ShackNation::tech::NYC

General Assembly, Flatiron

Startup Weekend is a Friday-Sunday hackathon with a twist. Creatives and entrepreneurs work alongside engineers, adding business plans and customer validation to the competition judging criteria. 

There were over 100 participants divided into 20 teams at this weekend’s New York City event. The three apps that won were:

BrandPulsar
*3rd place

inbed.me
*2nd place

Tagify.us
*1st place

BrandPulsar is a web app that uses recognition technology to monetize webpage images. Its team was composed entirely of Frenchies (and wasn’t the only startup with Francophones in the mix!). Judge Deborah Jackson, award presenter, congratulated the team on their polished product, “unlike other [participants],” she noted.

inbed.me, another team of non-nationals, boasts being “the world’s first Social Accomodation Booking engine, for young independent travelers.” Unlike foursquare, it aims to revolutionize social sharing by enabling future check-ins, i.e. where you’ll be at any point in the future. Award presenter and judge Reece Pacheco dubbed their demo a “real performance.”

Tagify.us tackles the problem of unmanageable personal and professional contacts by crowdsourcing ways to tag people. This one’s worth checking out, so definitely look up their Facebook app. You’ll see the value once you start using it!

Two crowd faves were: Beards for Breasts - a way for men to help raise money towards breast cancer causes by growing out beards in exchange for donation sponsorships. Then there was Selfey - a mobile app to bid for spots closer to the front of a line — any line. In charge of that team was 15-year-old Jack Kaufman, whom I affectionately refer to as The Next Zuckerberg.

Also, of particular interest to New Yorkers, was Renthackr, which disrupts the NY real estate industry by facilitating transparency in rent prices. My friend Zeb Dropkin headed the location-based app and is an all around good guy. The next time I participate in Startup Weekend or the like, I’ll be sure to be on his team!

Details on the the web app I contributed to will be provided in a subsequent post.

For the full list of startups visit: http://nyc.startupweekend.org/

yfrog credit: nycsw