We have a special Ignite Vegas: Green Edition coming up on April 28, in conjunction with the Greener Blocks weekend. The Greener Blocks movement is focused on encouraging sustainable lifestyles and to build community by transforming an empty block in downtown Vegas. The event will be held at an outdoor stage at 1042 S Main Street at 8pm. This is a FREE event and no tickets are required!

We’re looking for speakers at this special event, so if you have a passionate story to tell about sustainability, health, the green movement, etc., please submit your talk here! Deadline to submit is Wednesday, April 18.

If you can’t make this event, we’re also starting the works to have a full-on Ignite Vegas sometime in late May/early June. More details on this to come soon as well!

Time to mark your calendars! The next Ignite Vegas will be held on Tuesday, January 10, 2012- coinciding right with CES! Tickets will be available soon, but first… we need your help! We’re looking for inspiring, passionate talks by people like YOU. If you’re interested in speaking at the next event, please check out http://ignitevegas.com/submit to get a gist of what we’re looking for.  When you’re ready to make the leap, go ahead and submit your topic in the form on the bottom of the page. The deadline to submit is December 14, 2011 so get those ideas rolling!

Also, we have a treat for anyone who submits a talk this time around! If you turn in a submission, we’ll save you a brand spankin’ new Ignite Vegas sticker provided by our friends at Sticker Giant (http://stickergiant.com). These will be handed out at Vegas Jelly on 12/15! (For more information, check out http://vegasjelly.com).  Thanks for your support! Get going on those talks!

A proper post-Ignite writeup will come sometime next week. We’ll work on getting videos posted up and links to all the fun photos of the night. But for now, sleep sounds real good.

It was wonderful to see all your beautiful faces out in the crowd! Hope to see even more next time.

If you missed out on a ticket… shame on you! But we’ll work on releasing a few more tickets, so make sure you add yourself to the waiting list HERE.

Make sure you get your tickets for the following amazing talks:
- Nicholas Shook: Why I Love Booze
- Joshua Ellis: Augmenting Reality With Digital Ghosts
- Brian Kirkby: Anatomy of a dotCom bubble
- Todd Levy & Lauralie Ezra: How to survive dating an entrepreneur
- Chris Weiss: Loving The Dark Triad – Or, Why Jerks Will Always Be With Us
- Jason Arhart: Why Gambling Theory Matters
- Shavonnah Tiera: Run your finances like a founder
- Pawel Szymczykowski: Instant Ramen Story Time
- Mike Yoder: Social Media Pigs
- Bryce Murry: Ignite Karaoke

We also just confirmed a FREE PHOTOBOOTH service for all attendees, so make sure you check that out on Wednesday night as well!

I wanted to shed a little light on how we’re going to narrow down the proposals for Ignite talks before it actually happens.

First, we only have a limited number of slots: 10. We don’t want the presentations to go on more than about an hour, because the audience will probably get antsy after that. We already have more submissions than the number of slots available- which is something to be grateful for! Thanks to everyone who submitted a talk… you’re going to give us a hard time deciding which ones to go forward with!

Second, we decided to go with the model of having the talks chosen by a panel rather than by user voting. Especially with this being the first Ignite for a lot of people, we want to make sure that we have a collection of talks that correctly captures the Ignite spirit.

Last but not least, what criteria do we use to narrow down the list?
- Pitches: Yes, pitches. We warn against them again and again, but they’ll still sneak in sometimes.
- Similar topics: We want to keep the topics varied throughout the night, so we group together similar talks and cross them out until we’re left with only one.
- Niche topics: There’s a line between having a unique talk and having a talk that’s too abstract or geared only for a small group. These talks can be great, but we want to feel sure that most of the crowd will “get it” even if it’s their first time hearing about it.

We’ll probably learn a bit more about the selection process as we go, but this is where we’re starting from. Stay tuned this weekend for the final list!

- The website is up and running!
- Booked the first ever Ignite event at Beauty Bar for Wednesday, August 3.
- Scored a sponsorship from Zappos!
- Found our event photographer, Ryan Shewchuk due to the help of lovely ManyaS!
- Tickets officially went on sale last Thursday at ignitevegas.eventbrite.com.
- We have 8 epic Ignite talks lined up already!

Phew! Now there’s just over 2 weeks left before the event… what do we need next?

- If you haven’t signed up to talk yet… just do it! Everyone has a story to tell. You’ll only have to be up there for 5 minutes and more than 50% of Ignite speakers are occasional speakers or have almost no experience at all, so you have no reason to feel intimidated!
- We’re looking for a videographer to tape the event so we can submit our talks to http://igniteshow.com. If you know anyone who might want to be involved, shoot us an email at ignitevegas@gmail.com.
- Tell all your friends to come hang out with us! The more the merrier!

Truly amazing how much was pulled off in such a short amount of time and it couldn’t have been done without the awesome support & community of vegas tech. We love you all and can’t wait to see you in a couple weeks! Keep spreading the word!

If you’ve already heard about Ignite, then you’re obviously one of the cool kids.

If you haven’t heard of Ignite yet, don’t worry, we got you covered! Ignite is a fun, relaxed night to watch some awesome presentations and drink beer with friends. Speakers get 5 minutes total with 20 slides which automatically move forward every 15 seconds. It’s fast-paced, it’s to the point, and it’s inspirational!

Ignite is a fun, relaxed night to watch some awesome presentations and drink beer with friends. Speakers get 5 minutes each with 20 slides that automatically move forward every 15 seconds. It’s fast-paced, it’s to the point, and it’s inspirational!

We’re currently in the works for securing a location and we’re hoping for the first week of August. Stay tuned for updates!