JumpBox Official Blog

“Setting up a blog has never been easier.”

Over a month ago, JumpBox launched the “Powered by JumpBox” service, which helps Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) grow sales by removing the friction associated with deploying server software.

Our Powered by JumpBox service transforms an ISV’s application into a JumpBox. (If you read this blog you probably know already that a JumpBox is a pre-built, pre-configured software application for virtual computing.) Short story: A JumpBox application deploys in less than three minutes, ease of deployment facilitates in-house trials by an ISV’s potential customer and motivates purchase.

We launched Powered by JumpBox by developing Virtual Movable Type for leading blogging software and services company Six Apart.  Using the Powered by JumpBox service, Six Apart allows potential customers of Movable Type to experience the power of Movable Type and realize its value in minutes.  Powered by JumpBox, Virtual Movable Type gave Six Apart a powerful sales tool that enables them to close sales quickly.

Though we knew this service would be a valuable tool for ISV’s, we’re still tickled, and darn proud of reviews like this.

Last weekend, JumpBox helped sponsor the first ever Startup Weekend Phoenix event.

Valley sponsors come together

Roughly 100 people gathered to pitch ideas, form teams and then get busy developing products; all within 48 hours. In addition to a cash sponsorship, JumpBox made its entire JumpBox Open catalog of virtual applications available to each of the Startup Weekend product teams.  When you need Instant Infrastructure to develop your project quickly you know who to call.

Here’s how it’s done, Startup Weekend style

Friday Oct 17th

6-7pm                Meet and greet. Roughly 100 people gathered at Gangplank, a fantastic co-working location, and the launch site for Startup Weekend. People of diverse backgrounds, and attendees from various professions shook hands, many for the first time. Software developers, lawyers, graphic artists, rock climbers, Mac fanatics, Microsoft employees, and more. Web developers, photographers, videographers, and Marketing, public relations, and business development professionals came to take part in this first wild west product development shootout.

Sean Tierney of JumpBox-Pitching SaaS backup aka Reserve Chute (He's standing up, top right waaay back in the white shirt) Yes, if I had a better pic...

7-8pm                Ten to twenty people pitched their ideas for new products and services. If chosen, these products would be developed into production ready products over the next two days. Ideas ranged from healthcare applications, web apps for stay at home parents, and apps to match human personalities to dogs, to SaaS backup services, alternate reality games, and new twitter apps.

8-9pm                Startup Weekend attendees vote for the ideas they’d like to help turn into projects. Teams were formed, a line was drawn. No turning back.

Ideas chosen to move to development:

• Doggie Slobber - Matches you with compatible dogs
• Twitter Rater - Tells you if a keyword is viewed positively or negatively
• Data / IP Escrow - Holds your code ’til you get paid
• GPS Inventory - Realtime tracking of trucks and what they have in them
• SaaS Backup - A way to pull all your data from hosted services (Flickr, Basecamp)
• Alt Reality Game - You play it… it plays back
• Diet Management tool

9-10pm              Groups begin discussing and developing product development strategies. Some stay late into the night.

Doggie Slobber Team at work

Francine Haradaway, Den Mother to the Phoenix startup community. You should answer her "Yes, Ma'am," when addressed.

Saturday Oct 18th

8:30-9:30am       Sponsored breakfast. Mmmn.
9:30-9:40am       JumpBox for Trac/Subversion launched. All groups are given the JumpBox’s IP address and have immediate access to check in code and track bugs.

Sean Tierney of JumpBox-resting after 2 JumpBox launches

9:40-9:50am       JumpBox for Lamp deployed. MySQL plus PHP, Perl, Ruby and Python along with PHPMyAdmin, give devs a crucial head start in development time.

Lamp = Headstart for app devs

Trac= Flawless proj mgmt

10am-10pm        Code.   Develop marketing plans, website graphics, software and web site architectures.  Also, intense sensitivity to daylight.

Easey peasy right? No, but get it done, or be an..

Sunday Oct 19th

9am-6pm            More design, more teamwork, faster!

Alt Reality Game Team at work

7-8pm                 Presentations

A few of the projects that emerged:

Twitrratr: Twitter opinion tracking app. Search keywords and discover the tone of what’s being said about it on Twitter. Distinguish negative from positive tweets surrounding a brand, product, person or topic.

Reserve Chute (formerly, SaaS Backup): An open source web application that fetches data from online applications and stores a local copy. Back that SaaS up; Reserve Chute currently supports Basecamp, Gmail, Delicious, Bloglines, Google Contacts & Calendar and Yahoo Contacts & Calendar.

My Shelter Helper: Lets shelters and other animal organizations create a presence on the internet for no cost.

JumpBox is a proud sponsor of Startup Weekend.

We pulled it off in Phoenix, see it on Flickr, read it on Twitter, Watch videos on YouTube

Then do it yourself

Thanks and congrats to all who came together.

Update: Startup weekend Phoenix featured on Techcrunch!

Naysayers hate, Sean Tierney throws the smackdown!

If you’re in education and you’re in the Bay Area, come by the Innovative Learning Conference at the San Jose Convetion Center. Steve and I will be there until Thursday at booth #400.  This is the inaugural year of the ILC which is essentially a revival of the CUE event. It’s a 3-day conference centered around furthering the use of technology in education. We’re proud to be an exhibitor and to be helping make OSS applications more accessible to schools and teachers. Come by and say hello if you’re attending the conference. And mention this blog post and we’ll give you one of our brand new t-shirts.

Sean and Steve staffing booth 400 at the ILC

Hi, I’m Austin Godber.  You may remember me from such JumpBox films as “The Amazing JumpBox Forums”, “JumpBox Support Squad”, and everyone’s favorite “JumpBox Platform Release Notes”.

I will be out in the world teaching a class this Friday, October 10th, at the Ohio Linux Fest University.  The classes are put on by the League of Professional System Administrators or LOPSA.  My topic of choice, of course virtualization related, is “An Introduction to Virtualization on Linux using KVM“:

This short course will provide an introduction to virtualization as well as discussion of the following topics:
* Overview of the state of virtualization on Linux.
* DIY virtualization options for Linux, concentrating on KVM.
* Innovations based on virtualization to keep your mind wandering through the rest of OLF.
This course is intended for those new to virtualization while some of the innovation material may be interesting to the not-so-new.

I will be around at the main event on Saturday the 11th as well.  Any one in the Columbus, Ohio area should come down and check it out.  The schedule is packed with all sorts of Linux goodness.

Hope to see you there!

Austin