Le croqueur de pommes

WoW! Just wow ! i just get back from the crazy SXSW, or for those who don't know: "the Las Vegas of startup world". It's been an amazing experience from Day 1 till the end. I can't wait to tell you about what happened

The StartupBus

As you may have read in my previous post I took the StartupBus to go to Austin. We left San Francisco, CA on Tuesday in the early morning to arrive Austin, TX on Friday evening.

Day 1

We were all supposed to meet at the StartupHouse at 6 am to pack our stuff and start the journey to Austin. I had a really time to wake up, I barely spelt the weekend before, I was at another hackathon where we've build a tip planner called EasyMapr. Apparently some other Buspreneurs attended the same Hackathon, so we were all on the same page in terms of hours of sleep. But ready to rock !

Josh, our conductor organized hackathons and a launch party the week before our departure but I was not able to attend. So I did not know anybody. It's part of the magic of the StartupBus adventure

While we were meeting each other prior to departure we were surrounded by cameras from TechCrunch and another special guest : Mr. Robert Scoble in person.

For those who don't' know Robert Scoble, he is working for Rackspace (a hosting company) and helps startups to get traction thanks to interviews and blog posts on his high-traffic Blog. He is sometimes solicited to be a judge or an advisor during startup competitions. He was on the bus with us until we stopped in Santa Monica. It was a chance for us to have him onboard to receive quick feedbacks about what we were building.

We had a long way to ride to Austin, but thanks to the sponsor of the Sillicon Valley bus, Elance we had a nice breakfast at their place. We also met Buspreneurs from the Stanford bus. On our way to Elance we all present ourselves in the bus. I was really impressed by the variety of skillsets and by all the talented people. Most of my Buspreneurs fellows were working in a startup or already create one/many. It was also a nice international crowd with several Australians, a German and a French (myself).

After our nice breakfast it was time for us to ride to Los Angeles. As soon as we get onboard we started the pitch session.

Everybody had 1min to explain his project and vision. I think that we all pitched something. They were ideas like a StartTrek alarm clock that gives you a summary of your day in the morning, or a website to create your own cereals and many others.

I pitched the idea for a Taxi-sharing service, where people can split the taxi bill by sharing a cab with somebody that's going somewhere around the place you are going to. Like most of us I was not strongly attached to my idea and I was very open to work on someone else project.

At the end of the pitches (~40 pitches) we stopped to form groups and start working.

Most of the groups were formed pretty quickly, and 6 projects really emerged after the stop.

StartupBus Silicon Valley projects:

Beeliner - Find which events the people you want to meet are attending Cerealize - Your custom cereals delivered at your door. Expensiev - Expenses tracking for freelancers Gaggle - mobile app that filters your social feeds to only people you care about in that instan HipType - Dynamic content for iBooks Author, analytics and social media integration Kinetic.ly - Tools for motion analysis

As soon as we went back on the bus we were all ready to brainstorm and work on our on projects. By the end of the day we had to stop in Santa Monica to do quick Customer validation survey on the street, so we better have a good idea of our product by that time.

I joined to the team Cerealize because I was very excited by the quick brainstorm we had when we were forming teams. I did not know before that cereals were a big deal in America. That helped me to understand to full potential of this project, much bigger than what I thought during the pitch session.

The video of the first day thanks to John from TechCrunch

To be honest I am not yet on the Bus, it's just a matter of time now. In 6 hours I will be seating on THE bus, THE StartupBus departing from San Francisco to go to Austin for SXSWi. I think I have not realized yet that I will part of this crazy adventure.

For those who have not heard of StartupBus and SXSWi before let me try to explain.

SXSWi

Helds in Austin Texas, SXSW is a global festival. SXSW stands for South by SouthWest and the little i is for interactive. It started in 1987 as a music festival and then they add music and more recently an interactive track for emerging new technology stuff. It happens every year in Austin and it is always bigger and bigger in terms of number of attendees and performances

From a tech point of view it is the place to be if you are part of this world. During 4 days, all the most important guys on earth that are building the Web/App/Mobile world will be there. Either by being speaking in one of the many panels of the official track or by throwing other events in the city.

It is the place to go for grown startups who want to promote their product and new features but for sure it is really the place to be for new startup that need traction and press.

I think that all the web entrepreneurs in the world have a "SXSW Launch plan" in their mind. There is a lot of competitions to get the attention of the early-adopters techie attendees, and only few happy ending stories. Examples ? in 2007 Twitter get a lot of early traction event if they did not launch there, Foursquare launched a SXSWi in 2009 or FoodSpotting in 2010.

This year everybody will be looking around for the next big thing. And for short period the most popular pickup line will be "I was using blabla before it was cool at SXSW". Early adopters have a though life

I planned to install at least a dozen of new apps on my ipad, and sign up to a bunch of other websites. I heard so many thing about this festival, I am really excited about it. For a wannabe entrepreneur its all the fairy that I kid could have in Disneyland.

And to add more fun and WOWness to this adventure I will be joining the Silicon Valley StartupBus.

