This is the last of my planned blogs about Inoneweekend. Some people asked if this event was successful. Due to the nature of some of my postings they could not tell. So to set the record straight, in my opinion it was successful on many different levels. This blog is about one of those successes I wish to share with the people I write my blog for. There is a saying about ideas failing because they were not developed enough before they were tried. The saying goes, “you tossed and egg because you did not allow time to for the chick to hatch and grow enough to fly”. I have watched what happened on several of the efforts to create an Internet startup in a weekend. There seems to be a rush to announce the company and the details as soon as the weekend is over if not during the weekend. When you look at the sites posted you generally do not see things like trade marks, copyrights, and other forms of intellectual property protection. Lifespoke.com was not released until the Friday following the event. The website had both trade marks and copyrights. Articles and blogs about the company talked about patents and other non-disclosed intellectual property protection. It makes one wonder if these other efforts lost important assets in their rush to announce to the world what they accomplished. In the corporate world there is little forgiveness for ideas that are floated to early. With the Internet, there seems to be a rush to get something into BETA as quickly as possible. Taking the time to identify critical intellectual property and protecting it seems to be critical to a startup of any kind. After all, many times success depends on the intellectual property that a startup has. It leads back to my first question of “did you toss an egg instead of a bird”. Something to think about when you are planning a startup.
