Startup Weekend

Posted by Startup Weekend Crew

Have you noticed the left sidebar of this website lately? Go ahead – check it out. Look at that panel lineup. Teams on Sunday night are going to get some first-rate feedback on their presentations and exposure to some very active investors and seasoned entrepreneurs. In the words of a friend, this panel is the ‘bombizzle’.

Posted by Startup Weekend Crew

Here’s the official schedule for the Sept 10-12 Startup Weekend NYC at New Work City. We may be adding or re-arranging a few things here and there, so we will continue to update this post.

Friday, September 10th

• 5:30 pm – Doors open
• 6 – Event officially begins. Networking time. (delicious pizza and beverages served)
• 7 –  Official kick-off and welcome
• 7:10 - Speakers: Jeremy Mims (Frogmetrics), Mark Davis (DFJ Gotham Ventures), Dwight Merriman (10gen) and Jessica Randazza
• 8 - Pitches start (Pitches are 60-seconds each. Pitch your best idea first, because we may not have a chance for second or third pitches)
• 9-ish – Pitches conclude. More time for networking. Some teams begin to self-form
• 10 – Voting. Teams solidify
• 11 – Break off to a bar or coffee shop to continue the discussion or begin work

Saturday, September 11th

• 9 am – Breakfast is served. This day is all about building, developing, designing, writing, creating, etc.
• 10 - By now, teams should have prototype(s) on paper, decided on a working title, and created technical plans. Start getting servers live, buying domains, creating user flows, etc.
• 12 –  Lunch & Demos from Birchbox and Market Publique
• 1:30 – More coding, business plan development
• 6:30 – Dinner
• …Work through the night

Sunday, September 12th

• 9 am – Breakfast
• 10 - Teams should have a live splash page up with an email capture and a simple blog
• 12 – Lunch
• 4pm:  Final presentations begin
• 7 – Panel votes. Awards. Wrap-up and move out

If you have questions about the schedule, please send an e-mail to shane [at] startupweekend [dot] org.

Posted by Startup Weekend Crew

We’ve partnered with the folks behind the Web 2.0 Expo to grab some discounts and free passes to the event, which is happening Sept 27- 30th. We’ll be handing our the free passes (2) to the leaders of two winning teams at Startup Weekend NYC on Sunday. All attendees can grab 25% off using the discount code STARTUP.

Web 2.0 Expo is a conference and tradeshow for everyone who cares about embracing and extending the opportunities created by Web 2.0 technologies. Web 2.0 Expo engages thousands of participants through:

Tactical and strategic sessions assembled by program chairs Brady Forrest (O’Reilly) and Sarah Milstein (UBM TechWeb), designed to hone practical skills and keep you ahead of the game

A bustling Expo Hall showcasing companies and projects vital to the web ecosystem

Keynote presentations from leaders and innovators describing what’s ahead for the industry

Time to connect with other like minds through events, an unconference and a robust “hallway track”

Posted by Startup Weekend Crew

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.

Posted by Startup Weekend Crew

This just in from #NYCSW Sponsor Noiz Ivy!

Noiz Ivy wants to help diverse entrepreneurial concepts and teams gain access to advanced US-based manufacturing resources, professional product development and mass-market distribution experts to aid in launching their dreams.

In an effort to bring talented entrepreneurs together with US-based manufacturing & development professionals, Noiz Ivy will be providing a ‘venture spotlight’ to any #NYCSW project that intends to produce manufactured widgets for the toy, game, electronic, medical, industrial, automotive or general consumer market segments.

Edutainment concepts, novel materials-use concepts, and physical-digital product integration concepts will be of specific interest.

Through the commitments of our partners, Noiz Ivy will provide access to expert consultation in the areas of prototyping, business modeling & development, material sourcing, cost projections, legal, product and information management to any #NYCSW production with the potential for market success.

Posted by Startup Weekend Crew

Our venue, New Work City, is opening their new location on September 1st. It’s gonna be kick-ass and we are very excited to host one of the first events in their new space!

New Work City is a community that’s open to anyone willing to participate and contribute. This includes startups, hackers, freelancers, students, lawyers, telecommuters, designers, writers, artists and all-around brilliant awesome people. Their new space will include a large coworking facility, as well as multipurpose space for Meetups, workshops, classes, and more. Everything they do will be geared toward helping people lead better, more independent lifestyles.

To raise money for renovations, they started a Kickstarter project. Check it out and please consider contributing to what’s gonna be an awesome resource for the NYC tech/startup scene.

Check out their Kickstarter page here: http://nwc.co/kick

More information: http://nwc.co

Posted by Startup Weekend Crew

After Startup Weekend: How to make your startup happen? (By Edith Yeung from BizTechDay)

Edith is the founder of BizTechDay, an entrepreneur conference where inspiring entrepreneurs share practical business and technology ideas and strategies. BizTechDay 2010 will take place in San Francisco, Seattle and New York this fall.

