Austin Archive

It seems these days hackdays, hackathons, hack this, hack that events are popular across the world. Some of these developer events have created very successful startups and some of the companies have been acquired.

Austin will be holding an API Hackday on Saturday, February 18 at the HubAustin coworking location. The event is free for everyone – just make sure to register for the right category so the organizers can make sure there is enough of each type of attendee (developer, designer, investor, etc.). The event will run from 8am-8pm with free lunch, dinner and post-event beer celebration.

Here’s the event overview, “API Hackday Austin brings developers together for an all-day coding fest focused on building apps and mashups with APIs. Developers of all experience levels can share ideas, collaborate on existing projects, start new ventures, and find out about great tools and new APIs to play with. Hackers will also hear from some of the country’s top API-focused companies on tips, tricks, and tools for building the next big app. At the end of the day, teams and/or individuals get a chance to present their work to a panel of judges and win kickass prizes.”

The event is sponsored by Twilio, Mashery, Paypal and Sendgrid – all four companies are heavy on the API.

This Saturday, January 28, 2012, the LoneStar PhoneGap group will hold their first meetup. PhoneGap is a mobile platform that helps you easily create mobile applications and more importantly helps you distribute one set of code to all of the major phone OS systems (Apple iOS, Google Android, Blackberry, WebOS, Windows Phone 7, Symbian and Bada). Nitobi, the parent company of PhoneGap, was acquired by Adobe last October.

I think it is awesome that a group is meeting on a Saturday afternoon! The meetup will be held at a public library just west of the university area. Free pizza and drinks will be served.

Here’s the event description, “Lets kickstart the first PhoneGap meetup in Austin. Come to learn about PhoneGap, network with other PhoneGappers in Austin, and discuss best coding practices. On the program is a 15 minute coding session where we will develop a simple PhoneGap application demonstrating some of the key features and coding style. You are wlecome to bring your laptop and code along with us.”

I’ve covered the worldwide Startup Weekend events over the past couple of years. The concept behind Startup Weekend is to bring the community together in a different city each weekend to create a startup (or multiple startups) during the weekend.

The event is coming back to Austin during the weekend of March 30th, just after SXSW. The weekend of events will be held at Hub Coworking which is a few minutes south of the city center. Pricing runs from $75-$99 and if it is like the last event, meals will be provided. You can register here and there is an early bird registration that runs through February 17.

For those of you that are new to the Startup Weekend concept, here’s the overview, “Startup Weekends are 54-hour events designed to provide superior experiential education for technical and non-technical entrepreneurs.  Beginning with Friday night pitches and continuing through brainstorming, business plan development, and basic prototype creation, Startup Weekends culminate in Sunday night demos and presentations.

Participants create working startups during the event and are able to collaborate with like-minded individuals outside of their daily networks. All teams hear talks by industry leaders and receive valuable feedback from local entrepreneurials. The weekend is centered around action, innovation, and education.  Whether you are looking for feedback on a idea, a co-founder, specific skill sets, or a team to help you execute, Startup Weekends are the perfect environment in which to test your idea and take the first steps towards launching your own startup.”

Here are some groovy web tech events coming up in Austin that are worth checking out:

1 Semester Startup Demo Day Fall 2011 – December 1

From the event registration, “1 Semester Startup invites you to Demo Day where we will showcase the 20 undergraduate startups from our inaugural Fall 2011 class. Undergraduate students experienced entrepreneurship first-hand, learning from some of the most successful entrepreneurs in Austin. University of Texas students from many different departments including Computer Science, Engineering and Management started companies and were assisted with a semester-long program of startup acceleration: speakers, mentors, and supervised project work. Mentors are exceptional people who have successfully started one or more companies.” register here

Austin Web Bash – December 13

Over 15 monthly web groups are coming together for the mega huge Austin Web Bash. The party is free but you need to bring at least one can of food for the Austin Area Food Bank. register here

Full-day Running Lean Workshop by Ash Maurya

If you are into the lean startup movement, the Austin Lean Startup Circle has put together a full day training session hosted by Ash Maurya. The event will be held at Tech Ranch Austin and costs $250 – looks like there are 7 tickets left.  register here

Remember to signup for Joshua Baer’s weekly Austin events mailing list on StartupDigest.

Facebook is holding an all-day, free event on November 2 in Austin at the Sheraton hotel (would have been great if the event was held at the Facebook office). The day will start at 9:30 AM and end at 5PM and will include lunch. The event will center around the Facebook Open Graph and will include talks on games, mobile and marketing. There is a keynote presentation but the speaker was not noted.

If you want to meet a Facebook developer, this looks like a great opportunity to get some time with their team. It looks like the event will host about 100 attendees so it might be a good chance to meet other local developers.

Here is the overview of the event from Facebook:
“This is a unique opportunity to get hands-on experience with the new Open Graph technologies recently launched at f8, Facebook’s Developer conference. During this all-day program, Facebook will host technical deep-dives, a Q&A with our Developer team, and an opportunity for you and your team to share 1:1 time with Facebook Engineers during ‘Office Hours’.”

You can register for the Facebook event here.

Here are some upcoming Austin tech events worth checking out. For a regular listing of Austin tech events, Joshua Baer from OtherInbox has a weekly events newsletter that you can subscribe to here. Sadly it seems again most events are on Tuesday – so you are forced to select only one – a real shame considering that there are 4 other days in the week and the events would see more traffic if they spread out.

• Austin PHP – Tuesday – scaling PHP applications using Redis
• Your Internet Marketing Party – Tuesday – How to Use Human Psychology to Get Web Visitors and Cash (with Derek Halpern)
• Co-Founders Austin – Tuesday – held at the Microsoft office, this event is a matching event where new startups pitch to those looking to join a startup. Here’s an overview of how the meetup works. The event costs $10 to attend and free for the presenting startups. If you are interested in presenting, get in touch with the organizer (Ricardo Sanchez) asap.
• Austin Lean Startup Circle – Tuesday -October Meetup – Continuous Deployment Mechanics at IMVU – currently full
• Friday Night Hacks – Friday – “…is an opportunity to connect, share ideas, build cool stuff and launch projects into the community. We typically do this into the wee hours of the morning while indulging in delicious snacks, brewskies and copious amounts of caffeine.”
• Social Media Strategy Saturday Night @ American Bingo w/ Rachel Greenfield – Saturday – looks cool, you play bingo for an hour, meetup for an hour and then beer and bingo for another hour.

If you are in the Austin area, there are two networking events coming up that are worth checking out.

First up is the Austin Tech Fair which will be held next Monday, September 26 from 9am-4pm at the AT&T Conference Center near downtown. Last year over 1,100 people attended the tech fair which combines an expo hall with a number of talks on a variety of tech topics including Ruby on Rails, community building strategies and project management. The tech fair is free to attend.

I will be at the tech fair in the expo hall demoing CloudContacts – if you attend, please stop by and say hi. I have some goodies to give away and we can chat.

On October 5, the ProductCamp group will hold a networking event they call ProductParty. This event will also be held at the AT&T Conference Center in the evening and is a great way to meet other locals in the tech, product and marketing space. They are going to have a karaoke competition – I will enter – the only thing I have to decide is whether I go with Kris Kross – Jump, House of Pain – Jump Around or Snow – Informer.

You should bring a big stack of business cards and a smile to both events.