Getting my Kinect Hacks on

After someone hacked the kinect and another person made a MIDI music app back in December, I quickly decided to reverse my decision to buy one. Magically Amazon still had them and I had one in house before the end of the week.

The game responsiveness has improved since I test it out back at a Macy’s in July.

Hooking it up over my XP install with the NUI install has not brought success but in Win7 it worked great. So now I have to consider whether to upgrade or not.

The plan is to use it to control a large Tetris installed in a store window. Whee. Updates should be place in the new project page made just for this idea.

W2Labs 003 is here

On Friday, I went to the W2labs reunion at Zeki’s bar. It was loud but the new batch of founders were very interesting and hungry for advice.

I can’t wait to see what they come up with. I am eager to install a new android app or two.

Additionally, the @jenshine from the @stylegroupie team left us some great bites from @sigbites.

What Startup Camps Can Do to Create Hardware Products: Reflections from my Women 2.0 Labs Cohort

It’s the night before my team’s last presentation and I am reflecting on my experience. Namely that as a hardware person, I spent most of my time feeling like a fish out of water because most of the focus was on web-based business concepts. Furthermore, personalities often shape who ends up in a team instead of appropriate skill sets. I like my team, but I wondered how to get more out of the program and/or meet more people with similar interested and industry experience.

This is the list of ideas I have to make these types of programs more friendly to hardware or other industries that have long development times:

1. You need a high concentration of people with the right skills. Your chances of getting these people increase if you sell a specific ticket for hardware/firmware people or have a check box for them on your camp’s application.

2. If you are promoting a specific methodology such as rapid prototyping model, you need to show how to apply it to hardware or these other long-horizon industries (medical, biotech, pharmaceuticals, ICs, etc…).
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[W2Labs] Week 2- Holy Sh!t. Where the Hell Are We!

It was a day my team was dreading: Thursday presentations.

Every week over the 5 weeks, each Women 2.0 Labs team presents the development of their idea and gets a chance to be properly torn down by the guest lecturer. The feedback is a once in a lifetime chance but it can be a brutal wakeup call for teams who are deeply drinking the kool-aid all week. This week was particularly special because it was our first longer presentation and more importantly, it featured guest speaker Steve Blank whose book we had been reading since day 0.

Leading up to Thursday, my team had done a lot of customer discovery work on our Walk This Way mobile guidebook application. The truth was, out of 260+ survey responses and 4 personal interviews with guides and travelers, we could not hone in on a true pain that someone was willing to pay for. The market was all over the place. Even worse, the closest pain point we could find led us to believe we would just make a real-time ad-hoc meetup service which we called PosseUp. By Wednesday night at Hacker Dojo, my team was not excited about the business.

Team Frankendeal working

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Prototype lecture today

I found out I couldn’t park at the pier until after I was at 4th and King. Therefore, I was late to breakfast. Mike and I met for breakfast and to talk development. We have a set of features we want to focus on for the next five weeks on a common mobile dev platform. Can you guess which one?

After meeting breakfast, I went to True Ventures to hear Anna Billstrom talk about prototyping and process. Then I am getting an intro to Ruby on Rails.

Your adventure starts…. Tuesday

I was recently accepted into Women 2.0 Labs for this fall. It is the second cohort to endeavor on creating a startup in 5 weeks.

If you wanna see what I’ve done in the past, checkout this video of my project:

I am currently prepping for next week by:

* finishing out my last day of work at my current job. No, you aren’t expected to quit you day job for this but part of the reason I applied was because I wasn’t happy at work.
* Brainstorm workable ideas (I am meeting with a friend to hash out some ideas tonight),
* Brush up my personal “elevator pitch”,
*Fix my motorcycle