Ignighter Blog is Moving Home!

Hey Ignighter friends, the Ignighter Blog is finally coming home to nest at Ignighter.com.

So update your bookmarks to http://www.ignighter.com/blog and update your RSS feeds to http://feeds.feedburner.com/ignighter/Wltj.

New content will be coming more frequently than ever on the new location so stay with us!

BoulderDash – Ignighter Road Trip Part 3

At the end of Part 2 Jerry Rig and Alan Wrench were relishing their new manly alter-egos. They honeymoon wouldn’t last long though…

We woke up on the third day of our trip to find that somebody (the consensus points to me Rig) had left the headlights on the night before. The car was dead along with our Mr. Hyde charade. Needless to say, we didn’t have jumper cables. And while we had a conceptual grasp on the process of jumping a car, neither of us had ever taken the lead. We know, it’s pathetic. However we were fortunate enough to get some much needed help from the very kind Omahanian woman who worked at the check-in/concierge/valet/wake-up service/general maintenance desk.

Thanks to our new friend, we did get the car running. Now all we had to do was get the hood shut properly and we could be on our way. Unfortunately, we needed the manual to do so. Not a joke.

Once we got the hood shut we were back on the road, feeling ready to conquer the last leg of the trip and move into our summer digs in Boulder. The only obstacle left it seemed – aside from the incessantly pouring rain and disconcerting proximity to deadly twisters – was lunch.

Food stops along Rte. 80 in western Nebraska don’t come up too often. So when we passed a “food exit” at 12:45 we knew it would be best to pull off and eat rather than risk the chance that we wouldn’t come across another for hours. And we still weren’t passing any damn food stands selling freshly picked ears of corn on the side of the road! Share your product with us Nebraska, you’re the Cornhuskers! I always keep a used tissue in my pocket in case I come across a stranger who wants to know what Jersey is like. The point is, you have to share your culture with your fellow Americans. But I digress.

And do you want to know the reason for the digression? I’m trying to avoid reliving the following horrendous scene.

We decided to eat at Taco Bell. It was disgusting. I ordered a chicken quesadilla and a chicken taquito. From what I could tell, they consisted of the exact same three ingredients and only those ingredients (cheese, tortilla, rubber chicken) the only difference was that they were rolled up into different shapes; one looked like a half-circle while the other looked a lot like Joey Fatone.

The shape of the creation would ultimately prove inconsequential. The rubber chicken had its strangle hold on me and it wasn’t sitting well. The moment I got behind the wheel I felt incredibly queasy. We drove through the pouring rain for about 20 more minutes, with me trying to breathe while Dan laughed and continued bringing up gross details about the food we had just eaten.

Dan: I think your Fatone roll-up had some beak in it. It wasn’t supposed to crunch like that was it?

Me (between slow breaths): Shut up Dan.

Dan: I still don’t understand why you ate ALL of it.

Me: Me neither.

Why did I eat the whole thing? Ughhhhh.
We made it as far as the next turnoff when I knew I couldn’t drive any longer. We pulled off the highway into a deserted convenience store. I ran to the bathroom to refund my “meal” and Dan followed. With the camera.

Once the beak was out of my system, Ignighter was back on the road for the home stretch. A few hours later we were in Boulder! Road trip successfully completed!

While the trip sure had its ups (calzone) and its downs (vomit), it was definitely something we won’t soon forget. And Ignighter’s upcoming summer in Boulder promises to be an unforgettable experience too. It’s something we’ll try hard to hold onto forever. Because in the words of Kid Rock:

“Now nothing seems as strange as when the leaves began to change
Or how we thought those days would never end

Sometimes I’ll hear that song and I’ll start to sing along
And think man I’d love to see that girl again”

In our next post we’ll explain what exactly it is that Ignighter is doing here in Boulder, CO for the summer. It’s pretty exciting stuff!

BoulderDash – Ignighter Road Trip Part 2

When we left off on Part 1, Dan and I were heading west from Chicago into corn country, Iowa. Upon entering the state I boldly predicted that there would “most likely be little stands on the side of the highway selling fresh corn on the cob to weary passerbys.” This would prove to be incredibly wrong. Not only were there no stands selling corn on the side of the highway, but there was no corn to be seen anywhere! In movies, Iowa’s highways are lined with endless stalks of golden maize. But in reality, it’s just a lot of dirt.

