Thanks to Andrew & Tyler

I just wanted to take a moment and thank Andrew and Tyler for making this all possible – StartupWeekend is such a great vehicle to launch ideas and simply to get to know some really incredible people – thanks.

richard

Been to the War

I was at the Google Open Social presentation on Monday. I had registered before I ever went to Startup Weekend. There were at least a dozen Startup Weekend veterans there. There were also a few people that were only there on Friday night who I did not remember.

As I was watching the presentation, people kept coming up to me and saying Hi. The girl next to me said “Wow, you know a lot of people here”. I told her that I just met them on the weekend. I realized something on Monday. It had been about only 24 hours since I had seen many of these people but it was like we were old friends that had not seen each other in a long time.

I met some people that only attended on Friday night of Startup Weekend. That was nothing. I felt the same to them as I feel to anybody that hands me a card at a networking event. It is hard to explain to somebody that has not been to a Startup Weekend but I know that I was not the only person that felt that way. Over the weekend, 2 people asked me to be part of their startups and 1 person asked to be part of mine.

On the Friday of Startup weekend, I chatted with Andrew and he told me that it did not matter which idea we implemented. I thought that he was full of it. I was going to bail out if we had picked the wedding website idea . Personally, I am really happy with the idea we implemented. In hindsight, he was right.

It didn’t matter what idea we implemented. I met some incredibly talented people on the weekend. People that I would enjoy working with again. In full disclosure, I also met some people that annoyed me. However, when we met on Monday, we had been to the war together ( Silicon Valley sense).

Alvin

HelpHookup Presentation at Google

Wow, our team is spreading the word out like crazy. We just did a presentation at Google’s OpenSocial event. It was great to see our weekend work already on the big screens at the  Googleplex. Alexander, Abdul, Ivan, and Elsi pulled off an impressive show. Thank you guys. Here are some snippets:

What inspired you ?

It had been a tough 5 days & I was ready to call it a week when something told me that I should check out the startupweekend event at Microsoft’s San Francisco Office — I was not to be disappointed.

What is a startupweekend event? In a nutshell, 85-100 of the smartest, most interesting, most varied people you would ever meet come together under controlled chaos and create something special. There are no pre-set rules, tools or modes of conduct — rather these are defined by the community at adhoc meetings that take place as the need arises.

This weekend, we came together & built a community response tool – in one weekend. It was a beautiful thing – conceived, built, marketed, and released in such a short time. Kudos to Andrew Hyde, Tyler Willis & the awesome people who participated.

My Question to team is – what inspired you to stick it out & be part of this wonderful event?

Kaushal
http://thinkinnovate.blogspot.com/

The day after

Just woke up (3:00pm). It was such a hectic weekend. It feels like waking up from a dream. The Web site is still up and that’s great. However, there are a lot of bugs that we need to fix quicly. We have a running application, but it’s at the alpha stage. I’m not sure how many users added it already. For those who did, please excuse the unpolished look, the lack of content, and the bugs. Remember, the whole project was conceived, built, marketed, and released in one weekend. So, although it’s not perfect, I think the team did a great job given the time frame.

- Waleed

We launched

In the last second of the last minute. We’ll start sending out invites to those who signed up for them in phases. We’ll also post a video of the launch moments. Stay tuned.

Update

Wow, it’s been intense the last few hours. Apologies for not keeping you updated. We are so close to launching, but it’s not clear yet. We’re still waiting on dev to tell us if they’re going to make the midnight deadline. But we have a promo video ready, and the landing page is almost done.

By the way, once we put up the landing page we’ll move this blog to a different page and put a link to it.

Looking into the FUTURE…

We had a meeting and discussion of how things are going to work for the future of the company. Or perhaps I should say companies. It’s a great reflection on the people of the San Francisco Bay Area when San Francisco’s Startup Weekend is creating the first nonprofit company to emerge from Startup Weekend. As we’re approaching midnight, our group of strangers has clearly become a strong community that is still focused on the goal. We also have an extremely passionate core team that will be leading us as we move forward. Great things will come from this.

-rosina

Pizza is here

It’s 7:23pm and it’s time for dinner. Thank you Microsoft for sponsoring it. – Wal

Everyone IS a Hero!

Everyone IS a Hero!

HelpHookUp.com

The Biz Dev Update

The Business Development group pulled together after about 48 hours at SF Startup Weekend held at the Microsoft offices in San Francisco. A core group of 10 committed entrepreneurial-spirited folks came together to formulate a plan for what this product will actually achieve for their company, HelpHookup.

We defined our Vision as a community working together to improve our world.

We also came up with our Mission which is to make it easy for the users to hookup with others to volunteer in the global community.

We concluded that there is a void for an ongoing community in volunteer organizations. Through HelpHookup we defined a way to reward the volunteer and empower them to build continuity of volunteering and motivation through recognition of their contribution.

We are going to accomplish this through the following implementations.
1) Facebook – An application that will engage and retain volunteers through a Plugin
2) Website – Create a platform to seek, to engage and to retain users
3) Social Portals – Leverage existing social portals starting with Facebook to achieve critical mass

In addition we will offer a system of point rewards that will contribute to volunteer accountability and fostering communities.

First!!

