Conquering the product certification hurdles: Understanding FCC, and product testing and how to design to get a PASS
Come learn from a panel of experts about product requirements including FCC Part 15 class B, something virtually all electronic products sold in the US must comply with, and mechanical and environmental testing. Topics may include HALT, shock, vibration, salt spray, radiated and conducted emissions (EMI/EMC), ESD and best design practices. Panelists will include representatives from your local Longmont labs, NTS and Element and design engineers from Boulder Engineering Studio. Whether your already working on a product or thinking about starting, this panel is a must.
Join us for this panel where we will discuss the different coding languages available to developers today. We will take a deep dive to review which ones are being taught and used by technology companies today.
Intrapreneurship is thinking and acting like an entrepreneur while working with a large organization. In fact, many organizations are recognizing the value of entrepreneurial thinking within a corporate environment, and are adopting management styles that integrate and reward risk-taking and innovative approaches that were previously thought of as characteristics of entrepreneurship in a startup environment. This session brings together representatives of some of Longmon’t largest, most successful, and most innovative organizations that are leading the way in fostering a culture of intrapreneurship.
Using Docker enables fast, repeatable testing and deployment of software, lowering complexity and risk so entrepreneurs can focus on value. In this talk, we review how Developers use Docker, with discussion about interacting with the entire startup team.
You should be familiar with code and Unix/Linux command line basics. Most examples will be in Python. We’ll take a hands on approach to see how Docker works for Developers. As your knowledge and skills improve, the Docker containers you develop can push to the Cloud with little modification, assisting scale out for your new software system, while helping you to be a more versatile developer.
Bring your laptop and be ready to try something new!
Mac users install Docker here.
Linux users install Docker here.
Windows users install Docker here.
Have your SSH keys ready! Learn about SSH keys from Github.
Archethought will sponsor Linux logins during the session if you do not have your laptop configured for Docker.
Shoutout to Nextlight, for providing Longmont's Gigabit Network for the duration of Longmont Startup Week. Look for screamingly fast results!
Longmont’s craft brewers and St. Vrain Cidery have joined forces to brew up something special for Longmont Startup Week. It is a collaboration for Longmont and about Longmont. It is a beer made exclusively for Longmont Startup Week and only available during Startup Week called Wannaprenuer. Join us and be the first to try this exclusive, limited edition “beer for a cause” at the Wannaprenuer Keg Tapping and Opening Party for Longmont Startup Week at 300 Suns Brewery! Not only will you be the first to taste this blond apple ale using local ingredients, but you will also be making S#*t happen by supporting the Longmont Ignite! Fund, which benefits our local entrepreneurs. A portion of the sales of each Wannapreneur will go to Longmont Igninte! The first 100 guests through the door will also score a free, souvenir Wannapreneur pint glass!
The Wannapreneur will be available at each of the breweries participating in the collaboration during Longmont Startup Week only! Those breweries include: 300 Suns, Oskar Blues, Left Hand Brewery, Open Door Brewery, Skeye Brewing, Shoes & Brews, Wibby Brewing, The Pumphouse, Grossen Bart, and Bootstrap Brewing. St. Vrain Cidery is also a part of the collaboration, providing the apple juice using in the brewing process. The beer is being brewed at 300 Suns Brewery.
Make it a night and experience the other great breweries in Longmont by jumping on the BrewHop Trolley, which will be on hand to help you safely make rounds to each of the breweries and have a great time doing it!
Shina Culberson, President of Quist will share her two decades of valuation experience around the art and science of valuing startup businesses. She will talk about the stages of valuation and when to use them, the top six business value drivers and how to leverage multiple valuation techniques to win negotiations.
The demand for value in health care (higher quality at a lower cost) is a powerful force in creating change and disruptive innovation in how healthcare is delivered. The healthcare sector is respnding to this demand and we are already starting to experience changes in the way care is delivered via the incorporation of digital and mobile health technologies into the care experience, and the continued evolution of biotechnology products. These technologies along with fundamental changes in business models, are all centered on making healthcare more accessible and affordable. The long term belief and hope of these innovators and change agents is that in aggregate, these advances will lead to permanent changes in payment modes and the provision of care, and ultimately improve the quality of health status for all.
This panel will discuss the role of innovation and entrepreneus in the health care space, how health systems are using innovation in technology to improve the value of the healthcare they deliver and examples of other disruptive innovations that will change lives in health care.
RiNo: Located just north of downtown Denver, the RiNo has created a movement that includes a remarkable concentration of creative businesses, including architects, art galleries, designers, furniture makers, illustrators, painters, media artists, photographers, sculptors and an array of studio spaces. RiNo is "Where Art Is Made" in Denver. Come hear how it evolved.
