We’re having a quick meeting about the day’s progress so far. UI: Wireframes and mockups going well, logos are in progress.  Facebook dev is setting up the app. Dev is coding the rails app, environments are created and SVN is working. We have UI, we have Issues table in database, Facebook is rolling. Things are moving. There are some new posts on Startup Weekend Toronto describing the application and a parallel impromptu effort happening nearby.

Dev has spoken - Ruby on Rails it is. Dev has designed an initial data model, we’re setting up our environments and installing some plugins.

Presentation of the first rev of web pages going on right now.  Quote of the hour: “Does the penis grow as more people vote?” Referencing to a sketch of a interest thermometer on one of the view pages.

By the way, I’m sitting next to Martin, a developer with this cool WiMax box attached to his computer. WiMax is no longer vapourware (canadian spelling, right?). He gets around 1 Meg down and 256 up, the WiMax adapter reminds me of my first Cell Phone - a Okiphone bag phone back in ‘92. Pretty cool.

It’s 10:30, everyone has finally rolled back in, looks like a smaller group now. Team America got here around 9:35 for the managers meeting, was stopped at the door and asked to sign the operating agreement that included distribution of founders shares and facilities indemnification. A discussion of the unique distribution of the founders shares ensued and the need to keep the spirit of SW Toronto. This was resolved in about a half hour. Forms were signed, donuts and coffee are here and now we’re going.

Legal is discussing the share agreement now with the group - addendum being made to give further incentive shares for the go-forward team  from 13% to around 26%, decreasing the winning idea shares and Innovations Toronto shares, and also fixing a calculation error in total shares issued.  Some discussion now on one of the most difficult aspects of Startup Weekend - how to structure the go forward with 50+ founders. How is it going to look in the eyes of investors, if the idea is successful will founders come out of the woodwork and start to participate and want a bigger piece. Change is unanimous with a quick vote.

10:45 now we’re off for real - an architecture discussion about our Lobby Them product. Some of the SW Toronto folks were up until the wee hours discussing the idea and now we’re being brought up to speed. Next we break up into our functional groups to get this thing going. Quick meetings scheduled every hour to keep everyone informed of developments. More in a bit…

We just got back from breaking up into groups. Groups were tasked to do some feasibility planning for each of our two finalist ideas (Lobby Them and Product Ads) on Competitors, Target Market, Revenue Model, etc.

We’re a little over time for tonight but final pitches are taking place. We should have a final vote soon. Lobby Them elevator pitch: “A site that brings community together to lobby change” Talk about integrating Lobby Them into Ontario elections. Talk about crazies using Lobby them, Andrew just brought up the NAMBLA organization.

Auction ads - Steve Poland just got up and is saying they learned in their group that it can’t be done due to the need to have authorization from target sites before linking. Auction Ads idea is dead.

Lobby Them, idea of Alan McMillan wins!

We’re done for the night, reconvene tomorrow at 10am.

So I’m here at Startup Weekend Toronto - I’ve been here for a few days sightseeing and such, and I decided I need to make an effort to document what’s happening. I’m going to quickly breeze through some of this to catch up to where we are currently…

We got here at 6, did introductions, and started picking ideas around 7pm. The organizers had the idea pool narrowed down to about 10 or so ideas. We did pitches for the ideas, and then a bunch of new ones were added which increased the idea pool. We did a vote with paper slips (A rudimentary VoSnap) (four votes per person) and narrowed it down to five ideas (and of course 2-3 more were added after the fact). Pizza and beer arrived, and we discussed the idea among groups to get get opinions among a smaller group.

We just did another vote (two votes per person) and narrowed the ideas down to two: Lobby Them and Product Ads. We’re currently breaking up into groups again to discuss the pros and cons of both, after which we’ll have another quick vote and make the final decision. I’ll write another post as we reconvene.

(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!

I Just got back from the first evening of Startup Weekend. WOW! Nothing quite like having the honor of 72 crazy-smart-and-capable individuals choosing your idea and going at it full bore. So far everyone has been really dedicated and focused on the task - it’s a really exciting environment to be part of. We started at 6PM, and in that time we’ve:

• Discussed and chosen an idea
• Discussed overall vision and brainstormed product capabilities
• Decided on and registered domain name
• Creative team has most of the logo concept completed.
• Legal has incorporated, trademarked, and done all sorts of crazy research on the concept space and SMS regulations
• User Experience team has a good idea of how things are going to progress
• Development team has decided on dev. platform and is working up models installing tools and all that jazz.
• Marketing has a multitude of monetization strategies they’re considering.
• David Cohen has blogged 14 posts on the progress along with various video segments

Going into Startup Weekend I was a little concerned with managing the dynamics and communications among such a large group, especially with so little time to execute. Turns out my concerns were for naught as Andrew Hyde has been doing a wonderful job of managing Startup Weekend,  constantly soliciting feedback from the individual groups and moderating hourly status meetings to keep everyone up to date of the latest efforts in each team as well as the overall direction of the concept.

We start again at 8:30 am tomorrow morning with our staff meeting and mini-yoga session. Everyone is determined to get a lot accomplished tomorrow - mockups and skeletons in the morning and the developers have even signed on to some sort of demo by evening.

I posted this idea on the Startup Weekend  idea page, and figured I’d post it here as well:

The Idea: Vevo.com as in Vote Early, Vote Often.

Whereas twitter asks “what are you doing” in 140 chars or less, VEVO asks  “what are you deciding?”

The idea came from thinking about the Startup Weekend model. To eliminate the need for countless number of rules and to keep the Startup Weekend model self-organizing, we will need to rely on a democratic voting process to guide the course of the group’s action. I imagine we’ll be making a lot of decisions during the weekend through group votes. We will want a method to make these decisions quickly so we can focus more on developing and less on decision “overhead”

VEVO facilitates this process by allowing decisions to be made by a group through a quick, efficient, and accurate democratic voting process.

How it would work:

1. A group moderator sets up a voting group by adding group member emails and configures the parameters of the voting group (anonymous votes, voting duration, etc)
2. Group members login and setup their account (turn on notifications via email / SMS / whatever)
3. When a group member wants the group to vote on a decision, they can, in 140 chars. or less, enter a description of that decision (either online or via a SMS short code)
4. Decision request is broadcast to group members via their specified notification channel.
5. Group members have, say 5 minutes (configured by moderator in step 1) to vote with a simple Yes, No, Abstain (Y/N/A) response via email/SMS
6. After the voting period has expired, VEVO.com tallies the votes and updates the group members with the results of the vote via their desired notification channel.
7. Group members can go online to get a history of all decisions / votes processed by the system along with pie charts of vote outcome. If the moderator has configured the group such that voting results are public, members could see how each person voted on each issue.

Additional Features:
1. Multiple choice voting

Markets:

1. startupweekend
2. Classroom settings - enable feedback / quizzes in large lecture halls and eliminate the need for the “clicker” devices
3. Board Room / organizations
4. Advertising Agencies for instant focus-groups or quick-response surveys

How to make money:

1. See twitter.com
2. 37signals model of varying service levels based on # of groups that a moderator can form, # of decisions per month, security, archiving of vote outcomes, notarization of votes
3. Advertising (last resort)
4. Maybe Diebold will be interested in acquiring us

I met Kimberly Johnson at the New Media Summit in Denver (one of the scheduled TechStars events) and got to talking to her about Internet Radio and the pending legislation to increase royalty fees for webcasters.

Kimberly interviewed me yesterday over the phone and her article on this subject (along with a few of my comments) can be read here

Sorry, Britney, no hard feelings…