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 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.
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!
From Russia
Does anybody out there speak Russian? Somebody in Russia is talking about Ignighter, but we don’t know what they’re saying…
UPDATE: Thanks to Ignighter friend, Kristin Gaul, for tracking down a translation of that Russian blog article:
It’s a site started by a few recent graduates and it has a social networking component for young people, but how effective it is, will ultimately be up to you to decide…
Russia…always leaving the power in the hands of the people.
My New Bumper Sticker Says – Save the Bloggers
Just last week we reconfigured the design of the Ignighter Weblog and added a couple new posts. At the time it seemed completely harmless, what could possibly be dangerous about spending 4 hours playing around with WordPress blog templates and typing into a box? Apparently, everything. Little did we know that we were skating on ice thin enough to beat out Keira Knightly for the part of a waifish Shakespearean boy. In retrospect, spending that much consecutive time on the blog was one of the most foolish, utterly idiotic things we’ve ever done.
Our newfound appreciation for life comes In light of this New York Times article from Sunday. The article goes into detail about the intense stress that frequent bloggers – most notably Tech Bloggers – undergo as a result of trying to cover as much web news as possible and to be the first to do so. According to the article, constant bloggers have been gaining and losing large amounts of weight, not getting nearly enough sleep, and two prominent bloggers have recently died from what is suspected to be an indirect result of blogging too much. I’m not kidding. Bloggers have actually been dying.
At the outset of the Ignighter Weblog, I wasn’t so good about blogging frequently. Maybe I could inherently sense the dangers associated with a hard-blogging life. But recently I’ve seemingly thrown caution to the wind as I’ve been hitting the blog sauce pretty hard.
So from now on if a couple days go by and I haven’t zealously blogged, don’t think of it as “oh they’re being lazy bums again”. Instead try to take the approach of “ahh those poor guys must be too scared to blog today”. Because the truth is, we probably are. It’s not that we don’t love blogging. In fact, that’s just the problem.
Now that dangers are being associated with the blogger life, I predict that many will have a new found respect for them. Insiders are even saying that on next year’s list of the world’s most dangerous jobs, it could actually come in at number 3; Just behind deep-sea fishing and coal mining, but a hair ahead of Olympic Torch carrier.
In fact I’m feeling like a bit of a daredevil myself, and I love it. Little things like redesigning the blog layout now seem way more exciting, kinda like the modern day equivalent of Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But also not entirely like that at all.
I guess the real lesson to be learned here is that blogging, like most things in life (alcohol, extra virgin olive oil, books), are great in moderation but fatal in excessive quantities. The Times quoted Michael Arrington, founder and co-editor of Tech Crunch as actually being surprised that he’s physically alright (despite gaining 30 lbs. in the last few years), “I haven’t died…At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen….This is not sustainable.” These people seriously need to cut back. I mean we all love hearing about what new languages Facebook is now available in, but do we really need to hear about it at 4am?
Maybe for the sake of these bloggers and their families we need to take a stand. If we make a concerted effort not to read their blogs in the middle of the night, then I predict that they’ll stop the nocturnal postings. In the article, Arrington jokes about how it would be great if all bloggers could reach an agreement to not post in the middle of the night, but he knows this is an impossibility. What they’re missing though, is that the power to save these croaking bloggers lies in the hands of the readers. You know what I’m sayin’?
Talkin’ About Ignighter
Today is a slow news day so we figured we’d fill our readers in on a little of the press/blog coverage we’ve gotten recently. Now keep in mind, for the most part this stuff is about a month old. We wanted to post it then, but we were just so consumed with booking guests for A/S/L Check.
Here are some links:
Newark Star-Ledger Article
This article ran on the cover of the NJ section in Jersey’s Biggest Paper, The Star-Ledger. Sopranos fans may recall that this was Tony’s go-to source for reading Mafia news, browsing obits, and catching up on innovative dating sites. Tony, Syl, Paulie, and Bobby would’ve made a pretty solid Ignighter group.
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This blog basically gives the Cliffs Notes of the Star-Ledger article.
