As part of my week of wearing nametags I headed over to the third incarnation of Ignite in Boston. It was nice to see some familiar faces from BarCamp and catch a few talks. I also learned about post-apocalyptic Rock Band fan-fiction in comic form, and I’m not sure what to say about that except I’m pretty sure “nice” is insufficiently descriptive.
I only saw about half the talks but Jonathan Zdziarski’s discussion of iPhone forensics and working with law enforcement was fascinating. I love tech presentations that reach out into the real world. Drug dealers need to catch The Wire on DVD — even I’ve heard of a “burner” phone.
Here’s the complete list of talks, which is mainly interesting in the way that presenter Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos’s name pushes out the table formatting.
Echoing some other bloggers’ criticisms of the event:
- There was insufficient division between the “talking” and “listening” areas, and the acoustics of the long space made even reasonable conversation disruptive for some listeners (although I had to laugh at the impressive multitasker who was shushing people while talking on Twitter).
- There were too many keynotes who spoke for too long. I’d prefer zero keynotes.
- In other Ignite events the slides run on auto-play. Here speakers had to cue when their slides should roll over (they didn’t seem to be able to easily do it themselves). I like the discipline required of the auto-play paradigm — I got tired of lots of “skip this slide I’m running out of time.”
But overall I’m glad that the event continues to draw big crowds. I think Boston’s ready for a biannual event in a larger space.
(On a more tragic note, I did not get a women’s t-shirt.)