What an awesome, long weekend it was! I’m not really sure what to say about it because there are some legal issues to resolve before our product can go live, but we were able to accomplish something that I think is very cool.

In the span of 54 hours, lasting from Friday evening until Sunday night, I was with a group of like minded technologists, marketers, business developers and lawyers and we managed to come up with an idea, develop it, and are ready to launch it. I feel great pride in the work we did, especially because I was able to go from group to group and contribute a lot to each aspect of the project.

I started in the user experience / usability group and we worked hard Friday night until about 2am on Saturday to define the product. Saturday morning 8am was our next meeting time and it came around way too quickly. I met up with other UX people at a coffee shop to start working on wireframe models of how we envisioned the site to look, how we envisioned it to work, and how we envisioned the user’s experience to flow. The group was working well and we fed off of each other to come up with new ideas and flesh out details of our master plan. It was pretty impressive, especially because we had just met each other the night before. Some of the team already knew each other from school but for the most part we had all just met. By noon we had everything pretty much mapped and sketched out. It was time to pass our plan over to the legal department, the business development team, the marketers, and of course the coders and developers.

Meeting with each team was a bit of a challenge as we were not able to have 1 representative talk to each group; this process was so time-sensitive that we needed to have different people talk to each group and in the end some details got a bit skewed and there was a bit of confusion among the groups but that was quickly fixed and all the different teams got our vision and got to work on their respective tasks.

At this point, the UX team started thinking about usability tests for users and I decided to move to the marketing group. The marketing group was composed of some really talented individuals who are true professional marketing people. They do marketing campaigns for a living and also do graphic design and copy writing for a living. I was glad to be part of that group and I got to brainstorm and contribute valuable content to the copy writers and helped out with the marketing campaign by brainstorming taglines and ideas. The day quickly came to a close and I went home to catch up with my wife and our friends. They brought over a nice growler of Bloomington Brewing Company’s new Brown beer. It was delicious and hit the spot. Bed felt great and Sunday morning arrived before long.

Sunday was a fantastic day for me. The marketing campaign was going well, the UX team had their plans in place and I headed over to the development team because they needed a few coders. I was intimidated at first. After all, I don’t code too much anymore and these guys are all professionals. There was a front end developer and several backend PHP people. I joined the PHP team and was assigned a few tasks. After shaking the rust off my fingers, I was once again in my element and helping code the pages that will go live in the next few weeks. A day’s worth of coding always goes by fast and so the day flew by.

After getting home I got to reflect on the experience of the weekend and one thing is certain: I’m glad I went. I made some great contacts in the SEM industry, the SEO industry, met new school colleagues, met a few alumni from my program, and talked shop with people that I would probably otherwise not have met. Highlights included meeting the founder of Startup Weekend, Andre Hyde, seeing and playing with my first Macbook Air, being outnumbered by Mac’s (I’d say 80% of people at this conference had a Mac), being surrounded by iPhones, meeting new people, learning new things, and founding a company!

This experience was fantastic and I’m looking forward to the day the lawyers give the “go ahead” to launch our product. It’s not as revolutionary as Digg or Twitter, but I’m confident that it’ll make the lives of some individuals a bit better.

I’ve been feeling more and more entrepreneurial lately, and with that feeling of excitement and exploration normally comes some sort of opportunity. Reading the local newspaper last week my wife saw that our city was holding a “startup weekend” and encouraged me to join. So, without skipping a beat I ran upstairs and signed up for the Startup event.

“What is Startup Weekend you ask? Startup Weekend is a intense 54 hour event bringing together brilliant tech minds (developers, designers, marketers, ect.) together to create a company from concept to launch!”

So, this weekend will be VERY exciting and very busy. There’s an online community that is abuzz with ideas and chatter about what we will be founding and building this weekend. Anything is possible; there will be 99 others with me with skill sets ranging from programmers to legal aid, cooks to user experience, we will all be working hard to create a stellar idea and launch it by Sunday night.

I’m in one of the bigger groups, the user experience group. Together with about 20 others, we will come up with a solid design concept, user interaction components, usability innovations and anything else that we can imagine to make our idea pop.

Past Startup Weekends have started the following companies:

• Skribit: “Skribit is a user-generated content suggestion application for blogs. Effortlessly assemble what your readers really want to hear.”
• VoSnap.com: “It’s group voting…in a snap! Ask questions and get answers fast using text messages and emails. With vosnap, it’s decided.”
• Favoreats.com: “Favoreats is a great way to share local food recommendations with your friends. Simply put, it helps you find the best dish in town.”
• TipDish.com: “TipDish is a social media directory and wire service that is designed to connect influencers. With this service, leaders in social media including bloggers, podcasters and videocasters (Dishers) receive the latest news, information, products and info from companies, organizations, PR and Marketing Professionals (Tippers).”
• ScrollTalk: “Scrolltalk is a new take on chat. We like to think of it as Interest Messaging. It cuts through the noise of regular chat rooms and allows you to engage in relevant conversations. Your conversations are ever evolving, and move in a direction that suits you.”

And more! I’m excited to be part of this event and am looking forward to starting something up from scratch. I hope that the 99 others will be at their most creative this weekend! I’ll tell you all more about it…on Monday!

Have a great weekend, I know I will!