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This is a pretty cool site aimed at informing entrepreneurs, investors, and bloggers about the newest, coolest startup ideas out there. Each day they have a vote asking their readers which startup (out of 10 each day) will be the most successful. We got 66 votes and the second place finisher our day got 18. We were expecting to win something cool like a DVD player or a Series A VC funding, but no, apparently the winner doesn’t get anything. Apparently it’s not even a competition at all. Oh well, I think we’ll still call us “the winner” anyway.
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We had a chance to meet this charming blogger. What a guy!
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PopGadget
This is a Tech/Innovation blog aimed at women.
Interview with a Danpire
Hello Readers, sorry for the delay in posts. But today we’re totally making it up to you as we present our first in a series of interviews called:
A/S/L Check – An Ignighter Interview Series - Hard Questions, Soft Bodies.
We start off the series with an interview exclusive that Ignighter fought really hard to get; co-founder Dan Osit, 25. Dan is a NJ native with a penchant for cable news shows, talk radio, WSJ Op-Ed columns and anything else that helps him adopt other people’s quasi-informed opinions.
Ignighter: Dan, we’re really honored to have you here today. Thanks for coming.
Dan: Adam, we’re in my apartment. I just buzzed you in 10 minutes ago.
Ignighter: Right. Moving on.
Dan: k.
Ignighter: I think it makes the most sense for us to start at the beginning. Tell us about the night of your conception.
Dan: Well I don’t remember much because I was really young. But I will say that I haven’t been back to Cabo since.
Ignighter: Ok let’s skip ahead a little. Let’s talk about the College Years. Didn’t you think it was odd that Screech accompanied all the kids to Cal U only to become their RA?
Dan: Huh, Screech?
Ignighter: Alright, apparently somebody bailed on Saved By the Bell before it got good. But that’s ok. Tell us about your college years.
Dan: Well I attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. My Freshman year I joined a fraternity called Zeta Beta Tau…We affectionately called it ZBT. Hehehe.
Ignighter: Ohhh a frat boy! I bet there’s a lot of dirt to dig up there!
Dan (confused): Adam you were in the frat too.
Ignighter: Hmm seems like I hit a nerve. Maybe we should press on.
Dan: OK.
Ignighter: What was your major at Northwestern?
Dan: Communication Studies.
Ignighter: And do you think that has made you a better communicator in the business world?
Dan: Yes.
Ignighter: Can you give any examples?
Dan: Lots.
<<awkward silence>>
Ignighter: I wanted to bring up a pretty well documented event that happened early in your Sophomore year at Northwestern.
Dan: Oh yeah?
Ignighter: Yeah. Legend has it, that during the first lecture of Theories of Modern Mathematics, you struck up an enlightening conversation with a doe-eyed, breathtaking, young ingenue who for all intents and purposes has left an indelible mark in the forming of the fine young man you are today. Can you tell us about this chance encounter?
Dan: Well I’m pretty sure we’re talking about you again. And isn’t an ingenue a woman?
Ignighter: Is it? Again, we press on. I understand that after graduating you formed a company called Glenpoint Capital Partners. How many partners did you have?
Dan: I had 6 partners.
Ignighter: Sounds like a typical weekend for me. Zing!
Dan: I’m quite certain you don’t utilize the same level of “risk management” techniques with your partnerships though.
Ignighter (crest-fallen): zing.
Dan: Yes and then I left Glenpoint in late 2007 to c0-found Ignighter, a group-to group to dating and social networking service.
Ignighter: Hmmm sounds like a great idea. Well before we go, I want to close by asking you the same questions that we ask all our guests before they leave… your apartment.
Dan: Nice, shoot.
Ignighter: What is your favorite word?
Dan: Dogan.
Ignighter: What is your least favorite word?
Dan: Juice.
Ignighter: Boxers or Commando?
Dan: Boxers.
Ignighter: Favorite smell?
Dan: Cheese.
Ignighter: What historical figure would you most like to go on a date with?
Dan: Golda Meir.
Ignighter: Dan we want to thank you so much for coming here today and honoring us with this interview exclusive! It’s been great.
Dan: I live here, idiot.
Ignighter: Be sure to check back next week when we welcome another very special guest on:
A/S/L Check – An Ignighter Interview Series - Hard Questions, Soft Bodies.
ZZZOMG! We’re Back!
We’re back!!!!
Ignighter should be back to normal. Again any problems, questions, concerns please email help@ignighter.com
Thanks for your patience!
