Tag: Speakers

Ignite Seattle 15 – Outdoors and All Ages!

The next Ignite is going to be OUTDOORS on SATURDAY, August 20th at the Fremont Outdoor Movies space. We intend for this to be a family friendly event and we’ll be looking for under 18 speakers. This is our first ever outdoor event. Please come out in droves and make it our best one yet.

Submit your talk ideas now!

TONIGHT! Speaker Line Up for Ignite Seattle 8

Ignite Seattle 8 is tonight! As always we have a cornucopia of speakers talking about a variety of geek topics. The doors to the King Cat Theatre open at 7:00. The talks start at 8:30 PM. It makes “cents” to bring your art hat for tonight’s warm-up that starts at 7:30pm.

Here’s the line up (in order of appearance):

Eugene Lin – iPhoning my way to retirement, $.70 at a time
I want to be rich. Steve Jobs promised it. App after app, the Apple gods got angry with me. Until finally, with nothing but an accelerometer, two dozen naked women, and the nation of Japan, I had a story to tell.

Arianna O’Dell (arianna) How to Sneak into Bars
I am a 19 year old student at the University of Washington. Most people don’t know this because they never ask. I’ve been attending networking events all summer and most people think I’m out of school and already graduated.

Benjamin Franklin – Intellect: without an outlet in the world
Do we remain in awe of Ben Franklin’s capacity and accomplishments or do we take on his mantle of “Doing the best with what we have” and look at our issues and do something about them? Better yet, WWBFD? [Brady’s note: This is going to be a presentation by someone done as Benjamin Franklin. You can learn more on his site.

Wendy Chisholm (wendyabc) Challenge your assumptions. Innovate. Change the world.
Most designers are taught to design for the average user and as a society we hold many assumptions about the characteristics of those users. However, products are used in unexpected ways and by unexpected audiences.

Jeremy Bingham (captain_tenille) An Astronomical Viewing Shelter on the Cheap
Using your telescope in the city can be frustrating with all the stray light all over the place. You can’t do much about the skyglow, but you can shield yourself from stray light sources nearby.

Jon Bell (jonbell) Usability Beyond the Classroom
It wasn’t until I spent a year at frog design as a developer that I realized everything I learned in art school was either wrong, outdated, or only told half the story.

Peter Wilson (peterwil) Google vs. Microsoft: An Insiders Guide
Google vs. Microsoft: where will the battles be fought, how will each companies strategies and blind-spots impact the outcomes, and who will win? The speaker spent 9 years at Microsoft and 4 at Google, and so thinks he knows something about this…

Scott Berkun (berkun) Everything you need to know about philosophy in 5 minutes
I’m the sad owner of a philosophy degree. I’m convinced i can give people a better education in philosophy (and make them realize how much they already know and love philosophy) in 5 minutes than I got in 4 years.

Part 2

Mike Tyka – Cubes in the Sky
We went through about 10 designs each trying to achieve the same goal of somehow raising the 15x15x15ft Groovik’s Cube, weighing near 4000 lbs 10 feet in the air within a fairly tight budget.

Richard Bailey – More blink in less time? Manufacturing electronics for art projects.
The Groovik Cube required a custom surface mount circuit board for each of the 56 facets. Early estimates showed that this would require well over 150 hours of time to accomplish. The Groovik electronics team created an assembly line and produced 90 boards in one day.

Sarah Schacht (sarahschacht) Overcoming Cacophony: Making Gov 2.0 Work for You
What can you do, as an individual to make your voice heard in the lawmaking process and what tools do you use? Learn how to make your email float to the top of a pile of thousands, how to stand out from the crowd, and how to do so without losing your sanity.

Veronica Sopher (Shih_Wei) Jewelry: It’s What Geeks Know!
Elizabeth Taylor and Ivanka Trump may have their own jewelry lines, but it’s geeks like you/us who are the experts in jewelry. Yes, it takes a real geek to know jewelry, cut through the salesperson’s bs, and shop like a pro. Let me show you why.

Norman Guadagno (thinktone) Amazon Archaeology OR Swimming In Our Own Clickstream
Every time we buy from Amazon, we give their algorithms a little more information about ourselves (or at least the things we buy). But, do we have our own algorithms to help us make sense of purchase after purchase across time? What can we learn about ourselves through the things we buy?

Dylan Wilbanks (dylanw) Everyone Core Dumps: Death and Loss For The Geek
We are all going to die. But handling loss is something geeks struggle with. Learn three things you should do when a friend dies, three things you shouldn’t do, and ways you can preserve your existence online.

Greg Dunlap (heyrocker) How to not suck at pinball
Pinball is hard. Luckily, getting better at pinball, not great but respectable, is actually pretty easy.

Jason Carmel (defenestrate99) Defamation and Twitter – A Practical Guide to Covering Your Ass
I will provide a few practical ways that might protect your right as an American to roast the bejeezus out of the asshats of the world, without getting sued into oblivion.

Ron Burk (ronburk) Three Strange Definitions of Computer Programming Legendary computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra once said: “Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” But if programming is not about the computers, what IS it about?

See you there

We’re excited about Ignite Seattle and we hope to see there. If you are tweeting about the event, use #is8 and if you are taking photos, please add them to our Flickr group and/or Facebook page.

Tonight’s Ignite Seattle Line Up (8/3)

Ignite Seattle 7 is tonight! As always we have a great crop of speakers talking about a variety of geek topics. The doors to the King Cat Theatre open at 7:00. The talks start at 8:30 PM. We are going to have a massive Rock-Paper-Scissors contest at 8:00.

Set 1 – 8:30pm

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.

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?

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.

Rob Gruhl – How to Take Better Pictures
The person who taught you how to buy a car is going to teach how to take beautiful photos.

Vanessa Fox – (@vanessafox) – Life’s Too Short To Eat Bad Food
And you certainly don’t want to feed bad food to your friends. Achieve deliciousness in just about the time it takes to give an Ignite talk.

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.

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.

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?

Jessica Hagy (thisisindexed.com) – Lies To Ignore
Graphs can contain both Truth and Deception.

Set 2 – 9:30 PM

Scotto Moore – CPU
Our artist-in-residence, is back with another digital fairy tale.

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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?

Matthew Amster-Burton – (@mamster) What is Baby Food?
Sushi, stew, and spicy enchiladas for babies, from the author of Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father’s Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater.

Ignite 7 – The Final 5 Speakers

We’re excited to announce the final five speakers for Ignite 7, which will be held this coming Monday, August 3 at the King Cat Theater.

The Final Five

Here’s the list of previously announced speakers for Ignite 7.

We look forward to seeing you on Monday!