist for O’Reilly Media, hundreds of Ignite talks have now taken place worldwide. Now, Ignite debuts in Amsterdam at PICNIC ’09. This is your moment to shine!

What's an Ignite talk? Each speaker gets 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds, for a total of exactly 5 minutes on stage to talk about whatever lights them up. It's fun, it's fast, and the format forces you to really think about what you want to say.

To do a great Ignite talk, tell us about something you're passionate about, something that others should know, or some unique bit of knowledge or insight that you can impart. And please don't submit a pitch!

Submit your idea today via http://bit.ly/IgnitePicnic

The submission deadline is Friday 11 September. A total of 10-12 talks will be chosen from the ideas submitted. If your talk is selected, we'll need to get your slides before PICNIC '09 (in Powerpoint). Selections will be rolling so submit early.

Ignite Show: Jeff Veen on Great Designers

Good designers copy. Great designers steal.

In this week's Ignite Show Jeff Veen, well-known for his design work on Google Analytics, Wikirank and Typekit, lays out a strong argument for why iPhone imitators are the cargo cults of the digital era. The people building touchscreen knock-offs don't understand what makes the iPhone great. So instead of creating an end-to-end service they attempt to imitate it's flashiest features - kind of like Pacific Islanders who built "planes" out of bamboo.

Wikipedia provides further context for the use of the term cargo cults in this way.

From time to time, the term "cargo cult" is invoked as an English language idiom to mean any group of people who imitate the superficial exterior of a process or system without having any understanding of the underlying substance. The error of logic made by the islanders consisted of mistaking a necessary condition (i.e., building airstrips, control towers, etc.) for cargo to come flying in, for a sufficient condition for cargo to come flying in, thereby reversing the causation. On a lower level, they repeated the same error by e.g. mistaking the necessary condition (i.e. build something that looks like a control tower) for building a control tower, for a sufficient condition for building a control tower.

The inception of cargo cults often is defined as being based on a flawed model of causation, being the confusion between the logical concepts of necessary condition and sufficient condition when aiming to obtain a certain result. Based on this definition, the term "cargo cult" also is used in business and science to refer to a particular type of fallacy whereby ill-considered effort and ceremony take place but go unrewarded due to flawed models of causation as described above. For example, Maoism has been referred to as "cargo cult Marxism"[citation needed], and New Zealand's optimistic adoption of liberal economic policies in the 1980s as "cargo cult capitalism".[citation needed]

This episode of the Ignite Show was filmed at Ignite SF. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

You can see more episodes of the Ignite Show on our site or subscribe in iTunes.

Ignites Around the World: Boston, Sydney, Gnomedex Plus Firsts in Atlanta, Dublin and Missoula

Ignites, where speakers get 20 slides and just 15 seconds a slide, have spread to almost 50 cities since starting in Seattle. Some of them are helped, sponsored, or coordinated by myself or other O'Reilly employees, but most of them are run by a local community. There are at least ten Ignites happening around the world in the next two months (and I know of several that are in the planning stage). Check for one in your city below.

Ignite Baltimore #4
October 22, 2009
600 N. Charles St
Baltimore MD, USA

Ignite Denver October 09
October 14, 2009
2620 Walnut St
Denver CO

Announcing Ignite Sydney 3
October 8, 2009
TBD
Sydney NSW, Australia

Ignite Dublin #1
September 24, 2009
Trinity College, Pearse Street
Dublin, Ireland

Ignite Boston 6 - September 17
September 17, 2009
Fidelity Center for Applied Technology, 245 Summer Street
Boston, MA 02210-1133 MA, USA

Ignite Tulsa #1
September 17, 2009
311 East 2nd Street
Tulsa OK, US

Introducing IgniteATL
September 3, 2009
250 14th Street
Atlanta GA, USA

Ignite Missoula v.1 - Montana's first Ignite!
September 2, 2009
MCT Center for the Performing Arts
Missoula MT, USA

Ignite Fort Collins #2
August 27, 2009
802 West Drake Road
Fort Collins CO, USA

Ignite Salt Lake #3
August 20, 2009
4959 South State Street
Salt Lake City UT, USA

Ignite Gnomedex 3
August 21, 2009
2211 Alaskan Way
Seattle WA, USA

If you are curious about Ignite you can peruse our photogroup, watch the show, subscribe to the calendar or start your own!

