I’m sitting here in the Leeds School of Business amongst a sea of people with various kinds of educational backgrounds, talents, and interests who are all here to build a startup from concept to launch before the end of the weekend. It’s called Startup Weekend, and Boulder is where it all began; it’s currently hosting its third Startup Weekend, but there have been over 50 of its kind worldwide (and there are six going on this weekend alone!).

I’ve learned a lot about Startup Weekend, despite this being my first time doing it; Andrew Hyde, my first Boulder tech connection, founded it a few years ago and has seen it take off since then. It’s great to have it back in Boulder, and I am thrilled that I finally have a chance to partake in this opportunity.

Last night, roughly 50 participants met each other, socialized over pizza and soda, and began to pitch any ideas — or rather, come up with any problems that can be solved. Although most people decided to pass on coming up with a problem, we did come up with this rough list of problems:

1. Learning languages. One can learn a language, but keeping those skills can be difficult. How can we connect people at the same levels of learning to help keep those skills?
2. Scheduling efficiency. Scheduling is always a difficulty. How can we create a better tool for scheduling, for instance, at a salon?
3. Apartment hunting. Finding apartments is a hassle. How can we bring together all the best sources for apartment hunting?
4. Accessing healthcare information. Everyone knows that healthcare has some issues here in the U.S. How can we assist first responders in getting information quicker?
5. Media sharing. Some institutions and businesses have the need to use a program with the same functionality of media sharing sites (e.g. Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube), but don’t want the registration, the large user base, or rather, the “social” aspect. How can we create an internal media sharing site to fulfill these needs?

So far, each and every idea has pulled in a lot of interest, and most everyone has found something they really want to work on. We’ll be updating at http://startupweekend.com/boulder3 and I will be posting my blogposts here as well.