Bloomington Startup Feb. 8-10, 2008 [a startup weekend event]

This weekend will move very fast, surprisingly so. That’s what happens when we try to cram months of work into about 2300 hours of human labor over three days. To help move quickly to a group decision on Friday night about what kind of company to build, it is important to be prepared with ideas before reaching City Hall.

We have an online community, powered by Ning, which we are using to suggest and discuss product and company ideas over the next 10 days. Please post any crazy ideas for services, widgets, devices or other things our new company might do. The more discussed an idea is before we pitch, the more effective the pitch will be.

Startup Weekend founder Andrew Hyde published the 8th podcast wrap-up of a weekend, interviewing Kimm Viebrock as a summary of what happened in Seattle. It is worth a listen. I also recommend looking at the results of past weekends for an idea about what to expect on the 8th.

Last night, the 14th Startup Weekend host city—Seattle—kicked off the first day of the quest to build something new from scratch. For those planning to attend our event, it would be well worth paying attention to how things transpire in Seattle.

Read the official blog and follow Startup Weekend on Twitter.

Startup Weekend also announced two new weekends, in Portland (May 23-25) and Ann Arbor (June 20-22). Pending my summer plans (family and employment), I plan to attend the latter.

The most compelling of the past weekends to follow was the one in Atlanta last November. There are some nice lessons to be learned from Atlanta, as well as a nifty little blog widget, the outcome of their three days of work.

Skribit is a blog widget where readers can suggest posts to blog authors. I activated my blog this morning and added the widget here, as well. The widget helps move a blog from a broadcast to a collaborative paradigm, with suggestions for future posts coming from individual readers. Got a specific question you want answered? Post it in the sidebar on this blog, and we’ll likely be inspired.

It wasn’t Bloomington. The first official Startup Weekend came last October when West Lafayette—home of our bitter rivals to the north, the Purdue Boilermakers—opened as the sixth weekend in the short history of the event.

Andrew Hyde, founder of SW, had positive things to say about the small-town, Midwest experience:

I was impressed with the team. Very smart, very flexible, and just plain fun people. It was fun being on a college campus with so much going on. Someone would say “I have a BBQ to go to” and then 2 hours later be back at work, creating a company with the 30 or so people in the room. The energy was great all weekend, with the highs and lows you can expect.

That group didn’t do much advance brainstorming as a group, but they still came to the pitch session with 15 ideas. They eventually discarded them all and chose a completely new one, conceived after the weekend began—a contextual chat tool called ScrollTalk. The marketing people came up with a great tagline for the product: “Interest Messaging.”

The West Lafayette event suffered a bit from size, as only three dozen people participated. Our goal is 70, with room to gauge resources and fill needs in the final week to get us as high as 100. If early response is any indication, that shouldn’t be a problem. Registration officially starts later this week.

To prepare for February 8th, I recommend you peruse the blogs and companies created by past weekends. Start with West Lafayette.