. Ignite NYC Brings Big Ideas To Small Time Slots
by: Amy Berryhill
Ignite NYC hosted a varied set of presenters last night, each of whom got the mic for five minutes to inspire the crowd with a rant, rave or random thought. The first hour brought all three.
Lee Sean Hepnova started the evening off with a rant. "A specter is haunting the web and that specter is drop-shadow, reflection and 3-D," Hepnova asserted. His vision is a flat web, where design communicates meaning through simplicity. Negative space should be better utilized according to Hepnova, who also pointed out that, "Hello Kitty doesn't even have a mouth and she represents a multi-million dollar global franchise."Jen Pahlka presented on a new endeavor to connect technologists with local governments, thereby making those governments more useful to their web savvy constituency. Code for America is the name of this fledgling effort, for which Clay Shirky is an advisor.
Kevin Marks questioned how images of faces change online interaction. His ideas on this topic began when his young son asked him why he never changed his Facebook profile picture, and his following realization that faces are to be found everywhere online.
Hilary Mason once asked herself a question, but it was the answer that she brought with her to Ignite. Her speech was titled "How to Replace Yourself with a Shell Script." Over the course of her five minute discussion, she explained scripts she had written to parse and reply to her email according to a set of simple rules.Casey Pugh talked about his crowdsourcing project, Star Wars Uncut. Scenes from the original movie, Star Wars: A New Hope, are broken down into 15 second clips. People then sign up to recreate the scenes in their clip in a video of their own. The end goal is to string together all of the original video clips into a new version of the movie: Star Wars: Uncut.
Nora Abousteit introduced the crowd to the concept of open-source sewing. Her company, BurdaStyle, offers sewing patterns free of copyrights, encourages designers to submit their own patterns or variations on BurdaStyle patterns, and creates a platform for sewing communities to form. Abousteit said of these communities, "If you go to Singapore or India you can find little groups of sewing soldiers sharing BurdaStyle."
Brady Forrest, co-host for the evening, promoted the Burning Man event as a useful testbed for developing technologies. Forrest sited the interest of companies (Google) and government agencies (NASA) as evidence that Burning Man has created a unique atmosphere for development of many kinds. "If you're looking for a place to test your technology," Forrest said, "this is the place to go."
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