Last May 11 to 13, 2012, Cebu held its first Startup Weekend. Startup Weekend Cebu was a 54-hour event (started at Friday 6pm and ended around Sunday 8pm) that's designed around the maxim, "No talk, all action. Launch a startup in 54 hours." Although all kinds of startups or business can be built on startup weekends, due to the nature of most attendees majority of the startup ideas that would flourish are those that are tech-related: mobile applications, websites or web applications, stand-alone PC applications.

The people that came to participate, all 200+ that paid the Php1,000 registration fee, are mostly developers (or programmers, if you still like that term) and designers.

There are also a few business-types who showed up, and for good measure. These guys' skillsets, unlike developers and designers, are hard to define.

Unlike developers where you can bunch them based on their technical skills (Objective C+, Java, CSS... if you consider that a computing language), business-types do not have targeted skill sets. What they have are years of experience in what I'd like to call as "life skills." Sure, there are business certifications like Six Sigma, Lean and the like. But if you think about it, those certifications don't amount much to actual product building but instead they are more on process efficiencies.

I could go on and on and not make a very good picture of what business-types are about but just take it from me: these guys' skills are difficult to categorize.

Why am I babbling about this?

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As you know by now, and it's ok if you don't, TechTalks is organizing Startup Weekend Cebu this coming May 11th through the 13th at UP Cebu. Startup Weekends are 54-hour marathon no-talk-all-action events for entrepreneurs and would-be entreps who are thinking about building their own startups and launching their own products. TechTalks is proud to be the group that is hosting this weekend and is actively promoting it in the spirit of entrepreneurship and pushing Cebu to the forefront of PH tech/startup circles.

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I wanted to make sure that this piece is sent in the evening (PH time) of Valentine's Day so that those who are celebrating Cupid's official unofficial day would have lesser chances of reading this. Thus they would not be offended. Those in the US who are just about waking up to paper hearts, flowers, chocolates and other Valentine's Day gimmicks, I'd like to think that you have a more open mind.

This piece isn't about directly making money and enterprising or commercializing Cupid's Day. No one can deny though the reality that this "holiday" has turned out to be one big cash cow. Prices of bouquets of roses would jump to about 100% to 250% of the regular price. The same goes for hotel and resort reservations. Sure, that's the law of supply and demand.

But when you see the restaurants, malls and hotels crowded on this day, you know there's something wrong going on. I think it has become way too commercialized. Whatever happened to... OK, I'm not in a position to lecture about you-know-what.

This is really about what you can do, as a team leader, people manager or operations head, to "cash in" on this day and take advantage of it for the good of your organization or company.

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