Ignite Seattle 7 on 8/3: Speakers Announced

Ignite Seattle 7 is being held a week from Monday, August 3rd, 2009 at the King Cat Theater. We have an all-star line up of some of the most ingenious, fascinating and inspiring geeks from across the world (or at least in or around Puget Sound).

Doors open at 7. Talks begin at 8:30. The opening contest will be a massive Rock-Paper-Scissors tournament. You join the team of the person you lose to until hundreds of people are on each team.

Here are the first 13 speakers listed in no particular order. We'll announce the final 5 next week.

Daniel Westreich (danielwestreich) - Causal inference is hard; or how I learned to stop worrying and love counterfactuals

The philosophical and practical problems of causal inference, and how to overcome these problems using randomized trials. With particular application to medical literature and epidemiology more generally.

Lee LeFever (leelefever) - Where Goldfish Come From
Everyone knows goldfish and koi, but very few have ever thought about where they come from - how they are bred, raised, transported, etc. I know these things like the back of my hand.

Dan Shapiro (danshapiro) - Making Benjamin Fly: Geeking out aero-style for about a hundred bucks
When I was a kid, RC flight meant spending thousands of dollars to put what was essentially a slightly-aerodynamicized lawnmower in the air. You spent thousands on engines and electronics and balsa, months building your plane, crashed it your first flight out, and then repeated. Over, and over, and over again. Enter lithium polymer batteries, rare earth magnets, miniaturized solid state inverters, 2.4 GHz spread spectrum frequency hopping transmitters and receivers. What do you get? I'll show you. And I'll show you how to get it up, for about one benjamin.

Mandy Sorensen (mandercrosby) - What To Do With 60 Minutes in Whale (and How I Learned to Use a Machete!)
Ever wondered what to do with a half-alive beached whale on a remote island in the Pacific?

Mehal Shah (mehals) - Fighting Dirty in Scrabble
Are you tired of your family thrashing you at Scrabble? Do you wince when someone brings out that red box at board game night? Are you ready to wipe the smug grin off the face of your significant other who pulls 7-letter words out of nowhere?

Elan Lee (elanlee) - I Wish I Was Taller
I filed a bug on my life with a major software company in Redmond.

Lauren Bricker (brickware) - Geek Generation
Don't call me a teacher, I'm more of a “Geek Generator.” I have kids (9 and 18), both who love computers and yes, they've already learned how to program. But apparently that wasn't enough for me. For the last two years I've been teaching computer science at a local private high school. It's incredibly interesting, rewarding, and yes, a lot of work. My goal with this talk is to generate more Geek Generators.

Willow Brugh (willowbl00) - Creating Communal Creative Space
The experience of building a maker space from scratch is certainly a project - I'll talk about my experience in doing so, what advice others have shared with me, and what spaces like this are already available in Seattle (and perhaps elsewhere on the West Coast).

Mónica Guzmán (moniguzman) - Addiction! Staying afloat in the age of the stream
Glued to email, your RSS reader or Twitter? Has your hand grown by 133 grams and the approximate weight of an iPhone? The Web is a stream, and it's easy to drown. Tips, tricks and cautionary tales from a reporter who swims the stream to stay on top of local news, but has learned the hard how easy it is to get carried away.

Gregory Heller (gregoryheller) - What Makes The Greenest Cab?
Green transportation is all the rage these days, especially hybrid vehicles. Popular wisdom may lead some, including civic leaders and politicians to believe that the greenest vehicle is a hybrid. NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg has been fighting to Green the Yellow Cab fleet in that city by forcing all new cabs to be hybrids. The iconic NYC TaxiCab often sets the pace for the rest of the country's cabs. However would hybrids in NYC really make green cabs? And would the rest of the country's cab industries follow suit? The answer may surprise you.

