Take a peek into a hackathon assembled on the fly.

By Marissa Louie, July 2

What happens when someone come up with a half baked idea that could -potentially- change up the commerce game, then decides to act upon it?

We are about to find out because in the past few hours we’ve assembled a team including up to 8 developers, 1 designer, and myself on the fly to hack it out and see if it will work:

• William Nelson
• Craig Benson
• Sugam Pandey
• Steve Enzer
• Lucija Kordic
• Ari Greenberg
• Joanne Sun
• Michael Arace
• Suyash Joshi
• Marissa Louie

We even have a sponsor who called with a generous offer:

Special thanks to appbackr, The New Way to Finance Your Apps.

The premise: I came up with an idea for a new platform about a day ago. Then we announced the hackathon on a whim.

The plan: Spend up to 48 hours developing an iPhone app while challenging ourselves to produce something of value to society.

This weekend should be a blast. Perhaps more fun than the trip to Belize, surfing, and golfing outings I cancelled in order to build this!

About the Author:

Marissa is a contributor to Adotas, BusinessWeek, and Huffington Post. Follow her on Twitter: @malouie

Marissa Louie is the Founder and CEO of HeroEx, San Francisco’s affordable 1 hour delivery service, where customers buy items then have them delivered in 1 hour or less.

Contact her at (510) 375-1941, or email marissa@heroex.com.

words and pictures by Brian Solis

On July 19th, Tesla Motors, Silicon Valley’s first car company, hosted a grand opening party for its brand new flagship dealership in Menlo Park, CA.

I was invited to attend the event and was more than happy to finally shoot the now famous Roadster! The company took over a vacant Silicon Valley GMC car lot near Palo Alto and transformed it into something unique and wonderful. The party, which boasted 10-15 valets, a red carpet, furniture constructed of cargo boxes and tires (and a nice outdoor setting), an ice sculpture vodka bar, and Tesla Roadsters as decorum, also hosted Silicon Valley VIPs in its service hanger that made you forget you were actually in a “shop.”

The Roadster is special because it is…

100% electric.

$109,000.

a rocket, capable of hitting 0-60 in 3.9 seconds.

inexpensive at 2-cents per mile.

able to travel up to 220 miles per charge.

There’s a year waiting list for these bad boys and if you’re one of the lucky elite, you’ll start receiving your car any day now. I even saw the cars belonging to Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

I’ll let the pictures tell the rest of the story:

Prototype (left), Wood mock-up (right)

Elon Musk, Tesla Chairman

Daryl Siry of Tesla

For more pictures from the Tesla Menlo Park launch, please visit my album on Flickr.

Connect with me on Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pownce, Plaxo, FriendFeed, or Facebook

UPDATE: GigaOm’s Earth2Tech’s event coverage is here.