Another great thing about working from the boat, we actually had 2 teams competing from the same work space this year - oh, and the internet stayed up!  Here is a view of our original work space, we eventually moved to more comfortable seats:

We’ve got a few videos posted, and a few more to come, check out the Tumblr page that Joe Fiorini is managing for us.

Again, a huge thank you to the LeanDog guys, my fellow team members, and our wives for letting us defend our 2008 title.  Hopefully we make the first round of cuts by the expert panel and I’ll be blogging again begging for your votes - until then, check the site out and submit your feedback.

I’ve got a lot stories and opinions on the process to get to this point, and some of the unrelated (and ridiculous) restrictions on foreign workers, I’m sure I’ll eventually write them all up for your amusement.  In the mean time - if you’re going to be immigrating to the United States, specifically into PA/OH/NY - I can’t recommend our attorney enough.  A good friend of mine, and fellow immigrant, is also working on a great new startup that will assist in the process when it goes live - so bookmark it here.

I’ve been in the United States on my L1-A visa since February 2005, but still have 2 or 3 years left before I can go for my citizenship test - plenty of time to start reading up on American History, especially since it wasn’t taught to us in Canada.  Thankfully, I’m surrounded by plenty of Americans that will be tutoring me along the way, hopefully they know a thing or two about American History…… I’ve got my doubts with some of you, you know who you are.

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

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

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

As the day progressed, our site was taking ~10 seconds to load and complete a map calculation. We scrambled well and with the support of the RailsRumble Organizers and the awesome staff at Linode we were given a much larger server for the remainder of the competition. Tuesday night at about 7:30 I completed the migration while we hoped most people would be eating dinner instead of reading LifeHacker and within 10 minutes we were migrated and traffic kept pouring in.

Watching the Google Analytics data over the next few days was really fun; growing from 200-400 visits per day to over 5,000 hits on Tuesday and still averaging over 1,000 per day since. The increase in users resulted in some great feedback to our Support & Info email addresses as well as even more press. We were featured on The Buzzer Blog, CenterNetworks, Thrillist, Technology for Agents and many other personal blogs and tweets.

It’s been fun to watch something that we poured our souls into over the RailsRumble weekend get that sort of attention and gave us the boost we needed to start planning our next release. As much as the validation from the press felt good, it was trumped at 9:34PM EST last night when the following email was delivered:

Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you the winners of the 2008 Rails Rumble competition!

Overall Winners:

1) Great Lakes Geeks for Meet In Between
- http://meetinbetween.us

2) Scatapult for Qflip
- http://qflip.r08.railsrumble.com

3) New Media Logic for Riverdex
- http://riverdex.r08.railsrumble.com

It was such a tight race over the last 2 days of voting, there was no way I could call it until the email came in. I talked to Joe after it was official and he couldn’t believe it either. Qflip gave us quite the race - at the end of voting we were only 0.031 points ahead of them! Well done to Qflip & Riverdex and the rest of the competitors this year. The quality of the top 10 applications this year was amazing - to be declared the winner of this tight race has simply been unbelievable.

Our team will be getting together later this week to formalize the plans for our next release and I hope to share more with everybody very shortly. We’re hoping to be able to get together and knock out the next release in true RailsRumble fashion - MiniRumbles together in 1 office; hopefully we’ll be able to broadcast our future sessions via UStream.TV and possibly put together some fun and engaging events in the near future.

There’s still a lot of news to share with everybody, but it’s still premature at the moment, but check back soon. We’ll be announcing a magazine appearance with 10 other startups that I’ve been in contact with the magazine over, and a few newspaper articles as well. It’s been an amazing ride so far, I can’t wait to see where this takes us.

Now - what would a wrap up post be without some numbers? I’m a statistics geek at heart, so I can’t write a blog post about another weeks worth of celebration worthy news without also including celebration worthy numbers - so here we go:

After 2 weeks of being live we’ve had a total of 16,529 Visits generating 39,703 Pageviews (2.40 Pages/Visit - down slightly, but still within acceptable ranges). We have a bounce rate of 42.23% that we need to work on with some usability tweaks during our next release and are currently attracting 90.63% New Visits which I hope to drop and increase our returned users as we build up more data.

Foreign Adoption increased with the US accounting for roughly 12.5k visits followed by the UK (Bloody hell), Canada (eh?) and Australia (G’day mate). Within the United States we had visitors from all States (Welcome South Dakota!) - leading the way was New York with 3,154 visits and California with 1,764.

Firefox accounts for 58% of the visits, IE in second with 20% and Safari in third with 14%. Now that we can post bugfixes, we might want to work on IE6 usability since IE appears to be catching up ever so slightly.

