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
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
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.
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