Experience. New Tech. New Media. The zerologic blog.
Viewing entries in Entrepreneurship
Well under way, Startup Weekend is absolutely one of the coolest things I've been involved in. The company we've created is a web/sms service for making quick decisions.

If you want to ask a few friends about a decision you want to make, come to the site, enter their email addresses, or mobile phone numbers, and we'll send the questions and options to them. They reply within a given time period and you're notified of the results. There is way more to it than that, especially if you ask the developers, but that is the general idea. Think pro features, white labeling, etc.



Everyone broke in to groups of specialty after the idea was chosen. For example: marketing/pr, front end development, creative, back end development, business development, legal, and user experience. These teams formed magically. How cool.

Normally I'd stick myself into one of the dev teams, but as I grow I want to offer my experience to as many people as will listen. So with this project, I signed up in the "I get things done" role. I floated from group to group, and if I say so myself, that worked well. I spent most of yesterday with the user experience team.

Keep an eye on the site... it will launch today (it may be tonight!) but it will go. Absolutely the best way to get a quick vote is with VoSnap. ;-)

Let me know what you think. Oh, we were TechCrunched (thanks Mike!) We were the featured show last night for quite a while on ustream.tv, and will be streaming the event live today too. Check it out at at ustream.tv
Some of Boulder's best and brightest startup talent is gathering tonight at 6. What exactly we'll be doing is still totally unclear, but the result will be a complete startup/product on Monday morning. If the idea is solid, there is plenty of opportunity for going big. Frankly, with the people involved, I expect just that.

There are 70 people signed up. Think about that for a second. An entire company's worth of high level talent, coming together to build something cool over the course of a weekend.

For updates on the project, keep an eye on http://startupweekend.com

I have to thank my wife Heather for her support on this. She'll be responsible fully for Z and will have little time to herself while I'm off creating something cool with my friends. She has plans to take our 3 year old son Z to the Colorado Renaissance festival on Sunday. She'll have fun! Thanks Heather! Don't forget about daycare! :)
My friend Ari Newman of tru.vu and Newman Venture Advisors has an interesting observation about Web developers in the Boulder area. It seems as thought all of the funded startups are sucking the market dry.

I know a some of these guys and they're pretty much booked as he says. If you're a good web developer and you have rails experience, give these guys a glance. They're in need of help.

Ari says you don't have to be local, but you do have to kick ass and already have remote relationships worked out. Read the post yourself here Web developer drought in Boulder?

Good luck Ari and team!
If you want to see the path to a cool company that could provide valuable services to prosumers and executives around the globe, follow this puzzle.

Read this then watch this. If you take this combine it with this and this you too can have your knowledge navigator service provider. Today. Anyone interested?
Can a team of people create an entire company in a weekend, from scratch? From concept to launch during a Friday night to Sunday night timeframe. Can it be done? Yes it can, and I'll be a part of it.

Chris and I were banging out grillm when I read about this event for the first time. We looked at each other and said, "Wow, what a great idea!"

Unlike our two man show, this a is a group of world class people teaming up from all areas of business. Management, funding, marketing, bizdev, application development... everything you really need to create a viable business.

I can't wait for the result, there are some phenomenal people involved. I'll be just back from the Butte, ready and refreshed. Who's catering coffee and pizza? Brad? ;-)

StartupWeekend: "July 6-8 in Boulder, Colorado. Let's create a startup."
Caron Schwartz Ellis wrote a nice piece for the Boulder County Business Review on the resurgence of web companies in the Boulder/Denver area.

The companies she mentions are a hop or two away from me. While I don't know them all personally, I think that they're all doing great work. Being involved in the startup scene has been a wonderful experience, and this article reminds me of that.

Sure, at one point we would have been in the list, but times change, as do priorities. How about you save some space for me in the followup article next year Caron? Deal?

BCBR ARTICLE: The return of the dot-com
Chris and I came up with a really cool idea for distraction project. We decided to try and build it within 24 man hours... and we did it.


http://grillm.com is a simple social networking site... with a twist. You don't know anyone and the way you get friends is to earn their friendship by asking questions. You click their picture and ask a question. They answer the question and if you like the answer, you ask another and so on.

Eventually you'll decide to add them as a friend, and when you do they'll have access to your full profile. That access grants them the ability to see your myspace, facebook, vox, etc. accounts and to see your grillm.com friends as well. If they like you, then they'll probably like your friends, too.

Remember, you know nothing about these people before you ask them a question... you've only see their icon.

This thing is cool, and if the first private beta day was any indication, we're going to be busy guys keeping up with the requests... and traffic. It is a good thing we have H5's app servers to power it ;-)

Thanks to everyone that signed up, you guys ROCK! See it for yourself here: http://grillm.com
As my friend David says, good ideas are a dime a dozen. Well David, here's another one I had, then found. I hate when that happens.

"Data de-duplication, also called data de-dupe, removes duplicate information as data is backed up or archived. It can be done on the file level, where duplicate files are replaced with a marker pointing to one copy of the file, or at the sub-file level, or byte level, where duplicate bytes of data are removed, resulting in a decrease in storage capacity requirements of several magnitudes."

OK, so the idea isn't unique, but if someone wants to bring that tech the desktop and you're interested in my UI ideas for it, I've got plenty.
I know this is taboo and very uncommon in the blogging world, but I'm starting over. I've retooled zerologic.com and am re-inventing everything around it.

zerologic.com started life in the 90's as the website for my company zerologic corporation. It served that duty well until 2001, the year we created HyperSites. Post HyperSites, it really became a personal playground for everything and anything that tickled my fancy.

I blogged about my company and the trials and tribulations of being a dad. Z's photographed history, and even movies were everywhere, and as I moved it more to a professional site, the family content seemed more and more out of place.

Today I'm introducing the new zerologic.com. zerologic.com has always been about being an entrepreneur and doing things that benefit people. I'm launching it with four sections, and may add more as ideas develop. They are: Blog, TV, Zeluco, and Computers.

TV is a live television (IPTV?) experiment that has you as the subject. Think of is as collaborative social media.

Zeluco is a service for Second Life. You've probably crammed for a test... well, this is my way of helping you cram for Second Life: "A month's experience in just one hour."

I love to build computers and so I've decided to offer that service publicly. It is a hobby, not a business so my pricing is simple, and you're responsible for buying the parts.

Have a look at the home page for details on the sections.
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