dc tech beat

Startup Weekend, which “recruits a highly motivated group of small business entrepreneurs to build a community and company in a weekend,” came to DC this past weekend for the first DC Startup Weekend. The best and brightest of the DC tech community gathered at Viget Lab’s new offices in Falls Church to create a new company. The result: HolaNeighbor!

HolaNeighbor! is a tool for creating social networks around hyper-local communities, such as an apartment building, city block, etc. The site offers tools to allow members of the network to post information, and plans on moving into hyper-local advertising by establishing relationships with existing coupon mailers and local businesses.

The site is up and running at holaneighbor.com, but still needs a bit of fine-tuning and polish; but for a weekend’s worth of work, it is impressive. The challenge will be getting people to continue to contribute past the initial weekend, and finding people to take the technical platform that was created and build a business out of it.

I was very surprised that Startup Weekend is more than just a bunch of coders and geeks getting together and hacking out a site; there was a significant amount of business development and planning taking place as well. One group worked on a business plan and competitive analysis, while other worked on branding and marketing strategy, even producing a few commercials for the site (available on YouTube). The end result is more than a functioning site; it’s a company that can be built and funded, and eventually grow into a business.

Check out the DC Startup Weekend blog for information and updates on HolaNeighbor! and we’ll post here with significant updates.