Startup Weekend - Phoenix: The Recap
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.
