Mike McInally

It’s late Thursday night, and I’m just back from the Ignite Corvallis portion of Willamette Innovators Night, the updated and reworked version of what used to be called High Tech After Hours.

I missed much of last year’s event, but participants told me that the crowds seemed larger this year, both in the exhibitors’ area at Oregon State University’s CH2M Hill Alumni Center and in the auditorium at LaSells Stewart Center, where this year’s Ignite Corvallis event, the second annual, was held as the climax of the event.

In the Ignite format, presenters have five minutes total and 20 PowerPoint slides — 15 seconds per slide — to make their point. This year, 13 presenters gave it their best shot, and the group included Corvallis Mayor Charlie Tomlinson, Corvallis photographer Ryan Gardner and the Gazette-Times’ own Matt Neznanski. (For the complete list of presenters, go to Ignite Corvallis’ Web site by clicking here.)

Tomlinson talked about economic gardening, a notion he’s been pushing for Corvallis to explore for more than a year now. Gardner talked about how you can take better photographs. Neznanski talked about how the Web is changing the face of journalism — for the better.

However, the show was stolen by presentations from Loyan Roylance of ProWorks, who spoke on the topic of “What Social Media Has Taught Me About Sex” (which I choose here not to excerpt in any way), and Aaron Hockley, a Portland photographer who spoke on his passion: Loving photographs of trains, or as he put it, “train porn.”

These Ignite presentations started a few years back in Seattle and have swept the globe: This week, for example, similar Ignite presentations are being held in Perth, Australia and Budapest, Hungary. (The next Ignite Portland is coming up later this month.)

I had to miss the keynote address, from Keen CEO James Curleigh, but folks were still buzzing about it when I arrived in the early evening. I think you’ll be able to read about it in Friday’s G-T.

Speaking of Friday’s G-T: The annual health care issue of Mid-Valley InBusiness is included in your newspaper, at no additional cost to you. Such a bargain! (Confidential to Loyan: We’ll be posting the InBiz stories on line throughout the day on Friday.)

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