Fundrunners took home top honors at the second Startup Weekend Columbia. The team consisted of (from left): Geoff Revis, Jake Sheafer, Bryan Pratte, Brett Koonce, Marshall Danner and Jamie Canine.
Fundrunners, a website and mobile app that aims to help runners organize and fundraise for special causes and charities, won the second Startup Weekend Columbia on Sunday, beating out 21 other teams. Trackly, a real-time website monitoring app, took second. OneCDS, a decision support tool for clinicians, placed third.
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“It’s all about making it easy for people,” Fundrunners co-founder Jamie Canine said. “When people care it shouldn’t be that hard to help.”
Canine first developed the idea for Fundrunners when he was a part of a run benefiting wounded soldiers. He recognized that the concept behind a charity run was simple, but it took a great deal of planning and resources. He wanted to simplify that process.
According to its website, Fundrunners is a set of tools that allow anyone to organize a charity run. It connects runners, charities and donors with a goal to make planning a “Fundrun” quick and easy.
“We have a phenomenal team dynamic,” Canine said. “Everyone got the concept, believed in it and went to work. We are definitely planning on moving forward.”
Canine and his team hope to host their first run in 4-6 weeks.
Nick Trabue and Dave Sill present SamePaged, an app that allows users to organize when, where and how they receive digital messages.
The three-day event, which was held at Museao, drew 125 participants – the maximum number of participants permitted by Startup Weekend – from different backgrounds, with several coming from outside of Columbia.
Looking back on the weekend, Startup Weekend Columbia co-coordinator Heidi Fuhrman attributed much of the event’s success to the amount of community involvement throughout the weekend.
“We had so many community members that were supporting the weekend,” Fuhrman said. “There were so many people who got involved. Looking back on the weekend that was the part that hit me, it was really encouraging.”
Five teams earned honorable mentions from the judges: Kill the Landline, Geo’d, Surfbored, Wooga and Project Olympia.
“The quality of the presentations was great,” said event judge Steve Powell, owner of Delta Systems Group. “It was better than I expected, there were a wide variety of ideas presented. It was comforting to know that there are 125 people here in town that were able to come together and do this.”
To learn more about the second Startup Weekend Columbia, see our post: “The 22 teams of Startup Weekend Columbia“.
Note: Taylor Bell is a co-organizer of Startup Weekend Columbia and an intern at The League of Innovators, a sponsor of the event.
Credits: Photos by Taylor Bell.
