DigiWidgets takes home prize at Lincoln’s first Jumpstart Challenge

DigiWidgets, a service that customizes sites, won Lincoln’s first Jumpstart Challenge Saturday. About 30 people attended the judging finale at Lincoln’s Hyatt Place Saturday where three teams pitched. The concept was created because many people have a hard time learning photoshop and customizing websites, said Jumpstart Challenge judge Brian Ardinger …

DigiWidgets took home the $1,000 prize and free co-working at Fuse during Lincoln’s Jumpstart Challenge.

DigiWidgets, a service that customizes sites, won Lincoln’s first Jumpstart Challenge Saturday. About 30 people attended the judging finale at Lincoln’s Hyatt Place Saturday where three teams pitched. 

The concept was created because many people have a hard time learning photoshop and customizing websites, said Jumpstart Challenge judge Brian Ardinger. The widget allows businesses to add digital graphic editors to websites and can be used from any device.  

Stacy Carlson, founder of Gotta Pixel, wanted to make it easier for her digital scrapbooking members to create and work on their digital scrapbook pages. She wanted a solution where users could login from any device, work on the digital scrapbook pages they have created and allow them the ability to build their pages through a much easier platform than what professional photo editing software allowed. 

Carl Steffen, founder of Stone Fin Technology, said he saw the potential the idea had not only in the digital scrapbooking industry, but also how it could positively impact many other markets.

HomeServices of Nebraska, a real estate company that was one of the two corporate partners, liked the idea for creating custom pages for real estate agents and open house flyers. The duo won a $1,000 prize and free coworking at FUSE Coworking for winning the “wild card” division.

Ardinger said the idea behind Jumpstart was to connect corporations with the entrepreneurial world to solve problems. 

“We succeeded at that and now we’ll try that again next year and look at different time frames to get more teams to go through the whole thing.”

More than 100 gathered at the inception of Jumpstart to find out the problems to solve. About 15 teams formed during the launch, but only three remained after the six-week time period teams had to work on their projects.

Ardinger said they will look at adjusting the timeline to attract more participants. The two corporate problems went unsolved.

Inspro Insurance wanted a solution to improve workflow and data management for its sales center while HomeServices of Nebraska wanted a solution to enhance the customer experience by creating a concierge service for agents leveraging technology tools to reward and enable them to perform more effectively. The Challenge was sponsored by NMotion and the Lincoln Partnership for Economic Development.

The winning team, Steffen and Carlson, paired up at the informational meeting and spent the next six weeks working on the widget. 

From its Facebook page:

“While digital scrapbooking is where we’re heading first, DigiWidgets will allow any business that needs digital creative space built into their website to use it. DigiWidgets will be subscription based and free to try for businesses that want to test the waters. We are building DigiWidgets to be easy to use and customizable to fit any website. Our vision includes deployment being as simple as installing a WordPress plugin.”

 

Credits: Photo from Lincoln Partnership for Economic Development on Facebook.

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 »

Get the latest news and events from Nebraska’s entrepreneurship and innovation community delivered straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

One response to “DigiWidgets takes home prize at Lincoln’s first Jumpstart Challenge”

  1. […] started out as DigiWidgets, a web customization program that won Jumpstart Lincoln. However, one of the co-founders left and Carlson, who has already had […]