WeekendApps is a full weekend event to get developers and entrepreneurs together to build and release OpenSocial applications in one weekend. We want to help you build hugely successful applications that grow virally and reach millions of users. Our goal is to assist entrepreneurs to reach their potential, launch their startups, and achieve massive success. We will do that by:

• Bringing in entrepreneurs and developers who have built hugely successful applications to share their secrets.
• Learn the secrets of success on social networks from successful entrepreneurs who started on OpenSocial just recently and in a very quick time reached milions of users.
• Work along side a team of designers, virality and UI experts, and developers from the OpenSocial containers teams.
• The top 4 apps selected by attendees and our judges will receive 1 million banner impressions each to promote their applications and give them a quick boost in traffic.

Think of it as a startups incubator on steroids. We’ll bring the energy and drive of talented people together to help you succeed.

Two Types of Tickets:

• 3-Day hackathon tickets. If you like to participate the full 3 days .
• Demo Night tickets. If you like to come on Sunday evening to watch the demos and connect with developers.

How it started

In 2007, Stanford offered a class that explored the world of designing applications for user acquisition and engagement. Due to Facebook’s extremely powerful application platform, they decided that all the students would build public applications to explore and test the theory they learned in the classroom. This 10 week course resulted in many applications, spanning a user base of 15 million users (and still growing). As we see it, the class owes it success to many types of learning: experts were brought in to talk to the students for short times, great application designers were available full time to the students who had questions, and there was a layer of oversight that was able to spread to the entire class a lesson learned by one group.

If you look at it, that kind of openness is pretty rare in application development. Having a slew of experts come give talks usually costs you hundreds of dollars to attend a conference. Having competent help around full-time means paying a salary. And just try to get your possible competitors to share the secrets to their success, it’s pretty difficult.

The biggest problem with the class, is that not many people attend Stanford. This awesome teaching method wasn’t really available to others who wanted to use it. So, the four of us (edit: now 5 including Peter Min), decided to design a program that addressed these faults. We all met at another event, Startup Weekend, which taught us that a hectically scheduled weekend offers the right amount of time for people to learn as much as they can in what effectively is a cram session. We know everyone is busy, very few have 10 weeks to dedicate full time to a class - so we’re going to pack as much into one weekend as we can.

Note: we are not affiliated with Stanford, or “The Facebook Class,” we certainly have studied their successes and failures very closely to improve our event, but we’ve changed the scope of the class and the end goal. We want you to leave the weekend with a great app of your own, the knowledge of how to effectively succeed on Facebook, and a big network of friends and business partners. This is not an exercise in theory, you might not be able to port all these lessons to other types of app development. This is a practical exercise to get yourself up to speed and briefed on application development for Facebook, and the viral aspects for success.

We will do that by having “hub” groups of awesome designers, businesspeople, marketers, usability experts, and lawyers available to each and every developer team, to answer any questions they may have. These hub groups will also be giving talks to the entire event about the biggest questions they’ve run into and document the big picture issues for everyone’s benefit. There will also be experts in the field that come in to give fast, informative talks, each explaining one tool they use that’s helped them be successful. Each team is expected to share information with the group, so we can all see how the most successful group of the weekend did it.

Please contact us at: info at weekendapps.com if you have any questions or would like to sponsor the event.

We’ll see you there, February 20th, 2009!

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