The highlight of Day 2 came when we actually stumbled upon the University of Iowa (our Big Ten rivals!) for lunch. We found a great little restaurant, The Summit, with views of the campus where we ate delicious blackened chicken calzones (see Dan’s pinkie finger for perspective).

After lunch we took a quick tour around the elegant campus, passed out some Ignighter flyers, and explored an intriguing street nearby.

I’m not sure if there was something in the calzone or maybe just too much time spent in the car, but after we left the University heading toward Omaha, we really started to lose our sanity.

Dan, having recently watched Transformers for the first time was convinced that there were Decepticons on our tail. And as crazy as it sounds in retrospect, at the time I was in complete agreement. Below are a couple of the Decepticons we eluded along the way. The second one was amphibious.

When we weren’t outrunning villainous robots we were chasing storms to occupy the time. Fortunately there were so many storms that we were able to just go straight on Rte. 80 the whole time and still claim to be chasing storms. However after sashaying around the U of Iowa together, and witnessing first hand what real men from the heart of the country actually look and sound like, we knew that if were going to attempt to chase storms (or even if we were going to attempt to say were chasing storms), then we’d have to assume alter-egos.

The new identities were basically just manly names draped over our nebbishy personas. We chose names that we felt evoked hardened cowboys, real men, the kind of guy who instinctually knows where the power box is when the electricity goes out. I became Jerry Rig and Dan was Alan Wrench.

That may look and sound like Dan, but it’s actually just Wrench (real men, we learned in Iowa, don’t use first names).

Wrench and I arrived in Omaha, Nebraska in the early evening. Although the hotel had an exotic name, it didn’t exactly feel like Cabo when we got inside.

We explored Omaha a little bit and then hit the hay early.

Check back in for the shocking final installation of the road trip, coming very soon. A dead car, an incident at a fast food joint, and so much more.

Our New Lead Developer

Part 2 of the Ignighter Road Trip will be coming shortly, but before that we wanted to introduce the newest member of our team.

Kevin Owocki is Ignighter’s new lead developer. Kevin has 7 years of software engineering experience, and he has run a handful of small scale web companies. He’s an avid runner and ultimate frisbee player. He loves exploring the outdoors, meeting new, interesting people, and chatting about technology and startups. Ask him about his unique ability to relate nearly any situation to the plot of a Simpsons, Seinfeld, South Park, or Family Guy episode. Kevin is psyched for a landmark summer, and we’re really excited to have him on the team!

BoulderDash – Ignighter Road Trip Part 1

The Ignighter team is spending the summer in Boulder, Colorado and we’re extremely excited and fairly exhausted.

Dan and I left Wednesday morning on a 3-day adventure from NY to CO and arrived last night. We laughed, we cried, Dan snacked (a lot), I vomited (a little). The following is the first of 3 installments recounting our journey.

First some background on our wheels:

Finding a car to take on the trip was quite a hassle, but thanks to Dan’s dad for making many trips to Long Island car dealerships, we finally secured a great ride to have for the duration of the summer. We pimped out our brand new Civic with the same instrumentation that I would imagine an F-16 keeps on board,We didn’t even have to pay $15 per checked bag!
a Magellan GPS and a Sirius Radio. The GPS was essential for reminding us to continue driving west on Rte. 80 (which we did for 97% of our drive across eight states).

Satellite radio was the fuel that kept our brains from shutting down which would have been the case if we had been forced to listen to Iowa and Nebraska’s radio programming – ever heard of a “corn debate”? Me neither. And at $6/month, the brain fuel was far more affordable than the more than $4/gallon we were pumping into our whip.

We learned that the Sirius Hits station currently plays a 7-song rotation, each song we had completely memorized by Des Moines. This was our soundtrack for the drive:
Fall Out Boy (featuring John Mayer) – Beat It
Leona Lewis – Bleeding Love
Nickelback – It’s Not My Time
Lifehouse – Whatever It Takes
Usher – Love in this Club
Flo Rida – Low

And our anthem for the trip:
Kid Rock – All Summer Long

On a side note, does anybody know if this song has been released yet? I started to get the shakes this morning because my body wasn’t used to not hearing it every half hour and when I checked iTunes, it wasn’t there.

On another side note, you have to love any musician who is self-confident enough to rhyme “things” with “things”. And this rhyme isn’t just a one-time cop-out nestled between two other better rhyming couplets. It’s actually the refrain of the song.

