C4 Blitz Talks

For C4[3] (September 25-27 2009 in Chicago, registration opening “soon”) I'm introducing a new feature: Blitz Talks.

The idea is simple: micro-presentations just prior to the normal, full length ones.

Blatantly ripped off from O'Reilly’s Ignite, the Blitz Talk format is constrained and predefined: you get 20 slides. Each slide is displayed for 15 seconds before I advance to the next slide for you. That adds up to five minutes, total.

A lot of really interesting topics just don’t need the full 45-minute treatment, and I think Blitz Talks are a great way to pack even more content into C4.

Another facet to the Blitz Talks are how they're selected. Normally I ask specific people to talk about specific things at C4. With Blitz Talks, that’s turned around.

Instead, I invite you to submit your proposed 20 C4[3] slides to me by Monday, July 13th 2009. Please send me a private URL to your Keynote file, PowerPoint file or 280 Slides presentation, with what you're going to be saying stashed in the speaker notes.

I'll select about 10 talks. Selected speakers get early access to registration, ahead of when I open general registration. (For now, I've abandoned the C4 attendee lottery idea and am going with this instead — my intent is to “reward” folks passionate enough to contribute to C4).

For your actual presentation at C4, Victoria and I made an app that will display your slides along with an on-screen timer: Blitz.app. The elapsed-time indicator takes up the lower-right corner of your slides, so be sure to test your slides against it.

For now Blitz.app only accepts PDF files, so eventually your slides will have to make it into that format. I'm looking into reading Keynote 5 files directly, but I don’t know if that feature will be ready in time for C4[3]. Patches welcome.

Monday, June 29, 2009
03:24 AM