Startup Weekend Bay Area Goes Mobile: Kicks Off 2012 at AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto

Entrepreneurs, developers, and designers from the Bay Area will gather under one roof for a 54-hour crash course in building applications and developing a commercial case around them

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--As solutions around mobile environments continue to provide ample market opportunity for innovators, Startup Weekend Bay Area (powered by the Kauffman Foundation) will kick off the New Year with a mobile-focused event, encouraging hundreds of local entrepreneurs, developers, and designers to put their heads together and create unique applications that leverage mobile’s many facets.

“The phone has come a long way since its early days as a mobile device”

The 54-hour “entrepreneur extravaganza” will be hosted by AT&T Foundry, 260 Homer Avenue, Palo Alto, California 94301, from Friday, January 20, 2012 to Sunday, January 22, 2012.

“The phone has come a long way since its early days as a mobile device,” remarked Ahmed Siddiqui, Startup Weekend Bay Area organizer. “From tracking our health, to paying bills we have come to rely on these devices in a variety of ways. The rapid growth of smartphones and applications available has created an extremely large market that is still emerging, and we look forward to offering a supportive, creative environment for innovators to explore these opportunities.”

To provide guidance and feedback to event participants on their various ideas, Startup Weekend Bay Area has enlisted a handful of local entrepreneurs with experience in the mobile marketplace. These mentors include: Aly Orady, PanoLogic; Hiten Shah, Kissmetrics; Scott Rutherford, UserVoice; Tom McLeod, Crosswa.lk; Shafath Syed, Mezz; Brandon Hill, Btrax, and Shahed Khan, Viatask.

Startup Weekend Bay Area “Mobile” will be followed by events focused on Building Physical products using 3D printers, Education, and Social Entrepreneurship. To register for Startup Weekend Bay Area, visit: http://bayarea.startupweekend.org/. For media related inquiries, contact Kristen Tischhauser: Kristen[at]talkTECHcomm.com

About Startup Weekend Bay Area

Startup Weekend Bay Area, “SWBAY”, (http://bayarea.startupweekend.org/) is an intense 54-hour event, which focuses on building a web or mobile application that could form the basis of a credible business over the course of a weekend. The weekend brings together developers, designers and entrepreneurs to build applications and develop a commercial case around them. With access to Silicon Valley’s best and brightest innovators, SWBAY offers a unique opportunity to connect and learn from leaders in the tech industry and provides an experiential education process for event participants.