“We were trying different things

And we were smoking funny things”

The song is amazing. One of the best things I’ve heard in a long, long thing.

OK, Now on to the trip:

The first leg was from NY to Chicago. We did it in 13 uneventful hours through NJ (land of Liberty and Prosperity), Pennsylvania (8 hilly, twisty hours of nothingness), Ohio (Rest Stops so beautiful and spotless that Dan actually ate a prosciutto panini off the urinal),

Indiana (Gary was killer), and finally to Illinois.

Chicago is a special city to us since we went to college there and it felt great to be back in the beautiful windy city.

We arrived in Chicago at night and grabbed dinner and a beer with our old college pal Dr. David Davidson and stayed separately at 2 friend’s places who conveniently lived a few blocks away from each other. Both friends were incredibly hospitable and both places were gorgeous. Dan stayed at Jess Schneider’s sci-fi apartment complete with Delorian-style cabinets

and freshly baked banana muffins for our road trip.

I stayed with Dr. David Davidson in his big-ass apartment overlooking Lake Michigan.



In the morning it was up and out. After a quick deep dish slice at Gino’s East we were presented with a Frostian dilemma.



We ultimately chose Iowa, mainly because it was the most untraveled, but also mainly because we found ourselves in the Exit Only lane.

In Part 2 the adventure really heats up. We reveal the crime-fighting alter-egos we were forced to adopt along the way, an epic calzone, and a tale of a dead car.

BYOZ

This weekend, to celebrate a friend’s Grad School graduation, we’re doing one of our favorite things; A BYO dinner. We love these dinners so much in fact, that a coulple years ago we made them a monthly tradition between our group of guy friends and a great group of girl friends with whom we always hang out. Needless to say, this monthly tradition heavily influenced the conception of Ignighter and its group-to-group model. Going out in groups is what we always enjoyed most, so why not create a structure online to facilitate what we’re already doing in real life?

BYO dinners with a big group of friends are the bomb. In a city like New York, it takes an extra effort to track down complying restaurants, but trust me, it’s entirely worth it.

First of all, you never have to guiltily ponder the eternal non-BYO restaurant question: “should I order another $12 glass of wine?”. When you BYO like we do, the only question you ask yourself is “can we finish the rest of these bottles before the restaurant closes for the night or they kick us out first?”.

That brings me to point two. BYO can be a very interactive experience because you can theme your night and bring fun things to drink. Sure, everybody loves Santa Margarita Pinto Grigio, but that gets boring. When we BOO, we like to coordinate, often times around the food that we’re eating. I usually get yelled at for consistently bringing the same thing to our Asian meals, Soju a Korean kind of sake made from sweet potatoes that tastes like a combination of vodka and sake and can have as high an alcohol content as 45% – hence our cognomen, sadka. I strongly recommend it though, fun drink.

Finally, BYO just creates an awesome atmosphere for enjoying time with your friends. You share food, you share drinks, and everybody relaxes and has fun. If your group wants to go out after, BYO dinners serve as wonderful pregames too.

For all you New Yorkers, below is a list of a few of our recent BYO destinations, let us know in the comments if you have any more to recommend.

1. Hop Kee – This is a divey Chinese restaurant in Chinatown with great food. Conan O’Brien is supposedly a regular. I must add the following disclaimer though: the last time we ate there, our meal ended with giant cockroaches nosediving from the ceiling onto our (mostly) empty plates as the girls ran out of the restaurant screaming. After enough sadka however, it wasn’t such a big deal (see equation below).

+ =

2. Poke – This is a great sushi restaurant on the Upper East Side. It’s better for smaller groups since they don’t really accommodate any tables greater than 6 people. They also only take cash.

2a. Azuki – This sushi joint isn’t technically BYO, but it’s all you can drink sake and wine when you order their Japanese beers. As far as I’m concerned, if there is any dinner outing more fun than BYO, it’s sake-bombing.

3. Panna II – A really good/affordable Indian restaurant decorated with thousands of hanging red lights. You know you’re in for a treat when before the meal even starts, one of your buddies (see below) starts passing Zantacs around the table like it’s the 70s and we’re experimenting with some new recreational drugs.

