Startup Weekend @ Holden Beach
Startup Weekend was a special conference: over the course of a single weekend, attendees took time out from your current venture/business and practiced building a new one.
Over the course of the weekend, ideas are pitched, teams are formed, and new companies conceptualized, built, and launched! Each person improvises using their own instruments and style to create something entirely new and wonderful–all in one brief session.
You’re not judged (unless you judge) and learning is paramount. It’s an awesome three days of networking, team building, coding, business planning and pitching (with some added cocktails and food)… AND, this particular SW is being hosted in beautiful Holden Beach, North Carolina.
2009 Agenda
Friday, September 25, 2009
5:00 p.m. – Check into the beach house (This is an optional early check in if you want to settle into your room at the beach house before getting started; otherwise, you can settle in at the end of the night)
6:00 p.m. – Meet-n-Greet; Hors d’oeurves & Drinks provided but bring more if you want (the more the merrier- hehe)
7:30 p.m. – Pitches Start after brief thank you and message from the StartupHB team
8:15 p.m. – Pitches end, teams form, assigned to work spaces
Saturday, September 26, 2009
9:00 a.m. – Breakfast served & work sessions begin
12:00 p.m. – Lunch & Quick Group Check-up
7:00 p.m. – Startup Weekend HB BBQ
Sunday, September 27, 2009
9:00 a.m. – Breakfast & work sessions begin
12:00 p.m. – Lunch & Quick Group Check-up
5:45 p.m. – Work on projects should end
6:15 p.m. – Final presentations
7:30 p.m. – Dinner on your own (last time we all went out to eat as a large group to a local HB restaurant)
2009 Participants
Josh Holden
Josh Holden is an entrepreneur and freelance marketer with a passion for new technologies that can advance the way we interact with information and the communities around us. He was born and raised in Holden Beach, NC and is currently taking time away from his home in New York, NY to focus on new business ventures and community enrichment in his home town.
Josh has worked with some of the brightest minds across industry boundaries. He has managed complex marketing campaigns for agency clients such as Samsung and American Express, and directed client side marketing initiatives for business solutions provider, Millennia Group, LLC.
Josh received his BS from Guilford College, where he studied business with concentrations in communications and information systems. While completing his degree, Josh was heavily involved in student government, earning him the Dick Dyer Award for Outstanding Leadership.
Scott Brewster
Scott Brewster(@jrmozart ) is a serial entrepreneur, blogger/podcaster, and educator. Born in Louisiana, Scott now resides in North Carolina where he is active in the entrepreneurship community. Scott sees his involvement in the entrepreneurship community as a way to give back to the state by helping budding entrepreneurs build businesses to grow the state’s economy and put more NC residents to work.
Scott holds a Ph.D. in music education from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG), and his expertise is in the areas of new media, educational technology, online learning, serious games, and electronic music. Currently, Scott is Director of Online Learning and Support for the Division of Continual Learning (DCL) at UNCG where he leads a team of 30 instructional designers, coders, and artists to develop online courses that focus on student-centered learning and cutting edge technology such as simulations and serious gaming. Additionally, Scott is partner in Triad Interactive Media, a company that provides new media services and products for instructional and training purposes, and is co-founder of several Web-based companies including Scavenja.com, Rare Brew online team community, and Startup Junkyard.
Jennifer Griffin
Jennifer Griffin(@Jennafleur ) is a social media enthusiast, marketer extraordinaire, and all-around crafty lady. By day, she is a member of Williams Mullen’s marketing team and supports marketing initiatives for attorneys in the firm’s Raleigh, RTP and Wilmington offices. In her current role, Jennifer is primarily responsible for public relations, marketing, regional branding, event planning and client development activities in the North Carolina market.
In addition, Jennifer serves as the marketing liaison to the firm’s Women’s Initiative, a group which supports career advancement for women at Williams Mullen through mentorship, professional development, and leadership training.
Jennifer graduated from North Carolina State University with a B.A. in Communication and previously worked in the Publishing Industry. In 2007, Jennifer transitioned her experience to legal marketing where she has assumed a variety of marketing roles with Rosen Law Firm and now Williams Mullen. In addition to serving on the Triangle AMA’s Social Media Committee, Jennifer serves as the membership chair for the Legal Marketing Association Raleigh City Group and is active in the local Twitter community.
Matthew McFarling
Matthew McFarling (@mtmcfarl ) is an entrepreneur and coder. Matthew started his own business, Entouch Designs , five years ago and hasn’t looked back since. He has done programming work for a variety of major well-known companies. Matthew enjoys taking requests from clients and turning them into something beautiful and useable on the web.
