Seventeen-year-old Alex Godin won the crowd's hearts at Ignite NYC XII.

The fall edition of Ignite NYC, the techie-oriented infotainment fest that goes by the motto, "Enlighten us, but make it quick!" is coming up next week. Past Ignites have featured speakers from the New York tech scene like the co-founders of HowAboutWe, Skillshare creator Mike Karnjanaprakhorn, and foursquare founder Dennis Crowley ("Everything you ever wanted to know about Family Feud.")

Ignite works like this: each presenter has 20 slides and five minutes to talk about whatever they want. It can be a personal story, a how-to or a rant. It's like a condensed version of TED, and it's all happening again at the Sheraton in Midtown on Monday, Oct. 10. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Pitchfork writer Matt LeMay and TechStars hackstar David Phillips, and topics span everything from art to data to astronomy to how to survive Los Angeles. "We have a room of 1,600 to fill, the largest evaaarrr!" says organizer Tikva Morowati. And Betabeat has a discount code!

Here's the full lineup:

Alexis Ohanian: Make the World Suck Less
Alexis is the cofounder of Reddit, founder of Breadpig, launched Hipmunk as head marketing dude, and is now a fulltime investor, advisor, and writer.

Amy E. Herman: How Picasso Helps to Solve a Murder Case
Amy is a recovering lawyer and art historian who has developed a unique program that teaches first responders—cops, FBI agents, ambulance drivers, ER doctors, special military personnel-- to rethink how they see the world by learning to look at art.

Caroline Drucker: How To Get More Women in Technology
She’s a Partner Marketing Manager at SoundCloud, has a die hard love for high-heels, spent 42 days in the wilderness on a canoe trip, hiked the Himalayas, has furious disco dancing skills, and makes a mean vegetarian chili.

Corvida Raven: How To Unstale Your Cheerios
Corvida pens technology pieces on SheGeeks.net and is Community Catalyst for TED. Corvida is passionate about the power of technology and community and teaches tech in plain English.

David Phillips: Los Angeles Survival Kit
David Phillips is currently a HackStar at TechStars after graduating from ITP. When he's not hiking the Long Path, he's writing zombie comics, memorizing movie trivia, or doting on his ridiculously awesome fiancé.

Emma Persky: Karaoke Faces
Emma Persky is technology evangelist, avid traveler, and storyteller. When Emma is not at home in New York, doing science with data at Hashable she can be found on an intrepid expedition, collecting stories for her blog, travellerwithatale.com.

Jack Aboutboul: Let's Talk
Technologist Jack Aboutboul has worked on far reaching tech projects including serving as the Community Architect for Red Hat, Inc., and on the One Laptop Per Child initiative.

Jonathan Levy: Life of an Infomercial Before and After Model
Jonathan Levy leads digital strategy and social media for Rodale, the world’s largest health and wellness print company and is writing a book about the science of adventures.

Lucianne Walkowicz: Explosions in the Sky: the New Era of Time-Domain Astronomy
Lucianne Walkowicz is a stellar astronomer, multimedia artist, newly-hooked marathon runner, competitor in costumed road races, devotee of karaoke, former burlesque dancer, and bang-up cook.

Mark Malkoff: Stretching Boundaries, Challenging Society, Testing Limits
Mark Malkoff is a comedian/filmmaker known for pulling crazy stunts that have been covered on "Anderson Cooper 360", "The Today Show", MSNBC, Fox News, and the "Tonight Show with Jay Leno."

Matt LeMay: Everything I Need To Know About Tech I Learned From Being in a Band
Matt LeMay started his music journalism career at 16 when he began writing for Pitchfork, spent five years touring his band Get Him Eat Him, playing with bands like the Arcade Fire and tiny, miserable shows at places like Columbus Ohio's "Taco Ninja," often in the same week. He is a platform manager at bit.ly.

Michelle Broderick: Yellow Cab, Gypsy cab, Dollar Cab, Holla Back...
Michelle is currently the GM of Uber in Seattle and Mentor at 500 Startups, previously she was the Marketing Director at Yelp. She frequently suffers from wanderlust, design envy, and food comas.

Nick Crocker: Floss The Teeth You Want To Keep - How To Change Yourself
Co-founder of WeAreHunted.com and Native Digital. Former Product Manager, Boxee NYC. Runner, writer, rugby league obsessive.

Ron Goldin: Workcation in the Modern Era
Ron Goldin is the principal designer and creative director of Studio Akko, a user experience, branding and strategy consultancy based out of New York and San Francisco.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay: Outdated: 5 Reasons Dating Is Ruining Your Love Life
Samhita Mukhopadhyay is a writer, speaker and technologist residing in Brooklyn, NY. She is the Executive Editor of Feministing.com and is the author of Outdated: Why Dating is Ruining Your Love Life.

