Event Archives - Serious Startups

Permission Not Required for Assemble Detroit, Michigan’s Own SXSW Event

Kevin Krease and Garrett Koehler recently lost the ESPN X Games bid for Detroit, but turned this failure into Michigan’s own and very first SXSW-like event. The event called Assemble will be hosted in Detroit during the Summer of 2014, and will combine tech, music, art and extreme sports.

The duo who attracted national media attention for the ESPN bid shared with us at last night’s Fifty Founders event how they got started and what they aim to do with Assemble Detroit. It was a great turnout at Bamboo Detroit where the community gathered to network and hear this young startup speak.

When Kevin Krease and Garret Koehler started the X Games bid in Detroit, it was because they wanted to make a positive impact in the city that had always fascinated them. Krease worked in publishing and Kohler had experience teaching art, traveling through Palestine, and eventually working at Groupon in Chicago. Koehler left to join Krease in Detroit this past year.

During the bid, their team raised national awareness, launched a viral video, and created a social media movement around the event. Along the way they setup strategic partnerships. The loss of the bid helped them garner enough support for Assemble Detroit.

Here’s what the duo says they learned along the way:

No Permission Required. This is the internal motto for the Assemble Detroit team. Why? Because they learned that to make something like a large scale event happen you need to take your own initiative. The duo said the resources are always there, and that there are plenty of startup resources in Detroit. You just need the idea to get started and inspire others to believe. For events, they said it’s about the idea and the brand. Then, you hire local talent to help make it happen.

Build relationships and trust. To get excitement for the ESPN bid going the team had to create a video. They had little budget to work with, and partnered with another startup to create their video that eventually went viral. The startup trusted them and covered the costs until the group received funding. What did they learn? It’s about building relationships and trust with others to get an idea off the ground. The video was a huge success in building momentum for the team. They were able to pay the other business back when funding came in.

Always add value. The team used this piece of advice to help maneuver how they would build up momentum for their extreme sports event. Every time they went to make a decision that may have seemed like a leap, they asked themselves if it added value to their goal. If the answer was yes, they found a way to make it happen.

It’s about perception, not risk. The duo said that they did hear some negative feedback on their journey. Others called hosting a large event with extreme sports in the city risky. They pointed out that risk is all about your perception on the place and the people. Risk to extreme sports is falling down during a dangerous jump. Risk in Detroit isn’t that risky as others might see it. The duo said:

“Detroit isn’t a liability. Its grit and resources are a bonus. Risky is believing that Detroit won’t turn around. It’s thinking you can move and make it in New York City.”

Failure can be fun. When the bid was lost, they realized how fun it could be to build their own large scale event that included sports. The idea for Assemble was to create a similar event to SXSW, but one that included extreme sports too. They’re aiming to bring 100,000 people to Detroit for the event next summer.

Remember the community. Both Krease and Koehler remarked that Detroit has a a strong sense of place. The name “Assemble” reminds us of coming together as an assembly line, to work, and to innovate in the city. It also brings together a larger community into the current narrative of a city that’s often described as rebuilding. They are aware of the sense of community, bringing up the X Games bid through grassroots marketing strategies. They expressed the importance for including the community, but also doing great work that isn’t tied to only Detroit.

Next Fifty Founders Event: The next Fifty Founder’s event which will feature Ryan Blair in September. Fifty Founder’s is a fireside chat series hosted in Detroit, bringing successful entrepreneurs in Michigan and around the country to Detroit. The series goes in-depth to share details about startup lessons learned. Sign up now here: https://ryanblair.eventbrite.com/

This event was sponsored by Start Garden and TechTown Detroit. Learn more about Fifty Founders and stay tuned for the next event.

From our content partner michipreneur.com! Written by: Amanda Lewan. Blogger. Marketer. Cupcake baker. I like helping startups with marketing. I also blog on digital storytelling Amandalewan.com. Follow Amanda at @Amanda_Jenn

Startup Weekend Heads To Columbus In A Pre-SXSW Extravaganza

Startup Weekend is headed back to Columbus Ohio this weekend, as a pre festivity to the huge startup mega festival we all know and love, SXSWi. In fact, the Ohio area Startup Bus is leaving Sunday from Ohio.

This weekend will pit together entrepreneurs, startup founders, developers, designers and mentors to see what Columbus can hack together in just one weekend.