Did you see our article on Techcrunch yet? Well SOMEONE did:

Comment by Drew:

Great idea. I’d like to offer to be the first partnership to this new company. They plan hook up volunteers with good causes, we already hook up donors and charities.

Let’s work together.

Drew McManus
President and Co-Founder
Bring Light, Inc.
www.bringlight.com

The User Experience from a…User Experience consultant.

Some Thoughts about working on HelpHookup at Startupweekend, San Francisco.

A couple of months ago I was walking in downtown San Francisco with friends from the tech industry and we were all wondering: “Wouldn’t it be cool if we got a bunch of developers, designers, biz dev, marketing/PR people…even a lawyer or two, put them all in a room and see what they can come up with within a weekend?” We all thought it would be a cool idea. Just a couple of days later, I met Tyler Willis who helped Andrew Hyde, the founder of StartupWeekend, organize it in San Francisco. It was obviously an idea whose time has come.

I went to the event without knowing exactly what to expect. I happen to organize an event myself, so I know the difficulties that are involved in getting the right people to perform the right things at the right time. Even simple tasks are sometimes interpreted differently by different people which results in comic situations at best and event tragedies at worst. So building a company, with all the complexities and dynamic factors involved in the process, during a single weekend by a bunch of people who have never worked together, seemed quite a formidable and ambitious goal that seemed destined to be fraught with difficulties.

And yet, so far it has been a remarkably smooth experience given the circumstances. Much praise should go to the founder who found a  format that works. It allows highly motivated people sit down, work hard and get things done in lightning speed. Sure, mistakes are committed, discussions can get heated and some things have to be left out because we simply don’t have the time. But there is also lots of laughter and bonding, and mistakes are corrected at a higher rate than they are committed. The experience of building something so fast with people you just met is very empowering and only serves to remind us that a goal, passion and talent can bring people together with fascinating results.

On the whole, the experience of working with all the different teams responsible for getting a company off the ground is invaluable to any aspiring entrepreneur.

It’s cool, free and fun…you almost feel that working shouldn’t be like that…- yet it is

Ok, want to get back to “work”.

Alexander Pagidas.

We have a Google gadget

This will work on your desktop and you can also add it to your iGoogle page. It’s in JavaScript. Alvin, our gadget guru, used the Google Mashup editor to create it. This gadget will send updates about the projects you signed up for directly to your desktop or home page.

- Waleed

Behind the Scenes Video

We’re doing it in RoR and PHP

So, here is an update from our dev team. They’re building the Facebook App part in RoR, and the main Web site in PHP. The backend will be common between the two versions, and our database is MySQL.

- Waleed

We’ve been TechCrunched

The title says it all. Thank you Michael.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/18/startup-weekend-san-francisco-in-full-swing/

-Waleed
global warming
startupweekend
sw-sf
swsf
helphookup
community service
volunteer
disaster relief
<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/startupweekendsf

the goings on…

it’s quiet in here… eery? not so much. people have things to do and we getting closer to our destination. if you want to follow along with other with photos, check out our Flickr with the tag “sw-sf” and our Twitter.

-rt

The Inspiration

The inspiration of Help Hookup is actually a comic book called Global Frequency by Warren Ellis. It was also made into a TV show that never aired. I understand that it is available on BitTorrent.

Global Frequency was a network of 1,001 people that handled the jobs that the governments did not have the will to handle. I thought that it was a great idea and it would be more powerful with 1,000,001 people or 100,000,001 people.  We would have to leave out the killing that was in the comic.

Typhoons, earthquakes, and improperly funded education could all be handled. If there is a disaster, doctors could volunteer. Airlines could provide tickets. Corporations could provide supples. Trucking companies could provide transportation. Etc. State a need, meet the need. No overhead. No waste.

Currently, people raise money for disasters and have no real idea of how it will be spent. People send food and it rots on a loading dock. There are needs in our own backyards but no central place to find the needs.

I had the idea of Help Hookup in the back of my mind for several months. The software would be easy to write. It would have taken more than 1 weekend but how would I get graphics, PR, bizdev, etc? Then, I heard about Startup Weekend. I went to this great gathering of over 100 people with the unspoken purpose of convincing them to make my idea come true.

Alvin

It’s a new day

Still waiting for the coffee and donuts to arrive.

- Waleed

BATTLE ROYALE!!!!

It’s been close; tensions have peaked, columns dropped, columns restored. A whole slew of 404’s without explanation. I haven’t been able to log out since I logged on in February….

But it’s coming together! Like Waleed said, there was a demo which showed the basic functionality of the system we’re building, and there’s a secret team of ruby developers whose wholesome goodness will be released upon the world in the next few hours or so. How do such marvelous things happen? Division of labor, overlapping coverage of goals (ie, two teams have some unique work, with really important work overlapping so at least someone gets it done).

It’s madness, but we’ll have something amazing tomorrow!

Sean F

We just watched a demo, wow

Our dev team just proved that they can do it. They gave us a demo of the application and it worked, sort of. It’s very basic so far, no graphics or colors, but it worked. It’s a pre-alpha version. We’re so excited about it.

- Waleed

Promo Shoot

We just shot an incredible video promo..for helphookup.com. Featuring and Starring the very sexy Elsie.. Stay Tuned!