When I signed up to go to Startup Camp 2008 I had no idea what I was getting myself into. You see, I came up with this cool concept of a dance video social network and a catchy name Hot Club Dancers and the Head Counselor David Berlind thought it would be fun to mention it and repeat my elevator pitch a few times. I believe, although I may be delusional, we were the most mentioned company of the conference, even though Chictopia was the winner of the best startup contest.

So I’d like to thank David Berlind (link to his blog) and Fritz Nelson (link to his blog) for shining the spotlight on my startup.

It really pays to be a good public speaker

Thanks to Toastmasters International and my home District 4 (for those of you in Bay Area), I became a pretty good public speaker in the last 18 months or so. For those of you interested in my particular club, you are welcome to visit ICC ArtICCulators. We meet every Thursday at India Community Center in Milpitas, CA.

As Startup Camp is an “Unconference”, attendees had the opportunity to create their own sessions. I saw an opportunity to teach some people presentation skills. With that in mind, I signed up to present “Presentation Skills for Introverted Techies” and I had a small audience of about 20 listeners who hopefully learned something valuable. This was especially timely because we had a best startup contest. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to compete due to being on the waitlist. Nevertheless, I helped at least 5 contestants to improve their elevator pitches and to refine the value proposition.

Startup Camp session recordings

I recorded that session, along with a lot of other parts of the conference on my trusty little Zoom H2 recorder. As soon as I post-process it, I’ll post the links here and on the wiki.

Networking for success

I talked with many fellow entrepreneurs and walked away with more business cards than I have of my own, so I have my work cut out to make the Hot Club Dancers site the success it seems to be destined to become.

Sun heats up Hot Club Dancers

What was also interesting is that I realized my need for a high performance computing render farm. Conveniently, Sun had a hardware expo. There are some REALLY good toys available now for unbelievably low price. I also had a good chat with Sun’s network.com people and how they can help me with my rendering needs.

Unexpected events

OpenSolaris had its release launch party. I had my video equipment. The results will be posted on Hot Club Dancers.com.

I joined the Entrepreneurial Society, which is a non-profit student organization at SJSU, as Executive Director of Technology in order to bring it to the next level. The organization currently brings a lot of value to its members, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

My current priorities include managing its website and e-mail operations. I am overseeing a major upgrade and the implementation of our overall vision.

In the near future, we are bringing online audio and video capabilities as well as a skills matrix grid.

8-second introduction

You have a great idea for a business. You think that business will make you a million or more if only you could get it started. You want to get it funded. Do you know whom to call? Will those people take your call? Join Entrepreneurial Society and tap into our investor network. Venture Capitalists come to speak at our meetings and are eager to meet you.

60-second followup

There are many other benefits. For example, we have internship opportunities available. You can participate in the business plan competition and the Neat Ideas Faire. Our organization is operated like a normal corporation. You can serve as an officer to get hands-on management experience. Serving on the executive board of our organization looks very good on your resume.

We are developing a skills matrix grid that you can search to find other members whose skills correspond to your needs.

We are seeking extraordinary people to join our team. Please contact E-society and we’ll schedule an interview.

Crashproof Solutions enables businesses to survive the failure of critical computer systems with no impact. In practical terms, we don’t care if a laptop, desktop, or server crashes. We expect hard disks to crash and recover them just about daily.

60-second followup

Traditionally, users have personal workstations. When these workstations fail, there is a severe business impact. Our business model changes the customer’s operations to resemble those of a large corporation. In the event of a workstation failure, the user can login on a spare system or into a virtual environment. The user’s environment will be rebuilt automatically.

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Referral partners

We typically partner with management consultants, venture capitalists, investors, web designers, web developers, and other consultants. We are open to sub-contracting for our direct competitors on a white label basis (no business cards left behind).

Ideal referrals

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We have several midmarket multi-national corporations as our clients.

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Technologies with which we work

Microsoft technologies (Exchange, Office, SQL, Windows Server, Vista, XP, Windows Mobile, Terminal Services, SBS 2003, CRM, RMS, SQL SRS, .Net)

Linux technologies (Ubuntu, svn, ssh, Debian, openssl, apache, php, mysql, ajax, json, Drupal, WordPress, CMS Made Simple)

More information

For more information, please see our main website at http://www.crashproofsolutions.com