3greeneggs

I spent yesterday evening up in Cambridge at the geographically misnamed Ignite Boston event (hey, I voted for Ignite New England). The event is sponsored by O’Reilly, and the company was very well represented.

The keynote was a 20 minute talk by Scott Berkun, speaking about his book, The Myths of Innovation. He’s a great speaker, and he has a really unique perspective on creativity and innovation. I had already made up my mind to buy the book based on his talk, but then I won a copy! Don’t worry, Scott, I’ll probably buy one as a gift.

There were twenty-four 5 minute talks after the keynote, which ranged from hilarious to technical to a bit too cool. For some reason, the two intensely technical talks were late in the evening. I do wish they had been earlier, because the audience was either exhausted or quite drunk at that point. I won’t spend too long on material that I’m sure is being covered elsewhere, but:

I was impressed with Matt Welsh’s ambitious CitySense project, amused by Bill Peña’s use of operant conditioning to encourage greater user contribution, excited about the potential that BuzzWord has for great typography in a virtual word processor, very surprised by how cool Brian Jepson makes RI-WINS sound, consumed by the desire to shake Jo Lee’s hand for the ingenious RingTones08 site, laughing hysterically at Rod Begbie’s presentation about making better Powerpoint presentations, amazed by John Resig’s badass JavaScript metaprogramming, and, finally, intrigued by Li Hong’s call to reform higher education using the principles of open source.

I left a lot out, and I can’t wait for the next one!

Update: Ignite Boston is on the Make blog!