Kyle
An official Startup Weekend event is headed to Providence Rhode Island on October 5th 2012. Startup Weekend is a 3-day hackathon style competition drawing founders, entrepreneurs, developers, coders, designers and more to put together businesses in 54 hours.
Startup Weekend Providence is an officially sanctioned event being administered in conjunction with the Startup Weekend organization based in Seattle, which receives major funding from the Kauffman Foundation. All “official” Startup Weekend events follow the same general format.
Registration will begin on Friday evening at 6:30pm at Johnson & Wales University Pepsi Forum. That will be followed by great networking dinner where attendees will be able to size up the competition and the possible teammates for the weekend. At around 7:30pm the “Friday Night” pitches will begin. We’ve covered a lot of startup weekends and you can see plenty of Friday night pitches here at nibletz.com.
The Friday night pitches are 60 seconds and hard timed by a Startup Weekend official. In that 60 seconds you need to sell the audience your idea and why it should be built over the next 53 hours. After everyone who wants to pitch has been given the opportunity, community voting will commence. It’s a rather diplomatic process. Usually the pitchers will hold up a sign with their startup name on it and attendees will put a sticker on the idea they like the best. At the end of the process, those with the most stickers will have their ideas developed.
Friday evening typically tops off with team selection and then some icebreaker time with the teams. From there the teams break off and start working on the startup idea.
Saturday, the community coaches come into play. These seasoned entrepreneurs and local business folks are there to help answer questions for each team and provide ideas and suggestions. The coaches in Providence include; Kipp Bradford, Technology consultant and entrepreneur; Coryndon Luxmoore, Buildium Interaction Designer; Charlie Kroll, President and CEO of Andrea; Cary Collins, Bryant Trustee Professor of Entrepreneurship;Eric Parrish, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, G-Tech; and Jason Barrs, Product/Solutions Manager, GTech.
Saturday is also the day that most teams take to the streets, the phones, the emails and the interwebs to get customer validation on their startup project. All the while designers, developers and coders are working on pitch decks, wire frames, prototypes and products.
Sunday is the day the teams put the finishing touches on both their products and their presentations. At 5:00pm and not a second later, the selected teams will have five minutes to pitch their idea and have a brief Q&A with the judges. Startup Weekend Providence judges are: Don Stanford, Chief Innovation Officer at GTech; Allan Tear, Founder & Managing partner at Betaspring; and Tom Napolitano, also with GTech.
Things got a little more interesting yesterday when the organizers of Startup Weekend Providence announced that Johnson and Wales and AS220 Labs would give the Startup Weekend teams access to their 3D printing equipment for prototyping. These labs have a variety of 3D printers and tools that will help teams working on physical products develop actual prototypes to show off on Sunday during presentations. This isn’t a typical part of Startup Weekend but it shows how the organization lets the local organizers innovate their events in their own special ways. It will be amazing to see these ideas come to life through the use of 3D printing.
Startup Weekend Providence has a great list of prizes to, including legal packages, branding packages, press opportunities and more. What are you waiting for, hit the link below to register:
Linkage
Startup Weekend Providence is here
Check out some of our past Startup Weekend Coverage
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