WeekendApps Aims to Launch 20+ Startups in One Weekend

Santa Clara, CA, February 21, 2008 --(PR.com)-- A new entrepreneurship project rides the trend of declining cost and barriers to entry to Web startups and aims to bring teams of entrepreneurs, developers, designers, and marketers together on an ambitious mission to build and release 20 different Web applications in one weekend. In addition to building software products, WeekendApps, a weekend incubator on steroids, as described by its organizers aims to help participants start successful businesses as well. There will be an attorney on site to help with incorporation and legal questions, and the participants in the weekend program will also attend a number of seminars and panels by experienced entrepreneurs with established track records. "The goal is to launch as many startups as possible in a short period of time, and to create a network of entrepreneurs that cooperate and help each other to increase everyone's chances of success," said Waleed Abdulla, one of the organizers.

To allow for better cooperation and knowledge exchange, the event will focus on one type of Web products: Facebook Applications; which have gained popularity recently after Facebook, the social networking star, opened up it's platform to outside developers to extend it with additional features and services. The applications to be launched in the weekend will also participate in a free ad-exchange program that will give all of them a big marketing boost that new applications need to get over the early market resistance. "The approach that Weekend Apps is taking feels not unlike an attempt to condense the spirit of the 3-month Y Combinator mentorship program into a single weekend," said Josh Catone in a blog post on the popular technology blog: ReadWriteWeb.

The five organizers of Weekend Apps met at an event called Startup Weekend, in November 2007 in San Francisco, and then crossed paths again at another event in Stanford University in which students of a class about building Facebook Applications demoed their successful applications and showed the great potential of teams working together, and that was the trigger. "As we see it, the class owes it success to many types of learning: experts were brought in to talk to the students for short times, great application designers were available full time to the students who had questions, and there was a layer of oversight," said Tyler Willis, one of the organizers. "The biggest problem with the class, is that not many people attend Stanford. This awesome teaching method wasn't really available to others who wanted to use it."

Weekend Apps is open to everyone to participate, and it will take place on February 22nd - 24th, 2008 at The Enterprise Network's Venture Accelerator building in Santa Clara, CA.

For more details, visit the project web site at: http://www.weekendapps.com/ . Or contact the organizers at press@weekendapps.com .

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