FACES of Ames is this Saturday, Sept 24 from 11am to 5pm at the Bandshell Park. The weather should be perfect - partly cloudy and 72 degrees! I hope you to see you there!

You know, the forecast for Sunday, Sept 25 is even better – sunny and 79 degrees! It will be a perfect day to spend with a special someone at Adventureland on their last operating day this year!

So, we’re giving away a pair of tickets to Adventureland!

How do you win? Very simple, just share a heroic story with us.

• The story can be about a heroic act that you’ve witnessed yourself or something that you’ve read or heard about.
• It can be about something heroic somebody has done for you or for other people.
• It can be about everyday heroism such as a boy scout helping an old lady cross the street, a kid protecting a friend from a bully all the way to extraordinary life saving acts.
• It can be as simple as a short tweet, a comment below this post or an entire blog post.
• Bonus points for links and pictures!
• The only thing I ask for is that the story is real, not made up.

For the winner, I only ask that you post on our Facebook Page a picture of you and your guest, wearing your bHeroic t-shirts, somewhere in Adventureland. No t-shirts? No problem! I’ll throw in a couple of T-shirts too

So, take a stroll down memory lane or keep your eyes peeled for heroic acts you see around you in the next two days. Enter as many times as you like! I will read all the stories and announce the winner on Thursday morning, Sept 22!

Have an awesome week! I’m looking forward to read your stories and to see you at FACES of Ames!

Regards,

Robert

AMA Iowa NOVA Award

Hey, we won our first official award. And we haven’t even launched yet (minor detail). A week ago there was an awards ceremony held up in Johnston by AMA Iowa (American Marketing Association).  I attended just briefly near the beginning but had to duck out early for another family commitment. It turns out that our entry for bHeroic was awarded the Best in Category for Emerging Technologies. Not too shabby for such a young company!

This one was based on the merits of the SMS registration process that our team devised for Unleash Heroes back at Startup Weekend Des Moines. A pair of our developers Stephen Rose and Scott Sorheim were the main instigators here. Here’s the whiz-bang coolness that impressed a few judges: new users can register on the spot for bHeroic — all they need is a simple mobile phone with SMS. In our original demo it was, “Text 123 to 56789 and your account will be created based on your phone number.”  Since then we’ve modified the process slightly to: text your email address to 515-555-5555. A few more digits, but we now have that email connection to the new user. Either way, the new registrant receives a text confirmation explaining, “Congratulations, you’re now a member with X Hero Points, please visit bHeroic.com to complete your profile.” Watch for more SMS features as bHeroic evolves. And yes, we do use Twilio for those of you scoring at home.

While it’s not SMS marketing per se, it is a pretty damn cool way to enlist new members. Envision hundreds of people crossing a finish line who see a sign or a card asking them to claim the Hero Points they just earned. It’s possible today — we just need to finalize a few more features to maximize the rest of your experience. Thanks for cheering us on.

You’ll find our friends from Dwolla there as well, both as sponsors of the event and taking the opportunity to lay some new technology on us. Kum & Go will participate as a sponsor, among others. Why Are Heroes Involved? We’ll be using this event to unleash our new-look site on some lucky  beta testers. Anyone at the event who makes a donation to DMSC via Dwolla will also have the option to collect some bonus Hero Points at  the same time. Don’t be surprised if there’s a significant announcement  here. We’ll be handing out our new T-shirts to the fashionistas who dare  to be the first to wear these proud colors. These shirts are made  possible by both 8/7Central and the Sigler Companies.

Oh, want to help us pick a tagline? In lieu of fancy focus group  research, we’ll have a unique mechanism for you to choose between some favorites and put these internal squabbles to rest.

If you haven’t been to the new DMSC home, parking is available in the City Garage west of the Kirkwood Building, in the parking lot south of Court Avenue and nearby streets. Be there to be part of the cultural  lifeblood of Central Iowa.

