Bloomington Startup Weekend

I’m amazed by how quickly the last three hours have gone.  Kevin just pointed out on twitter that three minutes is worth the time of a week, and keeping that in mind is frankly scary.

The legal team is up first.  They just briefed us on what can and cannot be disclosed - as those of you playing along at home (hi, mom) can imagine, we don’t want to broadcast any ideas that might ruin the surprise (and/or monetization) of what’s going on.  It’s interesting to think of how interest in legality and intellectual copyright has increased in previous years.

Development really addressed the scope of our work for the first time (at least in front of the large group).  They think it’s doable, and if Friday was the sprint for design (and a lot of today, too), then tonight and tomorrow are going to be a sprint - a long sprint - for the development team.

We’re discussing the logo right now.  It’s the sort of thing that elicits a pretty impassioned response from everyone here.

BizDev (Business Development) now - “How are we going to make money?”  It’s a question that’s pretty near and dear to some hearts, though not mine.  They’ve got some interesting ideas that could generate revenue.

The live feed from the dev group is being featured on the front page of ustream.tv!

We have established a chatroom using Campfire for everyone involved in the project to be able to get on and chat with each other.

MOSH mobile was good enough to pony up the cash for a twenty-five user account. If you are interested in getting in on the chat please speak with Raymond to get an invite to the account.

The campfire account is located at: http://bloomington.campfirenow.com/

Marketing is working on colors, fonts and graphic elements. We are looking at Color Trends 2009 to identify colors which will be hot in the next year to 18 months.  Currently favoring pumpkin, deep summer sky blue, and moss green.

Heated debate regarding the feature set, has narrowed the list to a manageable number for the developers

We’re about to start a meeting with the designers and user interface teams.  While we all have a much clearer vision of what’s going on, as we start to further develop the ideas, it’s also clearer what we don’t know.  From what I’m gathering, this is business as usual, just amplified by the large number of people involved.

A lot of people seem to be feeling the late night last night (working on this project, social time, and otherwise) combined with this morning’s early start.  Thanks to Bloomingfoods, we have some coffee.  I’m hoping that we won’t all crash around 3:00p, though.

Andrew Hyde is here now, and I think many of us are looking forward to hearing what he thinks of all of the ideas that have been flying around.

After the presentation by the UX group, the dev group started into discussing what kind of user management system we would use. The discussion shifted to selecting a PHP framework. We quickly came up with a list of possibilities: Symfomy, CakePHP, and the Zend framework. After approx. 10 minutes of discussion, we settled on CakePHP.

The feature list just arrived. Now we have to do some real work (sorta).

Our project manager just updated us: there is an argument going on what the site will actually do. So far, all we know is that we need an SQL database that contains event name and categories.

The dev group is going to get started on the basics that we know will be part of this system and will worry about the specifics after the other groups finish arguing.

Someone just started playing “The Final Countdown.” I have a feeling we’ll be hearing that song again.

We are getting ready to head to the first meeting of the day and see what the other groups have done thus far so we can get everyone on the same page and get going.

The product management team decided to each pick a group to hang out with and I’m hiding with the programmers.

They seem pretty excited to get going on the task at hand and they are mainly waiting for the meeting to find out everything they need to be doing.

So we have a theme and a general idea. The question now is: what are we going to do with it?

How are we going to differentiate ourselves in this fairly crowded space? Marketing/PR is going to do their part to answer that question today— beginning with working with the design group on what they have come up with for a logos.

Personally I had a blast last night… Went to 4 bars and made a bunch of new friends playing Bloomington’s own ‘Sink the Biz’ drinking game. 9am feels a little early after getting home around 4am… but I’m ready to rock today. Well at least until I fall over.

Hey twitter users!

If you haven’t yet, make sure to follow @btownstartup.  You can use the people following/being followed by @btownstartup to find other people this weekend, too.

(I am @katrina_)

As the final bell was about to sound we put the names we had found to a vote.   We are EventHerder!  The domain was available, the graphic designers are happy they have something they can work with, and the biz dev people feel we have a name, that represents what we will be selling.