For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept of the Ignite show: Ignite is an O’Reilly event, which is basically an ongoing series of speedy presentations. They range from building multi person pogo stick to hacking chocolate, any topic that geeks hold dear. Each speaker gets 5 minutes, 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. The ignite show went Global this year and we were lucky to have the first African ignite organized in Casablanca.

Presentations ranged from "NoSQL" to "the Glorious strategy of failure" (one of my favorites by the way). I had a hard time understanding some (maybe they weren’t geeky enough for my brain to compile) but I can proudly say the event was a success.

Here are some of the presentations that I liked, disclaimer: these are very subjective choices:

Anas B. El Filali, alias big brother, "the glorious strategy of failure". A presentation the “Seth Godin way”. On how we should rather accept failure and try to learn the best we can from it. In other words, how to transform failure into success.

The “Wardriving” presentation by Karim Jazouani was an amazing, cool and very casual presentation. Wardriving is actually “the act of searching for Wi-Fi networks by a person in a moving vehicle, using a portable computer or PDA”  [Wikipedia entry]. Loved the way he managed to turn the game into an awareness campaign for higher Wi-Fi security.

And Finally the Moroccan dream, a presentation by Youness Quassimi. Very fun story behind the making of a 6 morrocan’s dream start-up : http://www.synergie-media.com/

But Ignite show isn’t just about presentations, it’s about the atmosphere. I surely had a lot of fun mingling with people I only knew by name or through an Avatar on Facebook or Twitter. I missed a bunch of them though, mainly because of the archaic phone I’m proud of possessing, but had the chance to connect with them later on Twitter.

Bottom line is: If you hear about an Ignite show near you, don’t even consider missing it!

And yes, how can I forget the icing on the cake?

Yeah I know, it’s not that clear (I would love to blame it on drew’s cancer  but it was Casablanca’s rain and my short-sight’s fault. Note to self: always have a marker in arm’s reach!) and Yes I’m no super blogger (Jeeez a girl can dream, can’t she?). Yet, it was a great gesture from Mr Sefrioui. Thank you Sir, much appreciated! (Special thanks to my Geek friend Oussama who made this possible)

The upcoming Ignite Casablanca is to take place in few months. Until then I’ll leave you with some goodies, Cheers!

For More photos: Link

Finatech’s fan page on facebook has more details on the event: link

The event was organized by Salah‐Eddine Benzakour &  Jean‐George Perrin  And sponsored/hosted by Finatech. 

Lamia Ben.