Global Ignite Week 2011!
Last week was Global Ignite Week 2011.
Described by it’s sponsors O’Reilly as “Fast-paced, fun, thought-provoking, social, local, global”, the global Ignite concept has given rise to a large number of events held across the world, each sharing a common premise. Volunteer speakers present to enthusiastic crowds, with each speaker bounded by the Ignite Week rules :
- 5 minutes
- 20 slides
- slide autoscrolling -activated-
With 5 events planned for the UK, including Liverpool and Bristol, we were eager to sign up when we heard about the 4th annual event in London – IgniteLDN4.
On arrival we were greeted by the giant Wall of Tweets, showcasing the ongoing tweeter battle from within the audience who were fuelled by the chance of winning some O’Reilly memorabilia.We were also introduced for the first time to the 18 speakers who over the course of the evening, would be trying to keep their pace on a great range of topics….From Michael Reeves’ first-hand account of attempting a random life in the style of the Dice Man (from the 1971 novel of the same name); Steve Barry’s epic story of how George Lucas’ merchandising machine bought about the decline of the British toy industry and Jemimah Knight’s twitter patisserie (#knightpatisserie) including evidence of some deliciously geeky seven-segment display brownies arranged into those classic inverted calculator words…
Of course, being interested in everything web and creative, we were particularly pleased to listen to quite a few talks on technology and design. So without further ado, a round of applause please for our picks of the night!
Aden Davies
Can Silicon Valley/Roundabout/any other geographic location where tech companies live, disrupt the world of banking?
Aden provided us with a snappy insight into how us “Silicon Roundabout types” have recently been jumping in the ring with the big banks to bring new ways of banking to consumers. Aden identified how developments in hardware and software (such as RFID and NFC) and social networking are sprouting new web start-ups around the world, as well as giving the large banks something to keep pace with. He painted the picture that eventually we will be able to pay for goods using NFC enabled devices such as mobile phones (Google’s Nexus S is the first phone with this technology) and introduced a number of social banks, (Zopa is an example), that facilitate peer to peer lending. As a man in the industry, Aden alluded to some of the challenges facing the adoption of these new technologies, namely the difficulty in integrating new technologies into the highly structured and protected global banking infrastructure.
Aden’s blog is a good place to start if you want to find out more: http://www.adendavies.com/
Maxwell Roberts
Underground Maps, Design Challenges and Challenging Designs
Author of Underground Maps After Beck, Maxwell plotted the evolution of the original London tube map from the earliest 20th Century, to Harry Beck’s design in the 30′s and finally to the European tube maps we are familiar with today. Giving us a quick insight into the topology rules that Beck developed, including a common 45 angle on all diagonal lines, Maxwell went on to showcase his experiments with the London Tube Map that adhere more closely to Beck’s design principles.
Maxwell continually articulated Form into Function, identifying the reduction in time taken to calculate a given route that could be achieved with each design.
Tom Scott
I Know What You Did Five Minutes Ago
There seemed to be a definite wisp of hype surrounding Tom Scott’s talk. With his talk “Flash Mob Gone Very Very Wrong” from IgniteLDN2 still ranked @ No. 2 within all Ignite talks, Tom took the stage as the final speaker and it has to be said closed IgniteLDN4 with a bang! This year Tom chose to showcase just how much personal information can be gleaned from Facebook and Twitter if you’re not up to speed with your privacy settings. Starting with a few gentle anecdotes regarding online privacy, after about 3 minutes Tom launched into his show piece. In an algorithm driven, “pseudo-real-time” scour of open Facebook profiles, Tom quickly collected the name, profession, mobile number and mother’s maiden name of one random user and quick as a flash called up the gentlemen to leave these now not so personal details on his voice-mail.
Once the dust had settled on the talks,we couldn’t help but feel we needed to reflect on what we had seen. Given that we were in Brick Lane..we thought it would be rude not to go for a curry.
..and that’s exactly we what did…Bring on IgniteLDN5 in October!