Ann Arbor Summary
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
For those of you perusing the Flickr stream for this weekend (tagged swa2) I think you may be wondering, wow, is that really a chocolate fountain? Well indeed it was, and it was excellent. Fountains aside, Startup Weekend Ann Arbor was a tremendous success (thank you to the local organizers and Laura Fisher specifically) and the community there really pulled together to develop some innovative ideas. After the typical meet and greet and musings of possible roller derby (the facility was huge), the group came together and pitched 34 ideas, of which 13 moved forward for the rest of the weekend.
I’ll do my best to capture a few of the ideas here but for those interested in keeping up with current progress and the rest of the great ideas, the Ann Arbor blog will be active so check it out!
TagRoad’s product is called Vagabondoo - “a million local experts in your pocket.” It’s a GPS enabled iPhone 3G application, with accompanying website. The idea is that users can tell stories about the places they’ve visited and can read other user’s stories to help them find someplace new to visit, using GPS to create a map of interesting spots near their actual location.
Exploded View is a not-for-profit project exploring how to take apart and catalog old components and machines so that users can determine if there are valuable, reusable and/or recyclable parts inside.
The Brand YU Life is a personal branding project and will be rolled out at a later date.
Nudge is a text message appointment-reminder service for small business. Small businesses will be able to send reminders via text message so that their clients/customers don’t miss their appointments. Nudge will provide a low-cost, easy to use system to help mitigate revenue loss due to missed appointments.
Market Monitor is a tool for consultants, designers, and other service providers whose customers want to optimize their website ranking on major search engines based on keyword analytics. It is an affordable but robust tool which produces real-time reports. Market Monitor is in beta.
Storybridge aims to connect readers with short stories and other literature that they would like to read, based on recommendations. Jade is a companion system to Storybridge, and will allow for the aggregation of micro-payments to authors of short works.
Some of the other in-development groups include an enterprise data optimization tool, a large scale R&D center, a custom handbag creator, and a few research phase ideas. Be sure to monitor their local blog to keep up with current progress.
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