Edith has successfully brought together over 5500 entrepreneurs in the past 3 years and she is passionate about helping other entrepreneurs.

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Congratulations! You made it to Startup Weekend.  You made it through and you survived!

After the 54 long hours of non-stop of exciting work, now what? Based on the successful companies that come out of Startup Weekend you have two choices:

Choice One:

You can give up. Take the easy route. Forget about this experience. Go back to your cubicle land, and forever wonder how it would be like to be an entrepreneur.

Imagine you are like Neo from the movie “The Matrix”, do you want to take the blue pill or the red pill?

Choice Two:

You can take charge. Follow through. Apply what you have learned from Startup Weekend. Start leading and make your startup happen.

Just like Neo, you can choose the blue pill and not have your Startup Weekend memory erased. There is no turning back once you finally experience and understand how it feels to make things happen, and feeling that you too can do it.

FootSpotting is one of the many Startups who have survived the weekend and dominating the market after Startup Weekend.

Below is a short interview with the founder of FoodSpotting, Alexa Andrzejewski, where she shares her with us on how she survived Startup Weekend and made her startup happen:

Founder of Foodspotting

Why did you decide to join Startup Weekend?

Alexa: I met Sana Choudary at the Web 2.0 Expo and later went to lunch with her team. She was starting a site called Founder Shack at the time, and introduced me to the cofounders that she’d met at the Web 2.0 Startup Weekend. Foodspotting was just an idea that I was really excited about at the time, but as a non-developer, I wasn’t sure how to get started. When I realized I could actually find developers who shared the passion for the idea and make it real, and that ordinary people like me can start startups and build teams, I got super excited. I joined Women 2.0′s Jumpstart Your Startup and signed up for Startup Weekend right away.

What is FoodSpotting and how did you come up with the idea?

Alexa:The Foodspotting website and mobile apps make it easy to find and share food recommendations: Instead of reading and writing restaurant reviews, you can share photos of specific foods you recommend and see what’s good around you wherever you go.  Foodspotting was inspired by a trip to Japan and Korea, where I discovered all of these foods I’d never heard of before, like Okonomiyaki and Tteokbokki, and realized 1) people need to learn about the other foods that are out there — like Japanese foods that are not sushi and 2) there’s no easy way to find out where to get a food once you do know it exists. So we started Foodspotting to create a better way for people to learn about new foods and find them using their mobile phone.

Any specific suggestions and advices for our fellow Startup weekend community?

Alexa: Don’t expect to come out of Startup Weekend with a fully-baked startup. While it’s important to pick a project you can complete in a weekend (e.g., a prototype of one part of the app, a certain feature, a smoke-and-mirrors demo), the startup idea doesn’t have to be that simplistic! I brought a big idea to Startup Weekend and pitched it there — and by the end of the weekend, all we had was a demo and a deck. And yet with just that deck, we were able to attract an Angel Investor (Dan Martell) on the spot and lots of buzz.  Also, for my team, instead of using the weekend to build a working app, we primarily spent it brainstorming, putting things up on the wall on sticky notes, and getting input from all of the amazing people who were there — investors, market researchers, designers, developers, lawyers, etc. I highly recommend working in a super visible way so that you can take advantage of the community there! For us, that and the connections we made were much more valuable than the bit of coding we could have gotten done in a weekend.

Based on my conversation with Alexa, here are my suggestions and ideas on what all Startup Weekend Alumni must do within the first week to be successful

Write Down Your Startup Weekend Experience.

1. What your team has accomplished
2. What did you learn
3. What you need to do to move your startup forward

Schedule your follow up team meeting within the next week.

You want your team to meet again while the memory and excitement is still there to discuss:

1. Your next steps
2. Who on the team is committed to sticking with the company and who isn’t
3. What are the 1 – 2 things you must do now assuming your team wants to continue (how is this any different than point #1?)

Schedule your follow up meeting with advisors and investors within the next week

And take advantage of the community from Startup Weekend – investors, market researchers, designers, developers, lawyers, etc

So now – go!  Go make your Startup happen!

Posted by Startup Weekend Crew

Mark your calendars for the next Startup Weekend NYC: September 10th – 12th.

We’re doing something a little bit different this time. One of our national sponsors, Girls in Tech, is sending 50 female developers to the event. We’re going to match that number with 50 tickets open to the public. Our goal is to truly change the gender ratio at this event and contribute to the Change the Ratio movement in NYC.

Also, the winning team from Startup Weekend NYC will receive an exclusive invitation to pitch their concept on stage at the Startup Summit on Sept 20th at the McGraw-Hill Conference Center.

The event will be held at New Work City‘s new location (opening Sept 1st).

