Startup Weekend Toronto

The first ever Startup Weekend Kitchener-Waterloo took place this month at the Communitech Hub in Kitchener. 105 participants pitched 44 ideas and formed 12 teams to battle it out for glory and startup swag. 

We headed over from Toronto to show our support for the event. Chris had some tough questions for the teams on Sunday night as part of the judging panel, and I dropped by on Saturday to meet the incredible organising team. Congratulations to Andrea, Briton, Chelsea and everyone else who did a great job on this event! I picked up some great tips from Startup Weekend Facilitator Sally on how to manage mentors more effectively - I'm excited to put my new knowledge into practice at the next Startup Weekend Toronto.

It was also great to see the beautiful Communitech space in action. It's perfect for an event like Startup Weekend, as well as being the home to the winners of Startup Weekend Toronto 2012, GroupNotes, who are part of the Hyperdrive incubator's current cohort of startups. It's always great to see some of our alumni doing so well. 

The winner of the first Startup Weekend Kitchener Waterloo was HomeFed who pitched a platform to connect travellers with home-cooked and authentic foods wherever they are, by matching them with enthusiastic local hosts who will cook for them. 

Second place went to Fides, a social media analytics company that aimed to turn data into meaningful insights that would allow social media manager to learn from their audience and followers to predict what their audience wants and needs. Third was bagged by ZeroWaitThirty, an excellently-named B2B that allowed restaurants to manage wait times and customer expectations. 

There are some great pics from the event on the Startup Weekend Kitchener-Waterloo Facebook page. And if that's whet your appetite for a slice of Startup Weekend, why not head to Startup Weekend Hamilton on April 26? 

(And for all your Torontoites reading this, make sure you check back on the blog later this week for a very important Startup Weekend Toronto announcement!)

One last thing - if you took part in a previous Startup Weekend Toronto and you have news about your startup please let me know! I'd love to include you in one of our upcoming newsletters or give you a shout-out on Twitter. 

Thanks to an amazing lineup of teams from around the world, Global Startup Battle was bigger, better, and more exciting than ever this year. With over 137 events in more than 60 countries, the global impact and the competition were at an all-time high. 

To get to this point, competing teams had to beat over 1,000 other teams, putting them among just a handful of over 10,000 entrepreneurs who entered a Startup Weekend event during GEW hoping to win. 

The dust has finally settled and we are extremely proud to present your top 3 Global Startup Battle startups!

3. Smart Ward - video

2. Beethoven - video

1. Groupnotes (video) as this year’s 1st place GSB champion!

Read the full story on the Startup Weekend blog

Startup Weekend Toronto winners Groupnotes continue to impress us - they've just made it through to the semi-finals of the Global Startup Battle! 

The Global Startup Battle is the world's largest startup competition. Winners from Startup Weekend events all over the world went head to head this week, submitting 60-second video pitches. The public were then invited to vote on the ideas they liked the most. 

Thanks to an incredible amount of support (thank you to everyone that voted!) Groupnotes joins 14 other teams for the final stage of the competition. They will be individually considered by a world-class panel of judges to determine the overall winner. 

See the full list of semi-finalists and learn more about this year's judges 

The winning team takes home an incredible prize package:

• Free trip to Rio De Janeiro for Global Entrepreneurship Congress - sponsored by Global Entrepreneurship Week. 
• A free trip to San Francisco to tour Googleplex and meet with founders, mentors, and investors - sponsored by Startup Weekend and Google. 
• $5,000 in-kind PR Launch Package for your SW team sponsored by Geben Communication.
• $5,000 worth of Design Services for your SW team sponsored by Btrax.
• $5,000 Incorporation & Legal Package sponsored by Cooley LLP. 
• $20,000 worth of Google Cloud services for your SW team sponsored by Google.

Our thoughts are with Groupnotes as the final deliberations take place. The winner will be announced during the first week of December. 

Groupnotes is a collaborative tool that you can use to easily share, annotate, and comment on websites. You can follow them on Twitter @Groupnotes. 

Groupnotes! Congratulations to Matt and his team!

Congratulations to every single person that took part in Startup Weekend Toronto, you're all winners to us!

GroupNotes is an online platform to share and annotate pages of the web in collaborative research projects. They go on to compete in the Global Startup Battle against entrepreneurs from all over the world!

