tekArtist

I went to film the Blitzweekend Kickstart event tonight (well, yesterday, technically). It’s now 4:15 AM and I am done cutting, converting and uploading the footage for your geeky and entrepreneurial viewing pleasure.

Blitzweekend is an unique experience where designers, developers, and entrepreneurs are challenged to create a working product in 48 hours […] Find a solution to a current problem, meet and innovate with bright creatives, work in an environment built for rapid development, and get feedback from experienced entrepreneurs.

1. Introduction (EN/FR)
   Introduction and last minute match ups.
2. Team Introduction (EN/FR)
   Organizers and Sponsors.
3. Rules and Principles (EN/FR)
   Question and Answers.
4. Presentation - Ben Yoskovitz (EN)
   Starting and raising money for a startup.
5. Presentation - David Fugère (FR)
   Utiliser Ruby on Rails pour programmer des applications Facebook.
6. Presentation - Matthew Harrison (EN)
   Financial and administrative pointers for startups.
7. Presentation - Arach Tchoupani (EN)
   The benefits of Python for rapid web applications development.
8. Presentation - Yann Rousselot-Pailley (FR)
   Aides et subventions gouvernementales pour entrepreneurs Québécois et Canadiens.
9. Presentation - Vincent Guyaux (EN)
   Panelist tips for the contestants.
10. Presentation - Alistair Croll (EN/FR)
    “Making it Viral” (English starts 3 min. in)

Mainly being on the techy side of things, I particularly enjoyed the more business oriented presentations given by Ben, Matthew, Yann and Alistair.

Good luck to all the participants! See you on Sunday, when I come to film the demos and the event’s conclusion.

From: “Google Shoots For The Moon - Forbes.com“:

The company on Thursday announced the first 10 teams of competitors in its $30 million contest to send a spacecraft back to the moon to gain greater insights into the solar system and to find new sources of clean energy.

More info is available on the Google Lunar X Prize web site.

Google. Space. Clean Energy. $30M. What’s not to like?

Via Digg.

From “SXSW 2008 on BitTorrent: 3.5 GB of Free Music“:

The South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival is one of the biggest and most popular in the United States. For the fourth year in a row, SXSW has released a DRM-less collection of songs that - thanks to Greg Hewgill - can now be downloaded for free via BitTorrent.

A little consolation for not being able to attend this year. :)

From Brian Suda’s “XFN encoding, extraction, and visualizations“:

In this article I will take a good look at XFN - the microformat for describing relationships between people. I will look briefly at what it is and the basic markup needed to add the information to your sites, before then going into depth, looking at the benefits you can get from that data by extracting it and using it in different ways. Extracting the data is easier than you think - there is probably a library for your favorite language already! If not, there are also some web services that could do the job that I’ll show you below.

Via a Microformat tweet.

From “GigaOM: How Not to End Up as an Anachronism“:

There are always seemingly good reasons to continue doing things the way they were done in the past, and transition always presents challenges. As ironic as it may be, we continue to see software applications deployed as a service but which fail to use any service-based infrastructure themselves. They are two basic reasons for this situation: Change of existing operational services is hard. So is changing people behavior.

One of the advantages of working for a startup is that there is no baggage to deal with, leaving you with great freedom of innovation.

On the other hand, vendor and infrastructure lock-in is something that we, as technologists, have all had to deal with in one form or another. The challenge is to develop an ability to spot nascent trends and innovations early on, so as to gage and potentially leverage them as they emerge, rather than miss the boat and be left behind.

I think I’m not too bad at what I do, but then again, there are people like Sylvain, Joe and Chris (to only name a few) who always help keeping me modest on this front.