Todd Sawicki (sawickipedia) - How I learned to Appreciate Dance Being Married to a Ballerina
Often times we see talks about how spouses deal with being married to geeks and startup jocks, now its time to turn the tables. This is a talk on what I've learned about ballet and how to appreciate it being married to a former professional ballerina. Hopefully you too will be able to tell the difference between a first and fifth position and a Plié vs. a Passé. Even a geek can learn to love classical dance.

Yoram Bauman - Principles of economics, translated
Translates for a lay audience the 10 principles of economics from Harvard professor Greg Mankiw's best-selling textbook.

Deepak Singh (mndoci) - Big Data and the networked future of science
New instruments, sensors, distributed scientific collaboration, informal publication channels = lots of data. How do we crunch it? How do we share it? How do we distribute it? This talk will dive into (a very very fast dive) into the challenges and solutions of the big science of today and tomorrow. Exascale anyone?

If you're not sure what Ignite is check out this promo video for Ignite Baltimore:

(Video courtesy of Think Again Media)

Four short links: 27 July 2009

1. Ignite OSCON -- 56m of video from Ignite OSCON. They're all great, but Dan Meyer remains the highlight for me.
2. gheat -- a maptile server in Python, delivering heatmaps to be superimposed on Google Maps. Handy for visualization fiends.
3. CaDNAno -- open source software for design of 3-dimensional DNA origami. One of George Church's projects. I love the combination of math, biology, and whimsy in open-source giftwrap. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
4. CommentPress -- an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog. I'm taking a greater interest in tools that channel and focus participation rather than simply providing "edit this page". (via gov2.net.au's issues paper)

Tonight's Ignite OSCON Line-Up

Bring the duct-tape, your head will explode. Here's the line-up for tomorrow's Ignite OSCON, starting 7.30pm in Exhibit Hall 3 of the San Jose Convention Center. (It's just before the 8.30pm Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards)

Jesse Vincent (@obra) - Hacking the Kindle
The Kindle is not a read-only platform. One intrepid explorer reports back from the frontier.

Skud (@skud) - Textiles
Far more than you ever wanted to know about far more than you ever wanted to wear.

Liz Henry (@lizhenry) - Your Flying Jetpack
Don't sit around waiting for the future to give you a flying jetpack, there's something you should be working on.

Julian Cash - Photographing Open Source
Stories from behind the lens.

Sandy Jen (@meebosandy) - How To Be Really Cheap
How Meebo didn't buy expensive stuff and you can too.

Dan Meyer (@ddmeyer) - Three Words on Teaching
Three words that made me a better teacher.

Selena Deckelmann (@selenamarie) - How A Bunch Of Normal People Used Technology To Repair a Rigged Election
Lessons learned from a trip to teach PostgreSQL in Akure, Nigeria.

Erica Olsen (@eriquita) - The Librarian Avengers Film Rating System
The A-Z (more or less) of film ratings.

Damian Conway - Titles Are For Wimps
Nobody knows what Damian will talk about it, but it will be a miracle if we can get him to stop at just 5 minutes.

Tuesday Night's Ignite LA Line-Up

The first Ignite LA is tomorrow. We've got a great line-ups of talks. The topics range from social engineering to humpback whales. As always speakers will get 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. We're going to be holding the geek event at Cinespace in Hollywood Tuesday night.

The event is free. We're hosting it at Cinespace on July 21:

• 6:30pm Geek Dinner starts
• 8pm-9:30 Ignite talks
• 10pm - Cinespace opens to the general public for Dim Mak (you're welcome to stay for the band)

Here are tomorrow's speakers:

Thomas Edwards (@mpeg2tom) - Getting Physical over IP
The Internet has mainly been about moving text, images, audio, and video around the planet. What about physical interaction? Can we move touch, breath, heat, cold, and pain over the Internet? Yes!!

Ron Evans (@deadprogram) - Unmanned Aerial Vehicles You Can Make At Home
Unmanned aerial vehicles are not just for the military anymore. Thanks to open source hardware and software, you can build your own homebrew UAV's starting for less than $100. From your living room, to the edge of outer space, the sky is the limit... or is it?

