Startup Weekend Bay Area “Mobile”: What Happens in Palo Alto…Won’t Stay in Palo Alto
By: Ahmed Siddiqui
Ahhh…mobile. That funny little word that used to drum up images of trailer parks and oversized, portable telephones has now become an industry unto itself – rearing and ready to go, in search of continued innovation and the next best anything. Yes, mobile…you are utterly “hot” in every way.
So what happens when you put 120+ entrepreneurs, developers, designers, (ahh hem…many of them from Stanford and Carnegie Melon – those dummies – and some from companies like IBM, Cisco, and dare we say…Google?) in a roughly 4,000 sq. ft. space (AT&T Foundry) for 54 hours?
Well, here it is – by the numbers:
1. 1/20/11: Rousing excitement from over 120 attendees after a kick-off session with Peter Boctor, VP of Mobile at Zaarly.
2. 1/20/11: 45 pitches to a room full of peers, all vying for their spot as mobile’s next best thing.
3. 1/20/11: 17 winning, crowd sourced pitches that would set the stage for team selection.
4. 1/21/11: 17 teams worked feverishly to develop, design, and test their mobile-focused product for over 15 hours.
5. 1/21/11: 12 mentors worked with the teams to provide input and feedback.
6. 1/21/11: Approximate number of pivots that happened after the feedback sessions – 4.
7. 1/21/11: Alex Donn from AT&T spoke with 20 developers about the newly released AT&T APIs for text messaging, billing, and geolocation. P.S. The developers also got a taste for the Sencha development framework to help accelerate their mobile builds.
8. 1/21/11: Microsoft gave out 3 Windows Mobile phones. The Foursquare dating team had the greatest number of votes, and won a phone; one team (“What now?”) chose to build on Windows mobile platform, earning them 2 phones by the end of the weekend.
9. 1/21/11: Brandon Hill from Btrax design and branding consultancy mentored the 17 teams after 1 amazing dinner, making sure that their user interfaces were top notch.
10. 1/22/11: 17 teams worked for over 8 hours to hone their pitches, wrap up their projects, and prepare for the evening competition.
11. 1/22/11: Finally, on Sunday night, 17 teams presented to our panel of 5 amazing judges: Scott Rutherford of UserVoice, Mary Himinkool of Google Ventures, Rebekah Iliff of talkTECH Communications, Mark Nagel of the AT&T Foundry, and Yujin Chung of Andreessen Horowitz.
12. 1/22/11: 1 lucky (and talented!) winner was chosen, entitling them to a fierce prize package that will set them up for future success. The team “Speech Later” (led by Minnesota native John Mellesmoen) wowed the judges with their development and implementation of a technology platform (served through a Google Chrome Widget) that allows users to send news articles to a mobile device for future “listening” – you know, for that long commute home.
13. 1/22/11: 1 runner up, “TinyAddr” (the Bit.ly for physical addresses), impressed the judges with their simple, streamlined solution and well-designed presentation. Next stop: Andreesen Horowitz for a consulting session. Did someone say funding opportunity?
BONUS: We also ran a cool experiment with our friends at Quillt, a mobile app that lets you privately share “experiences”. All of the pitches and pictures of the event were immediately loaded up into the Startup Weekend Bay Area Quillt. Quilting isn’t for your grandma anymore folks!
Now that Startup Weekend Bay Area “Mobile” has wrapped, it’s time to start looking forward to the next event: Startup Weekend Bay Area “Education”, which will be hosted by Kno in Santa Clara, February 24-26!
Disruptive innovation: reflections from PeopleBrowsr Labs Curator Travis Wallis
Interviewed by: Ahmed Siddiqui
Meet Travis Wallis: the Creator and Curator of PeopleBrowsr Labs, San Francisco’s first Social Media Accelerator. He also serves as the Director of API at PeopleBrowsr, a social media analytics company that records, indexes, and stores social data from Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other social media. He has consulted on social strategy for Fortune 500 companies including PepsiCo, Microsoft, Sony, Philips, Kodak, Cisco, NBC Universal, and many others. In his spare time [what spare time?], Travis enjoys memorization, climbing, and meditation.
Well, with a “bio” like that I’m not sure if a further introduction is really necessary, so we will get to the good stuff. As a mentor for this weekend’s “Mobile” event, Travis was kind enough to sit down with me and answer some fairly pointed questions about innovation, trends, and what excites him about working with entrepreneurs and startups. Let’s get to it!
AS: What inspires you about entrepreneurs and innovation?
