What Is Startup Weekend?

What is Startup Weekend?

Startup Weekend is a global network of passionate leaders and entrepreneurs on a mission to inspire, educate, and empower individuals, teams and communities. Come share ideas, form teams, and launch startups.

Startup Weekend Global Site

Past event…

Event Ended

PARISOMA

Startup Weekend is one of the largest events that fosters entrepreneurship in the world, and for the first time, it invites media and creative minds to the table to create tomorrow’s media and entertainment experiences. Joins us for the first Startup Weekend dedicated to transmedia!

Ever wondered what Don Draper does between two episodes of Mad Men? Most likely, he drinks more whisky, maybe runs errands, meets charming women…

Unfortunately we, the audience, will never know for sure since we can only passively witness what the show lets us see through that weekly 40-minute window.

Now imagine if you could extend that world beyond the episodes and your TV screen, make it interactive, build additional story lines, let viewers choose their own adventure, or connect with the characters! How about doing the same for a game you play with your friends, or a documentary on an real-world issue dear to your heart, or even a marketing stunt for that killer idea you plan on launching?

Welcome to Startup Weekend Transmedia, a weekend-long event where people craft richer stories. Join 80 programmers, art directors, film producers, game designers, developers, advertisers – to form multidisciplinary teams and build prototype transmedia experiences, all in 54 hours. Tie-in multiple platforms and media to make your universe richer and immersive, enjoy advice by coaches from the media and tech industries, and pitch your project to a jury of industry luminaries to win the Prize!

The Transmedia Toolbox

We curated a toolbox with great media platform, production and animation tools that participants can use to build their prototypes.

Check out our toolbox partners below!

Startup Weekend is already a popular format in the entrepreneurship world, and for the first time, it invites media and creative minds to the table to explore how tomorrow’s best stories will be told and experienced. Join us!

This event is brought to you by Transmedia SF, a group dedicated to make San Francisco an epicenter of transmedia production, education and development. To know more about Transmedia SF events, stay tuned on Eventbrite! 

 

Schedule

Friday

Feb 1
  • Registration Starts
  • Dinner & Networking
  • Welcome & Keynote
  • Pitches Start
  • Attendees vote for the top ideas
  • Teams start forming and discussing ideas
  • Start to formalize teams and take an inventory of skills. Be honest, and direct about what resources and skills are needed for the weekend. You may stay and work as late as the venue will allow

Saturday

Feb 2
  • Arrive, simple breakfast & coffee
  • Teams formed and setting up workspace for the weekend
  • Lunch
  • Call for needs & skills
  • Coaches help teams one-on-one. They are here to help!
  • Dinner
  • Mid weekend check-in, status reports, call for help
  • Finished for the day. You may stay and work as late as the venue will allow

Sunday

Feb 3
  • Arrive, simple breakfast & coffee
  • Call for help (this is self motivated, so don’t be shy)
  • Coaches arrive… ASK QUESTIONS
  • Lunch
  • Gut check. Start prepping for presentations
  • FINAL PRESENTATIONS
  • Judging & awards
  • Wrapup
  • Superbowl!
  • Go home!
Sponsors
Become one
Speakers

Corey Ford

Founding Partners and CEO, Matter.   |  

Corey Ford is the CEO and Founding Partner of Matter., a start-up accelerator in San Francisco that supports media entrepreneurs building a more informed, connected, and empowered society. Combining the values of public media with the mindsets of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, Matter provides investment, a structured program, space,
access to audience, and a supportive community to innovators building tomorrow’s meaningful media institutions. Matter is a misson-driven, for-profit early stage venture capital firm backed by founding investors Knight Foundation and KQED and supported
by partner PRX.

Prior to Matter, Corey built Runway, a pre-team, pre-idea start-up incubator at
Innovation Endeavors, Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s early stage venture capital
fund. He also taught design thinking innovation at the Institute of Design at Stanford University, also known as the d.school. Corey began his career in public broadcasting managing the production of 17 films for the PBS series FRONTLINE, winning an Emmy and a duPont-Columbia Gold Baton Award. He is a Kauffman Fellow, earned an MBA at Stanford, and was a Morehead Scholar at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Judges

Ivan Askwith

Senior Director, Digital Media Lucasfilm   |  LinkedIn

Ivan Askwith is the Senior Director of Digital Media at Lucasfilm, where he oversees strategic and creative direction for the wide range of online, mobile, social and cross-platform initiatives that make up the digital presence of Star Wars, Lucasfilm and the company's other properties.

Prior to joining Lucasfilm, Ivan was the Director of Strategy at Big Spaceship, an award-winning digital agency in Brooklyn, NY, where he led efforts to develop immersive digital experiences and presences for clients ranging from Google and Apple to Sony Pictures and NBC Universal.

