TrendTechnology entrepreneurs head for "startup camp"

This is not your father’s summer camp. Backpack-toting dreamers from more than 600 startup firms spent a recent morning at an Internet-age version of summer camp brainstorming about new online waves and how to ride them to success. Camp organizers have described gatherings as “the physical meeting of online communities, so people can shake hands, network and share what they know in specific niches.” No two camps are ever the same. There are BarCamps for technologists; PodCamps for podcasters; RootsCamps for grassroots activists, and Copy Camps for journalists. “We can interact with different people and see what they do and promote our business,” said Gerhard Engel, founder of two-month-old startup PricePinx in San Francisco. “I was immediately excited about going, meeting other people and pushing this to the next level.”

Assistant professor Coye Cheshire of the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley says startup camps are “about rethinking organizational structures for learning and sharing information.” In many ways the word “camp” is misleading but captures the spirit, according to organizer David Berlind of Mass Events Labs. “We just thought camp was a great word that implies intimacy, closeness, everyone working together — collaboration,” Berlind told AFP. He said his firm began organizing camps in 2006 as a business enterprise and to enable people in technology to get together to share expertise at “unconferences” less structured than traditional industry gatherings. Unconferences and Barcamps are excellent for allowing people to mix ideas more freely than traditional conferences, Cheshire told AFP. With “speed geeking,” for example, camp attendees pitch their startup ideas succinctly in rapid-fire succession to dozens of peers, getting feedback along the way. Camps are usually free, independently organized events and have been held in cities around the world.

Kindred events such as Startup Weekends, Startup School, and TechStar’s Summer Camp for Entrepreneurs take the camp model a step farther by helping participants create businesses in a single weekend or summer. “Startup Weekend is introducing models in a quick and real way,” said Andrew Hyde, who launched the Weekend project in 2007 with his own cash. “We have companies we have created who are competing with venture capital-backed startups.” More than 1,800 people have attended a combined 16 Startup Weekends held so far in Germany, England, Canada and the United States. Camp alumnae include startups VoSnap, a platform for quick voting, and Handshakes, a way to find your friends using your mobile devices. Both startups are reportedly being courted by big businesses. Major companies are copying the model, with Sun Microsystems and Microsoft sponsoring or hosting camps. “The trend here is that there’s a lot of energy in the startup space in the last two years, similar to what we saw in 1999 and 2000,” said Sun director of emerging markets Sanjay Sharma. “These startup companies don’t really go to big trade shows because they are too expensive and the kind of conversation they want to have doesn’t exist there.” More than 90 percent of Microsoft’s revenues come from its partners, so helping young technology firms flourish is “very important to our ecosystem,” according to Microsoft ‘evangelist’ Anand Iyer. “We want to support these companies, their growth, and provide a vital business for everyone’s benefit,” Iyer told AFP. Cheshire expects the unconference and startup camp trend to endure. “They have been quite popular and successful,” Cheshire said. “Especially in the business and startup worlds where one of the major goals is sharing big ideas and learning from many rather than a few.”