Startup Weekend Archive

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.”

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.

This weekend the Startup Weekend tour hits Austin, Texas. You can register for the event now and the organizers note that there is a limit of 75 participants. You can also select to attend only the graduation ceremony on Sunday (which is what I plan to attend). The event will be held at the CoSpace coworking facility in central Austin. The full schedule for the weekend is posted here.

Here’s an overview of why you should consider participating at a Startup Weekend (this applies to all of the Startup Weekend events around the world):

Continue reading “Startup Weekend Comes to Austin” »

Last weekend Sydney, Australia held the second StartupCamp. Ross Dawson has a good recap of the event and his thoughts on each of the presented ideas.

Here are the ideas that were presented:

• ActivityHorizon – helps you find activities based on your requirements
• EpicTweet – posts the best and funniest tweets each day
• MyPetNeedsLove – pet dating service – yea I guess cats and dogs want to hook up and get some digits too!
• GiveDo – a way to give your search earnings to charity
• ThreeFeeds – social aggregation sharing
• iTrafficApp – iPhone application for road conditions and traffic information

Here’s a video from the event with each of the presenter’s discussing their applications:

This afternoon I sat in on a web video chat where individuals at Startup Weekend brought their pitches in front of Loic LeMeur of Seesmic and Guy Kawasaki of AllTop. The idea behind Startup Weekend is to bring the community together in a different city each weekend to create a startup during the weekend. Founder Andrew Hyde noted today that they have expanded past one startup to as many as the participants want to create.

There will be another live video pitch session on Sunday at Noon Mountain Time. To follow the live sessions and the weekend’s content, check these resources:

• http://mediacasters.tv/
• http://boulder2.startupweekend.com/

I’d prefer something like this… bring the community together on weekend #1, decide on initial ideas and break up into teams around the ideas. Take 2-3 weeks to strengthen the ideas and decide if there is any potential for an actual business behind the idea. Then bring the teams back together to present in front of the experts.

With that said, here are the pitches that were presented and let me say that Guy was very direct with his responses. The pitches were created in a few hours and were presented in one minute or less so we have to cut them a bit of slack.

The last idea – IMDB for podcasting – could be hot.

No name provided – iPhone App

The idea with this iPhone application is to build on top of Google Maps and show your friends current locations by attaching color coded dots on the map. If you select the open privacy settings, you would then be able to see anyone on the app.

Justin from Web2Splash

The first thing that startups do is nothing and then maybe later they create a splash page until they get out of the dungeon. With a few clicks we will create a splash page and forward any entered emails into the system.

Guy: "are you pulling my leg or is this a real company"

Dan from a "$10 billion company"

Plastic molding companies — if your mold breaks, you can’t make product. There aren’t any good ways to track this. You don’t really know how many hits the mold has taken and how close it is to being down. We want to show and track this mold and the supplier will show how many times it’s been molded and how close we are to having to build a new one. They are trying to make the mold business more efficient.

Guy: "Bubba and Junior are not going to use a Web app."

Elijah of Hitsurance

Not all organizations can budget the hardware to handle the traffic bursts. Hitsurance determines when a Web site is on the verge of failing. When that happens we provide multiple links to backup services that we can switch the site to immediately. Currently the service is free but in the future we will look at a per-year and a per-event fee. It’s a method of last resort.

Guy: "The webmaster has to go to his or her boss. I am a real bozo and I know our site is going to crash so I want you to buy insurance should it go down. You should talk to Michael Arrington and make a strategic partnership that when a site is on techcrunch you can pay him for the service. It’s admitting I am a little clueless and you are stupid for not giving me budget."

Elijah: "is the value prop not obvious?"

Allen: apparently this isn’t to prevent the downtime but instead to put up a static page that links to older archived content and to offer a box to be notified when the live site is back up.

Andy – IMDB for Podcasting

Central repo for looking at podcasts from a person perspective.

Allen: This could work. I could enter "Amber MacArthur" or "Robert Scoble" and find out what shows each has been on, watch any of them, etc.

Guy: In a perfect world, I would come to your site and put in my name and find every podcast I’ve ever been on.

Andy: You’d also be able to subscribe to the podcasts via itunes.