NYC Startup Weekend

This weekend, DigitalOcean was a very proud contributing sponsor at the NYC Startup Weekend event held at General Assembly. The event was focused around Music and Gaming and gave the participants an awesome opportunity to build a company in a weekend.

Participants brainstormed ideas and then these ideas were voted on. The appropriate skill sets were then assigned to each idea and teams were created. Each group consisted of at least a business person, a developer, and a designer. They spent the rest of the weekend building the company and getting ready to pitch to the judges.

And build they did…

One of my favorite parts of watching an event like this is seeing how the ideas transform into prototypes. On Saturday morning, the GA was filled with rough ideas and a lot of what ifs. By Sunday night, the teams were showing off working apps and business models. It’s really amazing what can be accomplished in such a short period of time!

The top 3 team won prizes, and DigitalOcean was excited to provide the first place team with $1,000 of cloud hosting. Here are the winners:

• First Place: TypeThat — a mobile game that requires you to text the words falling from the sky before they hit the ground. Think Space Invaders meets 2012.
• Second Place: Jam Spot — a site that helps musicians connect with studios to optimize studio usage time and prevent musicians from recording in their uncle’s basement.
• Third Place: Startup Trail — inspired by Oregon Trail, this game is based around the life of a startup. Given my addiction to Oregon Trail as a kid, this was surely a hit.

DigitalOcean was thrilled to award $1,000 worth of cloud hosting to TypeThat and looks forward to watching this team grow. We also provided all of the teams with free cloud hosting to get their apps up and online for the weekend.

A special thanks to Frank Denbow and all of the organizers, volunteers, judges, participants, and sponsors. Awesome work all around.

P.S. I hope the TypeThat team doesn’t mind me sharing this, but I’m going to anyway :) As I was walking around and talking to the teams before the demos, I was able to listen to TypeThat practice their pitch. It was definitely in a rough state just a few minutes before the final deadline. But with a few small changes and minor tweaks, they were able to pull together a very solid presentation and take home the top honors. That is what we call “just-in-time” work at its finest. Nicely done team.