A few Swirl folks attended this month’s Ignite Bay Area at the Mezzanine, an educational, inspiring and entertaining discussion that helped kick-off the 2010 Web 2.0 Expo. Each presenter at an Ignite event is allowed a five-minute, 20 slide presentation on a topic of their choosing, with this event’s topics related to the theme of technology and beyond. As expected, a variety of speakers presented on a variety of topics, with the goal being to “ignite”, jump-start and inspire the audience. There was a lot of enthusiasm floating around, and our goal was to capture some of it and be ignited, as well as share the websites that they spoke of with others. Below is a summary of each speaker:

• Derek Dukes, co-founder of Dipity, a site that allows you to create timelines for sharing online, spoke about the concept of Lean Startups. By definition, a lean startup eliminates any waste by only keeping activities that are necessary for creating customer value. As Dukes explained, “Lean startups are driven by a compelling vision, but are rigorous about testing… lean is the new black.”
• Kim Lembo, who worked at NASA, discussed new IT innovations pertaining to Microsoft Research’s Worldwide Telescope (WWT), which enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope. She also discussed the building of do-it-yourself planetariums for schools lacking science departments.
• Tony Deifell, the managing director of Q Media Lab and author of The Big Thaw: Charting a New Course for Journalism, discussed his “Why Do You Do What You Do?” project. The worldwide community-art project uses images and text to get people to think about the question, “Why do you do what you do?”
• Ola Helland started One Million Giraffes after betting a friend that he could get people to draw one million pictures of giraffes, and says, “Everybody smiles while drawing a giraffe. Doing something creative that you don’t usually do, will trigger something fresh.”
  
  
• Cara Jones is a former TV news reporter. After a few years in the business, she realized that all the news she was reporting was bad news, and this led her to the founding of Storytellers for Good. Inspired by a Zen quote, “Leap and the net will appear,” she quit her job to travel the world and started reporting only good news. Storytellers for Good is about “promoting goodness and inspiring greatness.”
• Jesper Andersen built The Forgiveness Engine in hopes of providing the web with a bit more forgiveness. The forgiveness engine allows you to anonymously apologize to someone in a way that the whole world can see, and his discussion consisted of social media compassion and “how not to hurt those you stalk.” As Andersen explained, “Forgiving is really hard, and even harder with social media.”
• Chuck Kindred started with, “I am a big, strong, athletic, handsome, vulnerable, sensitive, engaging young man. You probably don’t know anyone like me.” He then proceeded to give 26 things he is grateful for, based on each letter of the alphabet, that he called “The ABC’s of Gratitude.”
• Tobias Peggs is the president of One Riot, a real-time search engine and advertising startup, and he discussed the realities of starting companies and outsourcing in India. “In India there are lots people and not much work.”
• Chris Hutchins is the founder of Laid Off Camp, a resource for anyone who is suddenly faced with the loss of full-time work. He discussed “the cute hippo situation,” where people use hippos to represent friendly situations, when in fact they are ferocious animals, and talked about his own experience with hippos while traveling the world after getting laid off.
• Deb Schultz, a partner of the Altimeter Group, says “Technology changes, people don’t.” Her discussion was on her observations of “Jews and the Internet”, where she explained how her culture of people is not much different than the culture of the Internet. One great point she brought up during her presentation was that “A friend is something you have to work for; Facebook might want to learn that.”
• Andrew Hyde helped found Ignite, and described when “crowdsourcing turns exploitative. Exploiting the community, competition, and the human mind.”

Each of these speakers brought about ideas that helped educate and inspire – and at the very least entertain. Most presentations ignited thought and laughter and the opportunity to interact with one another, and the amount of slides and the length of the presentations reinstated that more often than not, “less is more.” In other words, cutting the fluff and getting down to the vital information is always most effective.