Help Send Us To Startup Camp + Foo Camp

Hey Everyone,

We’ve always believed in an open culture at Publictivity, and trying to get to Foo Camp/ Startup Camp held by O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures is no exception.    A month ago, I dropped my entire life and moved to Silicon Valley, while the rest of our team (by team, I mean 2 other people) stayed in Miami,FL. It’s the American (Geek) Dream, but not an easy one with having to leave behind anyone and everything.  Everyone I already know and continue to meet seems to ask me one question… Why did you move? Was it fundraising?  Was it the “dream”?  Was it a change of scenery?  It wasn’t any one of those things specifically, but something a hell of a lot more important: people.  Silicon Valley is endowed with people that will blow your mind.  These people encompass such a wide spectrum that they are other entrepreneurs, potential investors, biz dev partners, like minded hackers, or just intelligent people to talk with about technology until 6 AM.  When you put together all of these amazing people in a geographic area, you start conversations that help spark great ventures such as Apple, HP, YouTube, Facebook, Netscape, and more.  

On July 10-11 at Startup Camp and July 11-13 at Foo Camp, many of these great conversations are going to be happening with some of the world’s most intelligent minds.  I believe that we will learn a ton from these conversations, but that we can also give a ton back to the community through our own experiences.  We’re working on two areas that we could talk about all day that are not only important to O’Reilly ATV , but the entire community as a whole: open source software and information management tools/open data.  

We believe that open source software is what drives startups and innovation.  With tools such as MySQL, PHP, Linux, Eclipse, and more, we have seen the democratization of what was once a selective and expensive proposition… creating a web app.  Frank and I started our first company when we were both just about 20 years old, and realized through the process that entrepreneurs need tools to run their business.  Most of these tools are expensive, disconnected, and flat out suck.  We knew there had to be a better way to give entrepreneurs and companies the tools they needed to run their business, but at the open source level.  What if Sharepoint, Lotus Notes, and more were open source?  They’re powerful tools that significantly improve a startup, but often too expensive or over burdening for startups to deal with.  What if we added to the MySQL, PHP, Linux, and other open source tools, a great open source solution that let companies become more productive not only through the apps we’ve built, but eventually the other apps developers build on our platform.  The same way PHP, MySQL, and more dramatically reduced the costs needed to technically startup a company, is the same way Publictivity will dramatically reduce the costs for running your startup’s business processes.

If the past paragraph described why we created Publictivity, then this describes more of the what.  We’re creating a new way for companies to organize and share information.  Entrepreneurs and companies are so overwhelmed with information, and at the end of the day the best way to organize + share this information is through a horrible one-two punch of excel spreadsheets (organize) and a loose string of emails (share).  With Publictivity we’re giving companies a way to create data structures that matter to them, whether it be to manage contacts, track press coverage, log customer support issues, or track investment deals as a VC.  The possibilities are endless, because the structures are open, allowing companies to easily create forms for their data in a way that is relevant to them.  Think allowing companies to do with data, what Freebase has allowed consumers to do on the web. Last, but just as important, we make sure that any and all information can be shared socially and flow easily to the rest of the organization.  In short, we’re taking as many concepts from the social web, and applying them to companies.  If we can make information flow inside of companies as fast as consumer web tools such as Twitter and Facebook, things are going to change big time.

Maybe we’re 100% wrong, and things will blow up in our face.  Trying to change the world through software is as risky and uncertain as things can get.  I am certain about one thing though: we’ll not only learn a lot from Startup Camp / Foo Camp, but more importantly help contribute all the knowledge we’ve learned over the past 2 years while building Publictivity. Hopefully, we can join in on the 10-13th along with 5-7 other startups to start discussing the amazing things we’re all doing, but also will be inspired to do.

-Jason Baptiste

 

Update:

 

So about a week ago we posted the presentation and slides on Hacker News. We got our asses handed to us.  In short: Great presentation, but

 

a) Too long (27 slides vs 12 now)

b) Hard for people to simply understand what we do

c)  No straight forward use case.  What are we going to change? ie- this is how things work now and this is how things will change once we exist. 

 

Attached below is our full pitch in video form along with a PDF of the slides + notes:

 

View PDF Slides on Scribd