Retrospective of Startup Weekend Madrid

Anybody reading this should know that we love working with startups. We know their budget is constrained, but we are the kind of folks who prefer an engaging project rather than coding yet another boring payroll system.

So it should be no surprise to find us at the Startup Weekend Madrid which happened last weekend.

Zoomry

Zoomry is based on a simple idea: summarizing an event using its fingerprint on social media. It is like Animoto for tweets, but wiser.

A a pay-per-use service targeted at all the small events looking for tools to make a difference and promoting their event without burning their budget on other expensive alternatives. And because twitter is on the rise, but the budget for events is being cut… this seems like the right time for a tool like this.

Ironically, since the tool needs to grok the social network activity to make a meaningful summary, Zoomry will be able to provide a valuable analysis for the organizers of the event, while not trying to compete with other statistics-oriented tools which already exist.

The project won a total of three prices during the event, including fast path access to the linktostart final round.

Of course, we will continue to help this promising project!

GoPointz

Another simple idea… digital point cards for small businesses. Imagine you could collect points when buying at your local grocery store and spend them later at the coffee shop… all from your phone.

Saving on printing costs and leveraging a community of stores instead of a single one, customers have a compelling reason to sign up to this frequent buyer program. And, the best part is that there is no investment on new technology for the business owners… just print and display the QR code customers can scan!

Very simple, potentially very large… and most importantly, very helpful. We are following the progress of this team and will certainly continue to be involved if they decide to turn the project into a business.

Startup weekend itself

This was our first time at Startup Weekend and we can confirm that their no talk, all action motto is certainly true. There was an insane amount of action.

We enjoyed the company and energy of all the people who gather there… including our friends from BeCode, TetuanValley, StartupBootcamp and Madriagil.

To be honest, the weekend was exhausting. But we must have done something well, because we were invited to the upcoming Startup Weekend events at Galicia…

Just to say something not good about the event… there were lots of issues with the network, which I think we overloaded (plus some additional problems with the carrier). But that allowed us to focus more on the plan and less on the coding, which turned out to work great for us.

All in all, we are very happy with our decision of being there. This is the kind of people we want to be surrounded by every day!