Allen Hurff (@allanhurff) - Uranium
Just Uranium.

Jeff Hester (@jeffhester) - A Secret World: Communities Behind the Firewall
For every geek working in the vibrant sunshine of the internet, there are a dozen working behind the veil of an enterprise firewall. What goes on behind that curtain? How are communities thriving in spite of IT bureaucracy? What does social media have to do with any of this? And does it make for good business?

Dan Tentler (@viss) - Hacking people - your brain is a usb stick
People are essentially robots. You can program them! You can make them get things for you, you can make them think whatever you want! You can make them hand you their wallet and keys - willingly!

Cliff Atkinson (@cliffatkinson) - The Rise of the Backchannel
The backchannel has been around in geek circles at least as long as IRC, but now mainstream audiences are drinking the Twitter Kool-Aid and speaking out against boring PowerPoint and lecturing presenters. Good or bad? The beginning or the end? Stay tuned to find out....

Anthony Citrano - Money:remixed; why the dollar is dead and that's OK.
We think we know what money is, but we don't. The dollar is not foundational to money; trust is. In his novel, "Snow Crash", Neal Stephenson wrote of "KongBucks" - a private currency that served as a refuge from fiat currencies that had collapsed. Could new technology platforms bring new, branded currencies to life?

Heather Knight - Turning AI gurus into Comets and Star Field Explosions
We'll give you a quick run through of how we turned the attendees of this year's IJCAI conference into flying comets and exploding asteroids. We'll aslo reveal the ingredients! We used Processing 1.0 for the graphics, we'll talk about machine vision techniques such as frame differencing, background subtraction, planar homography to capture your victims, and finally, we'll reveal our object-based functions for collision detection and direction of movement. Very rapid videos and demos!

Kellee Santiago -- Why Everyone Should Learn Game Design
Kellee used to work in performance art. Six years ago she took one class on game design, and since then she's co-founded her own studio, published three games, and tonight she plans on telling you why you should be really into game design, too.

Al Seckel - Illusions
For your eyes and ears.

\
Jacki Morie (@skydeas1) - Are you real, or a bot?
A virtual world with no other people is BORING, and maybe even CONFUSING. Am I right? In our virtual worlds within Second Life we make intelligent agent characters that ensure your visit is interesting. What do these virtual people do? Serve as active villagers, tell cool interactive stories, show you how to do interesting things, guide you to areas that interest you and even yell at you. Can YOU tell the agents from avatars piloted by actual people?

Evonne Heyning (@amoration) - Sparking Intimacy & Lightning Up A Community
Do you fall in love at geek events? Push boundaries with your creative colleagues? Work with your partner? Master clear communication, defined roles, visual mapping for network culture flow. Connections that magnetize and grow new ventures require a great deal of passion and determination -- how do you keep sight of yourself in the process? ORGANIC & REFLEXIVE ARCHITECTURES facilitate healthy balance. Lightning Temple creators share one example of passionate interactive art in process, created in collaboration....this is our five minute love story.

Howard Seth Cohen (@HSCactor) - The Bubble net Besiji: HUMPBACK WHALES and FILM CREWS
...are they both on to something? Humpback Whales (Megaptera novaeangliae,) are an incredible species of Baleen whale. Not only do they have the largest appendages of any marine mammal, they mobilize collectively to hunt for prey. Utilizing a technique called "Bubble Net" feeding, groups of whales as large as 25 individuals have been observed engaging in this repeated communal hunting.

While the event is free, you are responsible for paying for your own food/drinks from Cinespace if you want 'em. This will be the first Ignite in Los Angeles; it is co-hosted by LA Geek Dinner. Please RSVP to the Geek Dinner list on Upcoming.

Ignite Show: Greg Elin on Hackers in Washington

The Obama Administration has taken broad steps to open up the government. It's created Twitter accounts, launched data portals, and released spending dashboards. Even with these steps Washington D.C. can seem a strange place to geeks. Greg Elin (@gregelin) is a hacker living inside the beltway working with government officials to help with the process of opening up. In this Ignite Show he gives us a geeks-eye view on D.C.

