Startup Camp 2010 invited 30 university students to spend a weekend this month, locked in a room, to create six new web-based businesses in 48 hours.
Participants included a mixture of coders, business “geeks” and graphic designers from the University of Melbourne, RMIT, Monash University and Swinburn University.
The event began with participants brainstorming ideas on Friday evening, coding non-stop overnight to have a beta version of the various websites launched to the public by Saturday noon and completing the camp on Sunday with a pitching presentation to a panel of successful entrepreneurs and IT experts.
Here’s a list of what they had come up with in just 48 hours:
Ansr.it (www.ansr.it): Crazy questions are posted daily. Users are invited to come up with even crazier answers.
Blood Thank (www.bloodthank.com): A place for blood donation recipients to express their gratitude to the donors.
Dream, Share, Discover (www.dreamsharediscover.com): A site where users share their dreams and aspirations and receive advice.
ClassNotes (www.classnotes.com.au): A classnotes marketplace for university students.
Night Mapr (http://night-mapr.appspot.com/): An easy way to find a night event close by.
Gwisher (www.gwisher.com): To help hapless guys find “the perfect gift” for their girlfriends.
For most student participant Startup Camp was their first dose of real entrepreneurship. They were amazed by how much they could achieve just by applying their minds to execution, rather than mere planning (or simply dreaming), an experience shared by those who participated in last year’s Startup Camp.
One panellist at the Sunday pitch, Andrew Gerrand from Google, commented, “The quality of what these students produced was on par with that of the Sydney Startup Camp run by professional entrepreneurs.”
(This article was originally posted on Australian Anthill, click here to see the full article.)
Posted by Tian @ 4.41pm, 15/4/10
