Cosmic Shelf

This weekend I attended StartUp Weekend SLO, held at Cal Poly, SLO. It was a great event where you pitch business ideas and then create teams for the most popular ideas. The teams then create a business based on those ideas. Some ideas pivot, or change into other ideas, some die and some stay until the end.

The team I joined was Cosmic Bookshelf. The concept is a way to interact with your virtual books in a bookshelf. I joined because it seemed the most not a web only application. My expertise was having read some blog post on the Kinect by Kean Walmsley at Through the Interface on using the Kinect as a input tool. The interaction with the bookshelf was to be with the Kinect.

It was a great experience and I learned a whole bunch. I learned how to work with the Kinect as well as putting some JavaScript into action. I haven’t done any JavaScript work before, and I was surprised how easy it was to pick up. Reading the first part of a book and my previous experience helped out. At the end of the weekend the startup was presented to the other attendees and judges. The presentation is below.

After all of the presentations, the judges tallied up their scores. The startup I worked on won honorable mention for innovative use of technology, well we tied with another startup called MisHeard.me. It was a great event and I’d definitely do it again.