You can subscribe to the Ignite Show via RSS or iTunes.

This was filmed at Ignite SF on 4/1.This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Ignite! comes to San Jose June 22nd - Submit your talks now!

Ignite! is coming to San Jose on Monday June 22, 2009 at 8:00 pm, attached to the Velocity Conference. Admission is free, open to all, and there will be a cash bar.

The deadline for talks is May 11th, so submit your talks now!

As with all Ignites each speaker will only get 20 slides that each auto-advance every 15 seconds for a total of five minutes. We'll be looking for fun geek topics like hacks, how-to's, and insights. (Talks don't have to be Velocity-related!) If you're not sure what an Ignite talk looks like check out the Ignite Show.

You can RSVP for the event on Upcoming or Facebook.

Ignite Show: Veronica Belmont on the Do's and Don'ts of Making Memes

At Ignite SF on 4/1 Veronica Belmont shared some do's and don'ts on businesses and their attempts at viral marketing campaigns. Her advice is simple (Don't be a jerk, Don't try too hard, Be funny). Veronica's examples run the gamut from one of the best (Subservient Chicken) to the recent and risky (Skittles).

You can get the Ignite show on iTunes, via the Ignite Show site, or in your feedreader.

Ignite Show: @MSG on Some Images are REALer Than Others

Snopes became a household word by debunking fake internet images -- like this wonderful shark attack. These images are the product of programs like Photoshop or Aviary. In this Ignite Show Michael Galpert shows us how to detect these fake images. For more reading on this check out eHow's article.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Subscribe to the Ignite Show on iTunes.

Ignite Google IO Line-Up; 5 Passes to Give Away

I will be hosting an Ignite at Google IO on 5/27 from 4:15-5:15 at Moscone. I did an open call for speakers and I'm happy to announce the following will be joining me onstage:

Leo Dirac - Transhumanism Morality
Why only geeks and hippies can save the world.

Michael Driscoll - Hacking Big Data with the Force of Open Source
The world is streaming billions of data points per minute. This is Big Data - capital B, capital D. But capturing data isn't enough. We need tools to make sense of it, to help us better understand -- and predict -- what we click and consume. We want to make hypotheses about the world. And to test hypotheses, we need statistics. We need R.

Pamela Fox - My Dad, the Computer Scientist: Growing up Geek

Tim Ferriss - The Case for Just Enough: Minimalism Metrics
Looking at how removing options and elements gets better conversions, etc., looking at screenshots of start-ups I'm working with and real numbers. Some humor (I hope) and fun, both philosophical and tactical.

Nitin Borwankar - Law of Gravity for Scaling
Why did Twitter have scaling problems? I spent 6 months thinking deeply about this and derived a simple formula that a high school student would understand. It demonstrates where the center of gravity is moving in the "Next Web" and why this aggregation of CPU's is even bigger than Google's. And oh yes it explains how to build a service that scales to 100 million CPU's.

Kevin Marks - Why are we bigoted about Social networks?

Andrew Hatton - Coding against Cholera
I'll examine what IT life is like on the front line with Oxfam, a humanitarian agency, and how good code can make a real difference to people's lives in all sorts of ways..some of them surprising..

Robin Sloan - How to Predict the Future
OK, back in 2004 I made a video called "EPIC 2014," predicting the future of media (and Google). It turned out to be 100% CORRECT. No, just kidding. But it made a lot of people think, which is really the point of talking about the future. Turns out there's a whole professional discipline of future forecasting. And there are certain ways you can think about the future that will give you better odds of being right than others.

Kathy Sierra - Become Awesome

Everyone who submitted a talk has a pass already so I am left with 5 free ones to give away. Google will be releasing a lot of products and APIs in the next two weeks between Where 2.0 and Google I/O. Put your wishlist in the comments by Wednesday morning. My top 5 will get the passes.

