Internet Tech Boston

Last Thursday night, I went to O’Reilly’s Ignite Boston 4 with 2 of my engineering colleagues from PermissionTV. For those of you who don’t know about the Ignite Events, they are part social mixer and part product demos from local technology companies. Here’s how the format works:

Ignite is a user-generated event. If you’re interested in speaking, then submit a proposal for consideration. Presentations must:

• Be no longer than 5 minutes
• Be on an innovative topic (no sales pitches, please!)
• Be viewable on a PC [a MacBook Pro with Powerpoint and Keynote, and PDF] with standard AV equipment
• Did we mention, no Sales Pitches.

Overall, I was not impressed with the quality of the speakers. The event logisitcs made them hard to hear, and the speakers themselves mostly sounded under-practiced and not comfortable with public speaking. I guess that’s what happens when you ask local technologists to speak at a bar.

Tim O'Reilly speaking at IgniteBoston4

Tim O’Reilly himself was present and gave a longer than 5 minutes talk split into 2 parts. The first part focused on exploring the topic on everyone’s minds: “The numerous reasons why O’Reilly Press is great.”  What was that about no sales pitches? In his second part, Tim transformed himself into an Al Gore-esque clone and chastised the room for focusing all our considerable technological talents on building frivolous (yet profitable) iPhone applicatioons like the iPint. Instead, he wants us to focus our talents on “solving the worlds most challenging problems.” Easy to say after you’ve struck it rich. In all fairness to Tim, I believe he was trying to energize the crowd and rally behind some important topics. But, it all sounded far too preachy for me. At the slide titled “solving the problem of predicting the future”, I stopped listening and grabbed a beer.

After the speeches and demos were concluded, the social mixer got into high gear and I met some interesting people:

• David Chancogne is co-founder of Traackr, “the only online tool that can accurately measure your online influence across all major social media sites.” Egosurfing meets Web 2.0. I love it.
• Palle Pederson is a serial entrepeneur who’s currently CIO at RealCME, an online continuing education website for medical professionals. We had a good talk about the uses of online video 2.0 in an online CME setting. Thanks for the LinkedIn invite Palle!
• Rich Tibbets, Chief Architect and Co-founder of StreamBase, whose product specializes in Complex Event Processing, “a technology for low-latency filtering, correlating, aggregating, and computing on real- world event data.” Of all the people I’ve met recently, Rich and his company StreamBase are clearly the ones who have decided to solve a definitively complex problem that requires real web engineering. Web hackers need not apply. Oh, did I mention it’s Java?
• Demetrious Harringon told us about his work at E-Ink Corp, the company that makes the product that is used by the Amazon Kindle. Was great to talk to someone who is a real engineer that makes something you can actually hold in your hands.
• Last but not least, I talked a length with Ivan Kirigin, co-founder of TipJoy, a Y-Combinator company. The other co-founder is Ivan’s wife and they’re currently working and running the business out of their home. That’s courageous in an of itself. But looking beyond the blurred lines between work, life, business and marriage, TipJoy is a cool idea with some cool features. Essentially, TipJoy provides a widget for your blog where users can leave tips for you based on their level of sastisfaction with your content. Recently, the founders have augmented that product offering this summer by releasing “a new platform API for Web applications that will let them share tips with users who contribute content.” I signed up, but unfortunately I’d have to switch to self-hosted Wordpress.org in order to use their widget.

Check out more pictures of Ignite Boston 4.