This will be a great weekend building on the experience gained in Startup Weekend Toronto and Facebook Weekend - check it out - IT

Rails

Symfony

Matt

The app we built is a simple tool that allows you to post to multiple Twitter accounts. We learned a ton during the experience so I’d like to share some of those lessons with you.

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Some great tips for the next startup gathering . . . - IT

photo credit: snakemanrob

When I met with Jim Rogers one day this spring, he tossed back two double espressos in a single hour. A charming and natty 60-year-old, Rogers is the chief executive of the electric company Duke Energy. But he has none of the macho, cowboy stolidity you might expect in an energy C.E.O. Instead, he lives to brainstorm. He spends more than half his time on the road, a perennial fixture at wonky gatherings like the Davos World Economic Forum and the Clinton Global Initiative, corralling “clean energy” thinkers and listening eagerly to their ideas. The day we met, he was brimming with enthusiasm for a new approach to solar power. Solar is currently too expensive to make economic sense, according to Rogers, because the cost to put panels on a roof is greater than what a household would save on electricity. But what if Duke bought panels en masse, driving the price down, and installed them itself — free?

“So we have 500,000 solar units on the roofs of our customers,” he said. “We install them, we maintain them and we dispatch them, just like it was a power plant!” He did some quick math: he could get maybe 1,000 megawatts out of that system, enough to permanently shutter one of the company’s older power plants. He shot me a toothy grin.

Even in this era of green evangelism, Rogers is a genuine anomaly. As the head of Duke Energy, with its dozens of coal-burning electric plants scattered around the Midwest and the Carolinas, he represents one of the country’s biggest sources of greenhouse gases. The company pumps 100 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, making it the third-largest corporate emitter in the United States.

Yet Rogers, who makes $10 million a year, is also one of the electricity industry’s most vocal environmentalists. For years, he has opened his doors to the kinds of green activists who would give palpitations to most energy C.E.O.’s. In March, he had breakfast with James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia theory, which regards the earth as a single, living organism, to discuss whether species can adapt to a warmer earth. In April, James Hansen, a climatologist at NASA and one of the first scientists to publicly warn about global warming, wrote an open letter urging Rogers to stop burning coal — so Rogers took him out for a three-hour dinner in Manhattan. “I would dare say that no one in the industry would talk to Lovelock and Hansen,” Rogers told me. Last year, Rogers astonished his board when he presented his plan to “decarbonize” Duke Energy by 2050 — in effect, to retool the utility so that it emits very little carbon dioxide.

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The success of Word Press in attracting a large blogging community has led to some new attention from hackers. There is currently a vulnerability that allows hackers to insert links into the code that affects Ad Sense. It manifests by the usual “adult” ads showing up on our home page.

We have been removing this code on almost a daily basis but until a new release is out fixing this vulnerability we will continue to have some of these ads show up.

So, we would like to apologize to you for anything inappropriate that may show up. We are working to fix things and I know that the Word Press folks are working hard to fix this.

A question for the hackers . . . wouldn’t it be more interesting for you to take that great talent for tweaking things and put it to more positive use? There are a huge number of charities and not-for-profit organizations that could really use your help and talent. Try volunteering just once, see the results in the faces in those you are helping and I really think you’ll get hooked. Just a thought . . .

In the meantime, please enjoy the site. We try to bring some of the most interesting innovation stories available together here to keep you both up to speed and excited about future possibilities.

Enjoy.

photo credit: spike55151

“We get a ton of pitches at TechCrunch every single day. It is a deluge we can hardly keep up with. Some are amusing, some are horrible, and a select few rise to the level of deserving a post. The large majority, though, never see the light of day. We thought: Why not let startups connect directly with our audience, and let the audience decide which ideas are worthy and which ones are not?

So today we are launching a little video project here at TechCrunch called Elevator Pitches. The premise is pretty simple: Startup founders and CEOs give us a 60-second video pitch about their companies, and our audience (that would be you) votes them up or down. You can think of it as a YouTube for elevator pitches (and, in fact, we are hosting the videos on YouTube and simply embedding them on the site).”

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This is the 3rd year for ToJam and each year it keeps getting better and better.
photo credit: the JoshMeister

Good luck and get some sleep You’re going to need it!

Have a great building weekend.

We are working on a couple of major projects that are supposed to launch tomorrow afternoon. Will be back with all of the information later today. Just to tease you . . . it is going to focus on the pet food recall anniversary from last year.

Stay tuned . . .

Let it be known that IW (Innovation Wednesdays) are hereby adjourned until further notice.

We all got a little tired chipping icicles off of one another

We will resume again when the temperatures return to saner conditions and our heating system joins us in the 21st century.

This has been a blast up to this point - a very interesting experiment that will be resumed bent into a slightly different shape  shortly:)

Stay tuned and thanks again for your enthusiasm and just showing up!

ron

photo credit: ericrobinson

So, tonight is officially CANCELLED!

We will resume the regular fun and hostilities next Wednesday with some very exciting new ideas and new faces.

Be safe out there in the snow and ice . . .