I had a fantastic evening at Ignite Portland 3 on Wednesday! The presentations were spectacular, as always, and we even had a great after party at Imbibe hosted by Strands and Polymer Studios. I thought that I would be too tired to enjoy the after party, but it was really nice to be able to kick back and enjoy talking to people where I didn’t have to worry about organizing anything.
There were so many great volunteers who helped make this event a success; Legion of Tech events, like Ignite Portland, are put together entirely by volunteers, and these events are not possible without a bunch of great people helping out. The sponsors also made this possible by providing the funds required to buy food, the use of the Bagdad Theater, insurance, etc. A huge thank you to everyone who helped, sponsored, took pictures / video, and more to make this event so much fun to attend.
From an organizer perspective, this Ignite went very smoothly, especially compared to the chaos of Ignite Portland 2. The ticketing system helped us get people in quickly, and the Bagdad was better prepared for the onslaught of beer and pizza orders, so even the lines for food and drinks stayed fairly short. The best part was that we had a bunch of people (I’m guessing around 500), but everyone had a seat, and we didn’t have to turn anyone away.
Silicon Florist (as always) did a really great write-up on his site with links to other reviews of the event, so I encourage you to read his post for more information about the event. If you missed it, you can watch the videos and view the presentations.
If you attended Ignite Portland 3, we would love to hear your feedback about the event - what did you like or what can we do to improve for the next one?
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Wow! We opened up the ticketing system for Ignite Portland just a couple of hours ago, and we’ve already sent 172 tickets with only 295 remaining. If you want to attend Ignite Portland on June 18th 20th, I highly recommend getting a ticket. And you do want to attend. It’s a great time!
Ignite Portland (as always) is a free event with costs covered by our lovely sponsors (including my employer, Jive Software). The ticketing system merely gives you earlier admission, shorter lines and the ability to reserve a spot in advance. Doors open at 5:30pm and your ticket is good until the general admission starts (6:15pm), then all remaining seats will be given on a first-come-first-serve basis to those in line.
If you don’t get a ticket, we’ll also have general admission for people who just want to show up at the event.
What is Ignite Portland? A bunch of fast-paced, interesting presentations - 20 slides for 15 seconds each. Our mantra is “share burning ideas” - just about any topic will do, as long as it’s interesting. From tech to crafts to business to just plain fun! There will be time to chat with other attendees after each series of presentations. Ignite Portland is brought to you by Legion of Tech.
Updated at 4:21. Oops, I was so excited about the number of tickets that I mangled the date 
Thanks Josh!
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I had the opportunity to do an Ignite Portland presentation last night about online communities in the context of Dr. Seuss quotes. It was a lot of fun to prepare; I got to sit in the children’s section of the library reading Dr. Seuss books for a few hours, which is always a good time! I also had a great time giving the talk - complete with a Cat in the Hat, hat!
You can view the video on YouTube and the presentation on SlideShare.
UPDATE: I removed the earlier embeds, since they were really slowing down the load time of this page.
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Wow! We had 750 people show up for Ignite Portland 2 at the Bagdad Theater last night. This is about 150 people more than the 600 or so who RSVP’ed on Upcoming. We were amazed and thrilled with the response.
We had some incredible presentations. We’re posting them as they get uploaded on the Ignite Portland site. I also had really interesting conversations with people, and I personally had a great time.
We also had some interesting challenges mostly associated with having way more people than anticipated. We even gave up on having people register in order to just get people in the door. Despite the challenges, people seemed to enjoy themselves.
There were so many great volunteers who helped make Ignite Portland 2 a success; we could never have pulled it off without their help. The sponsors also made this possible by providing the funds required to buy food, the use of the Bagdad Theater, insurance, etc. A huge thank you to everyone who helped, sponsored, took pictures / video, and more to make this event so much fun to attend.
Rick has (as usual) done an amazing job of summarizing the blog coverage of the event on Silicon Florist, so please visit his page to hear what other people are saying about the event.
If you attended Ignite Portland 2, please visit the Ignite Portland blog post “What did *you* think of Ignite Portland“. Drop your thoughts in the comments to let us know what you like and areas where we could make Ignite Portland 3 even better.