Voting on the recent AppSumo Lean Startup Challenge closed at midnight last Wednesday and we were excited to see so much support from friends and interested bystanders from across the country, even a few overseas. And the contest winner is… Um, we have absolutely no idea yet. Later this week the good folks behind the Lean Startup Challenge will make an announcement.

Regardless of the outcome, we’re flattered that over a hundred of you stepped forward to vote for Unleash Heroes in this two-day window. And to all of you who did (see below), you’ll be among the first to receive an official Unleash Heroes souvenir T-shirt. [Ta-da!] Oh, but we haven’t quite finalized the design on anything in our souvenir catalog yet, so stay tuned. We’ll do our best to get you that shirt, and it’ll be swell, I promise. We do need your T-shirt size, so please send an email to Robert [at] UnleashHeroes dot com. Please allow 4 to 24 weeks for delivery, sooner if we win.

Since voting for this contest was limited to Twitter users, there are several more of you who would have liked to cast a vote but didn’t have the mechanism to do so. Fair enough, we’d like to make sure you’re part of our e-mail list so we can keep you posted as Unleash Heroes reaches important milestones. If you did vote and don’t see your Twitter handle below, it’s entirely possible we just missed you in the Tweetdeck search. Just send an email to Robert with a link to your tweet and we’ll get you on the list.

What heroic things do you have planned for this week? Let us know.

Update – Mar 20, 2011: If you like what we’re trying to achieve, please help vote for us in the Lean Startup Challenge. Winning this competition will bring us so much closer to realizing a world full of heroes. Thank you for your support! Simply click here or Tweet the text below to vote: “Our entry for @AppSumo Lean Challenge http://bit.ly/dSBBdq #leanvote21 – Please RT”

So we hatched an idea. A germ of a concept. To encourage youth to perform more heroic acts (volunteering, running a 5k for a cause, donating blood, etc.) by giving them Hero Points and working with local businesses to reward their heroic acts. To change the world and create a world full of heroes.

The good folks at Startup Weekend Des Moines gave us lots of great feedback. These are thoughts coming from mentors, judges and fellow participants. Now it’s time to stand and deliver. And support from others like the Lean Startup Challenge will have a huge impact.

In terms of lean, today our site is a mere shell of the functionality we’ll launch in the coming weeks and months. We may apply a few new features here and there, bounce it off some of our prospects and refine as needed. Baby steps, babe. “We never fear to fail,” is an awesome mantra, knowing it’s fine to fail often as long as we also learn quickly.

As for mean, are you wondering how a group dedicated to helping nonprofit organizations and their volunteers can really be mean? More like cuddly, but competitive. Other startup weekend participants will say we certainly pulled out all the stops in an effort to pitch this concept to the judges. We had fun with it, but we also challenged each other to think through so many aspects of this project. Here’s one wicked aspect: we were able to leverage sponsor Twilio’s package for SMS integration. They made it easy for the uninitiated to enable SMS direct registration in our system — something we demo’d in that pitch to engage the live audience.

And if you’ve ever met our fearless leader Robert Hidajat — well, you haven’t seen his nasty side (honestly, not sure any of us will; he’s one of the nicest guys around). The reality is that our new team tends to be brutally honest within our ranks. We call it being passionate about a goal.

Startup organizations have to move quickly to deliver a useful product. Will someone else with more resources attempt to execute on our plans? We hope not. But it would almost be a bummer if they didn’t — imitation is the highest form of flattery, right? Precisely why we need to be there first.

Join us as we crank up this machine and we hope you’ll find it to be a fascinating ride. Always eager for thoughts on what you’d like to see.

An Epic Boss Fight presented itself very early Friday morning in the form of a massive 8.9 magnitude earthquake that triggered a devastating tsunami in Japan.

If past history of the tsunami in Indonesia is any indication, the number of people affected will unfortunately climb quickly into the thousands in the next few days and weeks.