The Startup Weekend crew in Columbus is one of the most seasoned. We got to meet a few of them at Cincinnati’s startup weekend event last summer. This one is being organized by Startup Weekend veteran; Suzy Bureau, by day she does marketing & communications for Columbus startup Bringshare; Serial Entrepreneur Steve Gacka; and Brian Billingsley the Director of Strategic Business Development at Allaince Data Systems.

Startup Weekend Columbus holds events every six months and they always have great attendance. This weekend’s event will be held at TechColumbus (1275 Kinnear Road). It will kick off with registration at 6:30pm on Friday night and will end with final pitches on Sunday at 5:00pm. All is expected to be wrapped up by 9:00pm, and then the weekend is done (unless you’re heading down to sxsw).

Dan Rockwell, the cofounder of Big Kitty Labs and Program Manager of the software prototyping center at Ohio State is the featured speaker.

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 mentors 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 mentors for Startup Weekend Columbus are: Tanisha Robinson, co-founder of TicketFire; Nick Seguin, Partner at Dynamit; Patrick Pohler, Founder at Anecka; Brooke Paul, Founder at Founder’s Factory & Taivara; Alan Gilbert, Vice President of Engineering at CoverMyMeds; and Matt Scatland, co-founder at CoverMyMeds and President at Innova Partners.

We also have it on good authority that Kyle Sandler, Co-Founder and Content Director of Nibletz.com The Voice Of Startups Everywhere Else, and the founder of everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference, the largest startup conference in the world dedicated to entrepreneurship outside the valley, and Nick Tippmann the co-founder and CEO of nibletz.com will also be in attendance..hmmm.

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.

For more info on Startup Weekend Columbus or to register click here

Ready For Weed Startups? Conference Coming To New York

With two states adopting laws around the recreational use of marijuana and more states adopting laws for medical marijuana it’s just a matter of time before weed startups start cropping up (no pun intended). Cannabis industry trade publication has announced a business seminar for investors and entrepreneurs eager to learn about the business of marijuana.

The event will be held on March 14th at The Lofts At Prince (177 Prince Street Penthouse in New York City). The seminar runs from 6:00pm until 10:15pm and features a panel of industry experts and time for networking.

Chris Walsh, Editor of MJJ Business Daily; Tripp Keber, Medical Marijuana Inc; Jessica Billingsley co-founder, MJ Freeway Software Solutions; and Eric Williams, President, CT Medical Cannabis Alliance, will all speak on the latest trends and industry data.

There will also be four sessions:

Session #1. New Financial & Business Benchmark Data for the Cannabis Industry

Session #2. Investing Advisory on the Cannabis Industry

Session #3. Typical Cannabis Business Mistakes & How to Avoid Them

Session #4. Tri-State Area Cannabis Business Opportunities & Regulatory Outlook

MJJ Business Daily was launched in 2011 with offices in Denver Colorado and Providence Rhode Island.

Tickets for the event are $149 in advance and $199 at the door. MJJ Business Daily warns that the event is for serious investors and entrepreneurs and not for patients or consumers.

For more information or tickets visit this site.

everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference Announced February 10-12th 2013 In Memphis Tennessee

MEMPHIS TN, & EVERYWHERE ELSE- “everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference” has been announced for Sunday February 10, 2013 through Tuesday February 12, 2013 and has already attracted an all star line up of speakers, panelists, investors,startups and entrepreneurs. The conference will take place in the heart of beautiful Memphis Tennessee at the Memphis Convention Center.

The three day conference will feature over 30 panels, keynote addresses, roundtable and fireside chats geared towards the challenges that entrepreneurs, startups and even investors face outside Silicon Valley. The conference will also include three signature networking events as well as a three day startup exhibition featuring 100 startups from “everywhere else”. Startups from every stretch of the country, and as far away as Israel and Romania have already committed to exhibit in the Startup Village.

Startup America CEO and founding CTO of Priceline Scott Case will keynote at the event. Best selling author and motivational speaker Tracy Myers,Rohit Bhargava,Bill Harris former CEO of Paypal and Intuit and many more, will also speak at the event. everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference will continue to announce speakers over the next two months.

Startups, startup founders, accelerator heads and investors will round out three fun filled and educational days in Memphis Tennessee on topics ranging from “raising money everywhere else”, “what I learned in an accelerator”, “what investors outside the valley expect”, “startups: life after hip hop, music and sports”, “kick ass female founders from everywhere else” and more.

