A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to give a talk at Atlanta’s second Ignite, held at the Georgia Aquarium’s Oceans Ballroom. I also attended the inaugural event back in August, and as someone with a relatively short attention span, really took a liking to the rapid-fire format of the presentations.

What is Ignite?

IgniteATL 2009. (Flickr: timdorr)

Presenters talk about a topic using 20 slides and 5 minutes. The concept originated in 2006 in Seattle, and has since taken off in cities across the globe. It’s a great way to get an overview of something without sitting through hours of material, and if you get bored, five minutes still goes by quickly. The format’s a refreshing change from the typical setup of most conferences.

Thoughts on Speaking

My talk was about Hackintoshing, the process of running and installing Mac OS X on a standard PC (slides available here). I’ve been interested in the topic for years, and thought Ignite was the perfect opportunity to share my knowledge and experience. I was also inspired by Chris Morrell‘s talk about overclocking last year – a technical topic paired with a passionate presentation seemed to be the right mix.

What surprised me was the humor with which the content was received. Apart from a semi-planned joke about Hackintoshing being “insanely great”, everything I said was in all seriousness. But the audience started laughing (hopefully not at me), so I ran with it.

Venue and Logistics

Oceans Ballroom (Credit: Wolfgang Puck)

For publicity purposes, the Georgia Aquarium was a great option. A cash bar and spread of various fruits and cheeses was nice, as well as the ability to carry them into the presentation area. However, I still don’t hold anything against last year’s choice of GTRI (Georgia Tech Research Institute) due to individual power and Ethernet ports.

IgniteATL also teamed up with Rank ‘em, a startup I’m working with, to provide a site for attendees to rank presenters by dragging and dropping. The rankings were then averaged to provide a list, top-to-bottom, which represented the crowd’s opinion. At the end of the night, I was fortunate enough to end up being ranked as the top speaker out of the 18. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Takeaways

From the perspective of a speaker, I had a great time. The experience of sharing my passions in front of a large group of people was really invigorating, something that I hope was conveyed by the talk. I’d love to put something together for future Ignites, in Atlanta or elsewhere.

Have you ever been to or spoken at an Ignite event? What did you think?

Launch Day

I’ve never been to an Apple product launch before, and was excited about experiencing the unique culture surrounding Cupertino’s releases. I arrived at Atlanta’s Lenox Square to be 16th in line – not too bad, considering the hundreds of people that showed up. At first, I was a little hesitant about having to wait a few hours for the doors to open, but the time passed really quickly, fueled by great conversations with Mark Bowling, Taft Watson (the first one to get the original iPhone in Chicago), and other like-minded technology enthusiasts. At 8:30, the doors to the mall were opened, and we were herded to the outside of the Apple Store until 9:00. Right after 9, the lights were turned on, followed by all the store employees running from both directions – clapping, cheering, and high-fiving. It’s about as close to sports and tailgating as I get.

The crazy thing is that very few of the customers were chiming in, but it still felt like a huge deal. Geniuses held HD cameras high above the crowd as the first group of us were filing into the store, scrambling to get a look. I first played with a demo unit, went to grab a case, and then was approached about my reservation. For as many people that were there, the entire process was surprisingly smooth. After getting checked out, I headed home to unbox and start using the device.

Impressions

Unboxing

As with any Apple product, the unboxing was an phenomenal experience. The iPad sat atop a USB cable and power adapter, separated by a few foldout documentations. When first powered on, an iTunes connection was required, although the presence of a full charge got me through the day. There’s been some buzz surrounding issues with USB charging, but I don’t see it as a pressing issue – especially considering the fact that the iPad’s battery life is excellent. I went ahead and synced my music library, podcasts, movies, and a selection of apps I downloaded the previous night. After making sure all content was synced cleanly, I went through the Settings menu to personalize everything to the same configurations as on my iPhone, as well as to enable MobileMe syncing.

Apps

There’s a few great apps for the iPad, a solid amount of good ones, and a lot of bad ones. The majority of the outstanding ones are a bit more expensive than their iPhone counterparts, but (especially with games) the prices aren’t terrible considering the amount of development work involved. My wish list’s currently at around $150 worth of apps – something that’s not happening anytime soon. Here’s a few favorites that I’ve already installed:

• NetNewsWire
• Evernote
• WordPress
• Twitterific
• Pandora
• Netflix
• Fieldrunners
• Tap Tap Radiation
• RealRacingHD

NetNewsWire is much faster than the iPhone version, and Netflix’s streaming capabilities are pretty cool. But as great as the first iteration is, it’d be nice if Netflix would offer a richer experience than just a site-specific-browser.