We saw our friends at Dwolla posted this blog post earlier today to do their part to support the relief effort by collecting donation through The Move Project. We think what they are doing is awesome!

Even though Unleash Heroes is not quite ready for Beta yet, we want to do our part to help.

We will be giving Hero Points to everybody who stepped up to become a hero in this time of need and donated to the Japan relief effort.

• Any donations under $20 will earn you 3 Hero Points
• Donations between $20 and $50 will earn you 8 Hero Points
• Any donations above $50 will earn you 18 Hero Points

1. If you’ve donated via The Move Project, whether you Tweet it or not, simply e-mail the # of Hero Points you’ve earned to japan@unleashheroes.com
2. Or, you can also donate to the Japan relief effort through our Hub Page by clicking the button below. Please include your e-mail address in the Memo.

If you already have an account, we will credit the Hero Points to your account. If not, we will create an account with your e-mail address and credit the Hero Points to your new account. As soon as we’re ready for Beta, we will let you know how you can access your account and start earning rewards from your accumulated Hero Points.

100% of donations that we collected will go toward Save the Children who focuses on helping children and families affected by this tragedy. Save the Children is an excellent organization, one of a handful of organizations that are rated 4 stars by Charity Navigator. They already started to mobilize a response to this disaster! We will simply write a check every week to send your donations to Save the Children and save them any credit card processing fees.

Finally, here’s where the Epic Boss Fight comes in. If together as a community we accumulated at least 500 Hero Points in the next 60 days, through both The Move Project and Save the Children, we will double everybody’s earned Hero Points! So, please tell your friends, families, neighbors, even strangers about this post and ask them to join the fight!

Together we can make a difference and create a world full of heroes!

Startup Saturday Des Moines is now over, I’m exhausted like most of the other attendees. But what’s really wacky is that I’ve got this foggy feeling I might wake up from this dream. Like the rest of our team, it’s starting to sink in that YES INDEED, we just won the whole enchilada! Must be true, I found it on the Interweb. Last night we were so blown away because the other nine groups each had such good ideas and presentations. Their ideas had really come a long way over the past two days. So much talent in that room. See the WHO-TV story to document the event as well as the Iowa State Daily’s coverage.

We can’t begin to thank all the parties involved, but one thing for sure is that a generous scholarship program made it all possible for a few key members on our team. Ben Milne of Dwolla got it started by sending ten of these people, and several more followed. Obviously we’re still intoxicated by 5-Hour Energy, sleep deprivation and kudos from friends and family. Tomorrow it’s gameface time.

Now it’s your turn — tell us below or on Twitter if you have a feature or suggestion you’d like to see in UnleashHeroes. Perhaps something we pitched seemed a bit off? You can also email Robert | at | unleashheroes.com. Don’t forget to sign-up to receive our e-mail updates. We are definitely moving ahead and you’re welcome to come along for the ride.

Who are the heroes in your life? Any in your neighborhood? Not like Superman or Mother Theresa. But people all around you are probably doing fantastic things to benefit your fellow man on an everyday basis. It can take the form of donating blood, supporting a worthy fundraiser — the possibilities are endless.

At Unleash Heroes we connect you with charitable organizations that need your help, plus track all those good things you do with a simple, centralized point system. You’ll earn points for rewards that benefit you as well as your favorite organizations. Your personal points may also contribute to collective community points for your school, neighborhood, or city. As you tell us what type of volunteer opportunities interest you we’d like to alert you via email or text message. This site is a resource for willing volunteers to find who needs their help on a given day.

We’re here to reward you and soon enable you to share the volunteer opportunities across social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. You’ll earn bonus points by referring friends and businesses to Unleash Heroes.

So think of the heroes in your life and make a checklist right now: tell them how to gain hero status and they may find new opportunities to help. And don’t forget that your name is at the top of that list. Be sure to register today to learn more and check back in the coming days to see how this evolves.