We’re back with our next episode of “A Startup A Week”, the online reality show where we challenge a team of developers to build a startup in just one week. For episode two, we’re trying something a little different by bringing together “A Startup A Week” with an event called “Incubation Week”. Instead of working with just one team, Incubation Week brings together multiple teams of entrepreneurs for a caffeine-fueled week of coding, all leading up to a final presentation in front of a panel of experienced angel investors.
For this video, I flew out to Boston to check out the initial Incubation Week event. We definitely had a great time, check out the video to see if the teams were able to complete their apps in time for their presentations to the investors.
I’ve started up a new blog! You can check it out at www.tchblg.com. The name is a tribute to one of my favorite bloggers, Peter Rojas, and his new-school record label named www.rcrdlbl.com. If Peter is leading a strike against vowels, then I’m going to stand up there with him.
I’ll still be posting some ideas here, but TchBlg is going to be more of a regular outlet for my general thoughts about technology and some of the stuff that’s going on our there on the blogosphere. If you’re reading this, chances are that you’d probably be a good addition to the conversation over on www.tchblg.com. Hope to see you guys over there soon.
From my third-ever startup idea from this blog (and one of my all-time favorites, truth be told…)
There are lots of local restaurant sites out there. How to stand out? Simplify! Imagine a desktop widget that loops a series of tasty-looking pictures from nearby restaurants’ menus. The widget would show three things - the food, the price, and a “Food Me” button. If you see something that looks good, just click the button and the food will be delivered right to your office, home, dorm room, etc..
The set-up would be similar to Amazon’s one-click feature, where you enter your address and billing information, provide information about the type of food you generally like, etc.. Local restaurants would pay for the ability to market their food directly to “Food Me” users and work with a “Food Me” account manager to set everything up (menus, pictures, workflow for the restaurant to deliver food).
Pizza Hut, the nation’s biggest pizza chain, also allows customers to order via text messaging and mobile Web. The unit of Yum Brands Inc. soon will unveil a new method for ordering pizzas, dubbed “Pizza Hut Shortcut,” that it says will be the fastest in the industry. Customers will be able to download a “widget” onto their computers that will let them place their favorite pizza orders with just one click.
Aight, hope y’all enjoyed the video series - now back to your regularly scheduled blathering.
Given the recent explosion of web-based social apps and widgets, there are a handful of companies who are making it easier to build and host your apps. Sites like Sprout and KickApps have Flash-based IDE’s to let you easily build lightweight apps, and the big guys like Google are building out full stacks to support larger-scale efforts. However, one big piece of the puzzle that I haven’t seen is the ability to create a very simple hosted web service that allows developers to create a basic CRUD (Create/Read/Update/Delete) interface to a data store.
Here are a few key features that a service like this would need to succeed:
It must be ridiculously easy to set up. Users could just paste a SQL “create” statement, or could use a simple interface to define the columns.
It must be scalable. S3 on the back-end for the basic package, with maybe some faster local storage options available for premium packages.
Pricing must be competitive. Again, S3.
It must be easy to load existing data into the store. Several options like CSV files or even Excel exports.
Other interesting features? A set of open source or shared read web services that could be created or used by anyone. This could be as simple as basic options to fill a drop down list (i.e. standard set of countries, states, cities) or something more complex like IP-to-location mappings.
What do you guys think? Is there something like this already out there? Any other features you’d like to see?
With less than eight hours to go, the team comes together one last time for the conclusion to Episode One of ”A Startup A Week”. The concept of the show is to bring together top developers and designers, pitch them an idea for a startup, and give them just one week to take the idea from concept to reality.
Today the team prepares for the final presentation to the head of the Seattle chapter of the non-profit Room to Read. Our team is building out a Facebook application that can use the viral power of the social graph to raise money for a computer lab in Cambodia.
If you’re watching this video right now, chances are that you had access to a computer when you were a child - or your children have access today. In just five minutes, you can help be a part of a community that will share that gift with real children living in Cambodia right now. Here’s how:
Dedicate a five dollar brick to a friend or loved one
Share the app with five of your friends
The person at the top of the leaderboard at the end of the project will get to dedicate the school, and everyone who donates will receive updates on the progress of the lab.
Thanks for watching the pilot episode of A Startup A Week, and be sure to check out the first four days of the project on www.astartupaweek.com.
It’s Thursday and the team has just one day remaining to complete their project for ”A Startup A Week”. The concept of the show is to bring together a few rockstar developers and designers, pitch them an idea for a startup, and give them just one week to take the idea from concept to reality.
For the initial project of this series, our team is building out a Facebook application that can use the viral power of the social graph to raise money for a computer lab in Cambodia via the non-profit Room to Read. On this episode, our developer Adam Loving shows how he used LINQ and SQL Server to keep track of donations, our designer Jay Dokken of Design Commission gives us a very quick sneak preview of his awesome design, and Kyle Cressman sits down with our special guest Dominic Canterbury from D/C Strategic.
With less than 48 hours remaining, can our team come together and create a startup in a week? Stay tuned for the finale tomorrow, and be sure to check out the first three days of A Startup A Week - Episode One.
It’s Wednesday and the team has reached the halfway point of the project on “A Startup A Week”. The concept of the show is to bring together a few of Seattle’s top developers and designers, pitch them an idea for a startup, and give them just one week to take the idea from concept to reality.
The team has been working on Facebook application that allows users to work together with their social networks on a Room to Read fundraising campaign to build a computer lab in Cambodia. On this episode, our developer Adam Loving sets up the donation system with a great PayPal hack, our designer Jay Dokken of Design Commission gives a 3D preview of the virtual computer lab, and our marketing expert Kyle Cressman calls up the non-profit Room to Read to get their support.
With only three days remaining, can our team come together and create a startup in a week? Stay tuned for new episodes each day this week to find out!
We’re back with day two of “A Startup A Week”. The concept of the show is to bring together a few of Seattle’s top developers and designers, pitch them an idea for a startup, and give them just one week to take the idea from concept to reality.
Today the team got started building out the Facebook application. Our developer Adam walks through the basics of setting up a Facebook app using Visual Studio 2008, our designer Jay gives a 3D preview of the virtual computer lab, and our producer Stephen runs into the first setback of the project.
With only four days remaining, can our team come together and create a startup in a week? Stay tuned for new episodes each day this week to find out!
Hi guys! Now that all the videos are up, I’m going to post them all here. Please let me know what you think!
Finally - the pilot episode of “A Startup A Week” is live! The concept of the show is to bring together a few of Seattle’s top developers and designers, pitch them an idea for a startup, and give them just one week to take the idea from concept to reality. We’ll be hosting the videos on a Microsoft blog site (www.visitmix.com) but also putting additional material here (outtakes, code samples, etc..)
Please check it out and let us know what you think!
Apologies for being so behind on posts lately, but good news - the pilot episode of “A Startup A Week” is live! The idea here is to take the basic premise from my blog and go step further by bringing in real developers and designers and giving them just one week to take one of my ideas from concept to reality. We’ll be hosting the videos on a Microsoft blog site (www.visitmix.com) but I’ll be posting a little more behind-the-scenes commentary here.
