I’ve been playing around with the publisher tools for 4INFO.net and have put together a convenient way to search the “twit-o-sphere” for a keyword via your cell phone using a text message.
4INFO is a text messaging information service that lets you request and subscribe to a wide range of information from various publishers via your cell phone. I’ve signed up as a publisher and have reserved the keyword: TSCAN.
Here’s how it works:
Send an SMS/text message to 44636 in this format: TSCAN <keyword>
For example, if I sent a text message to 44636 with the message:
TSCAN obama
I would get back a short menu of the most recent “tweets” with the name “obama” in them. I could then reply to that message with the corresponding menu number to see the entire “tweet.” Seem confusing? Give it a try! It really works.
I have no idea if this is useful to anyone, but just thought it was a fun way to learn about 4INFO’s publisher services.
This past weekend, I participated in Bloomington Startup Weekend. And, while I’m not yet allowed to talk specifics about the resulting company/product we created that weekend, I can share what an amazing experience it was. 100 technologists from around the area gathered together to bring their experience, expertise, and talent to produce a company and community in one weekend. Developers, Marketers, Business Developers, Project Managers, Designers, Lawyers, and more spent 52-some hours at City Hall in Bloomington, Indiana working towards the same goal.
It was a truly unique experience that I would highly recommend to anyone with even the slightest interest. It really does give you an idea of what it’s like inside a startup company, only much condensed. There are highs, lows, excitement, tension… it’s a lot of fun. I’ve been describing it as the only time I’ve enjoyed being annoyed. You kinda have to experience it to know what I mean. Hopefully, I should be able to give out the details of the product and company we’ve created in the coming weeks.
With that said, I highly encourage anyone in the Indianapolis region to head over to IndyStartup.com to proclaim your interest in having a Startup Weekend in Indianapolis. That site will also direct you to the Startup Weekend City Vote project where you can vote for Indianapolis to be one of the next locations (very important).
I’ll be broadcasting live from Bloomington Startup Weekend sometime after 5pm today.
Here is the link to the UStream page: http://ustream.tv/channel/bloomington-startup-weekend
Have you ever wondered what a group of highly talented and motivated people could accomplish in a weekend? Could they start a company from concept to completion?
Startup Weekend answers that question and more. A unique three-day experience, Startup Weekend brings the best and brightest people together in a local office space to select the concept, break into teams, and develop the product, marketing and revenue model.
Bloomington Startup Weekend is coming February 8th - 10th!
…and I’ve got a golden ticket! Well, it isn’t golden, but it feels golden! I am incredibly psyched up about this unique experience. Probably because I only found out about it a few days ago and signed-up almost immediately, and realize that the last thing I can afford to give up is an entire weekend of not working my side business. But, for some reason, this is making me just crave the experience more.
In all honesty, some of the execution that has come out of past Startup Weekends have left me a bit underwhelmed. I’m sure I’ll change my tune a bit after having gone through the experience. I just had hoped to look back at previous events and seen bigger, more financially viable ideas. I understand it is only a weekend, but if 75+ great minds can develop an amazingly great idea, and crank out a rough, working prototype in 3 days, and emerge with a core group of determined individuals to push the company forward over the next 6 months, I think it has great promise. Alternatively, trying to crank out a finished, polished product in 3 days kinda forces you to set your sights a bit lower. So, I hope at the Bloomington event we can aim high and leave with (at least) half a product instead of a half-assed product.
If you are in driving distance and are so inclined, I highly recommend joining me in a couple weeks at what should be a very memorable event. Look for live updates and likely some streaming video on this blog during the marathon weekend.
I’m very pleased to say that Smaller Indiana is one of the local sponsors of the event!
This is only an educated guess based off some exploration of Mosh Mobile’s “temporarily offline” website and a small scoop (if I’m right), but it looks like Indiana-based Mosh Mobile might be offering Blackberry Pearl service as a part of their free cell service offering. They will make an official announcement later today at 1:00 PM.
Their service is still in closed beta, and their service area appears to only be northern Indiana and much of Michigan. However, their potential service model is quite interesting. Through agreements with their service providers, they can offer free mobile phone service in exchange for sending you up to 3 “dialogs” from one of their sponsors. The “dialog” could come in the form of a survey, a free game or a video. All you have to do is “answer” these dialogs to maintain your free service.
You can learn more at this page that, for some reason, is still online despite their site being down until their 1PM announcement today: http://www.moshmobile.com/learn.php.
I’ve been reading about all the recent changes at Facebook like integrating information feeds for their user’s actions at other sites and the privacy wall that continues to get lower. A Techcrunch article talks about competitors for Facebook in the “college students only” market and how viable any of them are. Many of the comments on that story point to a resistance by Facebook users to ever want to leave what they have with Facebook. There is, however, one angle to this social networking concept most are missing.
While the initial idea won’t seem as cool or even trustworthy to most students at first glance, University-sponsored social networks are a hugely overlooked opportunity.
Indiana University, as an example, has over 98,000 students spread across 9 campuses. That’s almost 100,000 users already tied together in the same system with usernames and passwords. If IU were to build out a social network, they would immediately have these users in the system (actually using the system is another thing). While this isn’t anywhere near Facebook’s millions of users, I’d be willing to bet that the day to day interactions of the average college student on Facebook is 90% related to his/her friends at the same campus.
In order for this to work, IU would have to be a bit liberal on students usage (read: free speech) and not censor everything it doesn’t like. But, with a strong word-of-mouth campaign and support from a few key on-campus student groups, the social network could take off quite fast. What IU would end up with is a closed social network in an excellent niche. With modest advertising, the site would pay for itself easily. The university would also have a new medium for communication with the student body.
Parting thoughts:
- Savvy IU developers can create a dead-simple Facebook application that exports a file containing your relationships with other IU students for easy import into the IU social network, thereby easing the transition and acceptance
- Savvy businesspeople create a business model around building closed social network systems and selling them to major universities like IU
- An interesting idea would be the option to “connect” one closed social network with another. For example, Indiana University has a campus at Indianapolis called IUPUI it shares with Purdue University.
- My main point here is that universities always have and always will have an amazingly strong position for creating social networks like these because of their endless data on and access to their students (what classes you are taking, who is in your classes, what books you need, how you are doing in a certain class, what books you check out, how often you print things out in the library, where you are logging on from in campus, and so on… think of the Facebooks apps that would exist if that kind of information was available).
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