Since 6pm Friday I have been involved with Startup Weekend Atlanta. I’ve written about it quite enthusiastically in the past and it has been an greater experience than I could have ever imagined. In a nutshell, a bunch of (~60) talented developers, designers, business people and the like try to choose an idea and create a company within a weekend. We’re at about the half way point and have made great progress, but I’ll back track for a second and tell you about the idea.
Friday night was mainly comprised of 20+ idea pitches from various people. I was one of those people with an idea for a user-generated content suggestions service for bloggers. After many hours of voting, re-pitches, debating and convincing the business development people, my idea came out as the winner. In its most basic form bloggers put a widget on their blog that allows users to easily post an idea for a great post and other readers may vote on that topic. There are a ton of other features and implications of this service in the pipeline but I have to get back to coding/design/marketing/server stuff so I won’t go into the details – hopefully, you’ll find out for yourself when we launch Sunday night.
The idea is now called Skribit – a mixture of “scribe” and “it” mixed with the ribbit croaking of a frog, which adds a great branding element.
Overall, I was most impressed with how many talented people have become so devoted to initial idea and the different angles people bring in with them when brainstorming. So much has been going on in a bunch of groups – we have a business plan, a ton of UI wireframes, a server (courtesy of (mt), thanks!), a domain, a logo, lots of guys hacking away at an Appcelerator-based RoR web app, many large post-it notes on the walls and unfortunately, a shortage of beer.
For more info keep track of the Startup Weekend Atlanta blog and my flickr stream. By the end of this weekend I will officially be a co-founder of a company and hold shares, which definitely can’t hurt my LinkedIn page and sounds cool to boot.
Oh and Leopard has issues with the current releases of MySQL for OS X, so you need to follow this guide. Thanks to Andrew Hyde for creating Startup Weekend in the first place.
Update: See What is Skribit? for more info.
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That’s awesome Paul! I’ve never heard of Startup Weekend Atlanta till today. I’ll be sure to check them out!
Wow, excellent idea. I’m looking forward to seeing how you guys implement it.
*grumblecakes* I have this feeling I should have been informed of this event.
nice. Paul. you are awesome.
Another feather on your ever growing bow sir – congrats!!! Look forward to seeing it out in the open one day!
Awesome! What will the little widget thing be written in? Javascript, AJAX, using RoR, …
Oh man, I am so jealous Paul. Sounds like a blast. Wish I could have attended, alas someone must protect the internets on weekends.
Hopefully there will be a Startup Weekend Atlanta V2.0 once you all recover that is.
You’re really going to kick ass at Silicon valley, ain’t you ? Good luck, Paul. Being an uber-techie, you’ll be better tech-inclined than other CEOs/COOs.
Btw, I wonder how you’re doing at college. Not the academics, but how you are treated by friends, whether they know you’re blogging etc.
*grubmle* Why does New Zealand not have anything like this, it’s so not fair :(
Great idea, Paul. Best of luck with it.
Sounds like a good little tool! I want to go to a startup weekend sometime in the future when I’m back in US. It sounds like a great time!!
Sounds awesome. I can’t wait to see what you guys come up with. This makes me want to participate in one!
Paul, had a blast this weekend! I hope you did! Skribit looks great so far! I am excited to see 2.0 etc. I must say…hats down…great idea!
Great work man, just registered. I am waiting for my account to get approved :-)
i think its a great tool ,i personally would appreciate any feedback from my users .
registered and pending :-)
Thanks for sharing both your idea and talents. When I saw this concept on the Atlanta Startup Weekend wiki I just knew it was the one we needed to create.
But I gotta tell you, the only compliant I heard about the beer was when we ran out of imports on Sunday night.
Hey Paul! Brilliant idea! This project would work perfect for my “Choose My Adventure” blog. People could make suggestions on the fly, others could vote on them… and I wouldn’t need to be the filter anymore. It would certainly take things to the next level.
Hopefully I get signed up to the beta!
Someday, I hope to be as cool as you :D
Cool that your idea won out. Whats the final word from the weekend of are you still sleeping it off?
My browser accepts cookies. Safari. So I should be able to see your sidebar recommendation topic widget. But it doesn’t think so.
@Joel – that is a known issue being addressed. It works in my Safari at times and then at times it doesn’t. I think the dev guys are tinkering with P3P stuff. Something to do with stuff loaded in an iframe is considered by Safari as a site you didn’t navigate to yourself and Safari by default doesn’t accept those cookies.
Awesome, Paul! Sounds like fun!
I’m going to do Startup Weekend SF this coming weekend!
@Paul,
Great idea … I signed up to be considered for the beta so keeping my fingers crossed you guys will let me in :)
Is the widget width adjustable? You have a wide sidebar, but I do not. Wondering what min width is.
3 days after signup and still pending status at skribit? any updates paul ?
@taggy – a post is coming soon. Skribit will be in private beta for a while until we can ensure it’s stable enough for public consumption.
The skribit widget is really nice, what a good idea. I suspect whoever suggested “pstam.com behind the scenes” and “PStam.com the future after graduation” are after additional Stammy points! Oh, thanks for the MySQL on OS X guide link.
Very cool and congrats. If only my edge of the world would come close enough to somewhere hosting one of these… I would love to participate. Lookng forward to seeing the final product.