Bloomington Startup Weekend

We have four hours left in the day.  FOUR HOURS.
When Kevin asked if we’d be able to blog at least once every three hours, I laughed.  I normally blog like I talk (as in: a lot).   It’s amazing how quickly all of this time gets filled.
BizDev just (THANK YOU!) finalized the outlook.  We have [...]

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With mulitple small changes in direction, the development of the home page has been pretty slow.  But we have clear direction, and I hope we will be able to pick up speed now!
On the up side, a musical interlude before dinner gave us a much needed break in the action.

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UX - met with a potential user, more solid wireframes, we need users (go to Vince), need to know what’s next
Design - want to keep momentum going, got homepage, need help with a widget (info coming the next hour, see Dan to provide input on the widget), need copy
Business Dev - flushed out details of [...]

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In what has become a tradition for the Startup Weekends, SMTV has brought some music into the house. Tonight, it was Gentleman Caller—a local Bloomington band—that came into City Hall to do a set.
They had a couple acoustics and an amplified guitar, singing 3 songs (”Tiger,” “Executionize,” and “When I am Traveling”) from a new [...]

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A lot of progress has been made since the 4pm meeting.
You can tell that everyone is hard at work on something as you walk around city hall.
People are glued to the computer screens, the guys working on the code are all drinking energy drinks and mashing away at the keyboards almost non-stop.
You can feel a [...]

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Dev is pretty much crankin’ on the various parts of the site. We’ve split up into a few sub groups working on the database, some simple forms to view and edit items in the database, and the programming of some of the lower level functions of the site. The sys admins have been pretty much [...]

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Whoa.  Three hours.  UX has kicked it up a gear, dividing and conquering the problems we have.  It’s a very different situation from our other work, which was UX-contained.  Now we’re working very closely with design (and marketing) as well as dev.
The increased communication is great overall, but has definitely led to a lot of [...]

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Dev - have database done, need communication and wireframes, alt detail functionality lists (anything on paper) to know what to do
UX - created wireframes, sitemap on campfire, strategy to build the next things, usability tests (meeting with a potential user), need people to do usability testing (call for people w/in the hour)
Marketing/Design - layering mockups
Bus [...]

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Without going in to specific details things from the end of product management are starting to look up. The individual teams are communicating with each other a bit better now, the programmers have an idea of where they are going and have really taken the lead on what they will do, the marketing guys have [...]

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Legal - don’t blog the IP/patentable stuff
Development - database structure is getting setup, group crash course on framework, breaking up jobs
Marketing - logo options (voting on two … trying to, anyway)
Bus. Dev. - telling us how we are going to make our money (talking premiums, affiliates, value of data, subscriptions)
HR - new sponsor (Suso is [...]

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