TW: What inspires me about entrepreneurs and their actions is that they have ability to change the world as we operate within it.
I’m most interested in disruptive innovation. I define that as a creation of a product or service where an entrepreneur creates a new market and value system within a society. Personally, I think there is nothing more invigorating than creating or being around the creation of more effective products, processes, and / or technologies that helps craft new ideas, methods, and behaviors.
AS: What are 3 tech industry segments in need of disruptive innovation? i.e. where are the opportunities for aspiring entrepreneurs?
TW:
1. Big Data: We are in such early days around the collection, indexing, cross-indexing, tagging, correlation and use of data. My personal passion interest is around the use of social data. We now have the ability to listen in and gain insights on what people are sharing on the Internet. Nielsen, ComScore and many others have been collecting data for years using “panels” or people that have opted in to have recorded what they are watching (tv) or viewing (web) to represent subsets of the population. Those within the panels opt-in and know they are being watched and it costs those collecting the data exorbitant amounts of money just for those tiny sample sets. With social data, companies now have the ability to take much larger samples and go even deeper depending on how those generating the content define themselves. The opportunity and market for insights held within social data – whether through customer or product discovery, to customer service, to advertising and sales, to even financial markets… if it’s harnessed correctly and made actionable, the data in it of itself will only become increasingly more valuable to the market.
Analytics and Data Science is the future. Whether through the creation of sites that can source content or for companies finding interesting ways to make sense of that data, this industry is going up and to the right.
2. Mobile: There are almost 6 billion mobile subscribers – that’s 87 percent of the world population. Yet, feature phones still outnumber Smart Phones at 4:1. That said, it won’t stay that way for very long. Companies like Nokia, Samsung, and others are leading the way with mass market Smart Phones and this market will only continue to grow.
Phones will soon be the only thing carry. Applications to unlock and start your car, financial transactions, to integration of video + holographs + projections to banking, to car keys, etc. Your phone will soon be the only thing you carry. And then, maybe it’s a watch. Maybe it’s just a pair of glasses. The opportunity for disruptive innovation is so present within this subset of the market.
3. Health: There is ample room for developments within medical, fitness, and other health- oriented fields. Keas.com is a great example of taking fitness and health into social gaming. Cardiotrainer, ifitness, and runkeeper are great examples of mobile apps that have had wild adoption because of their continued usefulness. Halcyon Molecular is aiming to turn biology into an information science by providing a cheap and rapid full sequence of genomes. Bionic Prosthesis to provide people that have lost limbs to be able to have fully functional limbs again.
All of these industries are ripe for disruptive innovation.
AS: PeopleBrowsr is all about “social” – so tell us, what are your thoughts on the future of social? Where is it going? Why does it matter?
TW: Social data will change the world as we know it.
PeopleBrowsr is all about social – we’ve been collecting, indexing, and storing the full firehose from Twitter since the fall of 2008. We have over 18 months of Public Facebook, and access to over 2 years of Blogs + Forums. We believe in the power of social data and are passionate about finding applicable use of that data.
The continuing trend is that people are using social networks to differentiate themselves. The fundamental problem within the market that we have attacked is that there wasn’t a transparent metric based off of actions for the social network Twitter. Our answer, Kred.ly is a scoring system that is normalized and transparent that allows for people to differentiate themselves based on actions and for those looking to find those differentiators.
Why does it matter?
In “What Technology Wants,” Kevin Kelly says progress is inevitable and it’s only a matter of time until the right tools are in place. We’re getting there now with the data and we’re working to make sense of it. For the first time in history we have access to what people are saying and we don’t have to ask, we simply have to find the right data set.
It’s no longer a question of does it matter. The question is how much will this disrupt the industry as we continue along the path of making sense of what is currently just in arms reach.
AS: What excites you about working with PeopleBrowsr Labs?
TW: I get excited by the opportunity to work with early stage companies. I have the opportunity to introduce them to customers interested in new social technology and get feedback. We also allow for the use of our APIs for startups within our lab + to try new things which makes me think more about what we can do with our data on a day-to-day basis.
Partners are also constantly educating the entrepreneurs (and me) in the lab, providing a unique perspective based on years of experience. Through Pereira & O’Dell and their new division Pereira & O’Dell Connect, we’ve been able to gain a lot from their perspective. The same goes about Scaling + Infrastructure (from Lab sponsor SoftLayer), Law (from Perkins Coie), Banking + Venture Capital (from Square1 Bank), and about the importance of social data to companies like PepsiCo, who recently agreed to support the lab.