There will also be three startup pitch contests with finals taking place at the conference; “The Best of Everywhere Else”, “The Startup Village People Awards” and the “Top of Tennessee” startup pitch contests will have their finals take place at the conference in front of a panel of well known angels, VC’s and celebrities. With the three startup contests over $100,000 in cash and prizes will be given away.

The Best Of Everywhere Else contest will begin with video pitches on November 1, 2012.

The Top Of Tennessee pitch contest will be open to startups throughout the state of Tennessee and will begin during Global Entrepreneurship Week.

In the Startup Village People Awards, Startup Village companies will compete for $25,000 in cash and prizes by audience participation vote via the official conference app.

“everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference” has made both exhibiting and attending affordable for even the boot-strapping startup from “everywhere else”. Attendee tickets are $60 with an early bird rate of $39 for all three days. Startup Village booths are $480 with a few $295 pre-sale booth spaces still available. An earlybird rate for Startup Village booths of $350 will continue through October 31st.

Linkage:

Check out everywhereelse.co

Attendees get your attendee tickets here at the special early bird rate

Startups, here’s a link for $295 startup village booth space that ends Tuesday at 11:59pm

Memphis Preparing For Startup Weekend

Memphis is hosting their first official Startup Weekend in four years this Friday through Sunday at Lab Four in Memphis. Over the three day weekend we will see some great ideas turned into startups and hopefully some emerge as actual companies, after all that’s the point behind Startup Weekend events.

The 54 hour event kicks off with preliminary idea pitches on Friday evening. Saturday is a day of working with mentors, teams and developing ideas and Sunday the finalist teams will pitch in front of the judges.

“We promise that this will be a fantastic, fun weekend, whether you want to come and work on your own idea for a company or hang out and help other people with theirs,” Co-event organizer James Ruffer told James Dowd’s Commercial Appeal. “The program has matured a lot in the past four years, and that’s why we wanted to bring it back. Not only will this energize the Memphis entrepreneurial community, but it’ll show other cities around the world that Memphis is serious about entrepreneurship.”

The early bird registration was extended through the 16th, but it’s not too late to register so if you’re in or around Memphis you should sign up here.

If you’re traveling from out of town there are two hotels participating in the fun. We’re sure we are going to see folks from Chattanooga, Knoxville and Nashville in Memphis for the big event. Memphis has a thriving startup scene.

What happens after Startup Weekend? Well if you’re serious about building your business in Memphis there are resources like the LaunchPad, LaunchMemphis and SeedHatchery all based at Emerge Memphis downtown. The LaunchPad features free drop in co-working space and office hours with the staff there to help cultivate your idea and develop your business.

Here are the links you need.

For more info on the LaunchPad click here

Help out our nationwide sneaker-strapped road trip here.

Philly Startup & Tech BBQ July 18th

The Philly Startup Listserv and other leaders in the Philadelphia area startup and entrepreneurial community are holding a relaxing shindig on July 18th.

The event,being dubbed the “PSL Summer BBQ Bash” is happening from 6-8 pm on Wednesday July 18th.

The event is open to PSL members and anyone in the Philly startup and tech community.

The $25 ticket covers drink tickets, delicious food and a fun time for all. It’s a pitch free networking and fun weekday event.

With the time and being on a weekday there’s no excuse to not come and hangout with great members of the Philly tech and startup scene.

And of course Philly’s own TicketLeap is handling the ticket sales here

TechCrunch Disrupt: I Shot A 50 Caliber Rifle At A Fax Machine, Thanks To Twake

Twake, a new big data startup, had a great attention grabber at their booth at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC’s Startup Alley. Twake hired a man in a wooded area in a remote location with an arsenal of high-caliber fire arms and a junk pile of computer gear. Old cpus, monitors, fax machines, radios and other electronics were put in the pile for the man with the guns.

Meanwhile back at TechCrunch Disrupt Twake had an iPad app where passerby’s could choose a device they wanted to shoot, and the gun they wanted to shoot with. After they made their selections they would hit a button labeled “fire” which sent a signal back to the man with the guns to go ahead a fire away at the old computer junk.

This was very reminiscent of Tommy Jordan, the laptop shooting dad in North Carolina. Now even though I didn’t get to fire the gun myself, I could feel the thrill and satisfaction of popping a cap in that fax machines ass. The boys from Office Space would be proud.

So what kind of company goes through this much promotion to attract people to their booth? That would be Twake, a recently launched big data startup.

