For those new to the Startup Weekend concept (is there anyone who doesn’t know it? ) Startup Weekend is a 54 hour event. Everything starts on Friday evening, with the participants pitching ideas in front of the audience. Teams are formed on spot, based on the personal preference of every participant. Building the businesses continues on Saturday and Sunday, with the help of a hand-picked group of mentors. The event ends on Sunday evening, when the jury decides the winning project.

Expect to see in the room during the weekend some of the promising Romanian entrepreneurs doing their magic in creating great Internet startups. The group of speakers, mentors and jury is formed of both local and foreign entrepreneurs, advisors and investors.

The winning team is going to be in the books for getting a seed investment from Seedmoney. On top of that my startup consulting company, Cronian Labs, it going to help the winning project with customer development and marketing strategy.

Register now on http://bucharest.startupweekend.org/!

Related posts:

1. Dan Feld from Amazon Web Services speaking in Bucharest

Taking into account the recents growth stats for the iPhone and iPod touch we decided to support the iPhone OS as the first platform. iCartApp.com creates an online store accessible from the mobile browser and offers a seamless shopping experience, a major improvement compared to the standard web shop, with many design elements familiar to iPhone users.

Read more info about the project on its eWiki.ro page and request your private beta invite on the iCartApp.com mobile shopping cart platform homepage.

The project I wrote about in

Feel free to contribute with information about Romanian projects and entrepreneurs. Project is expected to grow gradually in the next couple of months until reaching a critical mass of users and contributors covering most Romanian projects, meetings, startups, investors and other factors involved in the online market.

Feedback is greatly appreciated! Contact me with suggestions or feedback if you feel something should be improved or needs changing.

The main reason for starting this is to help provide an unbiased information source for people looking into the local entrepreneurship effort.

Topics featured into the wiki will include, but not limited to, who the entrepreneurs are, what projects are they working on, who are the local investors and advisors, who are the non-core business professionals with experience in working with entrepreneurs (lawyers, accountants, etc.). Also an entrepreneurship guidebook will be featured with articles about various processes an entrepreneur encounters in his activity (raise capital, make a partnership, hire the right people, etc.).

Anyone will be able to edit, as long as their submitted content is correct and unbiased.

Attached below is the Keynote I have used to support my speech. It is not very self-explanatory, but will offer you a general view of what today’s OpenCoffee was about.

If you want to know more about the project or how you can help please use the comment section or the about page.

Now I must complete the final details and make a great Keynote presentation.

The interview can be read at http://www.startups.ro/node/2107. It is written in Romanian language, but can be easily translated using Google Language Tools.

Actually the great thing about TwiMarket.com is that the best is yet to come. So far we only gathered feedback and shown a proof of concept to small audiences. Very soon the real marketing will begin and start having tons of new ads daily and strong promotion to support our efforts.

Attached below you can find the shorter version of the presentation I did some time ago for the website:

How was this possible?

First, we set a very aggressive deadline. We had to show the project at OpenCoffee Bucharest in 2 weeks time, even without knowing exactly how much time would it take and what are the exact steps involved into getting it done. We are professionals so we made an educated guess. It was correct.

Second, we started as a team of trusted peers with a great attitude. We knew that this is a nice project and we can pull it off. Stuff goes definitely better when you get the change to work with people you like.

Third, we are very organized in our way of working on the project. Everything was done via an online project management tool that I put the time into setting up at first and cleaning up from time to time. To keep people motivated you have to have no dead tasks and no lagging behind milestones. No instant messenger communication was used into creating this project. Phones were only used for congratulating each other for doing a great job and email only to pass on files.

My position in the project was one of manager. I had the vision and kept the people motivated. A general vision on what the project will look like in the end helped a lot.

Attached below is the presentation we did for OpenCoffee Bucharest today, the official place where the project went live.