There are some great online services out there that allow you manage your work in new ways and take it with you wherever you go. Take Evernote. It’s a wonderful note-taking tool. It would be even better if you could have content from other services like Instagram, tumblr, WordPress, and Google Reader added into your notebooks automatically. You found an interesting blog post. How do you get it into Evernote? You could cut and paste, but how do you do that easily on your phone?

What if you could backup your photos from Instagram to your Dropbox folder automatically? What if you could keep copies of all of your tweets with links?

If This Then That make all of this possible.

IFTTT, as it is generally known, is a web service for automating your online life. It allows you define an event on one service that triggers an action on another service. For example, you can tell IFTTT to add new pictures in your Instagram account to your Dropbox folder. You can tell IFTTT to take your new Tweets and save them in Evernote. You can define many tasks using this kind of simple instruction. IFTTT periodically wakes up, checks for new events, and then takes an action. All without your effort, saving you time.

The class

On May 22nd, I will be teaching a class on how to use IFTTT at the Lafayettech HUB. This two-hour class will start at 6pm and within the first 15 minutes you’ll be creating your own tasks on IFTTT. It’s less than $5 to join us.

I look forward to seeing you there.

For more details see the registration page.

Dave L. – “Ji Soo Yi’s presentation was very thought-provoking and relevant to current projects. The conversations on entrepreneurial activities were valuable.”

Conversation about entrepreneurship eco-system in Greater Lafayette

The actual conversation about entrepreneurship in Greater Lafayette that followed Ji Soo’s presentation was extremely valuable.

Topics like startup education, encouraging the local entrepreneurial spirit, attracting angel groups in Greater Lafayette, managing the risk of starting a business, co-working policies, were just a few aspects of the group’s conversation.

Dave J. – “Ji Soo’s talk was interesting and has opened up some visualization logjams in my head, but the real value of time together was afterward, discussing the problems of creating the entrepreneurial environment in Lafayette.”

Two founders of a new tech startup were present. They will move the startup’s operations to Lafayette and are interested in finding the right resources for it. They will soon close a first round of funding.

They are another great model and proof that Lafayette is ready to nurture new startups.

Groups like Lafayette Tech and Purdue ICC continue to educate other local groups about this being the right time to push the local entrepreneurship spirit and growth.

To us at Lafayette Tech, all this local startup education is solved simply by having an independent place/entity, a non-profit 3rd party that will handle the entrepreneurship ideas, their business education, and the growing community of startups over the next 2-3 years and beyond.

Students and non-students would need to mix and connect to each other and the local community of people and businesses, comfortably share ideas and find co-founders and other resources, and most importantly own “100% of nothing” while interacting with each other to grow their idea.

By letting students and non-students own “100% of nothing” for a while, in an independent environment, we’ll create a trend in the community and more startups will arise, while few of them will definitely become successes.

By keeping this community connected every week and month to a series of real entrepreneurship events that will spark the hope for their ideas, more students and non-students will eventually form new companies, angel groups will notice the real entrepreneurship trend in this area, more students will come to local universities and remain to live around Greater Lafayette to pursue their happiness.

Today, groups from South Bend, Indianapolis, Bloomington, Chicago are reaching out to Lafayette Tech to see what exactly we are doing here and how we manage to quickly attract so many eyes.

Tech HUB’s current model for growing the entrepreneurship eco-system around Greater Lafayette and the state of Indiana is supported by these ongoing activities:

• Startup acceleration, mentorship (Tech HUB)
• Educational classes and conferences (Tech Academy)
• Monthly idea generation meetups (SimpleTalk)
• Monthly idea implementation hackathons (Hack Days)
• Monthly idea launch/demos (Startup Showcase)
• Annual Demo Day
• Bi-annual Startup Weekend
• Larger local conferences with various themes and topics

We believe in this concept and other suggestions around it, and we know it will work with some local support.