A Must Watch

We at Ignighter are always confused about the fact that it seems like there’s a vast disconnect between an idealized mentality about dating and the way actually it happens in real life. Sites like Match and eHarmony basically have the user create their own blind date. This sounds pretty unpleasant and certainly doesn’t reflect the way we behave in real life.
We feel like Ignighter on the other hand, does accurately reflect the way we date and meet people in the real world; with our group of friends.
That being said, we really love this video that our friend JM shared with us. Not only is it hilarious, but it’s right on target in terms of representing the real way dating happens today.

Why the Entrepreneur Matters in Today’s Crappy Economy

We Ignighter folks really enjoy reading Roger Ehrenberg’s blog, Information Arbitrage. Recently he posted this poignant piece, The Halcyon Days of Entrepreneurship about the rise of (and the importance of) entrepreneurship in today’s struggling economy.

He points out -among other things- that we can potentially turn a negative into a positive by thinking outside the box. And he’s not just talking about creating ideas that come from outside the box, but even the act itself of thinking of an outside of the box entrepreneurial idea is outside of the box behavior for many of the mature, smart professionals who have recently been laid off after years of corporate employment.

The importance of this rise of entrepreneurship, he says, is that it “can help spur innovation, solve seemingly intractable problems and help energize the economy both today and tomorrow.”

I don’t really have much more to add because Ehrenberg’s post is comprehensive and well-written, and I’m starting to confuse even myself by writing about it. It’s definitely worth a read though, really good stuff.

Early Opinions of Facebook Chat

Disclaimer: The following post contains three very embarrassing – but entirely true – confessions by the writer. Please see them simply as attempts to prove his point and try to forget them after reading the post and understanding the point.

Facebook launched their chat feature last week and many are calling the creation another brilliant, inevitable step toward Facebook becoming the world’s next operating system. But while it was certainly inevitable and will probably, like most other Facebook creations (except for the Beacon of course) be a resounding success, I think this one is going to take a little more time than some of the other groundbreaking features they’ve recently introduced. Even more time than the initially hated, but now addictive News Feed – the goat cheese of new Facebook features.

Here’s why I think Facebook Chat isn’t such an easy sell:

I’m on Facebook all day long (embarrassing confession #1). This is not hyperbole, it is fact. If at any point in the day you were to look at my open Firefox browser you would without fail always see a Facebook tab. Even if it is just one of five running tabs, Facebook is always there. And yeah, I have justification since Ignighter is a Facebook application and I have to “do work” within Facebook, but trust me, it’s just a very convenient excuse.

Occasionally I just leave it open to my Homepage, but more often than not it’s open to poolside photos of the recent Fire Island weekend getaway of one of my Facebook friends that I probably don’t even know that well (embarrassing confession #2). What we do on Facebook, all the stalking, and gawking, and voyeurism (well that’s what I do at least) is really humiliating. Whether we want to admit it or not, Facebook is a guilty pleasure.

And I think this really cuts to heart of why I have 1,307 Facebook friends (EXTREMELY embarrassing confession #3) and I’ve yet to see more than 54 “online” at one time. You can be on Facebook and not publicly declare yourself “online”. And while I’m not sure if everybody else keeps Facebook up all day like I do, I’ve got to believe that more than 4% of my friends are on at any given time. If they are on, but just too ashamed to promote it all day, then Facebook chat is going to face quite an uphill climb moving forward. And if it’s true that only 4% of my friends are online at any given time (and I find this unlikely), then Facebook as an operating system has an even steeper climb ahead.

What do you think?

Should TechCrunch use MLA? Or maybe Harvard Referencing style?

Yesterday TechCrunch posted this story about the potentially treacherous future of many Facebook Apps. The blogger, Mark Hendrickson, discusses the “rough road ahead” for what he calls “low engagement apps” like SlideWall. He also quotes Naval Ravikant of Venturehacks as saying that the apps with the brightest future are the high engagement ones like travel, dating (right on!), book, and game-related, whereas “everyone else is kinda screwed”.

I guess we should feel pretty damn flattered because this is exactly what we predicted three weeks ago in this post. Now granted instead of “low and high engagement” apps, we were referring to them as “passive and active involvement” apps. And yes, it’s true we didn’t cite quite as many “figures” or “experts” to come to the same conclusion.

But it’s the conclusion that matters. So we’re certainly flattered that TechCrunch is hopping on the Ignighter bandwagon.

We’re also happy to hear that they’re still truckin’ along over there…Don’t forget to breathe!