The Best Startup Idea, Ever

This has got to be the best startup idea I’ve ever heard, presented by Gary Busey.

Great viral videos by GotVMail - more can be found on the Youtube Channel.

Tags: Business Idea, Gary Busey, GotVMail, Hybrid SUV

Ignite Cleveland #2

We’re ready to rock with our second Ignite event - we’ve only made 2 changes; first we’re looking for even more speakers (we hope to hit 18 this time) and second we are now charging $10 per ticket.  We had to start charging for the event due to the costs of the food & beverages provided and lack of sponsorship at this time.  We hope to lower this fee later when companies increase their marketing budgets again.

Head on over to the site, http://ignitecle.com, to learn more details or reserve your seat here.

Bringing The Party To Cleveland

It’s been a long time coming, and we’re not actually ready to announce all of the details, but I’m proud to announce that I’m bringing the party to Cleveland; by party, I mean Startup Weekend, and by Cleveland, I mean…well, Cleveland.

Thanks to the power of Social Media, specifically the Cleveland Social Media Club and Twitter, we attracted over 1100 votes for the City of Cleveland!  It’s been an amazing run and people are still voting while we’re in the midst of planning the event.

So what’s next you ask?  Well, I’ve assembled a great group of people from the Cleveland area, with an expertise in Entrepreneurship, to assist me with putting on this fantastic event.  The team members include:

1) Anthony Broad-Crawford, Vice President and CTO of Within3
2) Jon Stahl, Cofounder of Leandog Software
3) Stuart Saunders, Cofounder of Neevo LLC
4) Douglas Craver, Realeflow
5) Pending Member

We’ve also been getting some great advice from other members of the Entrepreneurial Network in Cleveland, including members of the NEOInc Incubator Network.

As a team, we are in the process of selecting the proper venue for the event - a venue that can seat all participants both in 1 large room and have enough work spaces in separate rooms for people to get to work.  A venue with enough parking, WiFi access, power strips for all of the laptops and room for our caterers to set up.  We’ve also started our Fund Raising efforts; there’s a few costs we need to cover to ensure that everybody that comes has a good time and don’t need to worry about the little details.

If you’re interested in sponsoring any part of the event, for now, you can email me - we’ll have our blog up at StartupWeekend’s main site soon with more details on these Sponsorship Packages, and more details on the Venue Selection and when the event will be.

For now, I ask you to spread the word - Startup Weekend Cleveland will be coming to town; look for more details and registration to open very shortly.  The event should be in late April or early May.

Watch this blog for more details that will be coming soon!

-AK

Startup Drinks Wrapup

I’m a few days late posting this as I was away for the weekend, but am now back in Cleveland and ready to move forward with the next steps from Startup Drinks.  The event, in my opinion, was a huge success.  I was suprised by the RSVP Count (24) but was impressed when even more people showed up - I didn’t take an exact count, but I don’t think I would be stretching it to say nearly 30 people showed.

I got to hear more about what’s going on at Mahalo from Chris Miller, a local lead developper for the LA Startup.  Had some excellent Ruby conversations with Joe Fiorini, Corey Haines, Scott Himmel and Darren Powell.  Before the event started, I had dinner with a few freelancers and other tech heads working for large corporations at Phnom Penh and was surprised to hear about all of the other groups around Cleveland that were starting up as well.

Best of all, I was able to erase one project from my whiteboard and side links, Nomadic Desk, as I was able to find a group of people a little further ahead on the project and hopefully will be able to lend a helping hand with their project.  Usually I would say there is room for more than 1 player in any space, but in the space I was aiming for in Nomadic Desk, I think joining forces to create 1 local solution will be optimal.  I look forward to hearing more about FS15 as it progresses and comes closer to opening.

Now that the first Startup Drinks is behind us, it’s time to look to the future.  The need to continue these events is there, but I think the format could stand for a little more structure to aid in some of the discussions.  I am starting to plan the next Startup Drinks and will post more about that soon, and I hope to see some of the Startup Drinkers at the Columbus Startup Weekend in July.