(crossposted from the VoSnap Blog)

The VoSnap development team met once again Thursday evening (7/26) and Saturday (7/28) to fix bugs, add a few features, and continue working to get the beta rolled out to a greater audience.

A few of our accomplishments:

• Scaled down the initial effort to focus on getting round-trip VoSnaps via email and SMS working flawlessly.
• A multitude of bugfixes involving SMS, VoSnap emails, start a VoSnap issues, elimination of some Java stack traces, etc…
• Login and signup pages in place and working.
• Start a VoSnap page has been cleaned up, added capability to add arbitrary number of VoSnap responses and recipients.
• Flex pie charting added to results page.
• VoSnap vote timeouts now working. Results automatically sent to all recipients after specified vote duration expires.
• Email and SMS opt-out considerations.
• An invite system that will allow a gradual rollout of the beta version once we go public.

At this point the developers that are dedicated to bringing VoSnap to life have been identified and are giving up large portions of their week/weekend, neglecting the spouse and kids, and often working into the wee hours of the morning, only to wake up and work their day job. Will and Aaron have proven to be exceptionally hard-core (they were the last ones standing yesterday at 3pm with intentions to keep at it until 10pm).

Development Schedule

The current schedule agreed on by the development team looks like this:

• 7/30 - Monday: Larger founders-only private beta release
• 8/2 - Thursday: Pre-public beta development meeting
• 8/4 - Saturday: Pre-public beta development meeting
• 8/6 - Monday:Initial public beta rollout.

Of course, the schedule can change at any time, and based on the state of the Vosnap application we may choose to delay rollout at our discretion.

I think I’ve finally recovered from the intense weekend which was Startup Weekend. What an amazing event, and one that I will continue to participate in down the road. While we didn’t meet our goal of having something live at the end of the weekend, I’d say we’re about 80% done (damn that last 20%).

What We Made:

• VoSnap, a tool that allows a quick vote amongst a group through email or SMS.

What Worked:

• The people. Only in the last seven months or so have I discovered the tight Boulder tech scene. It was great to work side by side with everyone on a common goal.
• Andrew Hyde - Great leadership, organization, and moderation of 7 minute status meetings and overall Startup Weekend flow.
• It was amazing to have all the various departments working in parallel. It was so cool to be working on a server or some code, and then realize at the next hourly meeting that PR had developed some new press releases, Biz Dev had come up with some new monetization models, Creative with some new logos banner ads, or funny videos, and Legal, hard at work researching trademarks, SMS rules, incorporating the company ten different ways, and coming up with founder equity agreements.
• The idea (if I do say so myself ). One of the coolest parts of startup weekend was seeing everyone in the room begin to understand the concept and the bigger picture. It was like a snowball effect - as momentum increased, understanding grew and and deliverables that were being produced by each of the different teams followed a common vision. I believe the original concept was well suited for the number of people in attendance, did not require specific knowledge about any field in general, was of a scope that could be completed in a weekend, and would, in the end provide benefits to Startup Weekend itself.
• Feedback and support from the world, including posts on the Startup Weekend blog, press, TechCrunchings, our live-stream viewers and all the other positive feedback we received during our startup weekend
• Startup Weekend is about execution. I’m tired of panel discussions, and passive entrepreneurship. There is a time and place for these things, but they tend to dominate the scene.
• Seventy-two people for a weekend smells of chaos and disaster, especially when you consider the mythical man-month and conventional wisdom of that sort, which ended up being a non-issue for Startup Weekend.

What Needs Work:

• Dev platform selection: Justin Shacklette nailed it right on the head in his comment on Brutal Honesty, a Failure and a Success. “…any random sample of web 2.0 programmers will include more Java than Ruby. But, and this is important, all Ruby web devs know the Rails framework. Java, and Java framework knowledge, is just too broad. You can have someone with 5 years experience on Struts, than doesn’t know anything about Spring Web Flow. And there is another tricky Java speed bump around tooling. A veteran Java dev may never have used Maven 2…for example.” I feel too many would be developers (myself included) were unable to contribute due to insufficient knowledge of Java framework(s)”
• VoSnap. We’re working on it. We’ll get it done, and we’ll get it done soon. And it will be awesome.

I’ll continue to update this blog as more VoSnap developments occur, until then…

VooooooooooooooSNAPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP!