Startup Weekend – Canadian City Vote

The Canadian cities are up! So, tell your friends and go vote for your city and let’s get our numbers up so we can start setting some dates! I’m excited to see SW coming to Canada and can’t wait to attend all the events.

So far we have (in no particular order): Montreal, Quebec City, Ottawa, Toronto, Waterloo, and Vancouver. If your city isn’t on the list, send an email to cities@startupweekend.com and we’ll make sure it gets listed.

To vote for your city go here: Startup Weekend City Vote.

Ottawa Weekends (web)

Our good friend Marc will be running a Weekend in our nation’s capital (Ottawa). Set for the weekend of April 4-6, 2008. So… if you’re in his neighborhood and are passionate about building innovative web applications, this might be of interest to you. I’m hoping to attend if my schedule permits.

 Web Weekends Ottawa

StartupWeekend Voting

I caught this post on the Birmingham Startup blog. Nice to see that Startup Weekend is taking off and gaining momentum. Congratulations go out to Andrew Hyde and all the members of past Startup Weekends that made this possible. I wish you all the best.

I too am a little disappointed that Toronto didn’t make it on the list. I mean… I know there was some friction, but lessons were learned and I thought we all moved on. I, for one, would really love to see Toronto (and maybe Waterloo for that matter) on the list (I’ll email Andrew tonight about that). I mean, now that Andrew has managed to set the tone for what Startup Weekend (his version of the weekend) is all about, there really won’t be any misunderstandings. Those that like his approach and rules, I’m sure, would love to be give an opportunity to have Toronto (or Waterloo) host an event under the Startup Weekend name. Those that don’t… well… I guess they/we can run our own under a different name

So… since this is about the community, lets get those cities on the list. What say you?

UPDATE

Just got an email back from Andrew and looks like not only will Waterloo and Toronto make it to the list, but so will some other Canadian cities. All of a sudden, I’m really pumped again. Time to have some good fun and build some apps. Roll up your sleeves boys and girls, cause here we go…

Startup Weekend – NYC and a bit more…

Wanted to send a big shout out to Startup Weekend – New York City! I’ve been following the weekend from afar and it looks like they had a great time and made very good progress with their selected idea, favoreats.com. I wish you guys all the best and can’t wait to see the product in beta.

On a not so happy note… I see that there’s still some fallout from the comments made by Andrew Hyde about the Toronto Startup Weekend and the comments that followed. I was contemplating writing a long post about this and my personal views, but I decided that it might just add fuel to the fire. Instead, I’ll say this. I get the impression that everyone wants to make these weekends successful, whatever name they end up running under. We all want o have a good time, learn, experience and grow. Oh and with any luck built a great product and grow a company. So… why don’t we just put the past behind us and learn from our mistakes and from our successes? If you like Andrew’s approach and want to join or run your own weekend, drop him a line on the Startup Weekend blog. If you don’t like the way he’s structured stuff, run your own like the Birmingham guys are.

I find both regrets and hatred take up too much energy. We’re all an energetic bunch, let’s channel that energy into something productive

Startup Weekend – Toronto – Lessons leaned

I finally have some time to write about the Toronto Startup Weekend experiment. First of all, I’d like to mention that we launched a product into beta. Yay! By that factor alone I guess we can consider this a success. There has been some buzz in the blogsphere about how the SW Toronto was run and organized. Here’s what’s been floating around so far:

Andrew Hyde: showing disappointment at the way things were organized, feeling that the spirit of the event was trampled.

Steve Poland: Agreeing with Andrew, but more mildly so

Brill Pappin: Giving his take having been one of the organizers of the SW Toronto event

And now for my take on it. First, my disclaimer, this is my opinion and mine alone. Ok with that out of the way… I was one of the pre-weekend organizers and had the “role” of product development lead.

Tired

Well, it has been a very long weekend, with very little sleep. I’m going to take a bit of a break in the evenings and try to get some sleep. I’ll be back with more posts on how the weekend went, what I think went well and what I think did not. Over all though, I think it was a great success and am looking forward to the future Startup Weekends.

Startup Weekend – Toronto – Pictures

Looks like pictures are starting to pop up on Facebook and elsewhere so I figured I’d add to the mix. Here’s the official album. And here’s mine.

Enjoy.

Startup Weekend – Toronto – We’re live

Well… almost. Here’s my post on the Toronto Startup Weekend blog.

Startup Weekend – Toronto – The final push

It’s the final day of this startup weekend and it looks like it’s going to be a long one. So much to do still and yet so much has already been accomplished. I’ll try and post updates, but real work comes first

Startup Weekend – Toronto – Day 2

Well, it’s 3am and I’m about ready to call it a day. I’m not going to sleep till I get our splash page up though. Once that’s up I’ll get some sleep.

So much has happened today the teams really came together and we’ve had a lot of successes. As a matter of fact the dev team completed the first phase of the site and we have a “working” prototype. How’s that for cool? The business team also made lots of progress today. The graphic team was amazing and put up with all of our crap and just kept putting out great concepts. The energy was great!

We also got a lot of help from our American friends, so I’d like to extend a special thanks to Erica O’Grady, Joe Scharf (Vosnap), and Andrew Hyde!

I have pictures and we have video and lots more to post, but that’ll come after I get some sleep

Check out the Toronto Startup Weekend Blog for more.

Stay tuned…