Startup Weekend in Olympia, hosted at Olympia’s own St. Martin’s University, is seeking participants who have interesting and innovative entrepreneurial ideas … especially if they involve “Green” environmental technologies! This all-weekend 2010 event, held October 15 – 17, promises to be an ALL ACTION opportunity for participants to learn how to take their brilliant ideas to full product launch. Absolutely priceless information will be yours in an atmosphere of lively interaction with others.
The Olympia area has a long history and reputation for environmental awareness and its community is stacked with citizens who honor and value the amazing planet we live on. Individuals who have ideas on how to minimize our impact and footprint, maximize our technological proficiencies, or improve our immediate and long-term prospects are strongly encouraged to bring their thoughts and innovations forward! Your idea may have been thought of before, but has it been fielded and tested for viability? Your idea may be so unique that you’re the originator of a brand-new process, product or invention so share it! The world may be looking for it now!
Even if you believe that your ideas are mundane and routine, but you’re strongly interested in learning how to take a concept to market, Startup Weekend in Olympia is for you! For less than $80 and one exciting learning-filled weekend, you can gain information on how to develop your thoughts and concepts, build upon them with effective strategizing and planning, and learn to pitch your beliefs to those who count … your potential customers, vendors, and investors.
Olympia Startup Weekend is an opportunity that cannot be missed for those who have a drive to build an exciting and vision-filled future! Visit olympia.startupweekend.org to learn more, register, and talk with other participants in our Google group! October 15 – 17, 2010 is right around the corner!
Thanks to the Jerry, Cynthia and the folks over at SW Olympia for putting this together!
Infochimps is excited to sponsor next month’s StartupWeekend in Austin, taking place at CoSpace on September 10-12. We are thrilled to be a part of this entrepreneurial event and look forward to attending and contributing to its success.
Infochimps is a data-as-a-service platform with a data marketplace at its core. We have over 10,500 datasets available for download and are committed to providing resources for developers of data-driven software. Our lightweight API offers high value datasets from Twitter as well as web analytics, such as Trstrank, a measure of a Twitter user’s influence, and an IP-Census data that maps IP addresses to census demographics. We are adding new calls as often as possible to give developers access to more datasets.
A few of our engineers, including @mrflip and @jessecrouch, will attend the event and contribute code. Any participants that are interested in implementing data from our API will have free usage of it for the weekend. We will also be providing discount codes for use after the event.
StartupWeekend Austin is only a few weeks away, we hope to see you there!
Infochimps features:
Startup Weekend Detroit ended 3 months ago (May 14-16, 2010), but startup firms and companies are still coming out of the event. One of them is SiteFog, founded by Kyle Mulka.
SiteFog is a web company that offers cloud computing at a more affordable price. Three issues became a starting point for SiteFog:
1. There is a market for cloud processing.
2. Distributed computing systems work.
3. Millions of people use the web.
Gathering all these points, Kyle and his team knew that bigger CPU tasks can be broken down into smaller processes. By doing this, the tasks can be disseminated to different users and be done in a jiffy. Just by entering into a website, you can utilize your CPU’s capacity to the max, and help “solve amazingly difficult programs.”
SiteFog can also help you monetize your products and the users that go in and out of your website. Website owners who depend on advertisements for profit can profit greatly from this kind of monetizing.
During the last Startup Weekend Detroit, SiteFog was voted the “Company Most Likely to Make $1 Million.” Looks like the Startup Weekend crystal ball is right, and SiteFog is definitely on its way to the top. SiteFog also gave the locals a presentation of its firm through the A2NewTech meetup, so you’ll definitely be hearing their name all around the state soon enough.
In Startup Weekend Profiles, we highlight teams and ideas that made it big during Startup Weekend. Big enough, in fact, to get noticed by folks willing to get those ideas off the ground and turn them into a full-blown venture.
Michigan is probably not a state that would be top-of-mind when it comes to startups. One film duo aims to change that. Attila Bokor and Jason James are based in Grand Rapids, MI and want to help film pros like themselves gain recognition by raising awareness on filming opportunities for their state. Their project, Michigan Film Reel, got high honors in the recent West Michigan Startup Weekend.
The state legislature of Michigan enacted last 2008 a refundable film tax incentive of up to 42 percent for those who bring their projects to the state. That’s great news all around and Michigan Film Reel wants everyone to know about this so they can take advantage of this incentive. It would help a lot of people out from small businesses who want to gain media exposure, to people looking for work that can serve as film crew in projects.
