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Hello everybody,

Idea Contest 2.0 is joining forces with a couple of friends to bring you the ultimate entrepreneurial experience: Startup Weekend. About 2 years ago I participated in the first Startup Weekend in San Francisco and last November I organized Startup Weekend Athens. I can say without hesitation that Startup Weekend is by far one of the best tech events I've ever been to - and I've been to many. The idea is simple, and similar to Weekend Apps (in fact, Weekend Apps was inspired by Startup Weekend and the Stanford Entrepreneurship Week):

Go from idea to launch in a weekend.

You can pitch your idea or join another's. You can help more than one team. You become a witness to all the stages in the process of building a startup, from all the roles (development, biz-dev, PR/Marketing, UX and Graphic design etc.) and what's more important you can participate in all of them. People gather around ideas, and the hierarchy is horizontal not vertical. In other words, everybody in the team is equally valuable for their expertise, and there is no "boss". If there is one, it arises organically not artificially, so there is no friction or politics.

It is an invaluable learning experience and an opportunity to meet, work and make new friends - while creating what could be your next business.

Held at Microsoft's San Francisco Offices in downtown San Francisco, there will be schwag, free food, soft drinks, snacks and lots of creative energy. It promises to be a blast :)

Idea Contest 2.0 has discount codes for its members. To buy your ticket, go to: http://sf2startupweekend.eventbrite.com and use the discount code: d20swsf09

Act fast. All the previous Startup Weekends I went or organized sold out quickly.

Hope to see you there!

Yours,

Alexandros Pagidas.

A full weekend event to get developers and entrepreneurs together to build and release Facebook applications in one weekend. We want to help you build hugely successful Facebook applications that grow virally and reach millions of users. Our goal is to assist entrepreneurs to reach their potential, launch their startups, and achieve massive success. We will do that by:

- Bringing in entrepreneurs and developers who have built hugely successful applications to share their secrets.
- We will have a team of awesome designers, marketers, usability experts, and lawyers available to you to help you and answer your questions.
- We're partnering with the great folks at The Enterprise Network to lend their guidance and support to you for free during the weekend.
- We're planning an ad-exchange network to get applications to promote each other and overcome the initial challenge of reaching the first 10,000 users.
- We'll have all teams share their experiences so we can learn from each others successes and mistakes.

Think of it as a weekend incubator on steroids. We'll bring the energy and drive of talented people together to create an unstoppable force. But this is only the start. We except that the partnerships and friendships that form during this weekend will result in a lot of future ventures and successes that we'll continue to hear about for a long time to come.

Check our web site for more details: http://weekendapps.com/ . And specifically, read these two posts:

Who should attend:
http://blog.weekendapps.com/2008/02/10/who-should-attend/

Ticket Price:
http://blog.weekendapps.com/2008/02/11/the-tickets-are-free-sort-of/

And Buy Tickets here:
http://weekendapps.eventbrite.com/

Let's face it - a lot of us are busy working on projects that pay the bills but don't really fulfill our idealistic aspirations. We'd like to contribute to something that has significance in the grander scheme of things, without deserting what we are currently working for. Is there a way?

Enter Idea Contest 2.0 - Here you can brainstorm in teams composed of people with diverse skill sets (founders, developers, entrepreneurs, VCs, marketing, PR etc.) and within 15 minutes come up with an idea that could improve our world, even by a little.

But you don't have to quit your job, or commit to any responsibility that will burden your already busy schedule. Think freely without worrying. And if your team wins the vote at the end, build the idea enough to have something to show for it and we might get a chance to show off the idea in one of the popular New Tech meetups in the Bay Area (SF New Tech, SFBeta, Silicon Valley New Tech, STIRR etc.) and try to AUCTION it off. Feeling magnanimous? Ask only to be acknowledged as the originator of the idea. Want a cut of the action? Why don't you ask for a percentage of the profits in exchange for some of your time every month in the form of advice and expertise to the team that won the bid? Don't want to auction it off but would rather do it yourself? You can do that too.

What matters is tapping the creative capital of the Bay area and using it for some good without the risk of a personal crash. Sounds good? Sign up!