Ivan is also a founding member and consulting advisor to MIT's Convergence Culture Consortium, with a particular focus on transmedia development and cross-platform narratives. As a graduate student at MIT, his work focused on the rise of transmedia strategies for building audience engagement with primetime television series, as well as the creative and commercial applications of alternate reality games.

Ivan has published chapters on audience behavior and franchise development in numerous books and encyclopedias, and appears as a frequent speaker on digital strategy, transmedia development, and online communities at both academic and business conferences, including ad:tech, CAT, Digital Hollywood, NAB, SXSW and more.

Patrice Martin

Co-Lead + Creative Director of IDEO.org   |  LinkedIn

Patrice Martin is the Co-Lead + Creative Director of IDEO.org. Patrice’s work focuses on partnering with nonprofits, social enterprises and foundations to deliver innovative solutions to problems that affect low-income communities. She’s worked across a diverse set of challenges, including youth employment, early childhood learning, scalable solutions for water and sanitation, financial inclusion and more. She also created and stewarded HCD Connect, the online platform to build community amongst human-centered practicioners, a now vibrant website with 10,000+ users.

Before founding IDEO.org, Patrice was a Design Director with IDEO and her work spanned large-scale social change in the private, public, and social sectors. She sees design as a way of thinking that can be used to solve problems large and small, whatever the sector. At IDEO, she led projects in healthcare, financial services, hospitality and education, with clients including Nike, Mayo Clinic, The American Red Cross, Gates Foundation and Marriott International. Before joining IDEO,Patrice was a Senior Designer with SonicRim, a design strategy consultancy.

Patrice holds a BFA in industrial design from the University of Michigan.

Shannon Spanhake

Deputy Innovation Officer, Office of Mayor Edwin M. Lee   |  LinkedIn

Shannon Spanhake is the Deputy Innovation Officer for the Office of Mayor Edwin M. Lee in the City and County of San Francisco. Her focus is on building an Open Innovation program to enable job creation, citizen engagement and government efficiency. Prior to this role, Spanhake worked at a startup that was founded with her patent-pending environmental technology, which she was named by the Grace Hopper Foundation as “100 Women Innovation Science and Technology” and was a Semi-Finalist in the Buckminster Fuller Inventors competition. Before this, she held a dual appointment as a Researcher at the engineering institute, CalIT2, UCSD, and also, as a Sr. Researcher at the Center for Development Finance, a policy think-tank based in Chennai India. She holds an MFA from UCSD, a BSc. in Electrical Engineering from Drexel University, and is currently on a leave of absence from the London School of Economics and Political Science, PhD program in the Department of Management.

Stephen Clements

Executive Creative Director at AKQA   |  LinkedIn

Stephen Clements is Executive Creative Director at AKQA in San Francisco. In this role, Stephen co-leads the creative vision and output from AKQA’s San Francisco office, servicing some of the world’s most inspiring brands, including Audi of America, Gap, Google, Target, Visa and Xbox. Stephen has been at AKQA for nearly a decade and has created industry defining,award-winning work, including the interface experience for the Xbox 360 as well as global campaigns for Halo and Nike Run London. An architect by training, Stephen has a diverse range of skills, not just as a conceptual thinker, but also as a film and motion graphics director.

Toolbox partners
Become one
Coaches

Martin Caplan

Producer, EA/Bioware

With 13 years in the game industry and time served in theme parks, internet and film before that, Martin Caplan has done some pretty fun and weird stuff. Currently Martin is a Producer at BioWare / EA leading teams to create amazing next generation experiences in mobile games with AAA brands. He was Senior Producer and New Business Director at Other Ocean, pitching and running projects in the mobile/social space. At Sixense, he served as Senior Producer leading an internal dev team to create innovative gameplay for the Razer Hydra motion control hardware in a Valve game mod for Portal 2. He was previously a Producer at Sega of America for 5+ years with 18 shipped titles. He has worked in the serious games industry as a game and interface design consultant for U.S. intelligence agencies, earning Secret clearance. During all of this, he founded and sold Paragon Games, a tabletop RPG game company, developing and publishing RPG books and boardgames.

