Startup Weekend Omaha: Teams and Day 2 photos

The Saturday midday check-in at Startup Weekend Omaha recently wrapped up, and 18 teams are back at work, scattered throughout the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Mammel Hall, preparing minimum viable products for Sunday night’s final presentations. Friday’s opening pitch session saw 51 ideas proposed, and those were whittled down to …

Startup Weekend Omaha’s 108 participants combined to pitch 51 ideas Friday night. Those were whittled down to 18, which are serving as the basis for teams hard at work today. Photo by Michael Stacy.

The Saturday midday check-in at Startup Weekend Omaha recently wrapped up, and 18 teams are back at work, scattered throughout the University of Nebraska at Omaha‘s Mammel Hall, preparing minimum viable products for Sunday night’s final presentations.

Friday’s opening pitch session saw 51 ideas proposed, and those were whittled down to the list of 18 teams among which Startup Weekend’s 108 participants are divided. The teams and their projects, in no particular order (and subject to updates after I make the rounds and get a better idea of what folks are working on), are: 

  • Drink More Beer – Service providing geo-locational dispatch for people to get rides
  • CollegeStartr – Platform for crowd-sourced college scholarships
  • Team Craniak – Gameified education courses and textbooks 
  • ChronoFlow – Aggregates all social media into a visualized stream
  • Paper or Plastic – Mobile game to break the ice
  • CornFinger.org – A website to communicate, organize and show support for special causes
  • UnUn – Website for creating customized resumes
  • The Bob – Edible food skewer vendor
  • Slouch Couch Game Studio – Video game studio
  • DJEveryone – Social, live-streaming music service
  • ThoughtTalk – Counseling website
  • Eat Your Peas – Mobile app for people with food allergies
  • Feed Reply – Communications aggregator and dashboard
  • BedChair – Collapsible bed/chair
  • Gossip Cloest – Game that involves scanning of bar codes on clothing in stores
  • PhotoPig – Social photography game
  • I’m Broke – A social fundraising platform to help people with everyday economic stresses
  • TweetPull – A Twitter search engine and analytics provider

This morning, U.S. Sen. Ben Nelson stopped by to deliver a talk, and the Omaha World-Herald provided a recap. From the World-Herald:

Nebraska is a good place to open a business, he said, because an entrepreneur will find reasonable rental rates, low utility costs and a comparatively modest cost of living.

Nevertheless, he said, people who start businesses sometimes show too much enthusiasm and do too little analysis. They have to know their competition and if there is none, ask why that’s the case. They must consider the cost it takes to bring the idea to the marketplace and the cost involved in promoting it, he said.

Today’s midday check-in revealed teams at varying degrees of preparedness for tomorrow night’s final presentations. Those presentations will kick off at 7 p.m., preceded by dinner at 6. Presentations will last five minutes each, followed by question-and-answer sessions with Startup Weekend Omaha judging panel of William Fisher of Treetop VenturesKaren Linder of the Nebraska Angels, Jeffrey Meese of Invest Nebraska and Tom Chapman of Nebraska Global.

Startup Weekend Omaha organizer Grant Stanley (center) interviews with the film crew producing a Startup Weekend documentary.

Scott Anderson (left) and Rich Valerius discuss the marketing plan for the Craniac team.

The Craniac (foreground) and TweetPull teams go heads-down on their projects. 

Casualties of Day 2 — caffeine, candy and chips — lay in the wake as TweetPull team members Roy Zhang (left) and Hao Zhang move forward with their project.


It’s Saturday, but “Friday” … Friday! Friday! and other crowdsourced music options are at the heart of a discussion between members of the DJEveryone team. 

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

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