StartPad Countdown Series

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This Startpad Countdown is sponsored by:

This month, StartPad presents a talk by Mano Marks, a Developer Programs Engineer at Google. Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just upload your application, and it's ready to serve your users. In this talk, Mano Marks will go over the basics of Google App Engine, and walk through creating a sample application.

What: StartPad Countdown 5 -- The App Engine That Google Built
Who: Mano Marks
When: 6:00 pm, Tuesday August 26th, 2008
Where: StartPad offices -- 811 First Avenue, Suite 480, Seattle, WA 98104
Cost: Free!

Pizza and drinks will be served.

About the presenter: Mano Marks is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google, where he helps developers work with Google Geo products, particularly KML. Mano has a MIMS degree from UC Berkeley’s School of Information, and has a history of working in social service non-profits.

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The Startpad Countdown series is sponsored by:

This month, StartPad presents a discussion guided by Bill Bryant, currently a venture partner with DFJ and Appian. Here's your opportunity to learn *EVERYTHING* you need to understand about venture capital in one informative, entertaining evening. Get behind the curtain and leave with a better understanding of what venture capital is all about, including whether your startup should target this source of funding and how best to go about that. No question is off limits so come prepared with your list of issues that you want to have addressed.

What: StartPad Countdown 6 -- Venture Capital Unplugged: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Who: Bill Bryant
When: 6:00 pm, Tuesday July 22th, 2008
Where: StartPad offices -- 811 First Avenue, Suite 480, Seattle, WA 98104
Cost: Free!

Pizza and drinks will be served.

About the presenter: Over the past 20 years, Bill has been involved as a founder, senior executive, investor and Board member in over 25 successful startups, spanning software, Internet, digital media and mobile. Companies where he has been instrumentally involved include Visio, Netbot, Qpass, Medio, Mixxer (each of which he helped found), Corbis, Getty Images, Isilon Systems, Loudeye, Cascadia Capital, Throw, Singing Fish, Exchange Applications, HandsOn, Headbone, Jabber, Teamplate. Current involvements include blist, LiquidPlanner, Widgetbucks, mInfo, Limeade, Conenza, Sensors in Motion, Shelfari, ACL Services and Winshuttle. Bill has raised over $175M in venture capital for the companies he's been involved with, is a personal investor in over 15 leading venture funds, and has been a venture partner with three VC firms, including Atlas Ventures, DFJ (current) and Appian (current).

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The Startpad Countdown series is sponsored by:

This month, StartPad presents a talk by Roy Leban, Director of User Experience at Sampa, regarding their complete user interface redesign.

What: StartPad Countdown 7 -- Extreme Makeover, Web Edition
Who: Roy Leban, Sampa
When: 6:00 pm, Tuesday June 24th, 2008
Where: StartPad offices -- 811 First Avenue, Suite 480, Seattle, WA 98104
Cost: Free!

Pizza and drinks will be served.

There will not be an nPost pub crawl after this Countdown event, but look forward to future collaborations!

About the presenter: Roy's mission at Sampa is to enable millions of people to share their lives in ways they couldn't before, by providing them with a web service that is both easy to use and powerful. An expert at both usability and software development, Roy came to Sampa from DreamBox Learning, where he was instrumental in building an innovative educational content development and delivery platform from the ground up.He's written a short post about the talk on his blog.

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The Startpad Countdown series is sponsored by:

This month, StartPad presents a talk by Jeff Barr, Amazon’s senior web services evangelist. He will talk about Amazon's line of scalable, on-demand web services:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
• Amazon Simple DB
• How developers can use these service to build scalable, cost-efficient applications and businesses

What: StartPad Countdown 8 -- Amazon Web Services and You
Who: Jeff Barr, Amazon
When: 6:00 pm, Tueday May 27th, 2008
Where: StartPad offices -- 811 First Avenue, Suite 480, Seattle, WA 98104
Cost: Free!

Pizza and drinks will be served.

All attendees are invited to join the nPost Pub Crawl leaving from our offices immediately following the talk.

About the presenter: Jeff Barr is a Senior Web Services Evangelist for Amazon. He is focused on furthering awareness of web services and inspiring developers to create innovative applications using Amazon Web Services. Barr meets regularly with developers throughout the U.S. and abroad to introduce Amazon Web Services' expanding platform and showcase businesses that currently utilize the program's services.

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StartPad has just moved into our new space on First Avenue. We now have 20 people working out of our new offices. So, it's time to get back to the speaker series we started last November.

We're calling our lecture series StartPad Countdown. We're going to be offering a mix of both business and technical topics for the Seattle startup and software development communities.

The Startpad Countdown series is sponsored by:

This month, it's a business related talk by Craig Sherman of Wilson Sonsini. His talk will answer some common questions:

• What sort of company structure do I need (sole proprietorship, LLC, partnership, S-corp, C-corp, ...)?
• Many companies get into trouble having the wrong structure, or not keeping good records - this can bite you later and be VERY EXPENSIVE to fix. Craig will tell you know what you need to be doing and when.
• How expensive is it to do this? Do I need to be a corporation? Do I WANT to be a corporation?
• Some attorneys will help startups out by charging lower fees when companies are younger and have little (or no) cash. How does that work? What can I expect?

What: StartPad Countdown 9 -- Corporate Structures, Common Problems
Who: Craig Sherman, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
When: 6:00 pm, Tueday April 29th, 2008
Where: StartPad offices -- 811 First Avenue, Suite 480, Seattle, WA 98104
Cost: Free!

Food and drink to be provided.

About the presenter: Craig Sherman is a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where he focuses on corporate and securities laws, representing companies, venture capital firms, and investments banks in private placements and public offerings. Craig also has extensive experience in mergers and acquisitions, technology licensing, and domestic and international joint ventures.

If you have any questions, you can contact Craig Sherman at csherman@wsgr.com

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We're having an Open house and our first developer presentation:

StartPad.org Open House

Our goal at StartPad.org, is to foster community support for Seattle software development startups. Since there's nothing like being in the same place to get people talking, we offer month-to-month office space in Pioneer Square. We have 3 companies working out of StartPad today (Faves, RightSized Media, and PageForest). We're looking for compatible startups to join us. This is a great chance to get your team out of your garage and into a high-energy environment with like-minded developers and entrepreneurs.

At just $300 per person per month and a minimum 2 month commitment, you can have a great place to work, and access to other developers working on the same kind of problems you're facing.

Open Social

OpenSocial is a new API developed at Google to integrate third-party applications into social networking platforms. We'll hear from two developers who have been working with Open Social from the earliest release to talk about what's working and what's not, and where the API will be extended in the future.

• What can you do with OpenSocial?
• Who hosts OpenSocial applications?

• API Summary
• Comparison of Facebook API (capabilities checkllist)
• How to monetize your application.
• What can't you do?
• Future API additions.
• Security issues (background on cross-site scripting restrictions?)
• Spreading your application
  
  • Application Directories

Presenters:

• Adam Loving - creator of popular Facebook application Zuckerbucks.
  
• Vellore Vetrivelkumaran -Vetri's startup, Chronus, has been working with Open Social for several weeks before the public launch.