jennifer newell » Startup Weekend Boulder

SW summary of posts

swedishfish — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:33:06 +0000

I decided to instead summarize my posts from SW:

I ended up being the only blogger, but it was fun! I was unable to cover all of the projects, but hopefully there will be updates from some of them in the future.

SWB09: Languages idea nixed; starting over

swedishfish — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 20:44:25 +0000

I’m blogging from Startup Weekend Boulder 3, but cross-posting on my own site.

One of the most important things one can learn from building a startup is that having a good idea, but it’s not enough. Other people might’ve already done something with your good idea — and if you can’t do it any better, you might want to move on to the next idea.

That’s what we figured out in the group dedicated to solving our language problem. Although it’s true that we had a good idea — basically, matching people to other foreign language learners at their level and providing a web space to video chat and connect on forums — we have discovered that the service is available elsewhere, and we didn’t think that we could compete.

We’re now developing another idea, and here’s what we’ve come up with so far:

Creating a database of information that can be easily accessed when you lose your credit/debit cards and need to cancel them
Making reservations at restaurants via Twitter
Gathering a database of clothing sizes over different brands so that one can more easily order clothing online (i.e., if I’m an 8 in Banana Republic, what size am I in other brands?)

Startup Weekend Boulder 3

swedishfish — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 18:25:51 +0000

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:

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?
Scheduling efficiency. Scheduling is always a difficulty. How can we create a better tool for scheduling, for instance, at a salon?
Apartment hunting. Finding apartments is a hassle. How can we bring together all the best sources for apartment hunting?
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?
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.