Learn how to run a Design Sprint to quickly articulate a problem and generate an innovative solution. This session will include audience participation with hands-on learning and examples of design thinking in action and an example solution by the end of the session.
Multicultural marketing is no longer something that’s “nice” for a company to do. It’s become a business imperative as the population and spending power of Latinos in Longmont continues to grow at an explosive rate. Join Laura for a fast-paced, lively discussion on marketing trends and useful insights to ensure messaging relevance and success.
Being an entrepreneur is challenging in many regards and one of challenges is managing the ups and downs that come from starting and running a business. While the media loves to focus the successes of startups – winning rounds of funding, acquiring smaller startups and achieving unicorn status, the less glorious tales of entrepreneurs’ struggles to overcome challenges, the pain and scars of failure, rejection and loss of confidence tend to be glossed over or completely ignored. Great character is forged in the fire of adversity and many entrepreneurs and startups have risen to meet these challenges and achieve success. This panel of entrepreneurs will share some of the challenges and market flounders they faced as startups and how handled them.
Whether you’re a “ startisan” food business or an established food business seeking to improve your existing branding and positioning, this session will help equip you with ideas that you can use to drive product preference and move consumers from buying to buy-in. You will hear practical tips from local experts who have created promotion strategies, packaging, branding and pricing that work together to create an image that identifies your product and differentiates it from competitors.
Metro Denver EDC CEO J.J. Ament will discuss the importance of entrepreneurs and startups to our regional economic health.
Our state is second to none in concentrated talent, making Metro Denver a crucible for innovation and entrepreneurism. Partnerships among our research universities and national laboratories and the business community breeds company success.
Our entrepreneurial business environment is propelling forward with dynamic industries, significant venture capital awards, and high concentrations of scientific and research talent.
Made is an agency with a mission that believes that the world is a better place when things are made close to where they are consumed. Jobs are created. Communities thrive. And carbon emissions are dramatically reduced. Made was founded to power things made here, whether they are manufactured goods, agricultural products, digital platforms or those services that create the most jobs.
Web Development is one of the most common skill sets needed in the Start Up community. Maybe you've even thought of becoming a Developer. This panel discussion will walk you through the mindset of a Developer and what skills and abilities are needed to be successful. If Web Development is not for you, the discussion will also include what you need to know before hiring a Developer.
Join two local entrepreneurs as they team up to bring you Cheesemaking 101 with Cheese and Hard Cider Pairing. This informative and tasty presentation will teach you about the basic science behind cheesemaking while you enjoy some delicious cheese paired with the perfect hard cider. You will also get to hear how these two dynamic entrepreneurs got their start and are now living their passions through their successful Longmont businesses!
Equity investors are approached by hundreds of entrepreneurs every year pitching their respective businesses. Some are really polished and focused, and others amazingly ineffective and convoluted. Learn from two Rockies Venture Club investors some basic tips on how you can make your pitch as effective as can be, to capture investors’ attention.
Bill Aulet will present his new book and his proven framework for developing the product to launch a new venture. He will share his experience and lessons learned through his work at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship at MIT as a long time practicing entrepreneur.
A book signing will follow his talk.
Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) is powerful new market research framework that is gaining ground across various startup communities in the US. Companies like 37Signals and Intercom are using JTBD to heavily influence their product and marketing efforts with great success. Clay Christensen, Harvard professor who coined the term "disruptive innovation", just released a new book about JTBD called "Competing Against Luck".
How:
In this workshop, we will present an overview of the JTBD framework, the main tools (forces diagram & timeline) and then conduct a JTBD interview with an audience participant to show you how it's done.
Brian Rhea (Product Lead at Binocs) and Jason Hall (COO at Binocs) have been actively practicing the JTBD framework for several years and have been implementing a number of the findings across various companies.
Audience participation:
Please come with a recent purchase in-mind. It should be something that you've bought fairly recently (less than 3 or 4 months ago), and something that you haven't bought before.
StickerGiant’s Founder talks about his business journey over the past 18 years, from starting up an online store in his basement to over twelve million dollars in revenue. What’s been a key to the foundation of this success? John will share his Twelve Laws of Business and other stories from along the road to sticker printing fame. StickerGiant was recently featured in Forbes magazine as one of the top 25 Small Giants of 2017 and is also known for their Guinness World Records Largest Sticker Ball.
Application Replatforming: Take your knowledge to the next level with our best practices for migrating and modernizing legacy Java applications to cloud-native architectures running on Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Google Cloud Platform. In this session we will be working with code; please bring your laptop with the Cloud Foundry CLI installed and be ready to get your hands dirty.
