Avril-Bleh Grocery Update

I've taken a few photos of the new Avril-Bleh Grocery that was supposed to open this week. It's not quite there yet, but it's getting really close. Between Wednesday and today it's been painted and most of the fixtures seem to be in place. I even saw a rack holding bags of chips in there this afternoon.





My biggest hope is that they'll slightly later hours than Ciancolo's on Main, since I usually get off work about an hour after they close.

Startup Weekend Cincinnati

Apparently there has been a little more drama in the world of Startup Weekend recently. This time related to Cincinnati.

You may remember the story hitting Cinplify and a few local blogs in March.

I thought it sounded like a pretty neat idea and I voted on the startupweekend.com/cityvote page.

A few weeks after voting I received an email from Ray Angel of StartupWeekend.com claiming that preparations were beginning for an even in Cincinnati:

I've begun planning for the Columbus weekend and we hope to be announcing it on the Startup Weekend website soon.

I'd like to be able to announce the Cincy Startup Weekend around the same time if at all possible and I need to narrow down the weekend that works best for the majority of people.

A visit to the site showed that a Columbus event had been announced, but as far as I could tell, there wasn't any announcement about Cincinnati.

Anyway, I didn't think much about it.

As usual, once a I'm exposed to a meme like this, I start noticing it where I might not have earlier. It didn't take long before I was actively digging around for information about this whole operation.

The group has been mentioned a few times on TechCrunch.com, fairly amicably, but the real juice is on uk.techcrunch.com where they did a longish post about the history of Startup Weekend so far and the apparently dramatic Andrew Hyde, Startup Weekend's founder. From that article we learn that a few cities have had uneasy relationships with Hyde and to varying degrees have divorced their "startup weekends" from his company. Some have complained about his style of management and professionalism.

More recently, a spat has occurred between Hyde and an Andrew Paradies. Paradies, is a co-founder of another web-startup based out of Cincinnati called photrade.com. Hyde accused Paradies of creating an inferior clone of Startup Weekend and also dissed him for using a Creative Commons licensed photo improperly on the new company's site InOneWeekend.org.

I turns out that Paradies is involved with InOneWeekend.org, but isn't really a founder per se, and based on the back and forth it appears he and Hyde have made up. Still I don't think Startup Weekend and In One Weekend have much love for each other at this point.

Anyway, now it appears InOneWeekend.org is planning ( obviously ) an event in Cincinnati in July as their first weekend. However, they have no details on the site other than the dates.

One wonders if Hyde's SW is still going to come to town, or if they decided to skip us and let IOW take the reins. It's not clear to me whether they've made up their minds about coming since there hasn't been a post on the actual site yet. Columbus and Cincinnati both still appear on the voting page. The decision making process is not very transparent.

I guess my initial interest, if not enthusiasm, for the idea has been somewhat dampened.

I'll still try to attend one or both of the events if they actually occur, but now it'll be more out of morbid curiosity than an entrepreneurial attitude. I know the videos I've seen so far make it look like a pretty unique experience.


Boulder Startup Weekend 2 - Day 2 from Danny Holland on Vimeo.