The first week in March 2010 will be Global Ignite Week.

Ignite is a public speaking event, of sorts.  Speakers get five minutes to talk about their geeky or DIY subjects.

The catch is the presentation behind them auto advances the 20 slides after 15 seconds.  The result is a fast paced night of ‘infotainment.’  It gives the geeks a great night to raise a beer and celebrate their community.

Here is an example talk:

Ignite was started in Seattle by Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis in 2006 and has grown rapidly since then.  There is a weekly podcast of the talks here.  If you are interested in hosting your own there is a nice FAQ here.  This features a step by step guide on how to set up your own Ignite.  Just about a year ago I set up an Ignite in Boulder.  It is a total blast.  We started as 100 friends and now sell out the largest music venue in town (which as geeks is the best joke we could ever play out).  It is an inpiring, fun a creative way to get people together.

The first week of March over 40 cities will participate in Global Ignite Week.  There is a formal post on the O’Reilly blog here and a cool map mashup of the events is here.

Holidays are here which means most of us will pack on some pounds from extra helpings of ham and plenty of toast.

For those looking for that extra motivation will like the WiFi enabled scale: withings.  It is as simple as a scale and as complex as a multi user weight and body mass index (BMI) tracker with web access.

They also have an iPhone app.  I thought I had seen it all, really.  A scale with an iPhone app.  Bravo.

Perhaps this is a little over the top, but having a no effort way to track your weight might be that last ingreedient to keeping to your diet.

The cost is € 129.00.

Hat tip to DailyBurn who has a free shipping offer and partnership with the service (you can pair the weigh ins with their fitness tracking app).

At a recent party conversation brought up iPhone applications and Twitter (ok, perhaps ‘party’ is used lightly here).  Tweetie, Twitterific, TweetDeck, TwitBird (interestingly just labeled “Twitter” in the app store), Twittelator Pro and Echofon are all paid iPhone apps ranging from $1-$5 USD (and all have been in the top 20 paid social networking apps in the app store this week).

Their current sales combined are well over $1M USD with the possibility that  Tweetie alone has passed that mark (this guess is based off of contrasting the top grossing app list with the top apps, taking apps that publish their data publicly to create a known data point).  Interviews with other top app developers had guesses from $300,000 total to $200,000 a week for Tweetie, although the actual number is not disclosed and most likely not as sexy.   Nevertheless, that is quite a bit of cash for access to Twitter on the iPhone, but just why so much?

Simple.  There is no iPhone specific stylesheet.  If you access twitter.com on your iPhone in Safari, you are redirected to m.twitter.com with a stripped down mobile version of Twitter.

Their current mobile version is screaming fast at less than 9KB with only four items loading (about a half a second on the ATT&T Edge network) which is really nice, except it lacks in common basic features such as follow and reply.  It is optimized for a T9 keyboard layout, which is useless for the iPhone.  If you go to a user you have to tap ‘Standard’ to then zoom in and tap follow.

This is why the apps are selling so well, because the user experience on the iPhone is remarkably bad.  Which puzzles me.  Why is it?  You can detect the device and present a seperate stylesheet, which should take about an hour to make (I’m shocked a fan has not already done this) and helps to solve one of the major problems of using twitter. The lack of stylesheet means users will flock to devices, perhaps piling in another $1M in sales.

Kirtsy, a ‘digg for chicks’ recently (and still does) have a problem with users submitting porn sites.  Sunday, a Twitter account @kirtsynews created quite a stir after it posted some very sexual updates, not aligned with the brand or userbase.  Users complained, and blamed twitter for letting ‘brand hijacking’ happen, demanding that the account be suspended.  A fan of the site created the account, growing the following to over 4000 users.

The only problem?  The links of the account were directly from the Kirtsy RSS feed, and linked to the articles on the site.  The only thing the account was guilty of was being exactly what the site was, user submitted links.  In this case, a few adult industry website owners posted links to their site, and the bot published them.

So Kirtsy removes the porn, problem solved, right?  No, in this digital lynchmob culture, users chose to place the blame on Twitter.  The weird thing?  It worked.  Twitter removed the account for unspecified reasons.  The account now reads “Sorry, the account you were headed to has been suspended due to strange activity.”

Yes, republishing an RSS feed is strange.

Couple this with the recent pulling of usernames and you must ask, do you just need a good story and a handful of friends to fake outrage to have a username pulled from twitter?  Or would Twitter having a policy and sticking to it work?

First Round Capital just send a clear message to startups looking for funding: “If you want to work with us, you have to dance.  Dance baby, dance.”  Sending a hat tip to Matt, they show all their funded startups doing a tribute.