A Hack the Dot is a two-hour hackathon where coding school students, junior developers, experienced developers, non developers, marketers, designers and curious web people come together to build ideas around a single domain name.
Our events are meant to be a quick and fun way to build a humorous (and functional) product quickly while meeting people in your tech/startup community.
There will be pizza. ROSALEE'S PIZZA. And beer.
What to Bring / How to Prepare:
• Bring your laptop and charger.
Not required but suggested you coder types:
• Install the Atom text editor. Go here: https://atom.io/
• Setup a github.com account
How does it work?
Step 1: Attendees are broken up into random teams.
Step 2: The teams are provided with the same undisclosed domain name by Name.com, arbitrary and often hilarious.
Step 3: Teams have just two hours to come up with a functioning site inspired by that domain. The team builds the most creative and fun idea for the domain wins.
Participants will be judged on four criteria: (1) functionality, (2) design, (3) humor, and (4) creative domain name interpretation.
What do you get at the event?
FOOD!
SWAG!
FRIENDS!
How much does it cost?
It’s FREE!
Questions? Send them to HacktheDot at name.com.
As technology becomes smaller, smarter and integrated into everything, wearing it has become part of the social standard. It is no surprise then that wearable technology is being adopted widely by many industries and their consumers. According to Statista there will be upward of half a billion connected wearable devices worldwide by 2018 and rising to just shy of a billion wearable devices by 2021.
In this New Tech Colorado session we will peek into the world of health and fitness wearable technology. We will explore how innovations in the space of wearable technology are making it easier for individuals to understand their body and their health, and perhaps get a glimpse of what the future holds.
Please come and join the conversation and interact with the panel as we take you on a journey beyond the smartwatch. Our conversations will include discussions on topics such as:
Connected Health: Constant health monitoring and the impact to patient care and individual health.
Data: whose data, my data, your data, what about data privacy? What are the benefits of shared health and fitness data.
Policy & Regulation: How are wearable innovations viewed by the regulators and policy makers.
Utility: What’s in store for the future and the utility of health and fitness wearables.
Agenda:
Social time; networking and welcome
Announcements; job openings & talent availability
Thanks to our sponsors
This month’s theme topic and panel discussion
Register at https://www.meetup.com/bdnewtech/
All too often entrepreneurs attempt to bring a solution to market before really understanding the challenges faced by the customers they intend to serve. This is a recipe for failure at worst— mediocrity at best. On the other hand, it’s amazing how quickly a new company can achieve success when they’ve really taken the time to walk a mile in the shoes of those customers and identify the most important problem to solve. In this fireside chat, Todd Kinzle will share the story of how he and his partners found the right problem to solve in the auto industry by first becoming dealers themselves. This approach lead them to a successful product launch and to quickly being acquired by one of the largest players in the industry.
Digital marketing is opening new doors and closing old ones. Be prepared for the future. Learn how digital marketing is changing and redefining the marketing landscape and how you can stay ahead of the curve. Learn about the OmniChannel experience and Connected Commerce, Influencer Marketing as a key strategy, Personalized Everything, Social Selling and more. It’s a connected world, and you need to be connected. The future…Is now.
Have you ever wondered what it takes to make a video game? How much money video games make? What you have to do to get into the game industry? The Longmont “How To Make Games and Learn from Our Mistakes” panel features four different industry panelists discussing everything from making games as a hobby to working at huge studios on some of the world’s biggest titles. This panel will cover everything in gaming including getting started, how to get your game some coverage, educational advice, common industry mistakes and more. There will be heavy audience participation so feel free to ask any question you have ever wanted to ask.
The panel will be hosted by Zhenghua Yang who is the Founder at Serenity Forge, a local publisher who have sold hundreds of thousands of games.
Outlaw Yoga is a revolution in power yoga, a physically challenging and technically simple way to practice a new way of being on and off your mat. The practice is powerful, bold, present and fun. Outlaw Yoga challenges you to make more than a habit of life, to connect to self through intense physicality and to explore the power of presence in a contemporary community setting. Outlaw is not just yoga but a community and a way of living. At its core, Outlaw Yoga is a movement to bring the practice of yoga to everyone! Get your ass in this class!
Local founders have put together teams of 2 to represent their business and compete in a head-to-head competion on the Warrior Playground Obstacle Course. The teams will show us how much grit it takes to be an entrepreneur! Come show your support and cheer on your favorite team as they attempt to prove their physical and mental fitness.
Thanks to our generous sponsors, beer and wine will be available for purchase, with ALL proceeds benefitting the Longmont Ignite! Fund. Longmont Ignite! is a group of community-minded individuals who have established a fund to make grants available to entrepreneurs developing products or business concepts that will add to the economic vitality of the Longmont area.
