StartupWeekendSF produces a record 23 startups
StartupWeekend brought together around 200 of the most talented people from the San Francisco Bay Area together at Microsoft’s offices in SF this past weekend – all with the common goal of building a startup in a 54 hour time span. Andrew Hyde, the founder of StartupWeekend, kicked off the event at 7pm on Friday which was followed by an introductory discussion by a set of speakers, some very familiar and popular names in the valley – Connie Chan, Dave McClure, Katherine Barr, Mark Jacobsen and Christine Herron. Tyler Willis, one of the main organizers of this event, did a great job of moderating this discussion.
[photo credit: antoniocapo, kyeung808]
Following the discussion, Hyde moderated a series of lightning pitches from the audience – essentially anyone who had an idea for a startup got the opportunity to propose their idea to the audience in a short 30-60 second pitch. There was absolutely no shortage of ideas (there were probably around 30 pitches). What made this lightning pitch session exciting however was the real time feedback the expert speakers provided to those pitching. There was some great learning to be had here. For example, Antonio Altamirano describes McClure’s style of an ideal pitch: “Take 80% of the time to describe the problem and 20% describing the solution.” Once the ideas had been pitched, the originators of each of the ideas went around seeking team members to work on these ideas with over the weekend. This was a stark contrast from StartupWeekend last year, where everyone voted on one idea to implement over the weekend and split up in to groups of development, project management, marketing, biz dev etc. This go around, there were several teams working on several startups.
[photo credit: antoniocapo, kyeung808]
About 50 or so hours and several cups of coffee and later, the teams pitched their ideas to another full house. There were 23 pitches in all, and honestly, I’m in complete awe with the number of ideas that were implemented this weekend. This is truly the startup capital of the world.
| FounderShack is a website that helps you find co-founders. It’s for people who are passionate about solving a common business problem. The website looks trivial to use – users submitting ideas have to short videos of their pitch and to be matched the other party has to do the same thing. Hopefully the next StartupWeekend will use FounderShack to connect people at the event. http://foundershack.com | |
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“Digg for Deals” (working title) is making bargain hunting easy. The site helps you narrow down on the deal you love. The opening page shows you deals, with an initial filter. Then you click on either “Warmer” or “Cooler” and you get two more products that are similar in nature, but are probably more like deals you may be looking for. When you click on an actual link for a product, a little built-in toolbar appears on the top of the webpage (like the new Digg toolbar). |
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| BigPonzi– this was more of a demo for the sake of a demo. Huge shout out to Dylan Field and Daniel Brusilovsky, a couple of teenagers for putting the demo together. |  |
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DemoClarity helps bring clarity to the process of ‘democracy’. The site offers a summary of different legislations, media relevant to the legislation, discussions relevant to the legislation etc. At the bottom of the page are two buttons using which you can either Support or Oppose the proposed legislation. You can also sign a petition and spread the word with your friends. The site also lets you stay informed, and see more issues that are related to the legislation you are perusing. The site provides real value by serving public interest and educating the public. http://democlarity.com |
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| Hubb.Me is like bit.ly or tr.im, but it lets you share more than just one link. You can create a ‘hubb’ on the site, and share it via twitter. When users click on the’hubb’ link they can then check out each of the links in that hub. Hubb also provides an easy tab navigation bar as you start visiting each of the sites in the Hubb so that you know the next site you need to visit. The site integrates with Google Analytics, and you can create a ‘Hubb’ in seconds. http://hubb.me |  |
| TwitFitLog lets you use twitter to send fitness logs using pseudo tweets (”@fitlog #run 3 miles” for example). Twitfitlog then records your tweets and presents it to you on a website in a clean manner. FitLog will eventually introduce some game elements, like challenging yourself or challenging someone else, which I believe will draw users to the site as well as retain current users. http://fitlog.pbwiki.com has a lot of what the team has thought about. http://twitfitlog.com |  |
| SnoozeMail lets you “snooze on your email”. Users can go to snoozemail.com, register on the site, authenticate (IMAP is a requirement at the moment). Emails that you have snoozed will re-pop up in your inbox (via another email) thereby sending it to the top your inbox. I seem to be the only one in this boat, but this is a service that I don’t see myself using any time soon and that may be because I have (unfortunately) found the most efficient way to work through my email. I think services like these, while very clever, are still band-aids on top of this very broken problem called ‘email’. The presenters mentioned that they may look at a ‘freemium’ model for monetization in the future. http://gosnoozemail.com | |
| OurBlockTV provides a crowdsourced approach to “neighborhood watch”. The idea seems to have cropped up when one of the founders tried this himself by setting up a webcam outside of his apartment window. The hope is that a community based network of webcams will empower citizens to help fight crime and save lives. Users of the service can upload their videos, which will go in to a moderation queue and eventually get published on to the site. Apparently users can get weatherproof cameras for fairly cheap ($49). I can see some legal problems cropping up here, but apparently the initial feedback seems to have been really good. http://adamsblock.com |  |
| Img.gr is a photo tagging tool for twitter. It is very similar to facebook photo tagging, but you tag users in their photos using their twitter handles. Once on the img.gr website, you can draw a rectangle around what you want to tag, which brings up a drop-down of your twitter friends so you can tag them. Here is their presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/driveafastercar/imggr-san-francisco-startup-weekend While questions around untagging and some other concerns arise, regardless, I can see myself using this service in the very near future. http://twitter.com/imggr |  |
