Ignite was awesome.

Everybody knows this by now, but Ignite Portland was a smashing success. Good food, lovely beverages (although this didn't affect me, the alcoholic ones ran out), GREAT speeches. Some highlights:

Steve Morris' talk on pitching to investors was both relevant and engaging, although the slides were a little "slidey" for my taste - fairly dry, and often too full to successfully absorb in 15 seconds. The guy clearly knows his stuff, though, and was in the right room.

Adam Duvander's talk was great and provided me some solid reading. I met Adam at an open coffee last month and was glad to see him do so well.

Both the StepChange guys were great, but Kevin Tate's talk on emergence was absurdly revealing and packed to the gills with references to books that I should have read by now but haven't. I like unicycling as much as the next guy, but I think hands down one of the best presenters was KT.

Crystal Beasley's presentation had hands down the best slides in the first half. Visit I Hate Hummer for a peek at her latest project, which involves, well, hating Hummers.

The second half was substantially lighter, although hilarious. You just had to be there, or wait for the video, for a lot of these. Of particular note in the "awesome slides" category was Hideshi Hamaguchi, who presented on "thinking like the Japanese" and had beautiful slides.

The dog of the bunch was Keith Gerr's random assortment of comments about things. He was out of time with his slides, didn't really have a single "burning idea," and generally speaking was baffling to try to understand. Not to be a Debbie Downer, but this one was really quite weird.

That aside, it was great! Kudos to all sponsors, presenters, and