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News Release

Last modified: Wednesday, January 30, 2008

IU School of Informatics sponsoring innovative small business start-up event

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Jan. 30, 2008

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Startup Weekend, a national business creation initiative, has announced that Bloomington Startup Weekend will be held Feb. 8-10 at Bloomington City Hall, 401 N. Morton St. This will be the 15th Startup Weekend to take place across the globe since the idea originated last July in Boulder, Colo.

Startup Weekend recruits a few dozen creative people to build a community, and ultimately a company, in a single weekend. The goal is to include 70 to 100 diverse, highly motivated participants. Tickets for Bloomington Startup Weekend are available for $20 each at the Startup Weekend Web site: https://bloomington.startupweekend.com. Many of the organizers of the Bloomington event are students and faculty with IU's School of Informatics, which is co-sponsoring the Startup Weekend.

There are seven areas of entrepreneurial expertise that participants may sign up for: Design, Developer, PR/Marketing, Business Development, User Experience, Legal and Project Management. Local technology professionals and students, many of whom are affiliated with IU's School of Informatics, organized the collaborative event.

"One of the primary benefits is giving people a common goal and a challenging time constraint," said Kevin Makice, a doctoral student in informatics and event organizer. "It forces collaboration and always results in a long-lasting relationship among the participants. Indeed, an important professional network is formed."

"We are really excited to sponsor the Bloomington Startup Weekend," said Dennis Groth, an assistant professor of informatics. "This is precisely the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that we encourage in the School of Informatics."

Bloomington Startup Weekend will begin and end with a group decision, using this schedule:

• Friday: Pitch ideas, select one, and determine roles of the participants.
• Saturday: Build things.
• Sunday: Launch things and discuss what to do next.

The final decision involves the future of the company that everyone has worked so hard to launch. There are five options put to the group:

• Do nothing. Shake hands, exchange business cards, and call it a weekend.
• Sell it on eBay. Highest bidder wins, and everyone gets their share.
• Keep working. Dedicate more time, on evenings and weekends, to continue to work, mostly to delay the decision about who takes over.
• Give control to a Few. Select a small group of founders to devote 10-20 hours weekly to taking the next step.
• Give control to One. Name a CEO and wish her the best.

One of the event founders will be in Bloomington to facilitate Startup Weekend, which will be blogged live on the Web and available as a live video stream from City Hall. After 72 hours it's expected that a new company will emerge with paperwork filed and a product or service launched and tested.

For additional information contact Kevin Makice 812-360-2557 or kevin@makice.net. Online resources for Bloomington Startup include: https://bloomington.startupweekend.com/, https://www.bloomingtonstartup.com/ and https://bloomingtonstartup.ning.com/.

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