As I wrote about this before I was one of the speakers at Ignite San Diego earlier this week. (Photos are here.) More people signed up to speak than there were slots available so part of the selection process was a vote through ‘uservoice’ (great site). Fortunately I was selected although the subject of my talk, iPhone Development, was not as hip as most of the other proposed subjects.

It did not go as I expected. I am quite comfortable with speaking in front of an audience but with an Ignite talk you only have five minutes accompanied by a 20-slide presentation that advances automatically. That made it nerve wrecking. I got enthusiastic reactions about my first Ignite talk but next time I will do some things different. Maybe I set the bar a little too high, but this is what I learned that night:

• You need to choose your subject carefully. I choose ‘Getting started with iPhone development’ because I know that subject very well. But it was too extensive to cover in five minutes. You need to choose a subject that is simple and easy to explain in a very short time. The most popular talk of the night was on waffles.

• I usually do not prepare a talk that well. I learned through the years that my talks are way better when I do not practice intensively. The auto advancing of the slides makes giving the presentation very different. You really need to practice, practice and practice. (Especially when you are not a native English speaker, like me.) Some speakers read their talk from paper, and hey, maybe some geek will use a teleprompter sometime in the future. I do not like that, we are not reading the news or giving away Oscars here. Paper or the teleprompter solves the timing problem (if you do it correctly), but the audience deserves better.

• In my opinion most speakers did not do as well on content as they could have done. A lot of the talks were very promising when you read the title and the description but eventually disappointed a little. It was a great and exciting night but it was not as intense as it could have been. Now two days have passed and I do not remember the message(s) of about half of the talks. (The other half is still resonating.) I had good content but because I did not present it as well as I would like I am afraid most people missed a lot of it. Some other speakers presented quite well but, it seems, at the cost of not having that much good compact content. A good speaker knows exactly what he or she will communicate, or better, will not communicate. They will only deliver their core message and have no need to talk quickly (like I and some others did) because ‘you only have five minutes’. It is sort of an elevator pitch.

• Your slides need to be very attractive. I made slides with a (professional) look that I think fit my subject. That works well if you do a longer talk, in the first five minutes your audience figures out what you and your talk are about, gets enthusiastic (hopefully) and then enjoys the rest of the talk. With Ignite there is no ‘rest of the talk’. You need to use all means at your disposal to ‘ignite’ your audience instantly. Good slides are a big help. And “good slides” with an Ignite talk are very different from good slides with a regular/longer talk.

One other thing, there was also this food serving truck that looked a little like those food trucks you see at construction sites. This one was very different, they had actually very good food. A gourmet restaurant on wheels. It was called the Miho Gastrotruck and on their website you can see where they will be at a particular moment. I will find that truck again.