We wish you all a fine 2009 and hope that you have much to dance about.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU_5P3GLWv4]

Check out their holiday card here.

Just after midnight BrightKite, a location based social network launched out of their private beta into an open registration. In their words:

Brightkite is a location-based social network. In real time you can see where your friends are and what they’re up to. Depending on your privacy settings you can also meet others nearby.

Think of Twitter mashed with Dodgeball with pictures, geotagging and threaded commenting.  Yeah, I know, another Twitter like service, but the location and feature set makes this app a stand out.

Location checkins are done attaching you to businesses, cross streets or user defined placemarks.  Notifications of nearby friends checking in happen via email, SMS (international too) and via their web interface.  Users can directly message each other via the iPhone app or txt message, without exposing phone numbers.

Privacy is always a huge concern with anything dealing with location.  BrightKite has some pretty advanced privacy features.  You opt into each checkin and opt to share it with trusted friends or the general public.

One of the most interesting features is the BrightKite wall, where places can display all of their recent check ins, photos and notes via fullscreen flash (imagine this at a concert or coffeeshop).  Users can check in and join BrightKite via txt message to the wall.

I’ve been using their application for a year now, and have found it to be incredibly compelling.  Their developer API is open, and robust (their iPhone app is built on top of this).  Here is a demo from their iPhone app, a new version is expected soon:

Disclosure: I’ve known the BrightKite guys from before they were accepted to TechStars, where I work.

Twitpay, which launched yesterday, is a way to send money with Twitter.

It turns twitter into a command line to make payment promises.  For instance, to send this fine blog some money I did this:

@nextweblog twitpay $10 for being a kick ass blog

Twitpay will then index my tweet in a Twitpay account.  They track all the money that has been sent to and from this account with the ability to cash out or donate the money to a TwitPay charity.  You can cancel a payment up to 30 minutes after you tweet it out, by sending a direct message to their account.  Twitpay charges $.05 for sending amounts over $1 and users will occur the usual PayPal fees.  Their FAQ helps quite a bit.

What is unique about Twitpay is that it doesn’t require the user to signup, if you have a twitter account, you are ready to go.

It was created at Startup Weekend Atlanta.

Startup tarpipe is aiming to simplify the workflow of posting on social media sites.  Their API enables users to do progressive things with their content in single actions.  You can upload a photo from an email, have it post to a few such as uploading a photo, announcing this action with a tweet, sending an IM to a friend and send an email (and can do so at the same time).  It does this without forcing the user to install a desktop or mobile application.

Their blog highlights some of the interesting projects their product is leading to, such as extending battery life while using location based service and make EverNote do some cool things.

The big question for me is in how it will be used, and how it will differ from just creating a social media power user megaphone.  I can see some people setting it up so that their Twitter, Pownce, away message, Jaiku, Flickr, Friend Feed, Tumblr and Plurk update every time they see fit, which would create an almost embarrassing echo chamber.

They are strong advocates for open source, and with their API can imagine some creative uses. Currently, I see uses that are neat (use IM to update your twitter) to useful (uploading your photos to several places) but don’t see a use of their API that absolutely shines.  Yet.

OneRiot , a ‘social search engine that finds the pulse of the web’ launched publicly today. The goal of the search engine is to create a realtime digg or reddit, where the most viewed sites on a topic rise to the top of the results. OneRiot is a rebranding of Me.dium.com (archive), which has installed millions of plugins to browsers tracking their viewing habits.

It is built upon the top of the Yahoo! Search BOSS platform.

Testing it out, I referenced a few searches against a real time traffic surge (stories popular on digg or reddit):

Testing out Digg:

Are You Making These 10 CSS Mistakes?
OneRiot search: “10 CSS Mistakes ”
The #1 term is the referenced digg article, but is not listed as popular or trending.

Testing out Reddit:

PNG .vs. JPEG (the most popular story on reddit)
OneRiot search: “PNG .vs. JPEG”
The popular comic was nowhere to be found.

The popular terms feature a specific editor made ‘backstory’ to the subject, making it possible to find your answer without clicking through to any other site. For instance a hot topic “OneRiot Launches ” reveals the ‘backstory’

“Backstory: OneRiot is a social search engine that finds the pulse of the web. Find the news, videos and products that people are talking about right now in relation to any search term. Don’t just find information, find the pulse of the web.”

It is just launched, and has some great easter eggs, such as this meta description:  <meta content=”Get Tobias/Scott H to fill in this lovely keyword desc” name=”keywords”/>.

It will be exciting to see how the startup refines their results, and if those constantly changing results get indexed in other search engines.