Holy cow. What a crazy weekend. So we started out Friday evening doing the usual vote and be bored session. That part pretty much always sucks, mainly because there are so many people who bring ideas to the table without first seeing if they’re out there or at least making their clone interesting via some twist or another. Some things were also just not feasible to do in such a short period of time. Joe Uhl said it best: “I didn’t come to startup weekend to get another job.”
Having said that, there were some really great, original (and some not so original but still interesting) ideas that came out of ASW2. The coolest ideas, in my estimation, were twitpay.me, givingti.me (very original, Sanjay), and Mark’s (Still) Horrible Idea (let me explain…and yes, I’m biased).
Twitpay was neat, not because it rides on the whole twitter-doesn’t-make-money bandwagon, but because it made money the first night. It was simple enough to do in a weekend, it was clever although I dislike the public stream business. My preferred format would have been something like “d twitpay @lance $5.” It was, however, well executed and designed. Well done. They get top honors, in my book.
Second place definitely goes to GivingTi.me. This is simply because it was the most original idea there (as opposed to “hey, lets build this iPhone app that uses GPS and like trade stuff with it since that concept hasn’t been done 90 times”). The GivingTi.me team got a lot done and I’m sure we’ll see it turn into a full blown app pretty soon — very good stuff.
Mark’s Horrible Idea started off as a joke, and since we were up to the challenge, we took the horrible idea and turned it into this (not so horrible idea), then ended up putting it up on ebay (also for fun). Will it sell? I doubt it, but it’s still amusing. It was pretty fun working on it simply because everyone else thought it was a joke the entire weekend. I still don’t think they fully understand that it could actually be used for useful PR stuffs, but that could be due to Tejus’ amazing marketing skills. 
Another cool deally that came out of ASW2 was the Skribit folks from ASW1, Calvin and Paul, implementing a new feature (on the left side of this blog, actually so take a look). I don’t know that we had as many designers as last year, which was disappointing, but then again my group was comprised entirely of engineers and a guy who really, really liked postgresql. Yes. We. Can.
I was pretty sad to see so many teams implode, though. There were some cool ideas that didn’t get to see the light of day due to resources or disagreements.
All in all, I can’t wait for ASW3…well, maybe just a week or two off would be nice.
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