The idea of the StartupBus started with a friend joke between Australian guys : roadtrip to SF with friend with the challenge of building a startup in the same time. The first StartupBus trip went to SF to Austin in 2010 on a bus with wifi. At Austin six projects were pitched to local investors. In 2011 Chicago, Clevevand, NYC and Miami joined the movement. For 2012 11 buses will travel across US and Mexico to get to Austin with entrepreneurs on board.

Or should I say Buspreneurs Buspreneurs are a mix of business guys and coders who have cool ideas about ways to make the world better.

They all have 3-4 days to make those ideas real project and viable businesses. When buses arrive in Austin it is time to meet other Buspreneurs, the next two days will be semi-finals and finals between all the buses. I just know the basic elevator pitch about the StartupBus, the rest will be the experience itself and I will find about it pretty soon

As a hacker and a Hackathon addict I am really excited. It's all about building a real business and not only a hack to have fun with a cool API.

I am sure I will learn a lot of stuff from the people that I will meet during this trip.

Let's get started ! Few hours away to a big step to the unknown

PS: get ready to get spammed on your Twitter Timeline with #sxsw if you are not there tweet with #notatsxsw

PSS: check http://startupbus.com as often as you can

Last weekend I attended my 3rd Startup Weekend but this time I was part of the facilitators. This one was focused on Mobile and was held at the AT&T Foundry (awesome building !!).

After being a part of DitchTheTourBus project in November 2010 during Startup Weekend Twin Cities and attenting the Mega SW in Mountain View, CA couple of months ago; I decided to help and join the SW bay team to make these events happen.

It's a really interesting experience to be on the other side. You can help teams to go on the right path and be focused on key points. My ultimate goal is to bring Startup Weekend in the East part of France, where there is (beside of Strasbourg) a lack of this kind of events.

So during the weekend I tried my best to help teams, especially teams that did not have enough time to work on app to demo or to build a website. I shared with them couple of wireframing tools like Balsamiq, Mockingbird or Mockflow.

But I also tried to make the part 2 of a previous article I wrote on my blog couple of months ago.

This article should help StartupWeekend teams but also small startups to create an easy nice-looking website/launch page in less than an hour. You can find the first part of the article about which tools we are going to use here : create a startup webpage in less than 1 hour - tools

The second part is contains in this screencast that shows all the different steps to create your launch page.

Check it out And let me know what you think about it, feel free to ask any questions in the comment section

HOWTO - Create a landing page for your Startup ! from Nicolas Grenie on Vimeo.

Big shout out to Amed and John who are the main organizators of SW in the Bay, also to AT&T guys, SW attendees, and other facilitators !

Give me an A ! Give me a P ! Give me an I ! API power !!

If that sounds like a cheerleader's song, it's totally on purpose. "API" is the new buzzworld in the tech world, with lot of fans and gurus. And you better join them now, if you don't want to be left behind.

What is an API ?

API stands for "Application programming interface" which means in a more understandable English : A hook to access a company's data/website/technology and use it in your own application. A good way to not re-invent the wheel and to sync up with other services.

Who provide APIs?

As a website you want to have as much user as you can because users means business and money (not only, we agree :P) . If you have an API you will let others create their own applications on top of yours based on the datas you are willing to share.

For example you can use Facebook Connect platform and let your users authenticate themself throw they Facebook identity. On your side it is simpler, you get all the data directly from Facebook, no more boring form asking basic informations. From a user perspective it also easier and very smooth, one account to rule them all.

Big players on API :

Facebook

Twitter

Google Map

Youtube

Linkedin

Klout ...

Why APIs are that big ?

Nowadays you could not think about creating an innovative startup without using somebody's else API. As we said before you do not need to re-invent the wheel, somebody else did it before you. It saves you time, money and let you focus on bigger challenges.

You need a video-chat system ? use OpenTok. You need to send SMS ? use Twilio. And so on... It no more "there is an app for that" but "there is an API for that".

APIs are a good way to share/sell your technology and your data with others and make revenues out of it.

How to find the right API ?

With this growing market there is a lot of places to find the API that meets your needs. You check APIs providers like Mashery or 3Scale, they help companies to maintain their API documention and servers. There are also API directories like ProgrammableWeb or Mashape. There is alo Apigee where you can debug APIs in a console.

Now that you know a bit more about APIs, it's time to code

Go to hackathons and meet engineers that are building those awesome stuff.

Having a website is cool, having a social website is better SEO is not the only way to drive traffic to your website anymore, you need a social presence to get more people coming on your site. If are looking for an easy way to make your website social you can use services like AddThis, with a small line of javascript, your users will be able to share your website on main social networks.

That's super easy but you might be the kind of person who likes to manage everything and want to code your own stuff.

Implementing a like button is also super simple go on this page http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/

And get the code you need to implement to have a nice-looking Like button

Recently Facebook add a comment functionality but you may want to disable it. Add these few lines of CSS and the comment box won't show up :

[CSS]
.fb_edge_widget_with_comment{
  position: absolute;
}

.fb_edge_widget_with_comment span.fb_edge_comment_widget iframe.fb_ltr {
  display: none !important;
}

Now you have old-style like button without a comment box Have fun "hacking" Facebook