Twake is a secure, agnostic, scalable recommendation service. In their own words they describe Twake as:

“Twake’s cloud-based service maps anonymous referential data on customers, products and services with behaviors such as view, like, buy, and comment along with the sentiment and significance of each. Our wave propagation and interaction algorithms analyze patterns, recognize highly relevant items that are far removed from the source and synthesize recommendations that resonate”

We would say it’s a predictive recommendation engine. The idea of being able to recommend what a customer may buy next is often the competitive edge companies need, provided the data is right.

Twake’s platform is scalable to most industries. Their unique adaptive recommendation engine can handle e-commerce, app discovery, deep personalization, restaurant suggestions, smart pre-fetching, sentiment analysis, genome research, social discovery, travel planning, business intelligence, and network planning.

Is that too many verticals? Twake is so new that we’ll have to wait and see how it all comes together. It will be great to see what developers can do using Twakes API’s.

Check out the video here:

NY Startup: Bar & Club Stats Presenting At TechCrunch Disrupt This Week

If you go to bars and clubs in the New York area and in the near future and have your license scanned by someone with an iPhone or iPod scanner, chances are they are using technology from New York Startup; Bar & Club stats.

The innovative new startup provides a two fold service to bar and club owners in their iPhone/iPod scanning app. The app allows bouncers and doormen to effectively check licenses and IDs. On the backend the app is providing anonymized demographic information that is analyzed and given back to the establishment in easy to understand data.

For example, a bar owner may find that Tuesday nights from 8pm-1am are great nights for women between the ages of 30 and 45, with that data they can offer better drink specials and promotions to attract more of that crowd. A club may also find out that on Thursday night, college night, they actually have a bunch of patrons who are in their late 20’s. Maybe changing college night to another night would work better for them.

This is just one of the many exciting startups presenting in either “Startup Alley” or the Disrupt Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC this week.

Nibletz Sneaker Strapped Road Trip Fundraiser, Now That’s More Like It

First off we wanted to thank everyone who contributed to our Nibletz sneaker strapped road trip fundraiser. We appreciate the donations and they are being put to good use on the road.

However it’s no secret that we had no idea what we were doing when we set it up and we had an extremely lofty goal of $25,000 we were hoping to fund the entire 14 month road trip in the bus but as a startup ourselves we’ve realized that was a ton of money and also with $25 the first donation someone could make, that could be even too much for some of our startup friends.

We consulted with a few of the crowd-funding startup founders that we’ve covered so far and some people who’ve been successful at indiegogo and kickstarter as well as some of the people that work for those two sites. We’ve revamped our entire fundraiser. We’ve added a $2.00, $5.00 and $10.00 donation option and decreased our goal to $5,000.

We’ve also worked out some strategic hubs across the country where we could safely park the bus and have friends and colleagues either help us with transportation to surrounding areas or hop on a low fare bus like MegaBus and BoltBus to get to some of the other towns on our journey.

We’ve started our road trip back up again in the Prius. We will immediately move to the bus quasi-full time when we hit our $5,000 goal (within 1 to 2 weeks of funding), and until then continue our mission, goal and project in the Prius.

Thanks for all your feedback. If you want us to come to your city please email us at tips@nibletz.com let us know who you are, and we’ll make a trip of it.

Please check out the new indiegogo page at http://indiegogo.com/everywhereelse and help if you can.

Thanks,

Kyle, Cameron and Brent

Here’s the link again indiegogo.com/everywhereelse

Have A Startup Idea For The President, Or The Government? Better Get To Disrupt

If you have a startup idea for the President of the United States or the United States government you want to make sure you’re at TechCrunch Disrupt starting on Monday at Pier 94 in New York City. The nibletz team will be on hand to see a great panel featuring the President’s technology “gurus” US CTO Todd Park and US CIO Steven VanRoekel.

According to TechCrunch’s Gregory Ferenstein, Park and Van Roekel will not only be introducing attendees to new technological government initiatives but they’ll be looking for startups to partner with the White House as well as individuals who may want to take their tech career straight up the flag pole.

We can expect the nation’s top two technology leaders to talk about the government’s blue button initiative for universal access to health records, and it’s green button initiative centered around energy.

If you don’t have a Disrupt ticket yet, you can get one here. And of course if you’re a startup from “everywhere else” presenting, exhibiting or attending Disrupt NYC then make sure you’re on our schedule too by emailing disrupt@nibletz.com.

