Bloomington Startup Weekend

Launched by Pat Coyle in late December, Smaller Indiana is a young but thriving online community making offline connections. The site—which has quickly grown to 555 members—was inspired by a book called “Nexus, Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks,..” by Mark Buchanan, who wrote:
“On a crowded street of any major city, there can […]

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71 people have registered for Bloomington Startup Weekend! A little local press did the trick, as we surged past New York City into Atlanta territory. We decided to expand the ceiling to 80 to give some Herald-Times readers the chance to get on board.
As it stands, this is the current breakdown of our future founders […]

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Our first official sponsor is Mallor Clendening Grodner & Bohrer LLP, a local Bloomington law firm offering professional services for businesses, including start-up and technology companies, family law matters, estate planning, and litigation.
Since 1976, the business lawyers of Mallor Clendening Grodner & Bohrer LLP have been helping entrepreneurs and business owners in the Bloomington area […]

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Attention future BSW founders (especially those coming in from out of town):
According to John Hill, Scholars Inn has agreed to give a 10% discount on food and drink—as well as the Bed & Breakfast rooms—for the weekend of Feb. 8-10 event. Tell them you are with Bloomington Startup Weekend.

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We’ll begin profiling our event sponsors later today, beginning with Mallor Clendening Grodner & Bohrer LLP, a local Bloomington law firm specializing in estate planning and contract disputes. In the meantime, I wanted to post a note of thanks to Travis Brown (who is new to blogging, so encourage him to get Web 2.0 by […]

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We are expecting the local paper(s) to provide us some coverage this week. That should push us up to our goal of 70 participants by getting us the last two dozen. Bloomington, a city of 69,000 people, is already comfortably within the norms set by past weekends.

134—San Francisco (Nov 16-18)
120—Hamburg, Germany (Sept 21-23)
82—Atlanta (Nov 9-11)
74—Wash., […]

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Apparently, the Seattle Startup Weekend had some problems out of the gate Friday. Founder Andrew Hyde writes about some of the issues and the recovery that is trying to put the weekend on track for a 9p launch tonight. This is important for two reasons.
First, scuffles, huffs and hurt feelings are likely in any scenario […]

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Startup Weekends begin and end with a group decision, roughly following this overgeneralized schedule:

Friday—pitch ideas, select one, and figure out who is doing what.
Saturday—build things
Sunday—launch things, and discuss what to do next

In between, we eat, drink and mingle.
That final decision involves the future of the company everyone worked so hard to get off the ground. […]

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Last night, I attended a meeting of Women Inspire, a three-year-old group promoting personal and professional connections between local women. I went specifically to make a special appeal to local women to help us achieve gender equity at Bloomington Startup Weekend.
Gender equity is a known problem in IT, to a greater degree than most professions. […]

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Last night, the fourteenth Startup Weekend host city—Seattle—kicked off the first day of the quest to build something new from scratch.
For those planning to attend our event on February 8th through 10th, it would be well worth paying attention to how things transpire in Seattle. The best ways to tune in are to read the […]

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