And the Winner of Startup Weekend Akureyri is...

Drum roll... Entrepreneurship! Yes, the winner over the weekend is the concept of Entrepreneurship. It was exciting to see over 100 people working on a problem, listening to feedback and presenting their ideas and getting recognized for their effort. As much as I like the idea of people getting recognition for their ideas, Ideas do not equate to launching a business. I have written about "Startup Ideas - Why ideas are not the problem". There were 19 teams that presented their ideas. The companies that I thought really created a business over the weekend were:

Video taken from previous Startup Weekend Events in Iceland

• Campalo.com and Campalo.is - a booking and reservation application over the web for Camp sites around iceland
• Disulistar.is - a hyper local curated list of things for everything from Top 5 restaurants for business meetings in Reykjavik to Task list to do press release. You pay a small fee for not having to spend the time to research the list yourself

Of course both of these companies did not win the award because their idea was not revolutionary or "cool" but both of these probably will be able to build a sustainable business. I think the other ideas and teams need to be recognized as well. Here is the link to a slideshow of pictures from my Twitter stream.

1. Whale Buddy - A Multilingual App for Smart Phones that enables a better experience for tourists on a Whale watching tour
2. Life Line - Making the rescue suits and life jackets fitted with GPS device, Nano technology and Diode lights to enable finding the missing persons at sea.
3. Viral Trade - An online market place for digital goods used in online games
4. Tannstra - A toothpick made from Icelandic straw
5. Active Site - A photo market for pictures taken underwater off the coast of Akureyri, I guess it could be applied for any all underwater pictures.

There were 12 more companies, I have to admit did not find them very interesting that is probably because of my lack of understanding of Icelandic. 

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SVEF or The Association of Icelandic Web Masters

I was invited to speak at the annual meeting of SVEF the Association of the Icelandic Web Masters. I was very impressed to see the Mayor of Reykjavik speaking about how he loves the Internet. Anyways, this was like the Oscars of Internet Web Page designers and implementors. I was impressed by the turnout and quite humbled to even be given a stage to talk about something that I believe in. I have written about it here "Iceland can create the next Google". The quality and the sophistication in the implementation of the websites that were nominated was world class. I wish this work gets publicized to the rest of the world and I spoke about that during the event as well. Orkusalan a energy management company won the most accolades. The city of Reykjavik also had a couple of awards for its website betrireykjavik.is. Here is the full list of the awards (disclaimer: I used Google Translate for the categories, here is the link to the original website article) :

• The best Icelandic website: Orkusalan.is
• Athyglisverðast web site, in the opinion of members sleeping:  BetriReykjavik.is
• The best look and feel: Orkusalan.is
• Original web site: BetriReykjavik.is
• The best campaign: Icelandair.is/uppahaldsborgin
• Best Mobile: m3.siminn.is/airwaves
• Best approach, blogs and video content: Snoop-Around.com
• The best entertainment and news: ruv.is
• The best service and information web site: Landsbankinn.is
• The best sales and promotional web site with more than 50 employees: Landsbankinn.is
• The best sales and promotional web site with fewer than 50 employees: Orkusalan.is

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First Lean Startup Meet up in Reykjavik

I was very excited to see more than 25 people show up for the first meet up of the Lean Startup movement in Reykjavik. I wrote about our planning meeting earlier. It was interesting to learn about all the different people who were there and what all they wanted to learn from having a regular session on discussing the experiences and learning around the Lean Startup methodology. It was obvious which group was missing... yes, it was the Investors group and the Management group. We all pledged to bring those groups into the fold in the future meeting. Gudjon the facilitator kicked off the meeting and we discussed about the book and Pétur Orri Sæmundsen gave a good speech about how Agile + Lean = Nirvana or something like that :) We broke up into groups of 8 and discussed the topics we wanted to cover in the future sessions. Our group came up with the following:

1. Waste vs Value
2. How do you determine value
3. Business as a Hypothesis (this is the one I missed in the original post)
4. Pivot stories and the learnings from them
5. Fail stories and the learnings from them

I am sure I am missing something, never the less each of the groups agreed to post their list to the facebook event page. Alli, shared with our group a couple of videos which are good summaries, here they are:

1. Eric Ries - The Lean Startup 30 min intro
2. Joshua Sieden's talk on replacing requirements with hypothesis

Eric Ries from Repertoire on Vimeo.

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