Source: TechCrunch

TechCrunch Disrupt NYC To Offer Design Office Hours On Stage

Next week we’ll be in New York covering the three day startup, entrepreneur and tech conference, TechCrunch Disrupt NYC. Just like last year we’ll be talking to all the great startups that present onstage for Battlefield and the ones in Startup Alley.

Although he was absent from the Crunchies amidst the TechCrunch/AOL drama, Mike Arrington will be back on stage hosting interviews and asking the tough questions to startups competing in the Battlefield.

Last fall Arrington left TechCrunch, the site he had founded, ultimately over concerns that AOL’s investment in Crunchfund, Arrington’s VC fund, sparked ethical questions and a conflict of interest (in some eyes). After the dust settled at TechCrunch earlier this year, Arrington welcomed the opportunity to come back and host this years Disrupt event.

Another highlight of this years Disrupt NYC is the new design office hours. Last year, Paul Graham, co-founder of Y-Combinator hosted office hours at Disrupt NYC. This year TechCrunch’s Kim-Mai Cutler reports that Graham will be at home in the valley playing daddy to his new baby.

This year’s office hours is focused on Design and includes Leland Rechis, (Director of mobile product at Etsy), Jamie Devine (head of user experience at AVOS), Jason Marrow (lead product designer at Betaworks), and Mimi Chum (design director at General Assembly).

If you’re interested in picking the brands of this design arsenal you can head over to TechCrunch Disrupt NYC website and complete this form. Those selected to participate will be announced at 11:55am sharp and must have a laptop, iPad, or phone to show the design.

We will have round the clock coverage of TechCrunch Disrupt on TDGN on Slacker & AOL radio as well as a ton of coverage here at nibletz.com of course focusing on startups from “everywhere else”.

Linkage:

TechCrunch Disrupt NYC page

Are you a startup from everywhere else that’s either presenting or attending email us here at disrupt@nibletz.com to get on our interview schedule.

Nibletz is the voice of everywhere else, check out these new stories

Oregon: StartupWeekend Near LockDown; Man Threatened Explosions And Guys

It’s unclear if the man removed from this weekend’s startup weekend event in Portand Oregon was a contestant or not. Oregonlive.com is reporting that a man who was removed from the event started tweeting threats of explosions, guns and violence.

The threatening tweets have been removed however as a precaution the rest of the event is near lockdown with only one guarded entrance being used for the remainder of the event.

According to the report, police responded to Portand’s first StartupWeekend event at 10:39am this morning. The man had gotten loud with event organizers and eventually left on his own. Later in the afternoon he started tweeting things that had event organizers concerned.

One of the organizers told oregonlive.com “They were very strange posts that were interpreted as maybe threatening to the people at the meeting,”

Portland State University beefed up security at the event and the StartupWeekend organizers offered refunds to anyone who didn’t want to stay after the disruption. From what we can tell the event has continued.

Portland Police spokesperson Sgt. Pete Simpson said “There’s no criminal act based on what the officer learned from talking to the people, but certainly concerning enough that calling the police was the right thing to do,”. Police apparently contacted the man again who said he has no intention on returning to the event location.

source: OregonLive

Startup Weekend Heads To Madison Wisconsin

While most people intone with the startup scene are well aware of “startup weekend”, the 54 hour hackathon style startup marathon, people in Wisconsin have never had an event quite like this. That’s why entrepreneurs and startup types are heading to Madison WI this weekend, the home of their first ever startup weekend.

“We want to foster and encourage people who are doing startup companies and get more people involved,” said Forrest Woolworth, one of the organizers of the event and brand director at Per Blue,told madison.com. “We want to continue to make Madison known as an awesome place to start a company.”

According to startupweekend.org there have been over 500 official “startup weekends” with over 45,000 participants to date. There have also been “unofficial” and similar events structured around the same model, like Hack Omaha. Great things have come out of startup weekends all over the country and all over the world. This first event in Madison will let entrepreneurs from a state widely known for cheese and the Green Bay Packers show off their tech scene.

Startup Weekend Madison will be held this Friday through Sunday at Madison College West Campus 302. S. Gammon Road in Madison.

“Younger startups are now growing to become a cornerstone of the Madison economy,” Mayor Paul Soglin said.

Madison’s startup weekend is part of Capital Entrepreneur’s Week which kicks off tomorrow with speakers, mentors, bootcamps and more for local entrepreneurs.

source: madison.com