1. Andrew Hyde (founder) has announced that Startup Weekend is hiring a CEO. This is the first organization based around creating products in a short span of time (54 hours for SW attendees) to hire a CEO.
2. Startup Weekend 2.0 begins this weekend in Boulder for their second SW. Big changes include the following:

• Multiple Projects
  • As a group we are no longer working on just one company.  If a group of seven, one or 45 for that matter wants to tackle a project or start a company, fantastic.   The community will take charge here, but nothing will be decided until Friday night.  All equity decisions will be made at the event.
• Build on a Project
  • An existing company can recruit a few some brilliant tech minds to spend two hours with working to make their project stronger.
• No Company Required
  • Every project will be different, but there will be no requirement to incorporate a company

The second point comes as a big move as this has been a hotly contended issue in SW past. Other weekends have already taken steps to decrease team size and put more power in the hands of the attendees as to “What happens Next?” Whether the weekend is a success or not, each product launched has the choice to do as they wish.

This is a shift in mentality from a group coming together around a common product and working as a team to being more of a code fest. People are now able to get together, put together what they want, and do with it what they want.

It’ll be interesting to see how shares are distributed and ownership happens with these changes. If one project doesn’t want to go to the group — how will it impact the ownership of that product? According to the site, power still resides with the group, but this weekend will prove whether that’s really the case or not.

Good luck to Boulder! Looking forward to seeing which app(s?) come out of the weekend.

I’m looking forward to hearing what apps come out of the weekend and which earns the prize of being dubbed top app.

You can follow their progress at Montreal Tech Watch.

Here’s the new run-down of the 11 apps:

• Matchtastic
  Dating and rating to find friends and meet new people
• ASPECTS
  ASPECTS shows the world the different aspects of your life, your skills and your interests. Flaunt it now!
• PikiPages
  Create your own free form page. Drag and drop your pictures, mp3, videos, etc. Share your pages with your friends or the entire world, event outside facebook.
• Send me an artist
  Send an artist to your friends and let him draw you a picture in 4 days.
• HitchHikers
  Hitchhiker takes you in a journey of a lifetime. Reach a destination anywhere in the world by hitchhiking with your friends. Meet new people and hook up with interesting folks along the way. Track the progress of your hitchhiking adventure and those of the folks you’ve helped.
• Deface a baby
  App for fun to deface a baby, in any way you want, and share it with your facebook friends!
• Spring Break
  Go on virtual tours and meet new people.
• Blogs I Read
  Display our favorite blogs on your profile, connect with bloggers, and discover new blogs.
• OH Snap!
  Choose your best pictures and display them on your profile
• Peace Quiz
  The purpose of Peace Quiz is to show you what would happen if we had world peace. The Quiz will show you some statements of what peace would lead to in and you get to guess whether or not the real affect would be higher or lower than our calculations.
• Ad Exchange
  An app to exchange ads among all the apps released in the weekend to cross-promote each other.

We’ll see how these apps turn out over the course of the next month. It seems to take a while in Facebook land for apps to spread, and with the most recent cries of application overload and the rumors of the peak of popularity, only time will tell how these 11 apps will fair in the land of the ever rising app.

The weekend aims to get people together in groups no greater than 8 large and build several apps in less than 48 hours. At Blitzweekend, some teams are pre-organized while others will organize on the spot.

The small team approach is similar to what we saw last weekend with Weekend Apps, but this will be on a much grander of scale.

We’ll see what comes out of Blitzweekend (both products and lessons learned) as they try to conquer the weekend application development world.

• Deface A Baby – Draw on baby photos and share them.
• Pikipages - “drag and drop” photos, videos, text, html code into a canvas that you can share.
• Blogs I Read – Share the blogs you read, rank them, and post comments on it.
• Ad Exchange – Advertising exchange to cross promote your application with others in the same group.
• Matchtastic – “find your perfect match”
• Spring Break – Take your friends on a virtual spring break

While I defer to Nick  for insight on which of these will be most successful and why, based on my view of Facebook apps and where they’re going, I’m going to say fun over function is going to prevail. Things like Matchtastic and a Virtual Spring Break are what Facebook users will grab on to. Nothing can be more fun than going through pictures of what spring break could be like if you could do anything.

I’m sure we’ll see more apps come that continue to duplicate existing functions on Facebook, but kudos to Weekend Apps for their first weekend. Even though they didn’t reach their goal of 20+ apps, the founders should be excited to have launched 6 apps in the first run. We look forward to seeing what they come out with in the future! Perhaps they’ll take Weekend Apps on the road (ie. Startup Weekend).

• Hitchhiker – your friends help you get from one city to another virtually.
• Dark and Stormy Night – group collaboration on writing a story, you add a part to a story, then pass it along
• Speed dating – chat over IM to meet potential dates
• Implicit dating – select people you want to date from photos
• Give friends to friends
• Social Match – you are matched based on common interests
• Web 3.0 page editor – a canvas page where you can drag and drop content
• App to promote peace
• Finds friends you should be friends with
• Lawrence Lessig for President
• Share blogs you read
• Deface a baby – you can draw or deface baby photos

While this is just a priminary list, we’ll see if the weekend a) meets it’s goal of 20 apps, but more importantly, b) actually launches some apps by the end of the weekend. Last night the group heard some speakers on topics from Facebook app development to the legal issues of start-ups.

We’ll see what makes the list come Sunday night — and what takes off in the upcoming weeks.

• Boulder II (March 21-23)
• San Antonio (May 16-18)
• Portland (May 23-25)
• Memphis (May 30-June 1)
• Ann Arbor (June 20-22)

Things will be interesting in March as Boulder (the founding city) hosts their second weekend. With about 15 weekends having occurred since the first innaugural Startup Weekend, it’ll be interesting to see what lessons that have learned are applied and how all of those lessons will turn into the potential launch of a second Boulder product.

Boulder’s first launch, Vosnap, was an online voting system that integrated SMS as an option for voting and receiving results. Things have been quiet since late September on the Vosnap Blog, which tends to be a common theme in SW ventures. Vosnap was launched a bit after the weekend concluded, but launched none-the-less (not always something that happens in SW ventures).

Good luck to Boulder and stay posted for updates and results as we get closer to their weekend.

The event hopes to launch 20 apps this weekend in Santa Clara.

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I’m happy to say this idea is finally being put to some social use. Connecting Moms is sponsoring the first Virtual Million Mom March. The goal of the site is to bring moms (or people sponsoring in the name of moms) together to raise money for the cause of their choice. People can pick a square and upload of a photo of their choice with the minimum donation of $5. There are about a dozen charities to pick from (ranging from the National Breast Cancer Foundation to Autism Speaks). By time the site fills up, over $5 million will have been raised for a variety of charities. It’s a great cause to get behind and support.

I think this could be the start of a new call to social action on the web. Several sites have petition signings and joining groups to support a cause, but the Million Mom March (www.millionmompicturepage.com) is finally getting at putting action behind the social cause.

This may solve one of the major criticisms that SW has with participants and nah-sayers that there are too many people working on a project to have it be successful. While this is still debated till this day, we’ve seen successful projects come out of SW.

According to the BW site, teams will come together before the weekend and can pick their idea. You can have up to 8 people on your team and then come for the weekend to actually code the project. It can be anything from a widget to a full-blown site. At the end of the weekend, the entire lot will pick a winner.

I’ll be curious to see the numbers of teams and success that BW may bring. Will it be the new style to do rapid-development? Only time will tell…well, time and a weekend of implementation.