Come to Ignite Where & Launchpad

Every year we kick-off Where 2.0 with a combination Launchpad and Ignite event. This year is no different. So far we've got 11 geo-oriented Ignite talks paired with 5 product demos spread across two sets. We'll be starting the show at 7PM and will conclude by 9PM on May 19th at the Fairmount in San Jose. Bar opens at 6:30.

RSVP @ Facebook. RSVP @ Upcoming.

First Set (Starts 7:00)

Demo: Andrew Weinreich - Xtify
Xtify is a location-based services platform offered to website developers. Xtify is able to abstract location without the involvement of wireless carriers.

Demo: Brian Trussel - Glympse: Socializing LBS
The next generation personal location-based service products should be much more like sharing a phone call and a lot less like forming a baseball team. Sharing location is impulsive, like text messaging and it needs to be instant, simple and clean.

Demo: Noam Bardin - Waze
Waze drivers are building the first dynamic driving map reflecting the roads right now. Driving with waze mobile client lets users passively and actively share real time data and receive the optimal route to their destination. This level of dynamic information can only be achieved by drivers participating and sharing real driving data. Waze is all over Israel and will be coming to the US (currently Android only).

David Troy - Election 2008: Mapping Voter Experiences with Twitter Vote Report
With irregularities in the election process widely reported in 2000 and 2004, the 2008 election represented one of the first opportunities to use technologies like Twitter, SMS, and cell phones to document and map the election process. Twitter Vote Report was the result of work by activists and technologists, and created a permanent document of the 2008 election.

Sam Hiatt - Implementing Web Services for NASA's Terrestrial Observation and Prediction System
The ecological monitoring and forecasting lab at NASA Ames Research Center produces daily global estimates of parameters related to ecosystem condition. Implementing web services has increased accessibility and greatly improved the usefulness of our data products. We present the TOPS data gateway and show how it is being used by the US National Parks Service to assist resource management.

David Felcan - A Crime Early Warning System: Using Spatial Statistics to Detect Changing Geographic Patterns in Crime
Large quantities of spatial data can be as much a burden as a boon without the tools to properly tease out important details. For police, HunchLab enables early detection of changes in crime patterns, pulls information automatically out of millions of incident records, and provides the means of detecting and stopping crime spikes earlier than they would be found through more conventional means.

Adam DuVander - How Open Should Mapping APIs Be?
Google Maps is innovative, but also proprietary. Yahoo, Microsoft, and Mapquest also have equally closed platforms, while the open source JavaScript library Mapstraction ties them together with a single interface. This panel will discuss whether there should be a standard for interoperable mapping APIs, or whether there's more benefit and innovation to remaining proprietary.

Michelle Bowman - Here There Be Lions: The Cartography of the Future
A new breed of maps is emerging that are revealing breakthroughs in our understanding of biology, neuroscience, ecology and the physical world. We’re now able to map not just physical geographies, but genomes, neural pathways, emotions, social networks - even the global movement of ideas. These new maps tell powerful stories about the changes that will shape society over the next twenty years.

Second Set (Starts 8:15)

Demo: Tom Link - Product Launch: SpatialKey
SpatialKey is a next generation Information Visualization, Analysis and Reporting System. It is designed to help organizations quickly assess location based information critical to their organizational goals, decision making processes and reporting requirements.

Demo: Ahmed Lacevic & He Huang - Demographic Data Mining Using Social Explorer
We present a very powerful new tool for mining current and historical demographic data online. We will show a quick and easy way to find the data, visualize change over time using beautiful thematic maps, create slide-shows with a click of a button, exploring everything from income to rent affordability to slavery in 1790.

Peter Batty - Social Networking Based on Future Location
This presentation talks about the challenges in building a fine-grained model of a person's future location, and about the range of powerful applications that can be built off such a model. Many applications focus on the current location of a person and their friends - future location is harder to handle but arguably more useful.

Ariel Waldman - Space Hacks
From creating remote-sensing cubesats to analyzing aerogel: how the public is hacking into space exploration.

