Entries and Visitors

It is officially Day 2 for the Preview Release of freshbrain.org. Very exciting!

Here is a quick update of the happenings as we launched.

• Visitors arrived, then more, then even more. We are using Google Analytics which provides you with a snapshot of what is happening on the site. We have already had hundreds of unique users from all over who have visited just about every page on the site!
• Contest entries have been submitted! We had expected this to take a while since there is some design work required to create an entry that is relevant to FreshBrain. But to our surprise, we already have a couple of really good submissions!!
  
• Our very early marketing is generating traffic. Marketing is all about letting people know that we are up and running. We have started small. Today we try out facebook:)
  
• Visitors are registering and viewing all of freshbrain.org. It is just cool to see this come to life. Try out forums, read news, etc. We are learning what works and what is interesting as we watch what visitors do.
• We made our first press release. Another way to let folks know who we are and what we are doing.
  
• We ran into a couple of problems. We were surprised by a problem with AOL spam filtering that we are fixing. And we had a certificate problem as well that popped up a warning message that was not very friendly. It has now been taken care of.
  

Thanks to everyone who has visited so far, and especially those who have submitted a contest entry!! I will report back in a few days.

The Contest is HERE!!

The Preview Release of FreshBrain is up and running!!

We did it. We have released the first version of our website - freshbrain.org. Please come and check it out!!

The preview release is there for two reasons.

1. Contest site - enter to win one of 5 iPod Touches.

1. FreshBrain information - students, parents, partners, volunteers and so on can find out more about FreshBrain.

Seems simple enough. But a lot went into it.

• Great teamwork between FreshBrain and Image X Media. Image X Media is our website development partner. Their whole team has been great, especially Glenn their CEO and Rick their head of sales and our project lead.

• Built on Drupal! We decided to use Drupal a while back and because of its use, there is a lot more to the site than we had originally expected. And the results are pretty awesome. Good content management and the begnnings of community capabilities!

• Successful deployment on Network.com from Sun Microsystems. The network.com team has been absolutely awesome to work with and delivered us the capabilities well ahead of schedule - our original plan was to go live on network.com for the Beta release in January. This means we are up and running on Sun Systems and Solaris! Big thanks to Jim who is the Sun VP responsible.

• Incredible support from Fenwick & West. They provided us with guidance as well as our Privacy Policy, Copyright & IP Policy, Contest Rules and Website Terms and Consitions. Big thanks to Julie who is our probono contact, Tracy the awesome lawyer who has been working directly with us and Mitchell the partner responsible for this area.

• And of course big thanks goes to my team. Todd, CT and Stan have been incredible. Everyone is in a new and different job. Everyone is something every day!

The point of all of this of course is the students. We are on a mission to enhance the educational system by providing them with the opportunity to real world hands on experience in with technology and business. This preview release is the first step. I couldn't be more excited.

Come check it out!!

The contest is coming ...

All right - here is a sneak peak of the front page of the website. This is for the contest but also provides lots of good information about FreshBrain, how it all works, our management team, board, etc.

I am not sure that this is final, but here you go anyway ... don't tell anyone:)





















What do you think????

Fenwick & West Providing Pro Bono Legal Support!!

I have been dying to talk about an evolving partnership that we have been working on that has just hit its first milestone. Fenwick & West LLP has signed on to provide us with pro bono legal support!!!!

This is a big deal for us. We have a number of major challenges that will require significant legal support. These include:

• Protection of the students. Most are underage. We need to do a great job protecting them from the risks that the Internet introduces. We need to make sure that their parents are comfortable with what they are doing. We will likely need their parents to approve of them doing projects.
• Intellectual Property (IP) ownership and protection. As students do projects, they may come with or create IP. We need to be very careful with how we protect this. We want to insure that they have the ability do with this IP as they choose.
• Legality. We of course need to make sure that everything that the students as well as FreshBrain do is legal:) This is very broad and includes things like use of source code, copyright and business models.

Fenwick & West hass signed up to provide us with support for our Preview Release!! If you don't know them - they are an impressive legal firm. They are very strong in IP and M&A, very well known in the Silicon valley and beyond! Here is an excerpt from their website.

Fenwick & West provides comprehensive legal services to technology and life sciences clients of national and international prominence. We have over 250 attorneys, with offices in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, California.

We could not be happier to be embarking on a partnership that I hope is beneficial to both FreshBrain and Fenwick & West, and one that enables us to do what we have set out to do and give the students an excellent learning experience!

Check out the New Look!

We have been busy working on the first version of our website - the one that I described last time in some detail. After looking at how cool it looks, I decided that it was time to update the look of my blog.

So thanks to our contractor Maria - HERE IT IS. Pretty cool!

Preparing for our First Contest

We are preparing for our first FreshBrain contest. It will be to submit graphic designs for the different technology areas that will be a part of FreshBrain. The areas include:

• Gaming
• Eco / Green
• Video / Movies
• Graphics
• Music
• Web

The five winners will get an iPod Touch. Very cool!!

Our goal in having the contest is three fold.

1. Start to make some noise about FreshBrain. We hope that a lot of folks come to the site, learn a bit about FreshBrain, check out the contest and of course enter.
   
2. Determine which marketing approaches generate the most interest. We will be marketing on websites, social networks and communities. We will be able to determine which of these lead to visits to our website. And as a result, we will get our first glimpse into the success rate of Internet marketing.
3. Get some good graphics that we may end up using on our website:) We are of course not the demographic. We hope that students see this, get pretty excited and creative, and provide us with some awesome graphics.

So to do this - we need our first real version of freshbrain.org. Check out the current mockup. It is getting there!! This was created by our partner Image X Media.

A Week in the Life

Last week was another excellent example of the diversity of activities that we face as a startup. Here are some of my highlights.

• Monday - spent an hour with a communications manager for Sun talking about how and when to make more noise around FreshBrain. The big idea that came out of this was the possibility of a FreshBrain sponsored JavaOne (or Community One) day for high school students. Imagine that - the most appropriate content from JavaOne presented the Sunday before the real event, provided to high school students free!!! We will see if we can make this happen.

• Tuesday - in Utah for two days. First we met with an amazing group at the Jordan Campus of Salt Lake Community College. In this one location they have a charter school, an applied technology high school, a biotech lab and the college itself. We were there to determine if there is some kind of linkage between the applied technology high school and FreshBrain. I believe there is in two ways. One in terms of their using FreshBrain for the areas of technology that they are currently not providing. And the other is their using FreshBrain in connection with their hands on labs - as a project and activity platform. These are both very interesting as we plan out how we expand and tie in high schools moving forward.

• Wednesday - met with the USTAR executive team. USTAR is chartered with driving strategic investment in Utah Universities in order to drive applied research from invention to implementation by industry. They are very interested in driving innovation widely as part of this charter - all the way back into high schools. That is where we come in. They are interested in partnering with FreshBrain in some manner. We are excited and interested in this as we see USTAR as similar to initiatives in other cities and states where developing our youth in the areas of business and technology is a priority.

• Thursday - back in CA, focused on caching up. We spend time discussing the difference between program, admin and fundraising expense and working on our budget submission as part of our 1023 (to add tax exempt to our nonprofit status). Also worked a bit on a better "Golden Pitch" about FreshBrain. I am starting to present more formally and need some slides to more succinctly tell the story.

• Friday - meeting with SRI in an effort to build a strong tie and establish them as a partner. Good progress ... Also worked on the early testing plan with a volunteer who has offered to take this on.

So there you have it ... a typical week these days:)