Wow. It has been a long time since I’ve blogged. In fact upon logging into this site I discovered a draft for a post I was writing about winning the Boxee and Twilio Hackathon back in April!
So if you did not know (due to my lack of blogging) Brett Hazen and I won the Boxee & Twilio Hackathon in April for our app “Bring The Popcorn”
Boxee Blog
Now that thats finally on my blog let me get down to the latest news.
This weekend was Startup Weekend LA hosted at the Coloft. If you are not familiar with Startup Weekend it is an event where entrepreneurs get together over the weekend, pitch ideas, form teams around those ideas, and then build a product over the weekend and show them off on Sunday.
So for Startup Weekend I worked as part of Team Hinty based on Daniel O’ Shea’s pitch.
To summarize Hinty in my own words:
Hinty is your life out loud.
During the day I have productive hours (like when I read my email in the morning and when Im at work) and then I have unproductive hours (like commuting to work or exercising). Well Hinty is a service that serves its customer’s online content thats important to them over their phones. With our technology you can call a number while you’re on the road and have Hinty read you your morning news (through RSS feeds), emails, or even things like your Facebook or Twitter feeds. This way you can turn those unproductive hours into productive hours.
Your feed sources would be controlled via a website or mobile app. We will also build a mobile app that can stream the content and let you organize your feed sources.
Due to our rockstar team consisting of myself, Drew Baumann, and the rest of the team:
Daniel O’Shea
Jason Templeton
Pete Couture
Alberto Cecioni
Boris Radev
Jay Stakelon
Max Mullen
We ended up winning Startup Weekend LA!
I’m grateful that we won. It was definitely tough competition.
Some of the competing products I really enjoyed were Recipe Byte, a great way to open source your recipes, and also Beerdar, an app for the iPhone which makes it easy to find the beers you like in your area.
In addition we won the Factual‘s Developer Contest so we have some Kindle’s to look forward to!
On a side note I’m pumped now that I know about Factual because its basically a service that provides open databases anyone can create and contribute to. I will definitely be making some projects to integrate with this service.
Due to winning Startup Weekend LA We also got some kickass prizes.
On top of that list is Coloft providing us each with a 1 month membership.
Heroku is also hooking us up with 300 dollars in credit to keep our website alive and well!
In addition we have pitches set up with Tech Coast Angels and Clearstone Venture Partners.
There are exciting times ahead!
Thanks again to Startup Weekend, Coloft, and Tyler Koblasa for the great work that was put into this weekend!
Also a huge thanks to Twilio for hooking us up with Twilio credit and NerdyShirts for the awesome T-Shirts!!