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w00t! We made the front page of the living section in the Oregonian with a really nice write-up about Ignite Portland. You have to buy the Saturday paper edition to get the full write-up. I’m curious what this will do for RSVPs?
Thanks to Scott Kveton for the pics:
Update 1/26/08 9:10am PST:
You can now find the Ignite Portland write up online, too (minus the pictures). Thanks to @kveton & @mfriesen via twitter for the link.
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Matt Tucker (XMPP guru at Jive, one of the XMPP Standards Foundation members involved in setting the standards for XMPP, and my boss ) has been spending a lot of time thinking about how the technology industry can benefit from XMPP beyond just as an instant messaging protocol. XMPP is the protocol used by Google’s GTalk IM and most recently AOL has been experimenting with XMPP. Matt’s post on Jive Talks today about how XMPP is the future for cloud services starts to outline some of his thoughts about how XMPP can be used in many other areas:
There’s a new firestorm brewing in web services architectures. Cloud services are being talked up as a fundamental shift in web architecture that promises to move us from interconnected silos to a collaborative network of services whose sum is greater than its parts. The problem is that the protocols powering current cloud services; SOAP and a few other assorted HTTP-based protocols are all one way information exchanges. Therefore cloud services aren’t real-time, won’t scale, and often can’t clear the firewall. So, it’s time we blow up those barriers and come to Jesus about the protocol that will fuel the SaaS models of tomorrow–that solution is XMPP (also called Jabber) . Never heard of it? In just a couple of years Google, Apple, AOL, IBM, Livejournal and Jive have all jumped on board.
…
Fixing the polling and scaling problems with XMPP as Tivo has done is compelling, but the built-in presence functionality also offers tantalizing possibilities. Presence includes basic availability information, but is extensible and can also include things like geo-location. Imagine cloud services taking different actions based on where the client is connecting from.
More people, us included, will make the shift to XMPP, which will provide the missing evidence to create momentum toward a tipping point. In fact, I’m happy to announce that Clearspace 2.0 will include a feature that’s powered by an XMPP-based cloud service. We’ll be publishing a series of blog entries in the near future to discuss how we built it.
Quoted from Jive Talks
I think it is about time we moved beyond the old model of polling and into new, more efficient paradigms. As we come to expect real time, always available tools on the web, we should be thinking about using real time collaboration technologies (like XMPP).
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Don’t forget to RSVP for Ignite Portland 2! We have some awesome presentations on the lineup.
I’ll even be doing a presentation on online communities in the style of Dr. Seuss. For example:
Dr. Seuss:
“I’m the Lorax who speaks for the trees which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please.
NOW…thanks to your hacking my trees to the ground, there’s not enough Truffula Fruit to go ’round.
And my poor Bar-bar-loots are all getting the crummies because they have gas, and no food in their tummies!”
Dawn’s Translation: Play Nice: Be polite and respectful in your interactions with other members.
Other awesome presentation topics include: robots, rockets, sushi, undercover hookers, biodiesel and more!
We have some really amazing proposals for Ignite Portland so far, but we are looking for more!
I just submitted my proposal for Ignite Portland: What Would Dr. Seuss Say About Online Communities? Have you submitted yours?
If you had five minutes to talk to Portland what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Launch a web site? Teach a hack? Talk about recent learnings, successes, failures? Fill out our presentation submission form to submit your talk. We are looking for talks that will inspire and teach, not recruiting or product pitches.
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Our last Ignite Portland was so awesome that we decided to do another one on Tuesday, February 5th!
If you missed the last event, take a look at the videos and presentations on the Ignite Portland site. After seeing them, you WILL want to attend this event!
Want to Attend?
Tuesday, February 5th
Time: 6:00 - 9:00pm
Bagdad Theater 3702 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd. Portland, OR 97214
Admission is always FREE
RSVP on Upcoming
Want to Sponsor?
We had ~300 people at the last event, and we hope to have more at this one. Ignite Portland is only as good as our sponsors - our ability to provide food, beverages, etc. is only possible because of the generous sponsorships of local companies! If you are interested in sponsoring, contact Todd Kenefsky (kenefsky at gmail).
Want to Present?
We will have the presentation idea submission form up soon, but for now, start thinking about an awesome presentation that will wow the audience in 5 minutes with 20 slides that auto advance every 15 seconds!
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