JumpBox Official Blog

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

Just wondering if anyone heading to VMWorld in Las Vegas next week would like to meet? I’ll be at VMWorld Tues-Thurs and would love to hear some experiences with JumpBox, virtual appliances and virtualization or cloud computing in general. Let me know in the comments here or feel free to contact me through the JumpBox site.

Kimbro

Just a headsup of two excellent events happening this weekend (we’re fortunate to be a sponsor of both):

1. If you happen to be in Memphis, check out Startup Weekend Memphis. These weekends are whirlwind rides where you meet a ton of people from your industry, break into functional teams and deliver working projects by the end of the weekend essentially condensing the first year of a startup into a single weekend. We sponsored the Portland event last weekend and it sounds like they had a blast and created some interesting stuff. We’ll be watching their blog and be interested to see what the Memphis folks come up with.
2. The other one we’re sponsoring this weekend is Desert Code Camp in Phoenix, AZ. If you’re anywhere in Phoenix Metro tomorrow and you write code, you’d be silly to miss this free event. It’s an all-day affair packed with multiple tracks of informative sessions on programming languages, language=agnostic phenomena and general tactics that make life better for people that write software. I’ll be facilitating a round table on (of course) tactics for using virtualization as a developer and specifically using virtual appliances to setup instant open source dev infrastructure.

Having attended both events in the past I can vouch that they’re worth the time for the social component of connecting with people in your industry. Plus you’ll walk away with a ton of actionable things you can apply the next day to improve your skillset. We’re proud to be affiliated with both of these and have a small role in helping make them possible.

If you missed the webinar we did with Virtual Iron earlier this week, there’s an archived version available here. It’s a 30min webex presentation with the first half explaining the virtualization piece (specifically Virtual Iron in this case) and the second half talking about the JumpBox piece with a full walk-through of the process setting up the Alfresco JumpBox start to finish. Big thanks to Chris Barclay and the folks at Virtual Iron for inviting us to participate.

Here’s a video that may be of interest for anyone using the JumpBox for Trac. This is a presentation I did on Tuesday night for the San Diego Java User Group. We talk about what contributes to effective project management, the qualities of a good proj mgmt tool and then use Trac in a real scenario to demonstrate how it works. Big thanks to Paul Webber of the SDJUG for allowing me to speak to his group.

Kimbro and Sean will be attending the rPath leadership summit on virtual appliances April 3-4th in Dallas, TX. It should be an important event - small (25 ppl) but dense with some of the brightest minds in this space and all of the major players will be represented. We’ll ammend this post with the takeaways from that event that we can share. If you’re a Dallas resident, come join us for a cocktail in the hotel bar of the Omni after the days’ events.

UPDATE: As promised, here’s a recap of some thoughts on the Virtual Appliances Leadership Summit last week in Dallas. 

As expected it was a small but high-power cast of some very influential people in the industry- program managers and CTO’s from the major hardware vendors and virtualization players. There were two tracks the first day and Kimbro and I split up to get best coverage. I lucked out with the one I attended while it sounded like Kimbro’s group got side-tracked by discussions of grid computing and peripheral issues to building virtual appliancs. The takeaways I had from my group:

1. Validation. Being in Phoenix we’re somewhat isolated from the lively technology ecosystem that is Silicon Valley. But engaging in discussion with these folks and having our company name used in the same breath as a 38-person, VC-funded company was major validation that we’re doing something right as a 4-person shop in the desert
2. Differentiation. Although we have a technology that’s similar to rPath’s in the sense that it allows us to deploy linux applications as virtual appliances, we’re serving different roles in different markets. rPath makes the toolset to allow software vendors to transform their apps into appliances- they don’t actually build appliances. JumpBox developed its own toolset but doesn’t sell it- we build appliances. rPath is focused fairly exclusively on the enterprise space while we’re tackling small/medium business - each has an entirely different set of problems to solve. Which segways to the third takeaway…
3. Distraction. The topics that were primarily discussed in my tracks were focused around the enterprise bag of challenges. This is understandable since rPath was the event host but from our perspective these concerns are secondary to improving usability and awareness of virtual appliances. Issues like backups in an enterprise setting, broadcasting resource requirements and doing dynamic resource allocation for the appliances: while these concerns are important in the enterprise setting, they’re moot points for us until wide-spread use. Our focus right now is on building awareness, building out the library of apps and solving issues to improve the adoption of VA’s for small/med business.

The second day the group stayed together and we heard summaries of the previous day’s discussions and an analyst from IDC explain why he thought the VA market is going to boom over the next few years. None of the charts or research he presented was public at this point but expect to see some compelling statistics come from the analyst world soon. The presenter that did the final talk of the day was from the grid computing group and while they were extremely nice people, we thought their presence derailed a lot of the discussion. Using VA’s for a grid computing scenario is interesting but such a specialized instance whose relevance is limited to academics and highly-niche industries, we thought it was a bit strange to close with this topic for a wrap-up.

All in all it was a great event with solid people in attendance and we were extremely priviledged to attend. rPath stepped it up and showed themself to be a leader in this space by gathering this group and fronting for all the food and materials. Great choice of venue, great food. We look forward to keeping in touch with the folks we met there.

-sean