| LiveCut is an ambitious project that helps you get legal downloads of music from the concerts that you see. Let’s say a group of friends go to a concert, on either side of the stage will be a song number or a ‘performance id’ that you can then text message to LiveCut. LiveCut will then respond with a viable way to acquire the song. The model has been well fleshed out with monetization capabilities (and therefore incentives) for artists to want to use it. LiveCut wasn’t developed this weekend, the founder was simply pitching it this evening. http://livecut.com | |
| FeedTheChef is an RSS reader for an average internet user. The interface looks nifty, with an inbox feel in the left pane, and a view based on “importance”. There isn’t a requirement to know about feeds or RSS – you simply key in the URL on the website, and it automatically brings in the feed for you. FeedTheChef is basically bringing together an online version of a personalized newspaper. If the UI is done right (and I think we got a sneak peek of a very slick horizontally scrolling UI), I think they can easily attract users. http://feedthechef.com | |
| MonkeyCalling lets you ask questions and get answers instantly by calling phones of people you want to survey thereby helping you get ‘fresh responses’. MonkeyCalling works on the basic premise that the phone is still very much the most immediate form of communication. The founders described the service as a “personalized call center in the cloud”. MonkeyCalling has used @twilio for the voice integration, and as creepy as the text to speech sounds I can’t wait to start spam-calling my friends through this service. http://monkeycalling.com |  |
| RadioKi shows you radio stations online that are currently playing the music that you want to tune into. Once on the site, you can simply type the name of an artist or a band, and the site automagically sifts through several radio stations to show you which radio station (online or not) is currently playing that artist’s song. The founders are using Yahoo Pipes underneath to exercise a giant workflow to sift through all the different channels. Eventually, they want to pull in information from other sources like Wikipedia etc. to show content relevant to the music being played. My big question is, if you know the name of the artist or the song you want to listen to, why not use imeem? http://radioki.com | |
| Gabi is a native desktop application that is about “Greater Access, Broader Independence”. Gabi provides technology for aging independents. Gabi plans on selling subscription services to care providers which provides basic video conferencing, mobile components (to help track via GPS), a video assistance center that contacts care providers in case of emergencies and much more. Gabi was another company that wasn’t developed this weekend and was simply pitching. They are looking for $300K in seed financing. http://Gabinow.com | |
| CheapParking is a mobile application for finding low cost parking using location based services on your mobile phone. The application provides mobile applications to find real time parking information. There are solutions out there help you find garages, but not necessarily the cheapest garage. Using the app, you can find the cheapest one based on proximity, with the list always sorted by the cheapest match first. Their first cut is an Android based app. It is likely for large events (like ballgames) that cheap garages are sold out, but the founders tell me that they plan on incorporating capacity information as well soon enough. The app will sell for $1.99, and $4.99 for “multiple” cities. http://cheapparkingapp.com |  |
| KivaiPhoneApp does exactly as the name sounds. The application allows anyone with an iPhone to become a social investor. The app gives existing kiva users a cool way to stay in touch with their investees. http://kivaiphoneapp.com | |
| ProdNv lets you give better gifts, and get better deals. Their first implementation is using BestBuy’s APIs and a Facebook application where you can track products you want to either get or give. Using the application, you can navigate to bestbuy.com, and add a product to your “envylist” for example. This will add the item to your Facebook productenvy page, which you can share with your facebook friends. The founders also demonstrated a twitter based app, whereby you can send a tweet to the twitter bot, @prnv which processes your pseudo-tweet. http://prodnv.com |  |
| Encritter tries to solve the twitter privacy problem – wouldn’t you like to twitter something to just a subset of your friends? Encritter tries to introduce layered privacy on top of twitter (the founder calls it ‘EaaS’ – encryption as a service). Using the web app, you can encrypt (using 128 bit AES) a message that will look something like this: “?encritter_XXX” that you can tweet to the twitterverse. Your friends would have to know the key that was used to encrypt the message to decrypt and read it. The real question is, how do you share the key (or password) with your friends? Or more importantly, what happens when twitter introduces “groups”? http://encritter.com |  |
| Beer2Peer – ugh, I spilled my coffee and totally missed this demo L I heard a lot of cheering and rara from the kitchen though. http://beer2peer.net | |
| TinyUPC lets you register every UPC for every product you make or use or distribute so consumers can easily find out all information about that product. The site lets you generate a Tinyupc.com/UPC. I didn’t quite gather the practical application of this or why producers out there would want to use something like this however. http://tinyupc.com |  |
| indinero is Mint.com for businesses. That’s it. I couldn’t tell what was unique about the service for businesses per se, but the founders tell us that ‘cash flow analysis’ for example is something that Mint.com cannot provide you with today. http://indinero.com |  |
| Yoola is Yelp for EULAs. The founders of Yoola claim that you’ve probably accepted over 1000 EULAs not having read them entirely. Yoola gives you the facts of a EULA in 0.03 second. All you would have to do is copy-paste the EULA from a site on to Yoola.com and click on ‘Get Facts’. If the site has a similar EULA in its repository, it will tell you what the pros and cons of the EULA are. The refreshing fact about Yoola is that the information about the EULAs is crowdsourced. I’m very transparent about my favorable bias towards Yelp, so when the founders mentioned that they were a Yelp for EULAs, I was immediately sold. If a certain EULA is not already on the site, you can create the thread. | |
| Spelunkr (working title) lets you get detailed information about your twitter friends. It lets you analyze your followers and more detailed analytics will be provided in future releases. |
So there you have it – approximately 200 people, 23 (or so) startups, one weekend.
“ai“
PS: Maybe the event should be called “StartupsWeekend”?
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