Second place went to FlyShortcut - an online program that calculates the cheapest route to a destination by using your final destination actually as a stopover.

Third place was taken by Milk - an online app that allows a user to subscribe to necessities.

Find out what the winning teams took home

We have lots more to tell you and a HUGE list of people that we need to thank - hang tight, it's all coming soon!

Final presentations are imminent! Here is the running order - good luck everyone! Don't forget to tweet your reactions using #GSB2012 AND #SWToronto to be part of the global hashtag battle!

1. Remember.me 
2. Fantasee
3. GroupNotes 
4. FlyShortcut 
5. Notch 
6. Parked.In 
7. FX Protect
8. Wallpaperz
9. Milk 
10. Dirt 
11. Upstage
    
    DINNER BREAK
     
12. TripTripAway 
13. PhysioKinect
14. Ampersand 
15. Blast Radius
16. You Made My Day 
17. Menu Snyper
18.  Not To Q 
19. 3Doable
20. WakeMe 
21. SocialGenie 
22. PetBook

Your best chance of success over the weekend (apart from an awesome idea and a great team, of course!) 

A big shout out to all of our local and global sponsors - without these guys, events like Startup Weekend Toronto wouldn't be a possibility. Not only have they helped to fund the event and the prizes, there's also loads of fab offers you can take advantage of, just by taking part!

Global Offers

For a complete list of offers from our global sponsors, please follow this link. There's a huge list to choose from!

Offers from our local sponsors

• Need a ride during the weekend? Grab a lift with Uber, the black cab app based taxi service. If you're a first time user you can get$20 off one trip (Code: SWNEWTOR), and if you've already used the service you can grab a $10 discount on a single trip (Code: SWTOREXST). Good all weekend.
  
• Toronto's Ultimate Entrepreneur and Leadership Event, The SociaLIGHT Conference happens this November 17. Join 1,000 other innovators and young professionals, 20 acclaimed speakers, and over 60 of the top business and leadership organizations for a day of empowerment and inspiration. Past contributors include Sir Richard Branson, Tony Hsieh, Robin Sharma and more. This year, the keynote is speaking at SociaLIGHT on Saturday and OPRAH on Sunday. Use the discount code SUWVIP (all caps no spaces) to get 50% OFF all tickets.
  
• Sign up for a FREE carddrop.me account here. This startup pitched at Startup Weekend Peel and their product allows you to create a virtual contact card which can be instantly shared with others through QR codes or NFC tags.

Microsoft loves startups! No seriously, we even have a special program called BizSpark to show our love for startups. BizSpark gives software startups the tools, software, training and cloud resources they need to get their idea to market as fast as possible, oh and it’s all free, for 3 years. And the catch is, there is no catch! You get to keep whatever you used. Get more details here if this sounds interesting, and I hope it does! This is why we wanted to get involved with Startup Weekend, an awesome event that challenges developers, marketers, designers and enthusiasts to start a company in just 54 hours!

So what are we doing at Startup Weekend? We’ll be on site to help you and your team sign up for this magical BizSpark thing so you can start using your benefits right away. We will also be there to ensure you activate your free Windows Azure benefits so you can get cloudy right from the get go. Thinking of writing a Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8 app? Of course you are! (right?!?) We’ll also get you hooked up with a free 1-year Windows Store & Windows Phone developer account (a benefit all our BizSpark members get) to secure your awesome app name. Other than that we are happy to chat about your ideas, talk tech, generally help out and enjoy ourselves. Oh and we might have some swag or something to give out too ;)

Unfortunately for you, and fortunately for me, I’ll be hanging out with Cheryl Draper who is running Startup Weekend here in Ottawa, but rest assured you Torontonians (and anyone traveling to Toronto for this event) will be well cared for by none other than Rob Kent and Jonathan Rozenblit (who are about as cloudy as you get) so if you have any questions about leveraging Windows Azure, speak to Rob and Jonathan!

As always, you can find me here: @marc_gagne

Startup Weekend Toronto is part of Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) and the Global Startup Battle (GSB). If all these acronyms have got you scratching your head, take a look at this handy guide. We're part of the world's biggest startup contest EVER - it's exciting stuff!