How QONQR Began (Scott’s Version)
Many people have asked me, “How did QONQR get started?” Well, it was Justin’s idea, and I hope he finds time to posts his version of this story, but here is my version.
I knew Justin as a peer in the tech community. He ran the local .Net user group and I ran the Silverlight user group. Justin and I had chatted occasionally at community events, but had our first chance to really talk about stuff just a few months before startup weekend. We had lunch to talk about start-ups and managing clients. Then out of the blue, Justin sent me an email the Wednesday before Startup Weekend. He gave me a brief overview of a mobile game he was thinking of pitching at Startup Weekend, “RISK on the map of the real world”. He said it was the first time he had shared his idea to anyone. He knew I was going, knew I was a “startup guy” and wanted to know what I thought. I remember saying something to the affect that it wasn’t a project that I would probably vote for, since I was pitching my own idea, but he should definitely pitch the idea because it was a fun idea and should get some votes.

For those that don’t know about Startup Weekend, it goes like this: a group of people get together on a Friday night and network for about an hour. Then when the Startup Weekend folks call the evening to order, anyone who wants to stands up and says, “I think we should build a business like this.” You have 60 seconds to convince the crowd you have a good idea for a business. Everyone votes for the top 10-15 ideas. Then, those people have 30 minutes to build a team from everyone who is left over. From there you have until 6pm Sunday to build a business, and usually a prototype. Well, Justin did pitch the idea and it was voted in the top 15 ideas. I pitched my idea, and it was not.
Before I get too far, I don’t want to miss the part about where the name QONQR came from. I was sitting next to Justin and he got up to go stand up in line to pitch his idea. The next thing I know he is sitting next to me again. I leaned over and said, “Why aren’t you going to pitch?” He said, “I will but I just thought of an awesome name and am going to register the domain.” He registered QONQR.com, then stood up and gave his pitch.
After the vote, Justin is standing up against the wall waiting for people to come join his team. He was all alone when I walked up to him. I said, “Nobody wants to be on your team?” He said that two guys had just talked to him and said they thought it was an awesome idea, but he would never be able to pull it off, so they were going to join another team. I told him I knew he would need a fair amount of map code, and I had done lots of Google and Bing maps work, so I’d do his maps for him tomorrow, but would probably go back to work on my idea Sunday, even though I didn’t get the votes, since it was something I wanted to do anyway. Then Jessy and Andy walked up and said, “OK, let do this”. I knew who Andy and Jessy were, other guys in the Microsoft community, but I didn’t know them very well. I’m pretty sure we were the only .Net guys in the crowd.

So it was almost midnight by now and I told the guys I would meet them back at SW in the morning and get started. I still wasn’t crazy about the idea, but said I would help out. I got to bed around 1am and by 5am I couldn’t sleep anymore. I had tossed and turned for most of those four hours, coding the map implementations in my dreams. So I started coding a Silverlight map implementation at 5am. By the time I had made it back to SW I was getting pretty excited and was wired into the concept. I had pulled together a foundation application and was excited to show the guys. I told them I was sleep-coding and could only sleep for a few hours. They said they had only slept an hour. They had gone to Jessy’s and bought web hosting, source code hosting, setup the DNS, started framing out a solution for the mobile app, and had even put out a 99designs.com project for a logo, with several responses to choose from by 8am. This is the original logo for QONQR.

By mid-day on Saturday a guy named Michael stopped at our table and asked if he could join in. Michael helped for the rest of the daylight hours on Saturday and much of Sunday. The rest of us only got another hour of sleep on Saturday night and pushed through to 6pm on Sunday when we had to present. We found and fixed a serious bug in our solution only 15 minutes before the presentation started, but by 6pm Sunday we were ready to go. It was only minutes before the presentation when we saw the whole solution work end to end correctly.

Our solution looked like this. We had every zip code in the US, with the center latitude and longitude, in our database. The website hosted a light-weight mobile HTML5 client that worked from phones that supported webkit, so we could get your GPS location. All you could really do from your phone is authenticate, check your current zone, and hit a “Deploy” button, but that was a fairly big feat in two days. I believe there was a timer that forced you to wait to refresh your nano-bots, but we made the refresh very fast so everyone could deploy a few times per minute during our 6 minute presentation.
Then there was the map we put on the overhead display. We had built a Silverlight application that showed all the pins (battle zones) in the US, if you zoomed in close enough. You could pan around the map, zoom in and out, and tap each pin. When you tapped the pin it would spin around and grow to fill the screen. The pin showed 3 bars, much like it does today. But these pins had bars that automatically updated. Every few seconds it would poll back to the server and ask for updated counts. So as people were deploying the bars in the pins would dance up and down to show who was winning real-time. The Silverlight was an easy way to get a fluid, animated and touch enabled (I had a laptop with a touch screen) map that really showed off well. You couldn’t see if from a phone because it was Silverlight, but the goal was to impress the crowd and judges for the competition, which it did.

We told everyone when we started our six minute pitch to go to QONQR.com with their phones and login with their twitter handle. We had already assigned them to teams, which we had cleverly given the military call signs of Whiskey, Tango and Foxtrot (WTF). The Legion, Swarm and Faceless had not been invented yet. As Justin gave our pitch, the crowd started playing, and the battle pin on the projector started to dance. The zone changed color several times, and soon the audience was starting to get loud as one team would over-take the other. I think it helped us a lot that the buzz was beginning to grow behind the judges.
When the night was through we were voted the winners of Startup Weekend. We celebrated by leaving the party early, returning to our homes to sleep. That was the start of QONQR.
-Scott Davis
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