And how will they go about this great endeavor? Their site is essentially an ezine, created to showcase talents inside Michigan as well as current film projects in the area. They post information, conduct interviews and upload video to keep things fresh and vibrant. Through the site, you can get a behind the scenes look into many of the current film projects in this Great Lakes state.
Unlike other startups, Michigan Film Reel is less concerned about making money and more about spreading the word about their state. Needless to say, they still need sponsors to help get their site more exposure. At the moment, they are keeping their regular jobs (Attila is a technology director at World Mission and Jason manages a production outfit) and paying for expenses out of their own pockets. The Startup Weekend that happened in their area was a great help in pushing out a working model and posting their first interview. Right now, they are looking for interns to help their cause and are in discussions with another company to offer their video services to other businesses in need of materials for promotional purposes.
All their efforts are slowly paying off. Michigan Film Reel was invited to be part of the West Michigan Film Industry task force and has already rubbed shoulders with the director of the Michigan Film Office. They have also been part of the Traverse City Film Festival and tuned in to discussions put together by Michael Moore, arguably Michigan’s most well-known filmmaker.
What advice can we get from the crew of Michigan Film Reel? “Yes, even if it isn’t making a whole lot of money just do it. If you are confident that the idea is good keep doing it, eventually you will make it.”
Sterling advice and we hope to see Michigan Film Reel become a startup celebrity in its own right soon.
In Startup Weekend Profiles, we highlight teams and ideas that made it big during Startup Weekend. Big enough, in fact, to get noticed by folks willing to get those ideas off the ground and turn them into a full-blown venture.
Score.ly unlocked its own achievement when it bagged the top prize in the NYC Startup Weekend held last June. AOL Ventures awarded David Leibowitz and Elizabeth Fuller, the founders of Score.ly, a $10,000 scholarship to kick-start their idea and bring it to the masses. Shirley Xu, an associate with AOL Ventures, remarks, “Above all else, we chose the team that we believe had the highest potential to execute and move forward as a world-class company. We liked many of the concepts at Startup Weekend, but the Score.ly team is exceptionally dedicated.”
What is Score.ly all about? Score.ly wants to put some gaming into your real life. You know the feeling you get when you finally finish an RPG quest or topple the final boss in a game? Well, Score.ly aims give you that same high but better: it verifies your offline achievements so you can tell everyone how great you are in real life. It’s bragging rights gone social.
How did Score.ly start? David says it wasn’t just a single “Aha!” moment that brought about the idea; it was more like several light bulbs that came together and eventually birthed the final concept of Score.ly. A lot of emerging technologies like scalable, cost-efficient cloud hosting and increased data integration for brands merged together and made the site possible.
If you think after such a big win that the team is resting on its ten-grand laurels, David says what they are doing is quite the opposite. Unlike some Startup Weekend attendees, this isn’t a hobby for the Score.ly team: they have been “pursing this dream full-time and have done so since day one.”
“Our biggest issues,” David adds, “are all of the challenges of a typically company; but doing so with fewer resources. Human capital and time are big issues when you code with the left hand, layout Illustrator graphics with the right, slam phones for customer dev with your left foot and do ‘meta-work’ (operations/corporate organization/legal/etc.) with the right.”
The site is still in a closed beta and the founders have been mum about what they plan for the coming months. Despite that, we have extremely high hopes for Score.ly and we’re pretty sure that it will be something big and truly “game” changing.
Girls in Tech has always been very involved when it came to participating at Startup Weekend happenings, but this one takes the cake. Girls in Tech is sponsoring Startup Weekend Minneapolis! We’re heading for the Twin Cities to give the local folks a taste of SW fun at a 54-hour event. So get ready to bring in your ideas, work with a lot of cool people, and launch your product with a bang.
Startup Weekend Minneapolis owes Shane Reiser a bunch of thanks for making it all happen on September 17 to 19. And of course, bringing in the big guns is all part of the fun. Co-founder of Zencoder, Jon Dahl, will be dropping by, as well as Jeff Pesek, co-founder of TECHdotMN. W31 2000 co-founder Rob Weber will also be there. Matt Bauer of Pedal Brain, Pete Birkland of RAIN Source Capital, Luke Francl, and Kathy Grayson will also make their presence felt come panel night.
And even though the event is still a month away, it will never hurt to grab a ticket of your own right now. Only 100 registrants will be taken in, so make sure you’re part of that number. Of course, members of Girls in Tech, as well as students, will get a discount. So head to Minneapolis on September and experience the SW rush soon.
