No this is not just a statement, it is a decision. The reason?

Believe it or not..iCloud!

Yes iCloud is what have me hooked on the idevices for life.

See some of us, we do use our phones as phones as well, and what is the most valuable thing on any phone? The contacts!

I dont want to think what it would mean for my biz and personal life the lost of my contacts.

iCloud is the best service for that matter. I write that cause I have spent more than an hour to sync my wife's droid with google sync.

Oh man! What a disappointment! Yes it is working but nowhere near as iCloud does. From the UX to the actual syncing!

iCloud makes syncing easy, effortless and this is what people need. I'm on Apple family full equipped with macbook to iPad and iPhone, you know what? Syncing between devices, so actually syncing between time frames of my day, is what I won't trade for anything!

That said, I do hope some day, Google follow the example and provide better services on Droid phones!

Teams, winners

First of all, I'm not going to talk about the teams and the ideas, just click on link above. I'm going to talk though about the environment, the feeling and the energy of the event.

Friday evening.

Microsoft's HD in Athens. I love this place, I've been there for the first TedxAthens and fall in love immediately. Although it has significantly change since then as they transfer the Innovation Center from Leoforo Amalias it is still a vire vibrant building (if we ever wanted a building to be vibrant).

So it is Friday evening, people started to gather and in no time there is a queue for registrations. I walk around, I don't see any familiar faces yet, but I do see a lot of young people, younger than me, with a spark in their eyes.

They have a lecture theater and we start taking places in there. Soon the theater is full, we must be around 150 people in there. Now you see 150 people with laptops and tablets and smart phones on their hands, trying to understand the wifi authentication system, make laughs about it, talk about their backgrounds, what brought 'em there etc.

The show begins and soon a new line formatted. It's the pitch line. I think we had 22 -23 pitches on that day. Pitches last only 60sec. There is no buzzer to remind you that you just run out of time, just audience's applause -what better could you ask?-.

*Personal note*
I have prepared my 60sec pitch to start with a question. I never expected and answer. When I did get answer, I was totally disoriented but I did manage to complete.

After the pitches, it's the voting time and after the announcement of the ideas that will go for round two, it is the hard time of recruitment.

You go out there, shouting, begging on your knees, crying or smiling, and try to find the 'right' people for your team. The process again is exciting. Soon the day will over and the teams that most of them where unknown to each other an hour ago, will meet again in the morning to start building a business!

Saturday

On Sat, the magic begins. What is magic, is not the same for everyone. For some magic could be to code a web site in 50hrs, for some to network with people on their professional area, for others to have laughs and spend some fun time, and that can go on for at least 150 more times. For me the magic was the 'Mentors"!

I mean, maybe because I never had the luck to have a Mentor in real life (I mean professionally, academically or whatever), the Mentors was my magic.

People dedicated their personal time, and they put a huge amount of effort to help us understand from business models to marketing issues to technical details. I loved it. If you tell me to go tomorrow on a similar event, I'll do it only to have the chance to speak and debate with them!

Now Saturday as you expect, it was a busy day. Everybody trying to put as much effort as they can on their ideas. So just picture about 150 people in various places, doing different stuff, but all inspired by the same goal. I saw a few twits saying about the energy, and I can put my self in the shoes of an outsider and even consider these twits as cocky. But it is true. The building was full of energy, full of passion. For some hours in your life you do actually believe that this idea you had can actually be a business.

I didn't see any competition. Although there is a prize and we had winners, we didn't have losers, so we didn't have competition. And the most important thing, 150 people from claustrophobic Greece get out of their closets* and lost nothing!!

Sunday

Sunday is the last day in the process. It's the day we have the presentations. Now it's also the day where, potential investors will come. Again a mind blowing experience. Well I consider myself as a sales person no matter the business card. I know sales, I love sales, I live through sales. Nothing new for me here. Investors are like customers of any product right? Wrong!

You don't have a product, so you can come up with any features they might ask. I mean, come on, how hard is it to say something like:

"Here is my idea..it does that and that" ... and if the investor says something like"Yeah but does it does that as well?" ... you can always say "Sure it does!"

Yeah right!

The people at least approached ME, not only knew what my product does, not only knew the revenue streams, the cost structure, the potential, the viability of the idea, they also knew what I know about the product, what I know about the revenue, and bottom of line, they also knew if I'm capable to do it or not.

So Sunday was roughly the day of the serious networking and the presentation.

I'm pretty sure that at one point the presentations will be available on Youtube, so I won't describe them. Just to give you the big picture: Energy!!!

And the Winner is:

Well it doesn't matter. No really! It does matter for the winner, but it doesn't matter for the process, for the experience. To be honest I wanted Niobiumlabs's prize so bad, that if I wasn't so tired I would have proposed them to tattoo their logo on my forehead in exchange. Then again, I do appreciate their feedback and I will start from there.

In fact I got so much and great feedback, and I know all the teams had their equal share on that, where I know how to proceed.

At the end

Startup Weekend -and probably other similar events- is a life changing experience, if you can keep your ego out. And this is something we don't see very often in business.

See you next year!

PS1
As always, I DO NOT PROOF READ, so probably I have a ton of grammar/spelling mistakes.

PS2
Microsoft ppl ROCK!

PS3
I heart Colab

...or eventally will have!

There is quite a bit of talking about Path nowadays, and I think it is time for me to step in and make clear what Path is about.

This is pretty easy as Facebook give you the option to export the Birthday file.

All you need to do is go to Events, scroll at the end where you will find following footnotes:

Events Birthdays Export

Click on Birthdays, now you have a list of your friends, again at the bottom, click on Export.

If you are on a Mac, iCal Subscription will automagically open and you can subscribe to that new calendar.
Again if you use iCloud to sync, the new calendar will appear on iPhone / iPad, no more effort from you.
PS

I have switched from Google Calendar to iCloud. So far very satisfied. Although Google was pretty fast, Push technology is faster, actually is instant!! I won't do that for email though, no need to change reliable Gmail. So basically I use iCloud for iPhone backup, address book backup and now Calendar.

Well you can't call me early adopter as there were 1million downloads of Apple's new OS in the first day, however I did  install the new OSX 10.7 (Lion) the other day.