How would you like to help and get involved?

Photo by Dustin W.

Few applications shaped up last Saturday during the Community Apps Hackathon at the local Tech HUB.

After exploring some ideas on how to mix the available data, teams have formed around a couple of ideas and this is what happened by the end of the day:

• VisualCity - Took all the anonymous data, for Lafayette only, and mashed it up into a large heat map of… stuff going on in a city. In its current state, the map can be used by future homeowners, the City, and other local people. Soon the heatmap may highlight more relevant data, like schools ratings, parks info, frequent bicycle routes etc.
• Where is my bus? – May solve several problems for people traveling by bus and dealing with arriving at stations without knowing whether the bus is on its way there or they just missed it.

Other ideas have been explored, they may come to life during one the future events at the Tech HUB, like the Tech After Hours (May 9), Arduino Hack Day (Jun 2), SimpleTalk (May 16), or one of the focused meetups for developers we’ll soon put together (details soon).

At Greyhouse Coffee, 7PM.

This monthly event is keeping everyone up to date with the latest cool local startups and the evolution of their development, funding, team, market reach.

The showcase is also a good opportunity for the startups to get early feedback and explore many new ideas, which is critical for them to properly move forward.

These monthly showcase events will eventually culminate with a larger “Demo Day” we plan to host later in the year.

APRIL STARTUP SHOWCASE MINUTES

Last evening, HungryBoiler‘s Nick Moore kicked off the showcase by presenting their new mobile app (iTunes).

Patrick Austin next presented QPon Express, a B2C startup that will launch next month, developed by the local agency Social FlyWay.

Nick Schuetz, James and TJ of SPEAKall then demoed the iPad app (iTunes) they developed to help children with autism. There were literally many iPads moved all around the audience, running SPEAKall and getting the people excited about how much helpful this app could be. Even more amazing, the team were then showing us their entire suite of apps helping children with special needs.

MARCH STARTUPS UPDATE

As for news from the last month’s Startup Showcase products, GimmeBar offered their API platform to the developers attending the API Hack Day on Apr 7th, and iDreamAgent (iTunes) launched publicly with much coverage within the real estate industry publishers.

NEXT MEETUPS

Next month’s Startup Showcase is scheduled for May 15th and is already having a great lineup (a spot is still open, let us know if you’d like to demo), but until then you may attend SimpleTalk tonight at 7pm at Greyhouse, Coffee and Collaboration/Tech After Hours next Wednesday at Morgan D Burton, Community Apps Hackathon May 5th at the Tech HUB (more news on this one soon), and other cool meetups and events listed at http://meetup.com/lafayettech. RSVP and enjoy.

On Tuesday, April 17th, Greater Lafayette’s Startup Showcase will feature some amazing local startup companies and apps:

• QPon (QR code-based coupon campaigns)
• SPEAKall (an iPad app that assists children with autism)
• Eatnlocal (a new way to find the favorite local restaurants)
• HungryBoiler app (an iPhone app that extends HungryBoiler’s services).

Demos

• Come prepared to demonstrate the features of your startup
• Talk to people on what you need to move it forward
• There will be booths available, or live demos
• Send your info at contact@lafayettech.org to get listed here

Launches

• Launch your startup during this showcase
• Pitch your startup on stage, take it live
• Shout out what you need to move it forward
• Send your info at contact@lafayettech.org and we’ll keep it secret until the day of the event

Contact us with suggestions at contact@lafayettech.org, on Twitter, Meetup or Facebook.

RSVP for the next event at http://meetup.com/lafayettech.

Bring your own set of API tools and collaborate with other developers to create new tech apps, hardware hacks, automated gadgets.

Mix software and/or hardware with existing or new APIs.

We welcome local developers, designers, engineers, technology students and enthusiasts, startup lawyers, entrepreneurs, investors and angels.

More details and RSVP at http://www.meetup.com/Lafayettech/events/53292622.