Sam Lavigne

Game designer, Founder of Situate   |  LinkedIn

Sam Lavigne is a game designer and artist from San Francisco. In 2006, he launched SFZero, a real-world game built on the principles of urban exploration and collaborative artistic production. That same year, he also created Journey to the End of the Night, an open source street game which has gained worldwide popularity and has been played in cities including San Francisco, New York, Berlin, and Milan. He has produced games with the Smithsonian, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Microsoft Education and the Nike Foundation, and in 2010 he co-founded the game design studio Situate. His work has been featured in CNET, Newsweek, NPR and the Wall Street Journal.

http://situate.cc/

Emmanuel Saccoccini

Executive producer, Unit9 San Francisco   |  LinkedIn

Emmanuel has over 12 years of experience with creative concept, development & production management of awarded creative websites & interactive experiences for the advertising industry. He joined the British digital creative production Unit9 in 2011 to establish & manage the San Francisco office. Earlier, he co-founded & managed the French interactive studio Grouek for ten years. The entertaining online experiences he helped create & produce since 2000 received awards such as 5 Cannes Cyber Lions, Andy, 6 FWAs, D&AD, 2 Webby, 4 Eurobest, 3 Epica, 2 Asia Pacific AdFest, CSS Awwwards Site of the Year, SxSW Interactive Award, etc.

Peter Katz

Producer, Radio Host   |  

Peter Katz is an award-winning producer/innovator who has been
featured in Mashable, Wired, and CNN’s The Screening Room. He has
produced critically acclaimed feature films that have premiered at AFI
Fest and the Rome Film Festival. Katz was a producer on Mortuary,
which was helmed by legendary director Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw
Massacre and Poltergeist). His next feature was Pop Skull, directed by
Adam Wingard (A Horrible Way to Die and You’re Next). Recently, he
produced the short film Already Gone, starring Shawn Ashmore (X-Men)
and Harry Shum Jr (Glee). This project is being adapted into a
full-length movie. Katz is currently developing projects for film, TV,
and the web. Peter also co-hosts Hollywood 2.0, a podcast covering
innovation in the entertainment industry.

Xavier Damman

Co-founder and CEO, Storify   |  LinkedIn

Xavier moved from Belgium in the summer of 2009 with the vision that there are voices on social media that deserve to be published on main stream media. This vision is the foundation of Storify.

He founded Tribal in 1999, a site that gathered student content from around Belgium that was published in a 30,000-circulation magazine distributed nationwide to high schools. He built content partnerships with leading brands such as Microsoft and other Belgian companies. Xavier earned a master's degree with distinction in computer science from Belgium's Leuven University.

Stefano Corazza

CTO & Co-founder, Mixamo   |  LinkedIn

The mastermind behind Mixamo’s advanced technology, Stefano Corazza applied his experience from the University of Padua Human Movement Lab and the Stanford University BioMotion Lab to develop the effective mathematical and machine learning solutions that support Mixamo.

Prior to Mixamo, Corazza was a research associate at the Stanford University BioMotion Lab until 2008 where he developed markerless motion capture technology. He additionally is the CTO and co-founder of dublit.com, a Web 2.0 site for short-form literature based in San Francisco

Matthew Meschery

Senior Strategist, Odopod

Matthew Is a senior strategist at Odopod specializing in content development and cross-media storytelling. With over 8 years of experience in strategy, he has helped brands, organizations and individual artists produce high quality content for various channels including social and mobile. Before Odopod, Matthew worked at ITVS (Independent Television Service) where he supported independent filmmakers and interactive producers to create innovative projects including original web series, mobile applications, digital games and large social media campaigns.

Peter Brown

Strategic Policy and Planning, SFMTA   |  

Peter Brown manages SFMTA’s Climate Mitigation and Adaptation programs for the transportation system and runs the Bicycle Counting and Reporting programs for the city. Peter is a Faculty member at the University of San Francisco teaching urban planning courses in Environmental Management. He holds two Master’s degrees from UCLA, is an avid cyclist and just returned from a month in Brasil where he learned a great deal about Samba, Cachaça and the Portuguese language – he’s very excited to be here today.

Neil Hrushowy

Urban Designer, San Francisco Planning Department   |  

Neil Hrushowy is an urban designer in the City Design Group. He is the lead urban
designer for the Better Market Street Project, an inter-agency effort that will redesign Market Street from the Bay to Octavia Blvd. As part of Better Market Street, Neil is working with the Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation to bring emerging technologies to Market Street that will add new layers of experience and understanding to the public realm. He is the lead planner for the update to the City’s Urban Design Element and the Project Manager for the Fisherman’s Wharf Public Realm Plan and the Jefferson Street Redesign. Neil also manages the Planning Department’s Public Life Program, which conducts in-depth studies of neighborhood commercial streets and produces a robust analysis of, and recommendations for improvements to the pedestrian realm. Neil holds a PhD and an MS.

Paul Chasan

Urban Planner and Designer, San Francisco Planning Department

Paul Chasan manages the Parklets Program, and is urban desin lead on the Green Connections Program.

Organizers
Alice Gillet
Romain Nervil
Jonathan Archer
Maya Zuckerman
Mélanie Picard
Hector Gruyer
Blog
view all
No talk, All action!

Hello, World!

by swtransmedia

We’re so happy to introduce the very first Startup Weekend Transmedia – which will be held in San Francisco on [...]

Upcoming Events
View all