Announcing Our Second Confirmed Speaker – Russell Davies!

Those of you who didn’t manage to get tickets yesterday are not without hope – we’ve still got well over 100 left. which we’ll release in the coming weeks. Still, you blew our socks off yesterday. Those first 100 went in less than 40 minutes!

Now onto the real reason for this post – we have the great pleasure of announcing our second invited guest speaker, the very, very interesting Russell Davies.

Russell was born in Derby, enjoyed an uneventful childhood, did college, all that. After failing as a popstar and a joke writer he ended up in advertising and tried to do ‘interactive marketing’ way before anyone was interested. He ended up at Wieden + Kennedy working on clients like Microsoft, Nike and Honda. Then he went to work for Nike as Global Consumer Planning Director. He went freelance in 2006 and works with shadowy organisations like the Open Intelligence Agency and the Really Interesting Group. He also writes eggbaconchipsandbeans, occasionally organises ‘Interesting’ conferences, plays with things like speechification, dawdlr and slowpoke; and does columns for Campaign magazine and Wired UK. Russell’s latest project is Newspaper Club, a 4iP sponsored service created to help people make their own newspapers.

We are still looking for speakers for Ignite London. The deadline to apply is the 9th of February. Here are the details.

Get Your Ignite London Tickets!

We are really pleased to open up the first batch of free vouchers for Ignite London #2, which will be held at The Luminaire in London on Tuesday, 2 March.

Although admission is free, we are using a voucher system so that people can ensure their admission at what we imagine will be a sold out event. Here’s how it works:

• Today (as in right now!) we are releasing the first 100 tickets on Eventbrite, which you can now click over to (see below for the link).
• Each ticket is good for the admission of one person and you can ‘buy’ a maximum of two tickets.
• As always, tickets to Ignite London are free.
• Your ticket only guarantees you admission if you arrive by 7:30 pm (doors open at 7 pm). At 7:30 pm, we will begin to let people in at the door and your ticket will no longer guarantee you anything.

The Luminaire has capacity for about 250 people. If you didn’t manage to snap up any of the first 100 tickets, don’t despair because we will be releasing more in the coming weeks. We will also have a few available at the door for those of you who want to take your chances. Tickets are limited so please, only take one if you are able to attend. If something happens and your plans change, let us know so that we can free your ticket up for someone who can use it.

Any questions? Leave a comment below or email info@ignitelondon.net.

Now go on and book your tickets!!

Cory Doctorow to Speak at Ignite London #2

Photo by Joi Ito, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

We are ridiculously excited to announce our first invited guest speaker for Ignite London #2 — Cory Doctorow!!

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger – the co-editor of Boing Boing and the author of the bestselling Tor Teens/HarperCollins UK novel LITTLE BROTHER. Cory’s latest novel is Makers, which depicts the booms, busts, and further booms in store for America. He is the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in London.

We are still looking for speakers for the upcoming Ignite London. The deadline to apply is the 9th of February. Here are the details.

Check back tomorrow for information about securing your free voucher for Ignite London #2, which is being held as part of Global Ignite Week on the 2nd of March, 2010 at The Luminaire in London.

Welcome to the New Ignite London Website

When we launched our little Tumblr-driven Ignite London site last summer, we didn’t anticipate that the response would be so great. We’ve quickly outgrown that space and at your request, we’ve added some much needed navigation to help you find specific information about Ignite London.

The homepage of this site will give you the most up-to-date information about Ignite London, what we’re working on, speaker announcements, etc. To learn the basics of the event — the who, what, when, where and why — visit About. If you are interested in participating, visit Speak. We’ve also included some archival information from the first Ignite London under Photos and Videos. We’ve still got a few glitches to sort out on the new site and hopefully they’ll be ironed out in the next few days. Feel free to let us know what you think in the comment section below.

A few people have asked about securing tickets for Ignite London #2, which will be held as part of Global Ignite Week on the 2nd of March. As always, admission will be free, and we will announce how you can get tickets later this week. Please subscribe to the website or follow us on Twitter to get the most up-to-date information. We expect tickets will go fast, though we will be holding back a small number for people wishing to take their chances at the door.

A huge thanks to Richard Johnson who has taken on this site rebuild, migrating us from Tumblr to WordPress and adding the navigation and multi-media content. Great job Richard!

Ignite London 2 – Call for Speakers

We are now requesting proposals for speakers at Ignite London 2. If there’s a topic you are passionate about and you want to tell the world, this is the place to do it. We’re after a mix of funny and serious, social and personal, high and low tech, crafty, webby, environmental, quirky and mainstream. Making us laugh is a good thing, making us think is even better! The only thing we insist on is No Sales Pitches.

How to submit a Proposal

Email your proposal to speakers@ignitelondon.net. Please include as much information about your proposed presentation as you can including the following:

• Your Name
• Title of Your Talk
• Brief description of what you want to talk about
• Twitter Name (if applicable)
• Email Address
• Contact phone number
• Blog or Website URL
• Short Bio – who you are and what you do

By submitting a proposal, you are agreeing that we may use your name and the title of your talk within Ignite London promotional material.

Deadline

Proposals must be received by 6 pm on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010. We are planning to have 15 speakers but based on the response for the first Ignite London, we’re expecting to receive many more submissions than can be accommodated. We will endeavour to respond to your email within 24 hours to confirm we’ve received it.

How will selections be made?

Talks will be primarily selected based on whether the topic is interesting, inventive, creative and unique. We will also make an attempt to select a wide range of topics so that there isn’t too much overlap in terms of content. We have put two or three spots aside for invited guest speakers, but there are still plenty of places to go for.  We’ll let you know soon after the 9th whether your proposal has been successful in order to give those selected as much time as possible to prepare.