Many of my entrepreneurial buddies
started their first business
while at university/college.
Many of us are still working
with contacts we made there.
The University Of Waterloo,
the school with tight ties
to the founders of companies
such as Research In Motion
and OpenText,
has taken that one step farther.
Their VeloCity is a student residence
consisting of 70 budding entrepreneurs.
“Three-time VeloCity resident
Barbara Macdonald
enjoyed the experience so much,
she and seven other friends set out
to repeat it,
this time as an ultra-hack-a-thon.
7 Cubed’s ambitious goal:
seven applications
in seven days
with seven programmers
(and one designer).
“We’d arrive at 8:45
and do a post-mortem on the day before,”
Macdonald says.
Then the team would pitch
and rank ideas.
They had three criteria:
“fun to build,
useful for a wide group of people,
and feasible to develop in one day.”
The team coded until 10 p.m.,
when they were expected to release.
Their first app, QuickCite,
takes the sting out of assembling a bibliography.
Feeling bleary-eyed
after finishing that essay?
No problem.
Simply hold your smartphone up
to the book’s barcode
and snap a picture.
Select a formatting style
and QuickCite takes care of the rest.
To date, the software’s had
more than 2,000 paid downloads
from the iTunes and Android stores
and been profiled on
popular blog Lifehacker, PC Magazine,
and ABC News.”
Of course, you don’t have to be in university
to duplicate this experience.
My writing buddies and I
go on writing retreats.
One weekend
with no goal other than
have a publishable story
at the end of it.
Go back to school…
or at least
residence.