Posted by Julian Bryant

The first Startup Weekend in San Diego had a exciting ending on Sunday evening as five teams presented their businesses and prototypes for everyone to see. Interestingly, three of the teams had a social entrepreneurship angle.  The winning team makes complaining easy. They promote communication between customers and companies using social media, and developed a working prototype in fewer than 48 hours. The prize from Cooley is being used to start a company which is going into stealth mode.

The panel also announced the team GeekedIn as the 1st runner up from the strength of their presentation and prototype. All five teams are moving forward this week with their businesses so expect to hear from them in the future!

Thank you to all the participants, sponsors, mentors, and guests for making the weekend an enjoyable success.

Posted by Jennifer Newell

Ernesto was kind enough to donate a few minutes during crunch time to talk about Goal Crowd and the team’s progress.

Posted by Jennifer Newell

Frank Peters typically conducts the interviews, but we turned the camera on him this time and had him talk about his visit to Startup Weekend and his role as a mentor.

Posted by Jennifer Newell

Goal Crowd’s mascot donates a few moments to tell us what she thinks of Startup Weekend.

More interviews soon!

Posted by Jennifer Newell

Whew – this day has been incredibly busy!

Last night, 18 pitches were made and 5 team developed. Teams are working vigorously into the night to churn out applications, prototypes, logos, branding, and other essential components to a full-fledged operation. The goal? To have excellent demos for tomorrow night’s expert panel, which will choose a team to receive $2,000 in legal fees from Cooley Godward Kronish, free assistance in distributing an online press release from PR Leap, and use of VMIX’s video platform for incorporating video into their projects.

The startups are:

1. FamilyCareZone.com: Bringing together family caregivers through an online portal
2. GeekedIn: An online community where developers, hackers, and entrepreneurs can meet to quickly prototype ideas
3. Goal Crowd: Crowdsourcing health and wellness
4. HootOnU: “Making Complaining Easy”
5. PocketPhilanthropist: Making donations easy by connecting causes to givers through a mobile application

Posted by Julian Bryant

We had a great beginning to the first Startup Weekend in San Diego (#swsd). Over 50 people gathered at Hive 770 including a diverse group of entrepreneurs, mentors, and some generous sponsors.  18 people pitched some really interesting business ideas. By the end of the night, teams formed around 6 solid startup ideas. Now the hard works begins as teams spend the next two days taking converting these ideas to real businesses. Good luck everyone. It will be an exciting weekend.

Posted by Jennifer Newell

Cafes

Rebecca’s [Yelp page]
3015 Juniper St.
Neighborhood: South Park
Open 24 hours (Thur. – Sat.)

Lestat’s [Yelp page]
3343 Adams Ave.
Neighborhood: Normal Heights
Open 24 hours (always)

Other places that are open late but we don’t know a whole lot about (try at your own risk?):

Cafe Lulu [Yelp page]
419 F St.
Neighborhood: Gaslamp
Open until 3 am (Fri., Sat.)

Food (not necessarily good work places)

Valentine’s Mexican Food [Yelp page]
842 Market St.
Neighborhood: East Village
Open until 2:30 AM (Fri., Sat.)

Maryjane’s Coffee Shop [Yelp page]
207 5th Ave.
Neighborhood: Gaslamp
Open until 3 AM (Fri., Sat.)

Denny’s Little Italy [Yelp page]
2139 Pacific Highway
Neighborhood: Little Italy
Open 24 hours (Fri., Sat.)

Posted by Startup Weekend Crew

(mt) is providing a month free access to the (ve) Server, a great environment to dev on. specs here: http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/ve/Jason (@jmcvearry) will be around to chat about your start up, grant you (ve) access and most importantly, take out any thirsty team members for much deserved, cold beers.

Posted by Julian Bryant

We’re proud to have Intuit on board as a platinum sponsor. Zak Jacobson, Senior Software Engineer at Intuit, tells us why they are happy to help support San Diego’s first Startup Weekend.

-

Fifty four hours of living a start-up lifestyle. Fifty four hours of dedication. Fifty four hours of concentration and innovation – we can’t think of a better way to spend the weekend.

When I told my employer, Intuit, about the event, they jumped on as a sponsor almost immediately. They recognized what a great opportunity this is on so many levels.  Here’s why:

1. We’re committed to getting involved in the local developer community. We’ve been in the business for nearly 30 years and know what you’re going through. We love to code and give back! While we’ll be in the trenches coding with you, we’re happy to share our experience with you.
2. Even though we’re a big software company with tens of millions of customers, we still have a start-up mentality when it comes to building new products and features. Why not send employees to this event to learn by doing?
3. Innovation is a team sport for us. We have events like this all the time within the company to figure out cool new ways to solve customer problems. We’re always embracing the latest technologies – mobile, open source, cloud computing – and testing them out.
4. We love our customers and creating products that help them save and make money – if you have questions about any of our products, like TurboTax, QuickBooks, Quicken or some of the latest stuff like our Platform as a Service, the Intuit Partner Platform, let us know…

See you tomorrow!
Zak Jacobson, Intuit

Posted by Jennifer Newell

We’re giving away two discounted tickets to Startup Weekend San Diego! Tweet why you want to go to Startup Weekend San Diego with the hashtag #swsd50 or re-tweet this tweet and we’ll pick two winners at random at 5:00 PM PST tomorrow, Thursday, August 19th, and each winner will receive one (1) discounted ticket each.

Tickets to Startup Weekend San Diego include admission to the event, which means rubbing elbows with some amazing startup mentors, chatting with representatives from our sponsors at Intuit, Microsoft, and Cooley Godward Kronish, and meeting some of San Diego’s best and brightest. It also includes a whole bunch of good food from Tabe BBQ, Chipotle, and Ciro’s Pizza, and more. Build a startup, meet some amazing people, and get fed!

You only need to enter once. We’ll notify the winners shortly after the drawing. Good luck!