Tonight, over 70 people gathered to launch Facebook apps within 24 hours.

The night started with a few speakers. Chris Field, a lawyer from Orrick gave a talk on legal issues for start-ups. His most important comment is “Once a business enters the stream of commerce (sells a product, puts up a website, enters into agreements with vendors/suppliers/partners), it runs the risk of being exposed to lawsuits…). Incorporation is on my list of things to do Monday morning! Nicolas Kokkalis from Best Match gave a talk on his application that computationally selects the best match for you. Nicolas experienced going from zero to million users in about 10 days. He also had to change the initial name of the app because of trademark conflicts with Perfectmatch.

Later in the night, the attendees started to form groups based on ideas and programming languages they know. So, here are the application ideas that people proposed:

• Hitchhiker - your friends help you get from one city to another virtually.
• Dark and Stormy Night - group collaboration on writing a story, you add a part to a story, then pass it along
• Speed dating - chat over IM to meet potential dates
• Implicit dating - select people you want to date from photos
• Give friends to friends
• Social Match - you are matched based on common interests
• Web 3.0 page editor - a canvas page where you can drag and drop content
• App to promote peace
• Finds friends you should be friends with
• Lawrence Lessig for President
• Share blogs you read
• Deface a baby - you can draw or deface baby photos

I sat in with the group that became the Hitchhiker application. As of 10:30PM, their app allows the user to get from one city to another city virtually via friends. The friends will pass you along to other friends closest to that destination. I say “As of 10:30PM” because it seems like the idea is still in development. They did get some advice from Siqi of Friends for Sale. Siqi’s comments were, “keep it simple” and “travel categories are highly monetizable”. So, we have 12 ideas for apps and 24 hours of coding. Tomorrow morning, let’ see how things develop.

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Lee Lorenzen has graciously offered to sponsor the event on behalf of two of his ventures: Adonomics and TheUADA, the latter is still in stealth mode, and I’m really curious to see what happens when it launches in 6 days, 21 hours and 2 minutes. I’m really hoping he’ll give us a sneak peak!

Lee Lorenzen is president and CEO of Altura Ventures, which is the “first Facebook-only VC.” So if you build something really fantastic, don’t be surprised if Lee would like to talk to you. He’ll be at the event on Sunday night and will be giving a lightening talk around 6pm, just prior to the extravaganza.

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You want giveaways? I’ll give you giveaways:

• One copy of Adobe Creative Suite bundle to the lucky winner. Your choice of Web Premium, Design Premium or Production Premium (retail price $999).
• 2 Copies of Adobe Flex Builder 3 to the lucky winners.

Adobe agrees with our championing of the technical entrepreneurs interest, they were kind enough to allow us to give away these awesome prizes to those developers that really make a great app. Bribery is, as always, totally welcome*. This is very generous of Adobe, and I’m really thankful to have them supporting us.

*Bribery is only welcomed in Alabama, Oregon and Ohio. In California events, prizes will always go to legitimate, hard working developer teams who turn out an awesome product. With many thanks to Adobe, we are happy to support hard-working, honest teams.

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I just added a new Schedule & Activities page so you have one place to see all the activities we have planned for you. Check it out, it’s super exciting. Ohh, and that’s not all. We still have other activities we’re planning, and we’ll add them once they’re confirmed.

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Important Edit: It seems that our ticketing scheme was too confusing. We simplified it and introduced a new type of tickets for those who like to attend only on Sunday to watch the demos and listen to what entrepreneurs learned during the weekend. Details here, sale ends 2/18.

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Our goal is to get developers and entrepreneurs together to build hugely successful Facebook applications, and to do everything we can to help them achieve that success. Many of us have organized events and we all quickly learned that many people in the Bay Area say they are going to come to an event and never show up. In fact, the attrition rate of people RSVPing “Yes” and not showing up can sometimes be over 50%. Given the limited space, if we didn’t devise a way to guarantee commitment, a lot of people who wouldn’t show up would RSVP “Yes” because it costs nothing to them. However, by doing that they would bar entry to people who really wanted to show up but couldn’t because the event was fully booked. We thought such a situation would be unfair to the people who wanted to show up but couldn’t, to the people who showed up finding only half the crowd they expected and to our sponsors who entrusted us with their support. That’s why we devised a way that would guarantee commitment:

This how it works: you buy a ticket for $20, and when you show up we reverse that charge and give you back your money on Sunday (minus a 99-cent service fee that EventBrite charges).