Tim Waters - MapWarper, An Open Source Online Map Rectifier
Utilising open source tools, a website is presented enabling a user to upload an image and rectify it. Maps can be rectified by the crowd. Rectified maps can used as WMS or packaged and downloaded as tiles. Metadata regarding provenance and licensing is captured. All maps are searchable, resulting in a library of user submitted maps. The application is free and open source.

Ian White - Got Smarts
The coming wave of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) has been underway in the world of public infrastructure for over 10 years. Few are aware of the vast implications--fuel efficiency gains, lessened congestion, on-time trains, decreased accident rates/fatalities, the list goes on...But few outside the public sector are aware of what this means and how it will affect the morning commute.

Martin Flynn - OpenGTS - Open Source GPS Tracking System
OpenGTS (Open Source GPS Tracking System) was first made available in January of 2007 and is now in use in at least 33 different countries around the world for tracking vehicles, trucks, delivery vans, ships, people, phones, etc. This session will be an overview of the features and capabilities of the OpenGTS System available on SourceForge.

Eric Gundersen - Washington, DC's Government Push for Open Data and Map Mashups
This session will provide an overview of the Washington, D.C. government's recent decision to open up many of its public data streams for easy public use and the contest they sponsored to highlight the usefulness of this data.

Ignite Show: Lisa Katayama on Japanese Gadgets and Toys

Lisa Katayama is a tech journalist and an expert on Japanese culture. She combines the two in her Ignite talk this week where she demystifies Japanese gadgets and their society's fascination with them.

You've probably read Lisa's writing before. She is the author of Urawaza: Secret Everyday Tips and Tricks from Japan (a fun book that I got for Christmas this past year). She currently writes for BoingBoing Gadgets and has written for Gizmodo and io9 in the past. You can follow her blog Tokyo Mango to keep up-to-date on new gadgets.

You can subscribe to the Ignite Show on iTunes or YouTube.

Ignite @ Google I/O; Submit Your Talk

Ignite is coming to Google I/O later this month. On May 27th, the first afternoon of the conference, I'll be hosting an Ignite at the Moscone Center. As with all Ignites each speaker will only get 20 slides that each auto-advance every 15 seconds for a total of five minutes. We'll be looking for talks that geeks will like. Think of hacks, how-to's, and insights. If you're not sure what an Ignite talk looks like check out the Ignite Show. You have until May 11th to submit your talk.

I/O is Google's developer conference. If you rely on Google's APIs this is something to attend. They'll be running sessions on Android, App Engine, Chrome, Open Social and many of their other projects.

Ignite Seattle (and elsewhere) Tomorrow, 4/29

Ignite Seattle 6 is tomorrow, Wednesday 4/29, at the King Cat Theatre. Ignite Seattle is free. We've got a great line-up of speakers. Here's the evening's schedule:
7PM - Doors Open
7:30 PM - Paper Tower Contest Begins - Build the tallest tower you can out of just 5 sheets of paper and tape (See Details)
8:30 - First Set of Talks

• Hillel Cooperman (@hillel) - The Secret Underground World of Lego
• Dawn Rutherford (@dawnoftheread) - Public Library Hacking
• Roy Leban (@royleban) - Worst Case User Experience: Alzheimer's
• Shelly Farnham (@ShellyShelly) Community Genius: Leveraging Community to Increase your Creative Powers
• Dominic Muren (@dmuren) - Humblefacturing a Sustainable Electronic Future
• Jen Zug (@jenzug) - The Sanity Hacks of a Stay At Home Mom
• Ken Beegle (@kbeegle) - Decoding Sticks and Waves
• Maya Bisineer (@thinkmaya) - Geek Girl - A life Story
• Scott Berkun (Scottberkun.com)- How and Why to Give an Ignite Talk

• Scotto Moore (Scotto.org)- Intangible Method
• Secret Guest Speaker from Ignite Portland
• Mike Tykka - The Invention of the Wheel
• Jason Preston (@Jasonp107) - Goodbye Tolstoy: How to say anything in 140 characters or less
• Chris DiBona (@cdibona) - The Coolness of Telemedicine
• Ron Burk - The Psychology of Incompetence
• Katherine Hernandez (@ipodtouchgirl) - The Mac Spy
• Jamie Gower JamieGower.com) - I Am %0.0002 Cyborg
• Beth Goza (@bethgo) - Knitting in Code

Ignite Seattle Line-up

Ignite Seattle 6 will take place on 4/29 at the King Cat Theatre. Doors will open at 7PM and talk will start at 8:30PM. We are very grateful to be getting sponsorship from Google and Biznik.

