Start-up Weekend gets a winner

After 54 hours of fierce competition and innovative ideas, Start-up Weekend Hyderabad came to an end. The winners are now all set for a global competition.

Can people learn English by speaking with others over the phone? The team behind Lebtop that won at the recently concluded Start-up Weekend Hyderabad believe so and now they’ll go head-to-head with start-ups from 130 cities across the globe to find out which startup idea is the best.

Start-up Weekend gives a group of people 54 hours to come up with a start-up idea and create a working demo. The Hyderabad event was however, a part of Global Startup Battle and the team that wins internationally wins a VIP trip to Rio for the Global Entrepreneurship Congress apart from PR launch packages, legal support, design services and even free web hosting for their apps.

Around 50 people participated in the event that started on Friday evening and concluded on Sunday. According to the organisers, the crowd was a little less than usual as a lot of students were caught up with exams. That however, did not affect the quality of ideas presented, said the organisers. Mentors who visited the venue on the last two days were impressed by the ideas presented and felt that they were better than some presented in the earlier event.

The team behind Lebtop were judged winners on the final day and now the team has to make a YouTube video which will be uploaded on the Startup Global Battle YouTube channel and put up for vote. Out of these 130 startups the top 15 will again have to face a panel of VCs and angel investors who will decide the ultimate winner.

Since Lebtop was made with rural India in mind it is made to work with basic feature phones that don’t have an internet connection.

However, on the advice of one of the mentors the team is also working on a web interface so as to target people in other countries where English is not commonly spoken.

What next?

There is generally a gap of 6-7 months between Start-up Weekend events and in the time being the organisers are planning to organise a special event targetted at college

students. At the event, students from different colleges and universities across Hyderabad such as IIT, Bits-Pilani, IIT, JNU, Osmania will be pitted against each other over three days to see which team can come up with the best start-up idea. The programme is still in the planning stage and if they decide to go ahead with it, it will be held in January.

Winners

1. Lebtop:

Team lead: Nikhil Kulkarni

Provides a platform to teach and learn English

2. Habited:

Team lead: Divya Sornaraja

A mobile app to gamify fitness

3. DigiFlap: Raghu Prodduturi. An innovative product to help consumers in retail stores to easily locate products

Special Mention:

SaveAChild:

Team lead: Venkannareddy Yamnur, Crowdsources location information of underprivileged kids. Venkanna is a class X student who came from Dharwad, Karnataka because he was interested in startups. He hopes to build a world changing startup soon.

Tags: 130 cities across the globe, 54 hours of fierce competition, featured, full-image, global competition, Global Entrepreneurship Congress, Global Startup Battle, innovative ideas, Start-up Weekend Hyderabad, startup idea

Category: City, City News