AS: The upcoming SWBAY event focuses on mobile…what are your thoughts on this exploding industry?
TW: The opportunity ahead of us for innovation is mind blowing.
AS: In your opinion, why does mobile matter?
TW: 6B people have handsets. 1.2B apps were downloaded in one week over the holidays. NFC will replace ids + eventually require DNA to access. The entire world is changing.
AS: Of course we have to ask…what mobile devices do you use? iPad, iPhone, Android?
TW: I have both an iPhone and an Android.
To learn more about Travis and PeopleBrowsr, be sure to check out the following properties:
Travis Wallis Personal:
http://www.twitter.com/
https://www.facebook.com/
http://www.linkedin.com/in/
PeopleBrowsr:
http://www.peoplebrowsr.com/
http://developer.peoplebrowsr.
http://ww.twitter.com/
Why mobile matters: an interview with Crosswalk’s Tom McLeod
Interviewed by: Ahmed Siddiqui
In preparation for this week’s Startup Weekend Bay Area “Mobile,” I had the express pleasure of “talking shop” with one of the Weekend’s mentors, Tom McLeod. In addition to being a music aficionado of sorts (he started the media production company MTerrace Inc. and the DC based record label Heavy Syndication), Tom is President and Co-Founder of Imaginary Feet, a web and mobile app idea factory. The company’s latest development is Crosswalk – a new website bringing social to the mobile app experience.
AS: When did you first experience the “entrepreneur bug”? What was your first endeavor?
TM: My first endeavor was actually selling snap bracelets in 4th grade. I partnered with a kid who could draw names using bubble letters and we made custom snap bracelets with our fellow students names on them. My mom was my first angel investor buying us a 30pack of neon bracelets to get our business off the ground.
AS: What lessons did you learn from that experience and how has it affected your decision making process now?
TM: I think it was probably the first basic understanding of supply and demand, supply chain economics, and that working with a partner is hard, especially when they’re the talent!
AS: What inspires you about entrepreneurship and innovation?
TM: I like problem solving, even when the problems are small. Entrepreneurship is all about problem solving. No one ever made a product that didn’t attempt to make an improvement in the way humans relate to the world around them. I’m always inspired by the way different minds solve the dilemmas of the world.
AS: What are 3 “hot trends” in tech that you think will be getting attention in 2012?
TM:
1. Nearfield Communications
2. Mobile apps taking a larger role in media right next to books, movies, and TV.
3. Streaming everything.
AS: The upcoming SWBAY event focuses on mobile…what are your thoughts on this exploding industry?
TM: It’s the way we’re heading right now as a collective entity. The freedom to have your data, personal connections, and communications with you at all times levels the playing field for everyone. If 2011 was the engagement 2012 will be the bachelor party, wedding, and honeymoon.
AS: In your opinion, why does mobile matter?
TM: Freedom. Mobile means information everywhere for anyone. It’s not just about the devices, it’s about the infrastructure that gets built around it. Longer batteries, Internet everywhere, constant data access…these make it easier for everyone to do more then check movie times. They can find refugee camps, healthier food options, and cheat at scrabble. All extremely important.
AS: Of course we have to ask…what mobile devices do you use? iPad, iPhone, Android?
TM: Love my iPad, iPhone, and my Original Kindle.
To connect with Tom or Crosswalk, check out:
http://www.facebook.com/crossw
http://www.twitter.com/crosswa
About Crosswalk
Crosswalk (www.Crosswa.lk) is the best tool to discover the iPhone apps that are most important to you, and your network. Friends, colleagues, and influencers let you know what apps they are using, and help you have a richer mobile experience.
About Tom McLeod
Tom McLeod is President and Co-Founder of Imaginary Feet, a web and mobile app idea factory. At Imaginary Feet, Tom oversees the direction of the company and their seven successful applications and services for work and play, with a particular focus on the company’s latest development Crosswalk – the new website bringing social to the mobile app experience.
Prior to Imaginary Feet, Tom started the media production company MTerrace Inc. and the DC based record label Heavy Syndication. For these companies he served as Founder and CEO where he was responsible for the daily operations, client relations, and much of the functional creative and technical work. Tom graduated with a Bachelor’s of Science in Audio Technology and a minor in Computer Science from American University. His many interests include classic films, basketball, and making mixtapes for his daily commute.
