Startup Weekend Bergen (27.-29. jan)

This weekend I participated in the event Startup Weekend Bergen at The Hub. Startup Weekend is a concept that are spreading all over the world. «Startup Weekend is a global network of passionate leaders and entrepreneurs on a mission to inspire, educate, and empower individuals, teams and communities.»  In other words it gives people the opportunity to pitch an idea, gather a team and try to execute the idea in 54 hours. After that judging panel are voting on their favorite teams and the winners get prices that can support the project further.

19 ideas were pitched on Friday, and of them about ten teams were created. I joined a team of ten people, two designers, three developers and five market and business and marketing people. The members are normally located in Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim and Kypros.

The idea was to make a system that would enable costumers in bars and restaurants to order with their smart phone directly from their table. The order will be sent to an iPad or another tablet mounted on the bar, where the waiters will take care of the orders. The name of the idea changed a bit during the weekend but was eventually called BringMe. At this point in time BringMe are only taking care of the ordering process and are not integrated with the payment system.

I signed up as a designer and worked together with another designer with making wire frames, logo and cards for the tables with QR-codes and links. Most of the interface design were not implemented in time, as the core functionality had to be in place first.  We worked for two intense days, «No talk, all action», only interrupted by a couple of talks from people with experience from startups, some eating, and a little bit of sleep.

During the event thee were also several mentors that walked around and guided the teams where it was needed. We experienced some problems on the server side, which delayed us a little bit, but in spite of the short time we did managed to get the basic functions up an running in 54 hours and were able to present them on the on Sunday.

A team member of mine summarized the weekend like this:

«So what did I do this weekend? I started a company, quadroupled my network learned tons about entepeneuring, ended on 2. place in StartupWeekend and won cool prizes!»

Spot on!