The Conference Center at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is the epicenter of activity for Startup Weekend Kansas City.
Seventeen teams are in the final stretch of Startup Weekend Kansas City, working toward the event’s closing pitch session, which begins this afternoon at about 4:45 at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
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This is the sixth Kansas City rendition of Startup Weekend, an event held all over the world that’s designed to give participants the experience of launching a business in just more than 48 hours.
About 100 participants turned out Friday night, and more than 50 of them delivered one-minute pitches for business ideas. Teams formed around 17 of those ideas and have worked since then to build products and ready pitches in preparation for tonight’s final presentations. Teams will deliver five-minute pitches and answer a few minutes of questions from a panel of judges, and those judges will dole out awards at night’s end.
The 17 ideas that were selected are listed below, with brief descriptions courtesy of a phone interview with SWKC organizer Erin Likins, who filled us in on the teams’ progress as of Saturday night. Following that are a sampling of photos from the weekend, provided by SWKC organizer Nate Allen.
For more information on the teams, you can check the SWKC YouTube page, which has video of Saturday’s midday check-ins. Also, the SWKC blog has been updated frequently throughout the weekend and contains all sorts of information about the event.
The teams
- E-Beacons – A location-based mobile app for public safety and emergency response
- Deal District – A service for opting out of advertisements in mobile apps but receiving notifications of deals from nearby businesses
- PassDefense – A service that offers secure password authentication
- Broville – An app that provides dating and relationship advice to men
- Soldier Up – A service that helps veterans and entrepreneurs connect
- eFarm – A company that helps consumers partner with local farmers to order and track food grown for them
- WaZoo – An application that provides real-time notifications of events taking place for patrons of zoos, amusement parks and other attractions
- Shop Startup – A service that connects people to startups that have unique ideas for holiday gift-giving
- Fix It Button – A company providing tech support for people that aren’t tech savvy
- Lisn – A tool for finding, managing and transferring podcasts
- Do or Donate – An app to help motivate users to complete tasks by donating money to specific causes for unfulfilled tasks
- WtfBing – A tool for getting promo codes through social networks
- Art Force – A website designed to provide artists and creatives business assistance
- Kansas City Culture Crawl – An app that creates a scavenger hunt for unique places in the city
- 20 Happy – An online provider of eye wear
- Clusterfunk – A tool that helps startups with market research and customer validation
- ItSent – A tool for easily transferring files of any size
Derota Lopez (left) and Sourabh Chakraborty are working on Clusterfunk.
Steve Stava (from left), Alex Rousch, Patrick Stoddart, Angela Anderson and Gary Barber are on the team building Shop Startup.
Royce Haynes (left) is part of SWKC’s organizing team, and Michael Gelphman is serving as a mentor for the weekend.
Updated Nov. 18 at 4:15 p.m. – Final presentations will start between 4:45 and 5 p.m. The story originally stated they would begin at 4.
Credits: Photos by Nate Allen.
