Spent the weekend coding, networking and making a pitch at Startup Weekend Tokyo. It was a good time and I learned a lot. Started Saturday with breakfast and networking for an hour or so. Then we sat a different table by our primary expertise. I was at the developer table, there were also marketing, design and idea tables. Dave McClure with Geeks On A Plane got the startup activities going with a session of half baked dot com . My team cam up with FreshYopparai.com (FreshDrunk.com in English). Then it was on to the first pitches of the session. any one who wanted to could get up and give a two minute pitch and then the best 5 would be chosen by vote and those 5 would be developed over the next day. The pitches were translated between English and Japanese by Samuel Baron. He did a great job. I am amazed by the ability to remember a a minute of pitch and smoothly translate it to a another language. My pitch did not get many votes but I did get some interest and question if I was going to do follow through and try the startup or if the pitch ws just for the weekend. (I don't know the answer to that yet.)
I ended up joining the iPhone Yoga app team. Yoichi Shirakata was the idea man. In marketing was Yoshiko Yamamoto and Loren Fykes. Design - Gohsuke Takama. Programing Aaron Franco, Takashi Kaneko and I. The Saturday afternoon was spent discussing what we should make and why. Market size, competition and product features. When we had agreed we had a feasible product for a business, I started coding. From here my perceptions of what was was going around me become quite limited. I went into head down mode and only had one ear on the surrounding conversations. Which was mainly in Japanese so I would have needed to concentrate to follow it. The app design did not include any 3D features but Unity3D was still great for prototyping work. I had some basic features running on the iPhone within an hour so. Having something on a phone that people could see and feel (it used the accelerometer) help my (and others I think) energy level. The ended around 21:00 and people went home or off to the bar.
The second day started with breakfast and a little hanging out, but people were pretty focused on getting to work on their project. We were down to 4 people in our project. This was not a complete surprise some of our team had told us at the beginning had told us they would not be able to come the second day. I spent the morning on twitter stuff for the app, getting it to tweet the right information in the right format,with some help from Aaron. Aaron was working on the website while I did app work. Gohsuke and Yoichi were working on the business plan and presentation. We got a call for two a sentence description for the panels summary sheet. I came up from coding to join that discussion a little. We then got a quick lunch in our room.
Time for the presentations, there was a panel 6 people I think. I dozed off a few times until it was time for our presentation. When we went up to the front and started Gohsuke going through the power point I realized I had not really seen all the slides and not in order. I found myself thinking "Wow this is a real business plan". I gave the live demo of using Wubble (our product) to track your balancing time. We took some questions from the panel and later I saw a nice tweet from Dave McClure "Wubble presented compelling idea for suite of mobile fitness apps for jp women". Wubble took first place among the entries as best startup business plan/pitch.
We then had a Japanese TechCrunch interview and things wrapped up.
Here are some videos. Our presentation is at about 1:30 in the first presentation(1/2) video and the the Awards presentation video.
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