This past weekend I was a judge at a weekend long programming competition at USC. It was very kind of the ACM to ask me to do it and I definitely had a lot of fun. Here was the situation: something on the order of 10 teams of students were assigned the theme of "Change in your Pocket" on Friday evening, and had until Sunday evening to make a mobile phone application. Nearly all of the teams had no prior experience whatsoever with iPhone or Android development, so the fact that they had anything working at all on Sunday evening that was more than the most trivial application is extremely impressive. Hopefully this fact alone inspires people reading this - if these kids can put together what they did in 48 hours, there's nothing stopping you from making an awesome mobile app.
I don't want to post exactly what they came up with quite yet because many of the teams plan on doing a legit App Store release, so I'll wait for that to happen. But suffice it to say it gives me faith in humanity after seeing abject shit like this for so long.
I ran into an exec from another LA startup over there who was a very nice fellow and he said some things that make me want to punch the web in the face. I mentioned how this amazing talk by David Heinemeier Hansson at startup school was full of all kinds of great old fashioned advice like "your company should make money" and "there was a time when $1,000,000 was a lot of money." He responded by saying that 37signals is a lifestyle company. I said I hesitate to call a >= $30,000,000 business a lifestyle company. He said they're not going to get VC funding with their attitude.
Somehow this perverse notion that getting funding is a signifier for success has got itself into web businesses. It is as if the lifecycle of the web company is supposed to be 1. idea 2. launch 3. get funding 4. DONE. As if getting people to actually buy what you make is secondary.
Here are some pics from the Hackathon event.
And here's one of me being a judgmental prick whilst drinking redbull.
Anyways. Hooray humanity!