You can get your tickets here: http://blog.weekendapps.com/sign-up/

So there you have it. For free less than $1, you get to attend two and a half days full of activity, get help releasing your Facebook application, listen to presentations from successful people, learn the tricks of viral growth on Facebook, and make a lot of friends and business partners. Ohh, and possibly win expensive prizes that our sponsors are giving out (more about that later). Now that’s a great deal

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Update: I updated this post to make it clearer and added a new type of ticket for those who like to watch and learn, but not ready to spend the full weekend working.

First and foremost, this event is for developers and entrepreneurs who want to build and launch Facebook applications. We have two types of tickets:

1. Attend 3 days and work on building Facebook Apps. Choose one of these tickets if:

• You’re a developer, and you want to build and release your first Facebook application, or finish an app you’re working on and launch it, or if you have an App that’s not doing very well and you want to tweak it and relaunch. You want to learn how to make an app successful, and you want to utilize our cross promotion plans to get you started. You don’t need to have prior experience building Facebook apps, but you do need to have experience building Web applications. You can bring your own team, or we’ll match you up with other developers.
• You’re a graphics designer or have experience with CSS/HTML and you want to work during the weekend to help the developer teams make their apps look good and be easy for users to use.
• You’re a marketing ninja, and you want to help developers make their apps go viral. Select the right features, choose the right marketing messages, and appeal to users.

This is a great chance to learn, grow, and build a network. But, due to the nature of Facebook Apps, and the fact that they don’t require much help beyond programming in their early stages, you won’t get equity or a share in the applications you help with, unless you partner with developers who need your continued involvement after the weekend. But the assumption is that you’re volunteering your time to learn and have fun.

2. Attend the Sunday Night Extravaganza. If you’re not in the 3 groups above, or not ready to work throughout the full weekend yet, you’re welcome to attend on Sunday night at 8:00 pm. We’ll have demos of the apps we build, and our entrepreneurs will share what they learned.

Oh, and if you’re an expert who had built successful Facebook applications, or have great experience in areas like monetization, scaling, or marketing and would like to help out by doing a presentation or be available to answer developer’s questions, please contact us at: info (at) weekendapps.com .

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We’re strong believers in controlled chaos, it’s more fun and allows creativity to thrive. Therefore, our schedule for the weekend is high level and leaves space for new activities to be added or updated. We have a lot of plans, but we’ll give you the overall schedule now and fill in the details later.

Date and Time:

The weekend of February 22nd - 24th, 2008.

Friday 6:00pm - 12:00 am
Saturday 9:00am - 12:00am
Sunday 9:00am - 12:00am

Friday:
- Getting together and organization. It’s about the community, know the other teams and make new friends.
- Quick presentations to get things started.
- Start coding

Saturday:
- Every 3 hours:

- Team status updates about development progress.
- Lightning Presentation (10 minutes) about development, UI advice, viral features, and good practices.

- Teams aim to release first draft of their apps by 9:00pm to have time for debugging before they day ends.

Sunday:
- Every 3 hours:

- Team status updates about traffic and user feedback.
- Lightning Presentations (scaling, monetization, user experience)

- Organize cross-promotion efforts.
- Cross-team activities for socializing and to sharing experiences.

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So we got the perfect space for our event. The amazing folks at The Enterprise Network (TEN) offered to host us and make their facilities available for the whole weekend. The space is really nice and the fact that TEN is a startup incubator makes it a perfect fit. They’re a walking distance from the CalTrain station, and there is a lot of parking if you’re driving. And the view from the building is really nice. Here are a few pictures.

TEN’s Santa Clara Venture Accelerator
2953 Bunker Hill Lane, Suite 400,
Santa Clara, CA 95054
phone: 408-282-3500

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