Matthew holds a BS degree in Computer Science and a minor in Mathematics from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). His coding expertise is in web technologies such as Ruby on Rails, PHP, HTML and CSS. In Matthew’s limited spare time, he enjoys learning about emerging web technologies. One of these days he swears he’s going to learn Objective-C, so he can also code for OS X and the iPhone/iPod Touch natively. When Matthew is not coding, he enjoys spending time with his wife, two cats and dog.
Roy Morejon
Roy Morejon (@RoyMorejon ) is an entrepreneur and Internet marketing consultant specializing in blogger outreach, viral marketing, and social media strategy. Roy is the President and founder of B2WE a social media marketing agency focusing on brand strategy and corporate communications. With over a decade of Internet marketing experience, Roy is the go-to guy for businesses that want to maximize their marketing exposure using blogs and social media outlets. Roy also serves as co-founder of the Search Engine Marketing Association Charlotte and founder of North Carolina Businesses for Social Responsibility .
Roy’s current start-ups include PGMDirectory.com the only social directory online where you can find current and former PGM students from around the world, and Paid By Poker an online poker directory.
Roy graduated from The University of North Carolina – Charlotte (UNCC) with a degree in Communications – Mass Media. Roy, a self acclaimed work-a-holic and a twitter addict, has worked with top national brands and many local Charlotte businesses, including Microsoft, Dell, AT&T, NASCAR, Charlotte Bobcats and SLAPPA Distribution. Roy is an active part of the Charlotte community, spending time helping to promote and attend Internet marketing and social media events throughout the Queen City. When Roy isn’t engulfed in the social media scene, he enjoys spending time with his retired field champion black lab “Kiss”.
Tiffani Bell
Tiffani Bell (@tiffani ) is a twenty-something in pursuit of better living through software. She is an iPhone developer with one app in the store, one pending, and one in the oven. The first application, Potholes, allows users to geotag potholes where the results are reported to interested city governments. Pothole reports are publicly available at Thinkpositif.com/potholes .
Tiffani is also the founder of an emerging startup, Pencil You In, which allows beauticians to accept appointments online and via text message. Tiffani has also appeared on the radio in Philadelphia (Technically Speaking Radio with JC Lamkin) to talk about Ruby (she’s a huge fan) and the greater social/access implications of free and open source software.
Tiffani graduated in May 2008 with a BSc in Computer Science from Howard University. She can occasionally be found blogging at the.commentari.at .
Camden Watts
Camden Watts (@cammicam ) is a North Carolina native who loves meeting people. She is a creative, communicator, and life-long entrepreneur in love with big ideas.
Currently serving as a marketing communications liaison for an energy efficiency consulting firm, Camden has been studying social media and its impact. In her spare time, she is producing and directing her first feature length film, and performing regularly with two improvisational comedy teams.
Camden began freelancing as a designer and photographer before college graduation, working with clients in a broad range of industries such as pharmaceuticals (Sepracor, AstraZeneca, and GlaxoSmithKline), brides-to-be, and local small businesses. She graduated from Meredith College in 2003, earning a B.A. in graphic design/photography with a minor in professional communications.
ZY Guo
ZY graduated from UNC Charlotte with a Masters Degree in Information Technology and currently is employed as a programmer for the Division of Continual Learning at UNC Greensboro–mostly working on Flash and PHP projects.
He is passionate about coding in various programming languages and platforms and is skillful in Java, C++, Flash, PHP/ASP development, VBA for excel programming, Oracle, MySQL administration, JSP, and XSSL/SOAP programming.
Adam Arney
Adam Arney(@adam10 ) is the Director of Communications at a North Carolina university; his work keeps him busy with project management, research, writing, and marketing. He has won several national awards for interactive course development and is passionate about incorporating 21-century skills into modern education.
Adam is a startup junkie and recently co-founded tweetasy.com, a miniature literature site built for the twitter community. Adam’s education background is in history and philosophy. It is best not to get him started on either of these subjects unless you are in it for the long haul.
Steve Hong
Steve Hong (@st3v3hong ) is a web designer, search engine optimizer, jQuery pirate and CSS ninja. He spends his days obsessively optimizing code and graphics as Senior Web Developer at CrossComm, Inc., a Durham, NC web design and iPhone development company.
