Startup Weekend, the non profit in Seattle that recently joined forces with Startup America, is hosting a new kind of 54 hour hackathon startup weekend event in their hometown next weekend. This time, instead of assembling entrepreneurs, designers, and developers to create businesses, they’ll be working on making things.

Startup Weekends are typically about creating software and other tech startups. This time around at the MakerHaus, the hackers will have the resources to “bring innovation to a whole new level.” The teams at the Seattle event will be able to design and prototype actual physical products using micro-controllers, laser cutting, 3D printing, metal working, and wood working.

People with ideas for products will get to pitch those ideas on Friday evening. From there the group will vote on the products that they want to build and several will be built out over the following 52 hours.

Normally there are three kinds of tickets sold to a startup weekend event; developer, designer, and non-technical. These teams have produced countless startups that are still going today. Some have even gone on to get funding like Zaarly, or win bigger startup contests like Aspiredu.

For this Maker’s edition, Startup Weekend is throwing in one more ticket, a “unicorn” ticket. These are people who agree to be taught how to run the machinery at MakerHaus.

There will be some great coaches on hand for the weekend:

Alex Diener, Creative Director Pensar Development
Marc Barros, co-founder and former CEO of Contour
Ayemerik Renard, Vice President Accelerator, PCH International
H.B. Siegel, CTO IMDb.com
Jim Young, President and Creative Director, Nice Inc
Adam Benzion, Portfolio Manager, 10AK Technologies
Beth Kolko, co-founder and CEO Shift Labs
Terence Tam, Principal Engineer, OpenBeam USA

To register or for more info click here.

Check out this great event for startups everywhere else.

Last year after TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, most people thought that conference calling app Uber Conference was the bees knees. They had won the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield and were all the rage from the big publications. Meanwhile, back in the Washington DC suburbs Evite founder John Bracken and co-founder and PandoDaily contributor Danny Boice were busy working on Speek.

Speek is actually the easiest way to execute great sounding conference calls. Everything is handled through a web/cloud based interface and all you do to initiate a call is direct the participants to your Speek page, for instance mine is http://speek.com/kyle from there I can control who’s in the call, file sharing, information and anything else that pertains to a conference call.

The whole process is extremely easy and doesn’t require jotting down pin numbers or long codes, which can be quite cumbersome driving down the highway.

Well today Speek has released their iPhone app which makes it just as easy to initiate conference calls from your iPhone as it is from the web (although it was pretty easy just using a mobile browser like Chrome).

With Speek’s iPhone app, you can make super simple, free and visual conference calls. Reserve an easy-to-remember username (i.e.,http://speek.com/YourName) for your calls, instead of fumbling for a traditional phone number and PIN.

Features:

Talk instantly with one-click calls
Know who’s joined the call
Know who’s talking
Share images from your phone
Comment, mute and add/remove participants

Avoid the hassles of traditional conference calls with:

No telephone numbers and PINs
No scheduling
No elevator music
No interruptions

Check out Speek in the iTunes app store and go register your user name before all the good ones disappear. If for some reason you want to try it out feel free to Speek to me at http://speek.com/kyle

Join the nearly 1800 people who’ve bought tickets to the largest startup conference in the United States, more info here!

Startup Weekend Hosting “Makers” Event Next Week In Seattle

Check out this great event for startups everywhere else.

500 Startups Backed, Speek, Releases iPhone App

Join the nearly 1800 people who’ve bought tickets to the largest startup conference in the United States, more info here!