We'll feature 16 speakers doing great 5 minute talks and geek contest to kick off the night. We're still looking for 8 more speakers; if you want to speak submit your talk by 4/16. Here are the first 8 speakers:

Dawn Rutherford (@dawnoftheread) - Public Library Hacking
Money tight? Want to save more for a rainy day? If you aren't fully utilizing your public library, you might be wasting thousands of dollars a year!Librarian Dawn Rutherford will give you a quick trip through all your public libraries have to offer, and how to make the most of it, using tricks and tips gleaned from someone who has spent over half her life working or volunteering in them.

Mike Tykka - The Invention of the Wheel
It seems Nature has beaten man to almost every "invention" of his: Helicopters, Submarines, Electricity, Video Cameras, Supercomputers, etc. For the longest time i thought one notable exception was the wheel - seems hard to do out of flesh: think blood vessels; How do they attach? Then i started studying biochemistry and learned about proteins. Turns out nature has invented a full blown, reversible, proton driven turbine engine, many tens of thousands of which churn away in every one of the billions of cells in a human body.

Beth Goza (@bethgo) - Knitting in Code
Remember the joy of writing your first Hello World application? Do you still have a copy somewhere so you can gaze upon your coded baby steps into the world of binary goodness? In knitting, creating something beautiful is just like binary, with a series of knits and pearls you can dream up the most sophisticated of patterns. In the spirit of hi-tech meets hand-tech, I will show you how to convert your binary Hello World app into a pattern of stitches (think kint =1 pearl = 0), so that you can create, mount, frame and hang your Hello World genius for all to see.

Hillel Cooperman (@hillel) - The Secret Underground World of Lego
Get a glimpse of a thriving user generated content ecosystem that's been around since long before the web. See an incredible example of a community, and how a large corporation has completely let go of control only to find incredible success despite and maybe because of the economic downturn.

Shelly Farnham (@ShellyShelly) Community Genius: Leveraging Community to Increase your Creative Powers
We've all heard that it's a myth that creativity occurs in isolation. We've even heard about *group genius*, the ability for group with "flow" to create ground-breaking works of art or technology. Well, in this brief talk Shelly Farnham, social scientist and leading expert in community technologies, will take it to the next level and provide tips for how to leverage *community genius* to improve your creative powers.

Katherine Hernandez (@ipodtouchgirl) - The Mac Spy
I made a last minute decision to attend a meeting I somehow caught wind of. Assured of its importance, I flew down yet again, not even a month after MacWorld, to see what would happen at this 25 year reunion of the Berkeley Mac User Group.

Scott Berkun (Scottberkun.com)- How and Why to Give an Ignite Talk
To give a good talk you want to have a story. You have to be able to frame it. If you're going to give an Ignite talk you have to really, really quickly.

Scotto Moore (Scotto.org)- Intangible Method
A digital fairy tale about a young woman who realizes that first person video footage from her own life is being posted to YouTube - before the events actually occur in real life.

Jen Zug (@jenzug) - The Sanity Hacks of a Stay At Home Mom
Drawing from her real life as a stay at home mom (as opposed to her imaginary life as a bar tender on Cape Cod), Jen Zug shares her parenting hacks to staying sane when the majority of her day is spent discussing the merits of Optimus Prime over Buzz Light Year.

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It's Really Just a Series of Tubes

Molly Wright Steenson hit the Ignite jackpot at Etech this year with her explanation of the steam powered network of pneumatic tubes of the 1800s. If you're someone that, like me, has a somewhat obsessive relationship with Internet Infrastructure, you must watch this talk.