Running iPhone apps, however, is an overall bad experience. When scaled down, I feel cramped to use the app with the presence of a large screen surrounding it, but enlarging the app yields to pixelation. As suggested by Ajai Karthikeyan, antialiasing would be a great solution.

The Big Picture

The iPad will succeed in extremely general and extremely specific uses. There isn’t a better device for surfing the web on the couch; the same goes for using Twitter at a conference or doing a one-on-one presentation with Keynote.

But when it comes to day-to-day use and significant productivity, there’s still a huge need for the form factor of a desktop/laptop, not to mention their distance from the technical specifications of the iPad. In short, it’s a luxury item right now. Yet the tablet sector’s really starting to take off, and following the release of devices such as the HP Slate and JooJoo, the luxury factor will begin to decrease.

What’s your opinion on the iPad?

A few weekends ago, I attended the fourth annual SoCon unconference centered around social media at Kennesaw State University. Last year’s SoCon was the first Atlanta tech event that I went to; it was great to see some familiar faces that I met at SoCon09, as well as others who I’ve been in touch with since then.

Just as last year, the event kicked off Friday night with a networking dinner at the Cumberland Maggiano’s. Different tables were set up around the room for various topics, such as video, B2B, Twitter, et al. I sat at the entrepreneurship table hosted by Appcelerator CEO Jeff Haynie, who moved from Atlanta to the Valley a few years ago. During these discussions, I had a great chance to meet Travis Allen, a fellow young entrepreneur, as well as reconnect with Sanjay Parekh, Richard LeBer, and Jennifer Bonnett.

Flickr: leighauerbach

The event continued the next morning at KSU’s Social Sciences building, where a continental breakfast was a great opportunity to continue the networking from the previous night. After about an hour, Leonard Witt began the official conference by introducing the first keynote speaker, Carol Kruse, Vice President of Interactive Marketing at Coca-Cola. Kruse created the MyCokeRewards program, and also is a part of the company’s Facebook fan page initiative. The talk started with an explanation that Coke prefers for the consumers to lead the company’s social media campaign, leading to Kruse’s mantra: “Fans first”. She revealed that the page is moderated out of necessity, but that only around .8% of content is required to be taken down. However, any posts which may be negatively directed towards Coke remain. Also fascinating was the fact that any employee who wishes to be a part of the company’s social media marketing can undergo basic training and be let loose.

Flickr: leighauerbach

Dan Siroker of the Obama campaign then took the stage as the next speaker, explaining the huge impact that web marketing had on the President’s election and fundraising strategies. John McCain was able to raise $201M total through combined social media outreach and traditional publicizing, while Obama’s team (with the input and guidance of Siroker), raised over $500M solely through the Internet. Multivariant testing played a large role in this monetary gap; Siroker showed how a button entitled “Learn More” paired with a family-oriented image achieved the highest conversion rate, competing against tens of other combinations. The importance of taking advantage of circumstances was also stressed, as the campaign was able to raise roughly $10M simply through the sending of an impromptu email.

We then breaked for lunch, heading over to KSU’s newly-built student cafeteria. I caught back up with Travis and had the chance to meet Christina Stallings, a new media/tradeshow enthusiast. Lunch conversation varied from basic introduction of everyone to psuedo-representation (fake profiles)  in the virtual world.

After lunch, I attended two breakouts, the first being by Newell Rubbermaid’s Bert DuMars about implementing a community around an online brand. He talked about the marketing associated with Sharpie, and stressed the fact that community is a great resource and should be genuine, but shouldn’t be grouped to direct content towards one individual.

The next session I attended was by Chris Turner, Kimberly Turner, and Scott Lockhart of Regator, a blog aggregator sorting through and helping publicize the world’s best posts. They talked about their experiences in bootstrapping a startup, explaining what individuals would need to have in order to successfully launch:

1. A good idea.
2. Money.
3. A technical founder.
4. Commitment.
5. A polished product.
6. The ability to generate hype.

And their slides were hilarious.

I always leave conferences like this feeling energized and motivated to continue doing what I do. The sense of community here in Atlanta really is incredible, and the ability to connect with like-minded individuals is something I’m thankful to be able to do. Can’t wait for SoCon11.