The Evolution Of Startup Weekend
Posted on May 25th, 2008 in Events, Passion, Startups, Technology |
I have been waiting for this weekend for quite a few months now. The day Startup Weekend Portland was announced I was very excited and have been looking forward to it ever since. I have been following Startup Weekend in other cities and the way it has been evolving from city to city for a while.
Today was the second day of the three day event. On Friday we had a small session between 6 - 9 PM, today was the 12 hour productive day going from 9 AM - 9 PM, and tomorrow will be the final chapter going from 9 AM - 6 PM.
Evolution
The concept of Startup Weekend began as a team of 68 designers, developers, business developers, project managers and marketing/PR folks working on a single project last July (2007) in Boulder, Colorado. Today Startup Weekend has become more open-ended with smaller teams are working on multiple projects.
The Startups
Micah Elliott, a developer who I met at Startup Weekend put together a great blog post about the Friday activity. There were originally 10-12 ideas which the group collectively narrowed down to 5 startup ideas. Many people found out that startups/services similar to their ideas already existed in some form so they decided to join other groups. Micah has covered the 5 ideas quite well so I won’t cover them until my next post which will be going up after this weekend.
My Idea
Like many people, I am pretty passionate about music. I enjoy electronic music and like to DJ/mix when I get some free time. I can listen to Dance, House, Electro, Trance or Progressive music for hours at a time. In the electronic music community DJ sets are very popular. DJs broadcast live sets about 1 - 2 hours long on a weekly basis. In my personal experience, I have yet to find a service where you can listen to these archived sets online with a simple yet elegant user experience. So my idea is basically a web service that archives DJ sets from popular artists like Tiesto, Armin Van Buren, David Guetta, and Above and Beyond to name a few. Another important feature behind the usage model is that users will be able to choose individual tracks within a set and listen to just those tracks without buffering the entire set (usually ~120 Mbs). In technical terms, the user can scrub to any point within a set (flash player). I won’t spoil it too much for those of you who are curious, you’ll find out soon enough. We are planning to launch a working version of the service by tomorrow night.
The Team
The main reason this weekend has been a such an amazing experience for me is because of our small six-person team. I will talk more about our team in the next few weeks. Thanks to:
Varun Thota - My neighbor/PSU business student - Business Development
Darius Monsef - Marketing and Business Development- Co-founder of Colourlovers.com
Chris Williams - PHP Ninja - Co-founder of Colourlovers.com
Stephen Braitsch - Designer/Flash Developer
Justin Thiele - PR/Marketing/Brand Strategist
The Startup - Mugasha - Music, Gathering and Sharing For All
Stay Tuned…
- Akshay
4 Responses
Sounds like a good idea. All the best!
Great Idea..it would be cool if Dj’s can create their own profiles and share their Sets with users..also being able to share n connect with website like facebook, digg, del.icio…etc.
Nice post, Akshay. Thanks for writing this up. Your app looks stunning. Can’t believe you guys put that together so fast. Good focus on “doing one thing well”. Can’t wait to see where it takes you.
[...] The Evolution of Startup Weekend “The day Startup Weekend Portland was announced I was very excited and have been looking forward to it ever since. I have been following Startup Weekend in other cities and the way it has been evolving from city to city for a while.” [...]