San Antonio Startup Weekend

So the room was warm before, and now it’s really heating up as folks advocate for the three remaining ideas: dream interpretation widget, vacation rental community site, exchange/auction site for military goods. Debate on monetizing the sites, complexity of development in 3 days, and the fact that we only have one graphic designer in the entire group dominate the discussion. Oh, and all the developers want to be on the dream project, potentially leaving all the other concepts without the right people to function.   Yeah, sure… be that way.

The concepts were narrowed down to:

1. Dream Interpretation widget
2. Vacation Rental Community Site
3. Secure Smart Home Interface

Erica commented that many previous weekends’ ideas were almost exclusively tech focused, however, the SA group generated a lot of “real world” business concepts. Interestingly, some of San Antonio’s unique characteristics - proximity to the border with Mexico & our strong military presence - influenced some of the niche ideas… like a utility that enables former military and border patrol to exchange BDU’s and equipment that they have to buy while in service.

New concepts that were tossed in the ring:

1. Hydrogen storage chamber
2. BrightKite with GPS
3. Social networking version of craigslist for military stuff

Man, it’s warm in this conference room.

First round of ideas are in:

Universal lamp socket (Tirso)
Poop Scooper (Carl)
Trailer for Small Cars (John)
Fish Thing (Daniel)
Dream Thing(Donald)
Business Franchise Idea (Carl)
Sell My Corp (Alysan)
Event Planning Site (Shaine)
Dress Donation Matching (Vidya)
Group Chat (Joe)
Strength Tracking (Don)
Vacation Rental Community Site (Tony)
International Ad Production Site for Small US Businesses (Magaly)
What Are You Drinking? (Jess)
Survivor Style Online Game (Jess)
Back Window Business Card (Daniel)
Kids Playground – Sandbox – Kid Driven (Laura)
Border Trade (Jennifer)
Personal/Virtual Assistant Match-up (Peter)
Secure Smart Home Interface (David)
Lead Conversion Outsourcing (Carl)

Did I mention we have a participant who works for a wine company?  Yeah, Jess is my favorite SW’er so far.

Nothing like pizza and beer to make new friends and open the idea generation chute. I’ll be in and out this weekend, sharing blogging duties with Shaine, Jennifer and a couple other folks.

So this is a good start. So far by my count we’ve got one soldier, a couple soon-to-be multimillionaires (when the IPO goes through), a musician, a new retail store owner, a realtor, a kajillion programmers/developers and more pizza than we’ll go through all weekend. The ever-awesome Erica O’Grady joined us from Austin to facilitate.

I met Erica a couple weeks ago at Podcamp, where she said “whoever’s there is who’s supposed to be there and whatever happens is what’s supposed to happen.” We’re ustreaming the weekend… stay with us to see what’s supposed to happen.

At 6pm tonight the first ever Startup Weekend San Antonio will kick off.

It’s not too late to register and be part of the fun!

Sign up here

We’ve been busy planning all the great stuff that’s going to happen during Startup Weekend San Antonio. One of the things you can look forward to is nabbing one of these cool t-shirts:

 Oh, but that’s not all. Not by a long shot. We’ve got some amazingly fun stuff that’s going to happen over the course of the weekend. Meals, Massages, Music are just the icing on the cake that is a Startup Weekend experience. The real fun starts on Friday night when all the brainstorming and pitch sessions happen. On Saturday we hit the ground running to turn the startup ideas into a reality. Creating a company or two or three or four is hard work. So we’re bringing in a professional chair masseuse to work out those Startup Weekend kinks. It won’t all be work though because we’ll have time to enjoy the music of Matt Barker during the dinner hour.

On Sunday it’s race to get it all done. The fine folks at Microsoft have sent us some giveaway goodies to reward the folks who make it all the way to the end. Sign up now to reserve your spot. You won’t want to miss a moment of the first ever Startup Weekend San Antonio!

This weekend marks the big push towards San Antonio’s version of Startup Weekend scheduled for May 16-18th at the San Antonio Technology Center.

We are introducing the concept of Startup Weekend at PodCamp San Antonio: Numero Dos on Saturday, May 3rd. Erica O’Grady of Peanut Butter Media will share her experiences not only an attendee of several Startup Weekends but also as an Organizer of Startup Weekend Houston.

What is Startup Weekend?

“Startup Weekend is an intense weekend event bringing brilliant tech minds together to create a company from concept to launch over a weekend! “

While the concept is tech focused that doesn’t mean it’s only for the tech saavy. It takes business minds, legal minds, creative minds as well as tech minds in order to create a company. Startup Weekend is no different.

So who is the perfect Startup Weekend participant?

- Programmers

- Business Developers

- Marketing/PR

- Legal

- Designers/Creatives

- Developers

- Tech types

If you are passionate about the Technology, Business and Startup Community here in San Antonio then this is the perfect event for you. Meet us at the San Antonio Technology Center for Startup Weekend on May 16-18, 2008.

Tickets are now available.

Mark your calendars May 16- 18th for the San Antonio Startup Weekend.