Northeast Wisconsin Crowdfunders?

So last night Shane and I decided we'd like to incorporate a crowdfunding component in a startup that we help create during Startup Weekend Green Bay, February 6 - 8, 2014.

It will be challenging to create, launch and get off to a good start with a crowdfunding campaign during just one weekend. What we probably really need is two or three people on the startup team who have done one or more campaigns on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or another crowdfunding platform.

If you've done a crowdfunding campaign and live in northeast Wisconsin, which includes Appleton, Green Bay, Oshkosh, Fond du Lac, Neenah, Sheboygan, Sturgeon Bay and all the other cities, towns and rural areas of the 18 counties of the New North, please contact Bob Waldron -- bwaldron [att] gmail {dott} com. Or if you live outside northeast Wisconsin but have done a crowdfunding campaign and want to participate in Startup Weekend Green Bay 2015, contact me.

One of the challenges for getting a crowdfunding campaign launched in such a short time will be getting all the information submitted, approved and posted online. I haven't done a Kickstarter or other crowdfunding campaign, and I haven't researched how quickly a campaign can get put live on the different crowdfunding platforms. It might even be that all the platforms require a few days to churn through their application and approval process.

If the application, approval and posting process for a campaign takes several days on all the available crowdfunding platforms, we may try building a crowdfunding component into the startup website for built during Startup Weekend.

Bottom line is that we'd love to connect with interested entrepreneurial people in Wisconsin or in the Upper Peninsula who have done a Kickstarter campaign or some other type of crowdfunding campaign. Even if you can't participate in Startup Weekend Green Bay in person, we'd love to talk with you.

And if you're interested in Startup Weekend Green Bay 2015 but haven't registered yet, please register for SWGB today and get the Early Bird Discount!!!

(If you haven't done a Kickstarter or similar crowdfunding campaign but know someone who has, please suggest to them that they contact Bob Waldron -- bwaldron [att] gmail {dott} com.)

Out of Hibernation -- New Beginnings

So my last post on this blog was over a year ago. Today, like the groundhog Phil, I'm finally coming out of hibernation and working on New Beginnings for the myDigitechnician blog. Well, Phil won't actually be working on the blog.

The most recent mD post prior to this one was done on 03 Dec 2013, one of my weekly NEW NET posts (Northeast Wisconsin Network for Entrepreneurism and Technology). In earlier days on this blog, I often wrote non-NEW NET posts. In the last couple years, however, the posts here were mainly weekly posts with aggregated and curated recent entrepreneurial and tech news excerpts, with occasional personal comments about one of the news items.

For the foreseeable future, posts on this blog will be something other than weekly NEW NET posts. Not sure yet what that 'something other' will be.

The primary reason for the lack of posts on this blog for the past year was that I moved to northern California (Arcata, in Humboldt County) to work as project manager for a small California startup. That meant no NEW NET meetings for me. Weekly posting of tech and entrepreneurial news was dropped due to the long hours involved with my new job and due to my efforts to identify and help connect the TIME community (tech, innovation, maker, entrepreneur) in Arcata and Humboldt County.

As part of my efforts to connect the Humboldt TIME community, I worked with several other people to launch biweekly meetings of microcontroller enthusiasts, the Humboldt MCU Community. To help connect the Humboldt MCU Community (MCU is acronym for micro controller unit), I launched a new blog. The first post on the blog was http://humboldtmcu.blogspot.com/2014/05/humboldt-microcontrollers-community.html, posted on 19 May 2014, and it was the first of 100 daily posts on the blog. It was challenging, but fun, to have a new post published every day for 100 days. Two other people wrote a few blog posts, Ed Smith and Nick Appelmans, and that was very helpful and much appreciated. I tried to talk others into writing posts for the blog, but I haven't yet figured out how to effectively build a team of regular blog post authors. Figuring out how to build a strong team of people to write blog posts is something I plan to work on.

The last post (so far) for the Humboldt MCU Community, http://humboldtmcu.blogspot.com/2014/08/ardusat-update-201415-high-school.html, was published on 28 August 2014. After I met my initial goal of 100 daily posts, the frequency of the posts decreased for several reasons. The posts ended in August primarily because I was no longer participating in the biweekly meetings of the Humboldt MCU community since I was no longer living in Arcata, CA. Instead I was living in Appleton, WI, again and working for the startup remotely from Wisconsin. Not participating regularly with the MCU Wizards of Humboldt, like Ed, Nick, Eric, Gordon and John, meant that I had much less incentive to write MCU blog posts and much less inspiration for topics to write about. Since I returned to Appleton, I haven't yet identifed and connected a core group of Fox Valley or New North MCU enthusiasts. I have done a few things to help identify some of the MCU ninjas in this area, and hope to continue expanding this effort to the point where I know at least 20 MCU hackers in the 18 counties of northeast Wisconsin, because I know they're out there. (Can you hear me???)

I'm still doing remote work for the California startup, but am starting to look for a new full-time (paying) job. If you want to hire a good chemical engineer or community advocate (evangelist), or if you know of an opportunity that would be a good fit with my skills and experience, contact me at bwaldron[att]gmail{dott}com! 

If the CA startup brings me back to Arcata full-time, I'll likely resume blogging for the Humboldt MCU community. If I get a different full-time job that has blog-able topics, I may write blog posts related to my new job.

So that summarizes Bob's Blogging for the past year. There's no clear plan yet for my blogging in the next year, but my guess is that on this blog or another, I'll publish quite a few posts. Good writing practice, if nothing else...