startup weekend phoenix - from a nerd's perspective

Finally, something cool for us nerds came to Phoenix. On October 17-19, 2008, Startup Weekend came to town.  For those of you who don't know, Startup Weekend is an intense event bringing like-minded tech professionals together to create companies, projects and communities.  It blends developers and entrepreneurs together.  Roughly 100 people gathered at Gangplank in Chandler to pitch ideas, form teams and get down to business developing products.  Oh ya, this is done in 54 hours.

About 30 or so ideas were pitched Friday night.  If the idea was chosen (received enough votes from the group), these products would be developed into actual products over the weekend. Ideas ranged from healthcare applications, web apps for kids to find science projects, and apps to match human personalities to dogs.

The final ideas chosen by enough people were:

    * Doggie Slobber - Matches human personalities to dogs personalities
    * Twitter Rater - Tells you if a keyword in twitter is viewed positively or negatively
    * Data Escrow - Holds your code until payment is received
    * GPS Inventory - Realtime tracking of trucks and what parts they have in them
    * SaaS Backup - A way to pull all your data from hosted services (Delicious, Flickr, Basecamp)
    * Alt Reality Game - Like the movie 'The Game'
    * Diet Management tool

My group was Doggie Slobber.  My members were...(other than putting me at the top because...well...its my site):
 
Bret Feddern, CTO of Brice Cheddarn LLC and Systems Analyst at Fennemore Craig, PC.
Sally Strebel, CEO of BestPartyEver.com, Vice President of Obu Web Technologies—both of which are anchor companies of Gangplank—Co-Founder of Flare9.com and ranked 22nd on 50 of the Most Powerful and Influential Women in Social.
Joshua Strebel, CEO of all things awesome. President of Obu Web Technologies, COO of BestPartyEver.com—both of which are anchor companies of Gangplank— Founder of Flare9.com, and a loving husband and dog father.
Chuck Reynolds, Founder and principle of the WebMediaRx web firm since 2003. Freelance web architect, SEO and consultant and overall social media allstar. Find him at ChuckReynolds.us.
Andrew Ryno, Developer - Find him at AndrewRyno.com.  Note:  He is only 17.
Derek Neighbors, aka “The Big Dog”. Spends his time on the porch as the co-founder of Integrum and Gangplank. He’s a doggone pragmatic idealist.
Sharon Bowerman, Marketing and Public Relations
Kelly Roy, CEO of Plumsoup
Jack Ryng, CFO of INXSOL
Dan Suhr, Business Development, INXSOL
Steven Rundquist, Business Development and Public Relations
April Holle, Principal of Made Better Studio

Doggie Slobber was initially my idea, as an attempt to help keep dogs out of shelters.  After a little research, we discovered that a few other sites did this very thing...one pretty well.  So after a little more brainstorming Doggie Slobber morphed into MyShelterHelper.com, a marketing tool to help shelters and other animal organizations create a presence on the internet for no cost.  Yup...MyShelterHelper.com is FREE to all animal shelters.

MyShelterHelper.com will help shelters (and eventually clinics and vets) easily create a web site including a home page, an about page, a contact page, and a blog. We wanted to provide quick and easy-to-use forms and templates to get a shelter's site up and running. We will also intend to provide an email notification system and various other ways to promote the site with little effort.  After creating a profile, a shelter will be able to choose a design and proceed through a wizard to help them pick the content for their pages.

Well, it was a long 54 hours, but it was well worth it.  I am not sure if MyShelterHelper.com will continue, but I hope it does.  Regardless, the weekend was a great opportunity to met like-minded techies in the area...especially so close at Gangplank.  At first, I was a bit nervous walking into an environment by myself that I wasn't familiar with (nor that I knew anybody at).  Eventually, I came out of my shell and met some great people that I hope the nerds at brice cheddarn can collaborate with in the future.  More about Gangplank in the next post.

Other noteworthy projects that sprang to life this weekend:

Twitteratr:  a web site that allows people to search Tweets for a keyword to see if it is viewed positively or negatively.
Reserve Chute:  An open source web application that fetches data from online applications and stores a local copy.
GPSPartFinder.com:  GPSPartFinder uses the positioning information to locate trucks with parts.

It was great to be a part of Startup Weekend.  Check out more information on the guys at Startup Weekend on their website.  I intend on partaking in another one, when it comes to another city near me.  I am even considering trying to attempt to organize one in Iowa.  That might be a long time out, as there are still a lot of cities on the list.  But its worth a shot and Iowa desperately needs it.

UPDATE ONE:
Since the launch of MyShelterHelper.com we have received a surprising media outreach and influential connections.  A few people reached out to offer their support. The people include Amanda Blum who is an expert in animal rescue, a gentleman who is on the board of directors for the Humane Society in Arizona, and Ilene Proctor who formerly owned It’s a Ruff Life showed interest.

UPDATE TWO:

TechCruch Bitches!  Sorry, hard to believe.  Tech Crunch is the Wall Street Journal for Nerds.

UPDATE THREE:
The Big Word Project featured MyShelterHelper.com as their Word of the day.  Rescues, (To set free, as from danger or imprisonment; save) was one of the words purchased during startup weekend to help drive traffic to the site.  The site owner sent me an email, and told me they featured the site on their blog.  Check it out:

Helping animal shelters around the world
http://blog.thebigwordproject.com/2008/10/24/helping-animal-shelters-around-the-world/

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