Future of Mobile: What’s in Store for 2012
2011 was a big year for mobile as Apple’s iPhone got some serious competitors from Android and Windows Phone. However, even as competition increased, it was clear that entrepreneurs found it challenging to think outside “iOS vaccum” because of clear Apple market domination. Don’t get me wrong, I love iOS, but by late 2011, it became progressively more difficult for the independent app developer to really compete in this market.
With over 500,000 apps in the iTunes store, getting lost in a sea of apps was an obvious threat to any developers’ plans to “strike it rich”. Apple’s marketplace shifted from being a “cottage industry” to being overrun by the established players like Angry Birds, Flipboard, Instagram, and the big companies with massive marketing budgets like Disney, Electronic Arts, and Facebook.
Over the holiday season we saw amazing sales of the Amazon Kindle Fire and the Barnes and Noble Nook Color, while Windows Mobile and a whole slew of Android devices came to market. So where are the big opportunities for entrepreneurs and independent developers for 2012? The Answer is Windows Mobile and Amazon Kindle Fire.
Windows Mobile is an amazing interface and is silky smooth just like iOS. However, it has the fewest number of apps. Because of this, it provides an interesting opportunity. Surely, the volume of Windows Mobile phones is nowhere in comparison to Android or iOS devices, but with the Nokia partnership, this number will only grow. So far the screen sizes of the Windows Mobile phones have been the same, making development easier, and OS updates are managed much better than the Android. As a developer, you need fewer devices to test on, and everything is coded in the .NET framework, which is familiar to many developers. Furthermore, by programming in .NET, it opens the doors to porting over games to the XBOX Live Marketplace. With some modifications to the controls, your mobile app could be used on the big screen with the Kinect as its control mechanism, which is pretty cool, not to mention convenient.
Amazon Kindle Fire sold over 1 million units a week during the holiday season becoming one of Amazon.com’s biggest sellers. The tablet can do most of what the iPad can do at half the price and is completely integrated with Amazon’s eBook store, music store, and App store. In the short term, the downside of owning this is obvious: the Amazon App Store barely has any applications for the Kindle Fire; however, for entrepreneurs with a penchant for “opportunity spotting” this provides a platform for introducing fresh content to consumers. Angry Birds (of course!) and Fruit Ninja are practically the only competition at this point – so if you’re not developing somewhat nebulous, entertainment, gaming apps, the door is wide open!
The most interesting part of this is that the Kindle Fire runs on the Android OS, and has a standard screen size. I personally halted any development on Android simply because it was just too expensive to test on multiple devices with different screen sizes, processors, and operating system versions. However, with the Kindle Fire, I don’t have to worry about any of these. I also get to be part of Amazon’s curated App Store, which is far easier to search and navigate than Google’s standard Android App store. Plus, Amazon provides “one-click” purchasing, enabling a much better user shopping experience.
So what about iOS? Well, I still feel that this is the platform that will be tough to beat. However, as an entrepreneur just getting into mobile development, iOS is probably the most difficult from a programming perspective. (Android is based on Java and Windows Phone is based on the .NET framework). Furthermore, the marketplace for iOS is crowded, and unless you have a big marketing budget, or an extremely unique viral feature, the barriers to entry are high.
My hunch: 2012 is a year waiting for mobile innovation on many levels. Opportunities are everywhere, and for those willing to be creative the rewards will be extraordinary. I have no doubt new business models will emerge, enabling the little guys to compete better in iOS. The concept of the $0.99 app is not sustainable for most developers or entrepreneurs unless you get massive volumes like Angry Birds, and iOS revenue streams will require a shift in thinking. Perhaps the app becomes a marketing tool to purchase something bigger, e.g. a physical object (example, Disney’s Cars 2 pack for the iPad, or Sphero), or perhaps apps that offer branded entertainment and built-in sponsorship opportunities will dominate? Who knows exactly what will happen…but it’s going to be exciting! Let the app games begin…
Post contributed by Ahmed Siddiqui, who coordinates the Startup Weekend events in the San Francisco Bay Area, and also founder of Go Go Mongo!, a game company that inspires kids to eat healthier. He can be reached through twitter: @siddiquiahmed
TRULY Rapid Prototyping with StackMob
Guest post by Crawford Comeaux, a past Startup Weekend participant. This blog post originally appeared on the StackMob website, one of our sponsors.
I love Startup Weekends! They provide me a chance to easily find like-minded people looking to make their ideas a reality and they’re nothing but fun. Grueling, exciting, stressful fun. On any given weekend, there’s likely at least one going on somewhere in the world. I’ve been to four of them, successfully pitched one of two ideas at each and my teams have placed three times. These things are like crack for wannabe entrepreneurs with ADHD…or at least for THIS wannabe entrepreneur with ADHD! If you are not familiar with the program, you can find out more here.
