Ignite Seattle Was an Amazing Success!

Dan McComb of Biznik presenting at Ignite; Photo by Bre Pettis

Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you for coming!
Ignite Seattle ended just a couple of hours ago. It was an amazing experience. Over 200 people saw 13 popsicle-bridges being made and 25 speakers each give 5 minute talks. The speakers had 20 slides with 15 seconds a slide. See Laughing Squid and the Ignite Flickr Pool for photos. The speakers and crowd were great. We will be posting their slides and videos in the next week. Most of the talks were tech-oriented. Here were some of the new sites that appeared tonight (some of them were publicly revealed for the first time tonight):

The Darfur Wall – Jonah Burke left Microsoft to found the The Darfur Wall with his father and brother a couple of weeks ago. If you’re not aware Darfur is in a crisis. The Burkes have created a novel website for collecting money. There are 400,000 subdued numbers on the site; each time a dollar is donated a new number is lit. All of the monies go to Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children and others. In just 21days, they have raised $5052 from 445 donors. Buying a number is fast and easy; consider it. (Blog)

Biznik – Biznik is a social-network that is devoted to radical self-promotion and helping its members start businesses. They are event-focused. The membership is centered around Seattle right now, but that will change in 2007 with an upcoming release. (Blog)

Reality All Starz – Where people do crazy things with their lives… and earn points. This is another Seattle-based social-network that hasn’t broken its geographic bounds. On the site you can issue challenges such as: Arm Wrestle Someone, Ask out a girl, or Go to Burning Man. People can then upload text, video, or photographic evidence of their having completed the challenge and the community decides how many points they should get for it. You can invite people to the site by issuing them a challenge (I still have to upload a video of my first sky-dive if I am going to earn 50 points this month). For a fun exercise check out the existing All Starz and issue them a challenge. It’s interesting to note that both Biznik and Reality All Starz are built using Ruby on Rails. (Blog)

Ontela – Dan Shapiro, the founder, spent the majority of his talk discussing the process of getting a startup going (the big take-away: it has to be a full time commitment, don’t expect your after-work project to morph into a company on it’s own). Luckily, I’ve seen this product before. They have built an incredibly simple way to pull photos from almost any phone and send them where you (the consumer) would like without having to lift a finger. This could be your home computer, Flickr, or any number of services that accept photos (MTurk for text analysis anyone?). When it is released, this software will finally make the camera on your phone useful.

We look forward to seeing you all at the next Ignite in February. Thanks to Ontela, Amazon Web Services, Seattlest and Lockergnome for sponsoring!