Ignite NYC - 7/29/08

Every so often, there's an event I have to tell you about, and Ignite NYC is one of those. Founded by Brady Forest and Bre Pettis, this event is like a traveling TED Conference. I've seen Ignite in San Francisco, and let me tell you: it's quite an event. Here are the deets from the Facebook event page, where you can RSVP:

The first Ignite NYC is going to happen 7/29 at M1-5. We are going to feature 16 speakers. Each speaker will get 20 slides that auto-advance after 15 seconds for a total of five-minutes. Ignite is free and open to the public -- you're on your own for drinks. We're also going to be joined by Ignite co-creator, Bre Pettis. Bre is going to lead us in a creative soldering contest.

The night will begin with: 7:00 PM - Doors Open 7:30 PM - NYC Soldering Championship 8:30 PM Ignite Talks:

• Jessica Bruder (author) - How to be an Undercover Hooker (reprising her talk on taking an NYPD course)
• Tony Bacigalupo (New Work City, CoWorkingNY) - NYC's Startup Scene: Where are the geeks?
• Karen McGrane (Bond Arts + Science) - From Typing to Swiping: Interaction Design has come a long way!
• Tom Igoe (NYU's ITP, Arduino) - Physical Computing's Greatest Hits (or Misses)
• Rose White (Yarnivore) - Weird and wonderful knitting -- graffiti and science and art combined!
• Audacia Ray (Village Voice) - Porn as a front runner in technology innovations
• Charlie O'Donnell (Path 101, This Is Going To Be Big) - Shaving your head: When to start, how to maintain, and to BIC or not to BIC?
• Charles Forman (ImInLikeWithYou) - How to date celebrichauns with founder fetish
• Natalie Jeremijenko (NYU XDesign) - A bomb shelter for the climate crisis
• Pat Allan - So you're a kick-arse coder...
• Joel Johnson (Boingboing) - Indie Games: At Least They're Free!
• Nick Bilton (NY Times, NYC Resistor) - The Future of News
• Dustyn Roberts (NYU's ITP, Honeybee Robotics) - Flying High with Engineers Without Borders (on building a Kite Aerial Photography rig for mapping in Kenya)
• Nate Westheimer (Rose Tech Ventures, Sparkspace) - The Charisma Economy: Success in the age of authenticity
• David Rose (Rose Tech Ventures, Sparkspace) - How to get your startup funded

As you can see from where I bolded, I'm especially excited for this event because I'll be debuting a talk I've been working on for some time. The talk is titled "The Charisma Economy: Success in the age of authenticity," and it's inspired by a lot of the theory I used to study and included in my college thesis on Leadership.

Anyway, it will be great if you can make it. A lot of my friends are also presenting and I just think this is an awesome opportunity to show off the New York tech scene leading up to the Web 2.0 Expo in New York this September (which will be accompanied by the Web2Open, which I'm organizing and will write about next week).