The fun data - how many maps this week?:

The site itself has received a grand total of 2,721 Visits from 2,358 Unique Visitors that have generated 6,825 Pagesviews (2.51 Average Pageviews/Visit). This is in line with my expectations considering there should be 3 Pageviews per visit for a user that generates a Meeting Place Map. This should be going up dramatically with our next release, but it’s a good start.

In terms of browsers, Firefox takes the biggest piece of the pie, coming in at 60% with Safari in second with 20% and IE in third with 13%. Good thing considering IE was the browser we were having the biggest issues with and actually weren’t able to resolve a JavaScript issue with IE6.

My favorite Google Analytics report to watch has been the Map Overlay - we never really tested Midpoints in any country other than the United States, so seeing foreign adoption has been great. The US comes in at the top with 1,774 Visits, the UK in second with 143 and Canada in third with 123. An interesting subset of that data is looking at which States use the app the most often which shows we have active users in 51 of the 52 States; this goes along with my previous belief that South Dakota doesn’t have the Internet. The majority of our hits are coming from California (290), Ohio (264), New York (125) and Illinois (111).

Of course, the most important statistics are recorded in our own database - how many address points, maps and meeting points are we creating? Here’s how it breaks down:

With the data we’ve been able to collect thus far, the awesome feedback we’ve received from our users, the great coverage on blogs and an exciting press piece that will be announced shortly, we’ve started putting together what needs to be done next. I’m looking forward to our next release and hope to be able to share more details with you all soon.

The plan was to work from my Sun Room for the weekend - it turns out our location needed to be just as Agile as our development; TimeWarner has been upgrading the cable in our area for 2 weeks now, causing massive and lengthy outages. This weekend was no exception, the internet was down when the team arrived at 8pm. The competition officially started at 8pm on Friday, so we scrambled, I booked a room at a nearby Marriott (Thank you Marriot Points - the room cost us a total of $6) and we moved over to share the WiFi signal at the hotel.

Our next problem was that one of our team members had a conflict and could no longer make it. We discussed our options and made an emergency call to Jonathan Penn. Jonathan lives in Akron (Ohio) and had a small conflict with his band on Saturday night, but we worked it out and Jonathan cleared it with his wife and jumped in his car and drove to Erie.

With our team reassembled, we got to work; I setup our server, Joe started working on our template (Bettter-Bort - which lead to numerous Swedish Chef jokes and references) and our Javascript-guru and Designer, Josh Walsh, got cranking on our API Research & Design.

Jonathan arrived at around 1am, I think, and we started discussing our first issue - how do we get around Google’s limitations for their Google Maps API. This changed slightly again on Saturday morning, but our new solution kicks ass.

At 4am, we called it a night and got a few hours of sleep, grabbing breakfast at 8am. My father-in-law came to our rescue and opened up his office for us to work from downtown Erie. We grabbed the conference room for the day and got cracking on more code, design and server tuning all day Saturday until again heading to the hotel around 3am on Sunday morning. Breakfast again at 8am and back downtown to my FIL’s office. With just a small lunch break - we needed to get cracking to meet the 8pm deadline. At 7pm we realized we were all working on Macs and had yet to test in IE6/7. We got random friends to test and boy did we find issues - we were able to get all but 1 issue fixed by the deadline and launched our App at 8:01PM last night:

Ever wanted to meet up with some friends, but everybody lives in different corners of the city? Find a central meeting place using MeetInBetween.Us! Voting hasn’t opened for the Application yet - but feel free to use it and love it - we sure do and a lot of our Twitter Followers do as well. A big thank you to the rest of my team for their dedication and hard work, to my Father In Law for the office space, and to all of our wives for supporting us and letting us have this crazy Geek Weekend. To my team, I can honestly say I learned more about Rails and Javascript this weekend working with Joe, Josh and Jonathan than I learned from the numerous books, screencasts and tutorials I’ve read. I had even deployed 1 previous CRUD App on Rails, and now want to go rewrite it entirely with the lessons learned this weekend.

We can’t change anything with the App until voting closes, but we have plenty of features, fixes and changes we’ll be making once we can. I’ll send out a separate note when voting opens - but for now, it’s back to work and a healthy sleeping schedule.

1) We’re all moved into our new home - pictures posted soon.
2) Weddings and more weddings - 2 more this month - crazy year.
3) RailsRumble! Great Lake Geeks will be Rumbling from our place. I’m setting up the Sun Room with whiteboards, flat screens and maybe a webcam or two for the 4 of us to work on our Rails Rumble App. I’ll post more details soon as well as a link to vote for us once we’re done the App.
4) Startup Weekend - State College; not 100% sure I’m going yet, but I don’t have any other plans that weekend yet.