Founder Warrior teams and spectators are welcome to bring their own lawn or camping chairs, as seating is limited.
The BrewHop Trolley will be available to take spectators to/from Village at the Peaks, where the days' sessions will be held, at no cost! The trolley will make rounds between 5pm and 7pm, picking up/dropping off next to the Village Lawn at Village at the Peaks.
FOUNDER WARRIORS TEAMS:
Brewer Law, LLC
300 Suns
Wibby Brewing
Left Hand Brewing
Bootstrap Brewing Co
TinkerMill
Grossen Bart
St Vrain Cidery
CleanRoboticsCome place your "bets" on who you think will win the challenge and take home the trophy!
If you are interested in competing in the competition, please email Janine Ledingham at janine@longmont.org.
The adult cannabis consumer is tech savvy and health conscious. This panel takes a look at the technologies that are producing better cannabis products and devices to consume them with. Learn how new and old technology are being deployed to give consumers better flavor, quality and efficacy. Join Double Bear Concentrate Company, Wana and Grasshopper vaporizer for a discussion on how cannabis companies and products are built.
Lean Learning is the Learning & Development process of getting the right learning, to the right audience, at the right time, in the right quantity to achieve perfect work flow, while minimizing waste and being flexible to change. Lean’s primary purpose is to reduce operational costs by eliminating waste and increasing customer satisfaction along entire value streams. Lean methodology focuses on continuous business improvement within an organization. You will hear from this panel of experts how they are using lean learning to transform their businesses and the lessons learned.
Continuing the Transition Towards a Distributed Energy System. What will it take to get there? From philosophical to technical to practical application, our panelists will discuss the current state of the market, policy hurdles, complex modeling systems, funding challenges and more. Which markets are seeing more growth – microgrids or larger grids? Domestic or international? Will grid defection in communities drive policy change? How do modeling systems inform decision-making? Are VC’s investing in grid technologies? What opportunities are there for innovation and entrepreneurship?
Terry Olkin, Teresa Ewing and John Rigsby will will tell the tale about why they founded the GEAR alliance, a 501(c)(3) in 2015 as a spinoff from the St. Vrain Valley School District to be the the umbrella organization for their high school robotics teams (including Up-A-Creek Robotics), why they mentor high school robotics teams in their free time, and why one of them was passionate enough to invest over $1M for a building to house these teams. They will talk about their journey and vision of filling the missing pieces of education, especially in STEM and how they are teaching high school students how to collaborate, lead, innovate, volunteer and work within a budget and stay on schedule. They are helping to create a skilled workforce pipeline and impassioned students around robotics….not to mention these high school robotics teams are “killing it” in competitions!
Design Thinking is a problem-solving methodology built on a foundation of user empathy. It introduces a new approach to creative brainstorming, allowing one to discover, prototype, experiment, and iterate on solutions. As a process, Design Thinking can be used effectively in companies of any size and of any industry to drive innovation. This workshop is designed to give participants a firsthand experience with Design Thinking: posed with a design challenge, you will learn, experiment, and prototype a solution for your end user in a 90-minute sprint.
Dr. Walter Scott is the Founder of DigitalGlobe, the world’s leading provider of high-resolution earth imagery, data and analysis, and he is currently serving as their Executive Vice President and Chief Technical Officer. Join us as he shares his startup journey and what it has been like to grow the company over the past two decades.
Join us as students who graduated from the St Vrain Valley Schools and the Innovation Center discuss their findings around the "mindset of an entrepreneur." Listen as they discuss the 8 pieces of the entrepreneur and how they utilized an 'Opportunity Canvas' to discover a problem, solution and how to network. As you are journeying into the business world, do you have the 'mindset'?
So you have amassed some wealth, you have heard the buzz about angel investing and you are considering the idea of being an angel investor. You have heard it can be risky but you have also heard about the potential great returns. You may wonder: How do people really get started as angels? What does it require and is it right from you? Is your own risk profile a fit with angel investing or is it not the right asset class for you. Charles and Andrew McGregor from Rockies Venture Club will walk you through the basics of angel investing.
Opening Band: Francis & The Wolf
Headlining: Great American Taxi, a rock & roll classic band combining a timeless mixture of gutsy pop, calloused-hand country, blue-eyed R&B, and bare-knuckle barroom chooglin’ with songs for every man and woman grinding out the working week and anxious to shuffle the day’s cares away
Food vendors include: Samples World Bistro, Breakers, 7 West and Georgia Boys. Drinks from Longtucky, 300 Suns, Wibby, Bootstrap, Left Hand, Oskar Blues, Wild Cidery, Wyatt’s, and the Pumphouse