Posted by Startup Weekend Crew

Libatious is an application that helps beer fans track the beers they love. Log the beers you drink, share your recent activity with your friends, and win trophies. Log beers through the website–http://libatio.us–or on-the-go through the iPhone application. Users win trophies for their achievements and brewers & distributors can reward their fans with special offers on the beers they love.

peeraround is a FourSquare service that provides contextual information about the people around you. Whether you’re looking for top influencers, new friends, or specific peers, peeraround will help you make the connections you need. on Twitter

Score.ly adds a gaming aspect to the Social Graph to make it fun. Compete against EVERYONE, online and off. Earn rewards, achievements and bragging rights. What is your Score.ly? on Twitter

Bring Chinese to your child’s world. GoGo Chinese teaches children key Mandarin vocabulary through an interactive, mobile game that connects to their surroundings. Our responsive technology recognizes when your child is ready to test what he knows, and it syncs with Facebook to make keeping track of progress easy.

Mantrophy – Where Vanity Meets Charity!  [LIVE ALREADY]

1) You decide who is the Mantrophy to auction
2) The winner gets a dinner with her Mantrophy
3) Profits go to charity

Given the choice while traveling, would you prefer to stay in a hotel or housesit for a friend? Of course you would house sit, but you also want to be considerate and do this without placing a burden on your host. So then, it would probably be best to stay there when the apartment is vacant. The problem is there’s no way to know when you will be in a city when your friend is not there.

SpareKeyPlease takes chance out of this equation by leveraging the your social graph allowing you to see which of your friends will be away and when. You will then be able to communicate with that friend to ask about having an open place to stay during your trip.

We want to help you find a spare key or give a spare key to make travel a little more personal. on Twitter

CoWander.com is an international community of passionate world explorers. It matches travelers and locals to authentically and safely exchange their cultural experiences. CoWanderers are fun individuals with varied interests and expertise. They complete to be Top City Ambassadors to showcase their local experience to visitors, and while traveling, they seek to experience the real local life. on Twitter on Facebook

We help individuals monetize their private, personal data. We act as a broker between consumers (users) and Marketers/Advertisers – we help empower the users. (Users are always in full control of the information they decide to give up to sell.) Users sign up on our Web site and can offer up the logins and passwords to their various social networking tools (Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, for example). We then scrape information from those various tools, and allow Marketers/Advertisers to interact with our system, enabling advertisers to target our users more effectively.  In addition, we also collect information from users by allowing them to answer surveys on our site, and we incentivize them to do so by paying them more money for the more information they share with us. We pay our users a monthly check for their volunteering of information.   on Twitter

OpenAction is a social enterprise that has set its sights on mapping and bringing greater awareness to every social impact project in the world. Our application leverages smart technology and open data standards to offer a valuable marketing and connectivity tool for a wide array of users that includes nonprofits, foundations, fellowship programs, membership organizations, universities, and corporations. on Twitter

F.S. Publishing

F.S Publishing is a platform that helps fiction writers and publishers market test novels, build readership and make more effective marketing and distribution decisions. The lack of market testing among real book buying consumers has done more to cripple the publishing industry than the much feared digitalization of print. F.S. Publishing uses detailed analytics to chart reader engagement levels throughout the course of a novel length work of fiction while helping fiction lovers connect with new talent.

RedVaults is a platform that empowers entrepreneurial adult industry performers, both established and aspiring, to create a revenue-generating community around their personal brand. RedVault will disrupt the adult entertainment industry through ease of use, creating sophisticated interactive experiences between performers and end-users, while establishing a unique business model. on Twitter

My Map 4 Everything

Unless you live or work there, you cannot associate your website or any digital content to a street address using Google Maps or Yelp. My Map 4 Everything let’s you associate digital content with any street address, whether you live or work there, or not. With My Map 4 Everything, your list of mappable items can associate experiences with any mappable point in the world, and you can share that in your blog or as a tweet to your followers. Or send a ‘map’ message to friends.

Gamebook™ is a social gaming platform that provides students with fun and adaptive games containing relevant educational content. Our apps enhance the learning experience by allowing educators and educational content publishers to integrate questions specific to a subject domain into games in order to test users’ familiarity with those subjects and raise their skill level. Students can play alone or against their friends whether they are at home or playing on their mobile device. App developers can create new games or leverage our platform to convert their existing games so that they can be easily customized to the needs of educators and students. Gamebook™ also provides app development services for content publishers and media outlets to create games containing their branded content. Our company utilizes a revenue-sharing scheme that rewards the contributions of developers, content providers and educators through attractive compensation.

Save. Grow. Compete.

ProphetMargin leads small businesses to greater profitability.  Our proprietary algorithms predict cost saving and revenue maximizing opportunities customized for your business.  ProfitMargin is the easiest way to boost your margins, pinch pennies, and keep an eye on the latest industry trends.  Best of all, it’s free! on Twitter

SoundSpot is: Permitting consumers and commercial partners to record audio content and associate it with a location. Connecting smartphone users to the places around them with audio content. An immersive, heads-up, augmented reality experience. Social networking that draws you into the real world instead of out of it