Startup Weekend New York is a month away (September 10 to 12), and New Work was gracious enough to open its doors to host the event. New Work City (NWC) wants to build its own self-sustaining community, where everyone who needs some legroom to work can just come in and plug in his laptop whenever they please.
September 1 is the target date to open up their new space, but renovations are still in process, and funds are still coming up a little short. So, New Work City needs your help to make it to the finish line.
You can check out their Kickstarter project where you can pledge as little or as much as you are willing to contribute. New Work City needs all kinds of stuff, from paints, chairs, lighting fixtures, to kitchen appliances (because we will never have too much espresso for the day), so pledging as little as $10 can make a huge difference. If you’re feeling a little generous, you can even pledge as much as $500 or $1000 to help out.
And to make the fundraising even more fun and exciting, New Work City’s own crazy Tony is even daring you to dare him. You can choose to have Tony write a NWC rap song to perform at the NY Tech Meetup, or appoint him chef of the day and make breakfast for all the NWC gang.
Right now, many people are putting their money on Tony’s impersonation of Lady Gaga (complete with the outfit and the song!), so if you want to see it happen, help New Work City raise some money. And make sure you’re there for the “Dare Tony” event to see what’s going to go down.
via Kick Starter
When you sign up for a Startup Weekend event in your city, probably the one thing you’re thinking about most is, “I have this one heck of an idea and I want to see if I can make a startup company with it.” But the thing is, when you’re at Startup Weekend, you have to see further than that to come out of the event successful. No matter what your idea may be – whether it’s a green tech, a website, or an app – you will always deal with people. And when it comes to people, you should aim to make a sale.
With that objective in mind, you will have more appreciation for the mix of people you will get in your team. Not everyone is as well-versed as you when it comes to coding, or business savvy for that matter, but that diversity will never fail to fill in the gaps. Once you work together – marketers, programmers, advertisers, and entrepreneurs alike – you might just come out of Startup Weekend with a solid startup you can call your own.
Of course, you can’t make a sale when you just coop yourself in the building while all the potential customers are out there. So let’s get off our seats and get out, literally. Offer something to a passerby and see if he takes the bait (well, if he doesn’t, that means it’s back to the drawing board). If you don’t have anything to sell just yet, talk to strangers and get feedback and opinions that might help you tweak your presentation and product.
When it comes to startup companies, never make the mistake of forgetting why you’re doing this and for whom: to make a sale to all the people, everywhere. Keep that in your noggin for the whole of Startup Weekend, and you won’t fail to make a good impression.
via Startup Square
Mark Paul, author of the Entrepreneur’s Survival Guide, is giving a special offer to all you folks. Get $5 off when you purchase the PDF book through this link. From the site:
This book can save you significant time and money – Whether you are an inventor, technologist, entrepreneur, small business owner or CEO of a small to medium-sized company trying to take your company to its next level.
So Startup Weekend Chicago just wrapped up just this weekend and everyone is still on a high. There were about 45 ideas among the 85 participants. With glasses of cold Half Acre Beer and slices of pizza from the Art of Pizza, 9 teams were formed, and all had solid concept presentations by the end of the event. And that spelled SUCCESS in big bold letters.
For many people, Startup Weekend wasn’t just fun; it was a way to widen the network of people they know. Daniel Krieglstein, a participant who conceived the startup called The JournalWiki said, “Startup Weekend was a great place to find contacts… graphic designers and business managers. This is the best place to find [software] developers.”
For Ed Suda, the co-founder of eMotion, Startup Weekend was the perfect opportunity to “engage in a purely web experience” and he was amazed as at “how quickly a unique web business can be created.”
Even a Startup Weekend judge couldn’t help gushing over the Chicago vibe during the Startup Weekend. Jonathan Pasky, the co-founer of midVenturesLaunch (the largest startup conference in Midwest, if you must know), was happy to see that “Chicago’s tech scene is really coming together, and the quality of the startups pitched this weekend [was] phenomenal.”
To sum it all up, here is the list of startups that ranked high in the judges’ scorecards:
3rd place: Remnant Retail – a site where landlords can post vacancies for short-term tenants for a span of a day to a year.
2nd place: Data Insider – an application that enables companies to “monetize their data so hedge fund traders… can get on-demand sales metrics from the source.”
1st place: App Triumph – a website that makes applying to college and graduate schools easy.
In the end, everything came together perfectly and Startup Weekend Chicago ended with a bang. So see you the next time you drop by Chicago for another SW event!
via Knapp Center