MEGA Startup Weekend 2012

April 19, 2012

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Last weekend (April 13 – 15) the 2nd annual MEGA Startup Weekend got underway and was a big success in Silicon Valley with technology innovation coming out of the Mircrosoft office in Mountain View, CA. Yes, that is correct…I said the Microsoft office. MEGA Startup Weekend had a great lineup of speakers including Dave McClure from 500 Startups, Scott Case from Startup America, John Cabrera writer for the Warner Brother’s H+: The Digital Series and last but not least Hiten Shah from Kissmetrics.

dave-mcClure — Photo/image credit © Erica Kawamoto Hsu

There was also a slew of mentors to ensure the entrepreneurs were effectively using their time. You can find a full list of speakers and mentors here. Ahmed Siddiqui was the organizer of the event who also contributed a great post here on Startup Addict last month on how to guarantee a tech startup competition win.

The event focused on three tracks: mobile, gaming and robotics. The winners have a chance to recieve the following:

A chance to attend and pitch at DEMO. (We covered the DEMO competition last year)
An offer for free co-working space at Ground Floor in Santa Clara
Full scholarships at the Founder’s Institute
A free software package from Microsoft BizSpark
One lucky winner will be granted $25,000 in seed funding from Istanta Group

Startup Weekend brought together 28 teams all vying to win their respective categories. People from different walks of life and skillsets like software developers, graphics designers and business professionals had only 54 hours to build a startup that could become a viable commerical application in the real world. Gotta love the Startup Weekend concept. The judges had their work cut of for them but narrowed it down to the following 3 winners:

Robotics:
Eyes on Demand had the vision to win this category with a device that utilizes sensors, a server and a app to detect objects for the visually impaired.