Last night the dynamic duo from TechFlash, John Cook and Todd Bishop, hosted a couple hundred people at Spitfire to celebrate the anniversary of the TechFlash launch and get a little holiday cheer on.  I was there representing Seattle 2.0 as part of the trivia team contest.  I joined Seattle 2.0 founder Marcelo Calbucci, Brian Westbrook, and Shauna Causey and twelve other teams in coming up with answers to a couple dozen questions, some of which were easy (where did Microsoft move from in 1979?*) to the incredibly difficult (which original blogging service started out of a Mercer Hall dorm room?*)

Overall our team did fairly well – somewhere in the middle of the pack, I think – but the big winners were Ben Huh and the Cheezburger team, who tied for 1st but won the grand prize based on a tiebreaking question – how many “shakes” has the Urbanspoon iPhone app had as of November?*.  Congrats cheezburgers, and now stop idling your days away reading TechFlash and get back to work giving me pictures of cats perched on the toilet with the caption “I HAZ CATSTIPATION”. lol.

The Spitfire was an excellent choice for a venue – it was crowded, but not OMG-I-can-see-down-your-ear-canal crowded, and the Spitfire staff were busy and helpful.  There was a hosted bar for the first hour, and the buffet was, as my friend Marina Martin would say, nom.  Of course with my ongoing fitness quest I ate fruit, but…

I really liked meeting some new people last night, and the crowd was different than some of my regular stops, so I’ll be going back to future TechFlash events for certain.  Everyone was in a fun, friendly, networking frame of mind.  Until the trivia contest started – then the kid gloves came off and the competitive fires started burning white-hot.

You can go to the TechFlash site to view pictures from the event, and also check out the livestream from the back room.

Thanks to John and Todd for contributing their time and energy to yet another great Seattle tech event!  And thanks to the sponsors for their contributions – Reaxion, BDO Seidman, Denali Advanced Integration, and the UW-Bothell MBA program.

* answers: Albuquerque, LiveJournal, and 413.2 million, respectively

John Cook of TechFlash (and formerly with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) was recently interviewed by VOXUS.  It’s a brief interview, but has some good questions and answers.  John says:

There’s plenty of opportunity for entrepreneurs out there. The business world has been turned on its head — everything from manufacturing to media to financial services –  and that actually plays to the advantage of entrepreneurial organizations and people.

h/t Rachel Berry, via a post on the Seattle Tech Startups list.

John Cook has a great blog at the Seattle P-I and has posted an item about last week’s Seattle Startup Weekend.

I thought that Seattle had the most attendees of any SW, but John writes:

Of the 13 Startup Weekends held around the globe, only the San Francisco Bay Area attracted more people.

Hm. *shakes fist southwards*

(h/t Zach Hale)