Steve regularly provides consulting to CrossComm’s clients who require beautiful, SEO-ready, usable, accessible websites. He also actively contributes to the Triangle’s Meetup community of web designers and developers, teaching and learning from each other.
Steve grew up on three continents as an Army brat, so he never knows where to say he’s from, but he’s made his home in Durham since attending Duke University, where he met his wife in a dance class. Steve spends his free time at local restaurants eating ethnic food and at the dojo studying Kyokushin karate.
Josh Gibbs
Josh Gibbs (@jkgibbs ) grew up in the foothills of Tennessee, but don’t let this hillbilly fool you. His unique skill-set of graphic design, marketing strategy, and informational heuristics has allowed him to drive successful marketing campaigns and develop creative pieces for companies like Cisco Systems, VMware, Hewlett-Packard, and Salesforce.com.
In his spare time, Josh works with smaller companies to help them create a niche for their businesses in the online marketplace by using a mix of traditional, social and new media outlets. Additionally, Josh likes developing fun (and useful) Web apps–like TheTinyTimer.com–that improve on existing solutions by approaching them from a user’s perspective. Along with a development team, he is the lead designer on an Xbox Arcade game that has been approved for release later this year.
Josh earned a B.S. in advertising with a focus on Web usability from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Currently, he serves as the Web marketing director for SharedVue, a cloud marketing technologies company.
Josh Tucker
Josh Tucker (@itninja ) has spent most of his life in the NC Triangle area. While his most leveraged skill is PHP development, his desire to constantly learn new geeky things has led him to a diverse work history of tech shops, systems integration companies, a glass and metal shop in the Bronx, a startup tire recycling company, a startup healthcare EMR firm and most recently providing professional IT consulting services for home users and small businesses. Aside from learning, his passion is people and he believes technology comes second to empathy.
His hobbies are as diverse as his work history. When he isn’t working, Josh enjoys restoring his historical home with his wife, AV convergence into home networks, mobile computing and security (both IT and physical).
Brian Auton
Brian Auton (@brianauton ) is an entrepreneur, freelance software developer, and North Carolina native. He is passionate about creating elegant solutions to big problems, and loves meeting other entrepreneurs to share inspiration and collaborate on projects.
After earning a B.S. in computer science at Appalachian State University, Brian worked as co-founder of a web technology company in
Boone NC, using PHP and MySQL to develop solutions large and small for client websites.
More recently, he has been seeking every opportunity as a freelancers to explore a variety of technologies from advanced JavaScript web interfaces to desktop graphics programming, and to hone his skills at collaboration and rapid development by participating in new startups, most recently the online literature community Tweetasy.com.
Brett Bumeter
Brett Bumeter (@brettbum) is the owner of Softduit Media and entered social media building on 18 years of experience in sales, intelligence, process management, finance, accounting & contracts.
He left the high rise corporate world and an office with a view of a man made pond in Buckhead, for a Cove on Lake Wylie across from Charlotte, NC where a WiFi connection and an international airport keep him connected to the world.
In 2005, Brett began working as a business developer, web designer, blogger, & blog marketer. Writing intelligence estimates & strategy recommendations for Army Intelligence & Fortune 500 companies lent itself well to writing blog articles, & a double major in finance & accounting + a master’s in tax law didn’t hurt.
He has developed social media campaigns for Izod, Digital River & Nuance makers of Dragon Naturally Speaking. He has provided blog consulting services for CEOs of firms in Ireland, New York, Belize, Las Vegas, Burbank, Toronto & many more. He works with clients to increase their customer relationships & attract new business through social media.
Brett speaks at conferences around the country helping other businesses, bloggers and web designers profitably expand their success with social media. He is also a product evangelist, trainer & blogger for WindowsLiveWriter, MindManager, Dragon Naturally Speaking, Artisteer & WordPress. He covers consumer electronics, software, social media, solar power, personal finance, politics & comedy. A Jack of all trades turned professional philosopher.
He offers social media marketing, SEO, and ghost writing services using industry proven strategies. As a blogger, he continues to profitably build strategies that evolve every day in an industry that changes weekly.
Brett has a Bachelor’s of Science from Illinois State Universit, Double Major in Accounting and Finance. He holds a Masters in Laws from St Thomas University School of Law in International Taxation. He has graduated from various military intelligence schools in signals intellegicence and electronic warfare.
Brett will be speaking this year at WordCamp RDU, WordCamp Birmingham, and IzeaFest. You can definitely catch him at BlogWorld as well. Plus he runs a Local WordPress Meetup group in Charlotte and training labs called the Lab on the Lake.