I participated in my fourth Startup Weekend from November 11-13 in Baton Rouge, LA. I went in determined to win, since winners of Startup Weekends going down on that weekend & the next were eligible to enter into the Global Startup Battle. The winner of the battle is chosen via online voting and there can only be one. The prize up for grabs has the potential to launch the winning startup. So yeah…I wanted that chance, but first I had to win locally.
Most people go into Startup Weekends with just an idea. There’s no preparation done ahead of time. Me, I’m not going into battle without a plan. I wanted to be able to focus primarily on the prototype for the weekend, since the rest of the work had been pretty much addressed at SW Dallas a few months earlier. We built a prototype in Dallas, but the concept for the app had expanded a bit since then and I wanted to start from scratch. I couldn’t count on developers being available, so that meant it’d likely just be myself and a buddy of mine who’s recently developed an interest in interface design. Since the product is a set of mobile apps and we wanted to present with a live demo that others could participate in, that meant it had to be a mobile web app. And we had 54 hours…so we needed development platforms that 1) a non-coder could use 2) produced mobile web apps 2) allowed for “rapid prototyping” (slamming out quick, successive versions of a product)
There are different platforms/libraries/toolkits/etc that are recommended for “rapid prototyping,” but almost all of them define “rapid” from a non-Startup-Weekender-with-short-a-attention-span perspective. Most of the options available have a bit of a learning curve before you can quickly do whatever you want to do, especially if you’re not a coder. And even with simple docs, coding introduces potential fat-finger syndrome. I’m sorry, but a platform that allows for typo-generated errors or bugs doesn’t fit my definition of “rapid.” There are tools for preventing issues or at least detecting their origins, but the tools aren’t perfect and I want to minimize the amount of time I have to spend fixing glitches.
Thus, I went on the hunt for robust, but ridiculously simple solutions. I knew about PhoneGap Build, but wanted to see if there was something beyond that for building the frontend. What I found was Tiggr, a web-based app builder that supports mobile web app development via jQuery Mobile and has a simple drag-and-drop interface builder that let me set properties/events. Not only can projects be exported to your choice of HTML5/CSS/javascript or native Android/iOS projects, but it’s also collaborative!
Front end platform? Check! Time to move on to the backend. I’d read about StackMob on TechCrunch recently & knew about Cocoafish after meeting some of their devs at SW San Francisco in May. After doing a little digging, I found a couple more services: Kinvey and Parse. I signed up for beta invites to each & managed to convince all but Kinvey to grant me one (I still haven’t received a confirmation email from them, but they seem VERY new).
When I evaluated the features of each service, I kept an eye out for features that would be useful beyond prototyping. After reviewing the features offered by each, I eventually settled on StackMob for a few reasons. With StackMob, I can set which fields are indexed, as well as which fields in an object are related to fields in other objects. Being able to get expanded object data through relationships will save us the hassle of making multiple calls for a single screen’s data. On top of that, being able to build custom objects was really important. Parse allows for custom objects, that’s it. Cocoafish didn’t support custom objects until a few days ago, so that wouldn’t work for us, either. StackMob was the simplest option.
Building the data model in StackMob took about 15 minutes! Even if you add to that the 5 minutes I spent begging them for a beta invite, that’s still a server-side setup personal best!
I skipped right over the process of setting up a database server and went right into setting up my database tables! Sure, you may have a way to streamline/ease that initial process, but I didn’t even have to bother with it!
There’s one more feature I’d like to mention that StackMob & Tiggr actually share: responsiveness. The day of the presentation, I started connecting the UI to the backend and ran into a snag: I couldn’t figure out how to properly call the StackMob APIs from within Tiggr! I tried several different naive approaches to no end and searched online for the answer. I tweeted at every Twitter account tied to both companies begging for help and got a response within 15-20 minutes…on a Sunday! Jordan, one of StackMob’s engineers, connected with me over Google Talk and logged into my Tiggr account after I gave him access. He’s a backend guy, so he wasn’t able to provide a solution at that point, but I’d already fought the problem for too long & had to move on to preparing the presentation. After I presented, I started getting tweeted at from both sides…apparently people from both companies got together & provided me with a solution!
Long story short: I’m sold on this pairing for prototyping. Their ease of use, extensibility and fantastic customer service make for a pretty powerful combo!
