Inaugural Ignite Waterloo

Ignite Waterloo

Ignite Waterloo

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the first Ignite Waterloo event at The Children’s Museum in downtown Kitchener. In the last 6 months I’ve started to hit the circuit of geek networking events in the area, but I found this event seemed to be in a class all it’s own.

The premise of an Ignite event is to have a variety of speakers talking on a variety of subjects. Each presenter has 5 minutes to speak. They have a set of slides that auto-forwards every 15 seconds. This makes for a quick, rapid fire presentation. It’s quite the cool concept.

Presenters spoke on a variety of topics, ranging from solving a rubik’s cube in 90 seconds, comparing policing now to 20 years ago, creating a hacker space, engineers in Africa, diagnosing high altitude illnesses and the story of a 2000km fraternity road trip (Full list of presenters). It was an event that had a little bit for everyone.

Pacman Cupcake

Pacman Cupcake

One of the attractions for the event was a cupcake decorating competition. This definitely yielded some amusing results with the winning entry receiving a netbook courtesy of Communitech. Mike Shanks and I were the intrepid ones who decorated the first cupcakes. I opted for a cupcake rendition of Pacman.  I knew I wouldn’t win, but thought it turned out well.

Cupcakes at Ignite Waterloo

Cupcakes at Ignite Waterloo

I look forward to the next event in March, it was a great networking opportunity. I’d highly recommend checking it out next time around.

Other event impression blogs

Tags: , ,

One Response to “Inaugural Ignite Waterloo”

Leave a Reply