Beehive Startups Launches at Startup Weekend Ogden

Great Success!

We officially launched at Startup Weekend Ogden Saturday night. We spent the weekend working and mingling with fellow Utah entrepreneurs, who came here to pitch ideas and work on various projects.

Our primary goal for this weekend was to launch a website we’ve spent a significant amount of time building, and to have Startup Weekend Ogden be the first event Beehive Startups covered (you can expect articles to be published about the event in the coming days). But we also came here to build something awesome — just like everyone else.

To begin the weekend, we had a problem. A simply defined, yet impossible to solve problem: Time. We needed to find a way to create more time for our journalists to easily create a lot of high-quality content.

One of the most time-consuming aspects of a site like Beehive Startups is producing podcasts. It takes time to cut audio into segments; and to insert intro, outro (that’s a word, right?), and transition music, all while making sure everything fits together seamlessly can be complicated as well as time-consuming. Especially if you want to do it right.

Utilizing Gabriel Gunderson, the CTO of Izeni (our founding sponsor), and his FreeSWITCH and SoX skills, we developed a way for our reporters to conduct a phone interview that will automatically transform into a fully-produced podcast the moment they hang up the phone. The podcast will also have introduction and outroduction (I’m certain that’s not a word) music with a recorded voice-over talent welcoming and saying farewell to listeners. It will also have transition music in-between segments, and even voice-over prompts that only the person being interviewed will be able to hear, which will let them know when the host is transitioning to a different segment.

We were able to build an incredible solution to an important problem. We believe our staff’s time is valuable, and we want to utilize it as efficiently and effectively as possible; to free them up to write more stories, conduct more interviews, and embed themselves into the Utah startup community. We believe this is potentially not only an invaluable tool for Beehive Startups, but also for other media companies who are currently working to find a solution to the same problem we were facing going into Startup Weekend Ogden.

So, all things considered, this weekend has been a huge success for everyone involved in making this website happen. I want to personally thank Alex Lawrence and all of the organizers of Startup Weekend Ogden for putting on such a great event. We worked hard, but also had a lot of fun. We hope our site will become an important resource within the Utah startup community.

Published 11/23/2013