Sarah Feingold: The Laws of Ring Pops
Born an artist, Sarah Feingold decided that the best way to protect creative folk like herself was to go to law school. She currently serves as counsel of Etsy, Inc. and specializes in intellectual property, business and e-commerce law.

Suraj Patel: The Social Media Echo Chamber
After graduating from Stanford and deciding that there wasn't too much job demand for a political scientist, Suraj went to law school. A few stints at law firms, a consulting firm, the Obama Campaign, and in hotel development left him with one awesome problem - a lot of different friends from different social networks and periods in his life that he wanted to keep in touch with, so he washed our hands of the law thing and went right into founding imup4.com.

Tereza Nemessanyi: I Digitized My Mom
Tereza is a wife, mom of two, and co-founder of Honestly Now. In the past she had big-swinging-vagina kinds of jobs. But after she became a mom, a few people told her she lost her brain and what she had to say didn't really matter anymore. This made her sad. And then pissed off. So she started typing. She wrote an op-ed called the XX Combinator and has posted about 2,000 comments on AVC.com.

Josh Knowles at Ignite NYC talking about gamification--"How to get the user to do the thing:"

Foursquare hacker Pierre Valade: Dashing.

Happy IPV6 day, to steal the New York Times's line, and a merry Internet Week to all. Did you know Judah Friedlander is a Webutante? Or that $1,500 is enough to convince a former Facebook employee to dive into a decorative pool? Some other things that happened this week in New York start-ups:

THE WABBYS. Betabeat won a Webby! Just kidding. The Pulitzer of blogs eludes us. Go and congratulate our brothers in content creation as they rub shoulders with Daniel Radcliff and OKGO's Damian Kulash at the Hammerstein Ballroom on Monday, June 13.

IGNITE TONIGHT. That is all. FORTNIGHTER IS ALIVE. Customized travel itineraries. MADE IN NYC(^TM). HOWABOUT WE LAUNCH AN IPHONE APP. And have 35,000 people download it in the first week. FOURSQUARE HIRES HACKATHONER. It is Pierre Valade, creator of the Twttr-outlawed Agora App who ReadWriteWeb calls "dashing," which uses the Foursquare API to recommend people to meet in the vicinity based on who you follow in common.

AVIARY, BETAWORKS, HUNCH AND VIMEO: COME STEAL OUR STAPLERS! Walkabout NYC is a workspace walking tour for Internet Week on Friday, when all the start-up curious talent and Silicon Alley tourists--if there is such a thing--can check out New York's hawt start-up spaces. "Basically, companies open their doors to people who are interested in a behind-the-scenes look at how they work," Harvest's Danny Wen explains. Then, the New York City Startup Weekend hackathon happens at General Assembly on Saturday. My, what a busy week. We didn't even mention API Hack Day.

NYC SEEKS EAL, STILL. The six-month entrepreneur-at-large gig at the city is yet unfilled. Also in jobs, Behance is hiring a Rockstar Backend Developer. You must have strong backend development skills and play in a popular rock band.

BIG-ASS DATA. Sabey Data Center Properties building a 40-MW data center at 375 Pearl St. in Lower Manhattan. Initial tenants include Microsoft Corporation, JP Morgan Chase, Savvis, Internap, VMware and T-Mobile. Oh wait, our bad--no start-up can afford to take advantage of this.

TECH AND THE CITAY. The NYC Entrepreneurial Fund ($3 million, New York Economic Development Corporation; $19.5 million, First Mark Capital) has made its second investment, joining the seed round for Medico, "a high-quality health reference information in Spanish, including over 4,000 articles about diseases and conditions and continuously updated health news feeds. Medico.com also offers community features and a Q&A platform organized around focused health topics such as diabetes, heart disease, and plastic surgery." The Fund's first investment was in MyCityWay, the winner of the first BigApps contest.

His talk at last night's Ignite NYC, titled "High School in the Age of the Hacker," invoked Henry David Thoreau, John D. Rockefeller and the movieOffice Space. High school sucks, his argument went, but a true hacker will still get something out of it. Think of teachers and parents as clients, he said, and then build things instead of complaining.

Alex's parents were not in the audience at Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO to hear this, because Alex wanted to do his presentation on his own; his father, best selling author and marketing guru Seth Godin,  tends to attract attention.  "They'll see it on YouTube," he told The Observer.

Equipped with Power Point, a microphone and a room full of geeks, Alex was poised, smart and funny, and his message resonated with the audience. He compared high school to the cubicles of Office Space, talked about how his favorite teacher once decided to teach the Bible as literature instead of Shakespeare because the class had argued for it so well, and told the audience that even though the high school system is broken, the only solution is to "sit down and do the work."

Alex also edits video and plans to spend his spring break learning Ruby on Rails. This isn't the first time he's stormed the city—his team won grand prize at Startup Weekend in the fall. No doubt he'll have plenty of willing mentors after bringing down the house last night.

"So far best talk by far at #ignitenyc is by a high school student. We're all screwed!" one attendee tweeted.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries