At each Ignite Seattle there is a guy off to the side with a tripod and video camera. He records all of the presentations & spends hours editing, transcoding and posting them online. Bryan Zug is that guy. Thanks Bryan for all the hard work!
Here is the Noonhat talk, enjoy!
Jack Broom of the Seattle Times wrote an article describing Noonhat! It’s in the Northwest Life section of the paper today.
Last Saturday at Gnomedex, I opened the site up to all of North America. Noonhat is still most active in Seattle, but this week we’ve made the first lunch matches in other cities!
The good:
The bad:
So what happens when someone doesn’t get a match on the day they picked? They’ll get an email in the morning letting them know that Noonhat couldn’t find a match for them. Their registration automatically moves into a waiting mode, with an option to just cancel. Once someone else signs up for a lunch nearby, everyone in waiting mode will get an email with a link to follow if they want to have lunch on that date. If they can’t make it, they can just wait until the next email.
If you went on one of the non-Seattle lunches, how did it go?
If you’ve been on a Noonhat lunch and would be willing to be interviewed, please email me: brian@noonhat.com
A wide variety of experiences would be great!
And the site is still up. :) For that, I can only thank WebFaction for the hosting and the implementers of all the excellent software I’m using, especially PostgreSQL, Python, Django and of course Linux.
The King 5 segment about Noonhat ran during the 5pm news today. For two and a half minutes! Wow.
Here is the video:
http://www.king5.com/video/index.html?nvid=167050
And the article which goes with it (pretty much a transcript of the video):
http://www.king5.com/localnews/stories/NW_081507WAB_noonhat_lunch_website_TP.39c42c56.html
They did a great job explaining the core idea. Huge thanks to Ray Lane and everyone else at King 5 who worked on the story.
I should also mention Monica Guzman at the Seattle PI’s Big Blog. She was the first person from mainstream media to write about Noonhat. And as far as I know, she’s still the only one who has actually been on a lunch. ;)
The best thing about all this publicity is that a LOT of people are signing up for lunches. I think we’ll also get a wider variety of people (i.e. not just tech folks) which should make for more interesting lunches for everyone.
Check on the site this evening to find out! Rumor has it there will be a short spot on King5 news tonight at 5:45!
It’s been an incredible few days in the life of Noonhat. Two talks in three days, a huge jump in sign ups, and a ton of thought provoking conversations (some of them were even over lunch).
Wednesday: Ignite Seattle was fantastic. It’s usually very good, and this time around it was even better than usual. We’re incredibly lucky to have it in Seattle. Huge thanks to Brady and the team of volunteers who
make it possible. Also, it sounds like Brady is planning to run Ignite events in other cities soon, keep an eye on his blog!
Thursday- Saturday: Gnomedex was incredible. For an overview, there is a ton of Gnomedex info on the blogs. I’ll just say that for me, the people really made it great. The last three days were filled with friendly, inspiring and thought provoking conversations. Thank you everyone!
In the last few days Noonhat had a lot more traffic than it ever has before. Look at these graphs:
Noonhat.com site traffic for August. The yellow line is the number of visitors. Update: For the 13th, 1005 visits, 1882 page views, according to awstats.
blog.noonhat.com traffic - Update: The top point there is 254 views according to WordPresss.org
And most importantly for everyone going to lunch, sign ups made a similar jump. Wow! Thanks everyone!
So far, my basic shared hosting plan [1] is holding up well. The site is responsive and working well!
We’ll see what those graphs look like tomorrow, though. ;)
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[1] Noonhat is hosted by a ‘shared 2‘ plan from WebFaction. Their customer service is very personal and efficient. (Disclosure: these are affiliate links, if you sign up via those links, it will help pay for Noonhat hosting.)
I’ll be demonstrating Noonhat at Seattle Net Tuesday tonight (2007-08-14).
Eight individuals or organizations set up a presentation they can do on a laptop or with low-tech tools (like markers and paper). In two rounds, four presentations set up at a different table as the crowd of attendees breaks up into groups of five or so. Groups rotate from table to table, with five minutes for each presentation (don’t worry, there will be a break to refill your drinks).
Here’s the areas we’re looking for presentations on:
- Applied technology solution to a non-profit problem.
- Non-profit challenge– Pose a challenge and seek tips, contacts, and answers from your audience/panel of experts.
- Simple solutions– Technology that is cheap, easy, and useful for non-profits or communities.
Should be fun! I’m looking forward to seeing the other projects and meeting people outside my usual circles. ;)
In honor of the chance to speak at Gnomedex, and even though there are still some rough edges, Noonhat is now serving the whole continent!
Happy lunching!
Ignite Seattle was amazing. This was my fourth Ignite, and the quality of the talks gets better each time. If you missed it, I’d highly recommend checking back in a week or so when the videos go online. I’m honored that I was able to share the stage!
As a twist to this Ignite, the audience voted after the talks and the highest rated talks will be repeated this weekend at Gnomedex. I’m very excited to say that my Noonhat talk was voted in! I’ll be talking this Saturday morning. Wish me luck!
