TechCrunch coverage of Phoenix Startup Weekend… Yeah – I was there working on Reserve Chute!!!

Twitrratr gets a nice bump… nice job guys.

Go Phoenix!

It’s been some time since we last covered Startup Weekend, a series of events that bring a roomful of developers and entrepreneurs together to develop new startups in only 54 hours. When the program originally launched last year, each weekend was geared towards building a single application, of which every participating member was a cofounder. Since then the format has changed – multiple companies are created at each event, and they don’t have to incorporate at the end of the weekend. Here’s a handful of the companies founded at last weekend’s event, which was held in Phoenix.

ReserveChute

With so much of our essential data making its way to the cloud, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to quickly make a local backup. Reserve Chute, an open source web app that will be available for use in the next few weeks, will automatically make backups of popular cloud based services including Gmail, Twitter, and Basecamp.

It’s unlikely that any of these services will be going out of business in the foreseeable future, and they almost certainly have redundant backup systems in place. But the prospect of having my entire photo collection or Email history wiped out is unnerving – having an easy way to back up these services would definitely give users some peace of mind, even if they never had to use it.

My Shelter Helper

My Shelter Helper is web page builder aimed to help animal shelters establish a presence on the web. Shelters can logon and after entering some basic information like their address and telephone number will be presented with a functional and good looking website. It’s a great idea, and I love the tagline: “Helping save animal’s lives.”

For now the service is generating some pretty barebones sites, but will introduce support for donations so that shelters can easily collect from benevolent animal lovers worldwide. I hope the team keeps working on this – anything that helps animals is a good thing, and plenty of people (like my mother, for example) would love to donate to their local animal shelter along with the national organizations.

Twittrratr

Awful domain name aside, the Twittrratr team has actually built a pretty cool Twitter site. After entering any keyword, Twittrratr will find related tweets and attempt to figure out if the subject is being spoke about in a positive or negative light. It’s a good idea but unfortunately it doesn’t work very well – oftentimes words that Twittrratr associates with a negative tweet aren’t being used to describe the keyword that was searched for. The team acknowledges that the system isn’t perfect and is open to suggestions (it’s still pretty impressive for 54 hours from conception to launch).

[From 54 Hours To Build A Company: A Look At Startup Weekend Phoenix]

I hope you had fun. I was at Phoenix Startup Weekend working with a team of smart, energized people to create a new company in a single weekend.

The result – Reserve Chute – is sheer genius.

This one time, at Phoenix Startup Weekend (http://phoenix.startupweekend.com) actually held in Chandler, AZ, a band of brothers, and one sister, came together to create a new company called Reserve Chute. With it’s main offering a personalized data backup service that permits users to grab their data from online sources like GMail and others and save them to a storage device of their choice. This is one cool and innovative service that should be on your “Must Have” list. Your data on your terms for when Web 2.0 becomes Web 2 point Oh no! What more could you ask for. For more information, visit www.reservechute.com and sign-up for this unique and powerful service offering.

If you use online applications to run your business you need to check Reserve Chute out. It might be the best thing you ever do for your business.

The following photos are courtesy of Adam Nollmeyer – Thanks Adam. You can find Adam’s work here.

UPDATE – The photos below are actually courtesy of ccl1111 – you can find his photos here. Adam’s photos are still great… be sure to check them out as well.

I’ve taken the liberty to create a FriendFeed room to live blog Phoenix Startup Weekend – starting in 29 hours. You can join the room here.

Thanks to FriendFeed for the great new real-time functionality enabling the widget below – here is the live feed:

UPDATE: 10/17/08 – I’ve set up a FriendFeed room enable everyone to live blog the event – see this post for details.

The whole reason I’m going on vacation tomorrow (back next Tuesday) is to rest up for Phoenix Startup Weekend… well not really…

If you have not checked it out – you should. If you aren’t already signed up… you should.

See you there:

Marketers, Web designers, legal experts and others will convene in PhoenixOct. 17-19 to pull off what sounds like an impossible task: develop a product in one weekend from scratch.

The event is called Startup Weekend. It’s the brainchild of technology entrepreneurs Andrew Hyde and Michael Gruen, who operate Startup Weekend LLC. The company organizes the collaborative events in cities across the U.S.

Startup Weekend has a Web site set up for details of the Phoenix event, but it’s currently down.

details of the Phoenix event [From Want to build a product in one weekend?]