It is not hard to guess that what happened at the Startup Weekend Bratislava is another startup challenge. Teams worked together to either develop a completely new business idea or to improve an existing one.
The winner is Studentive and from what I gather (there isn’t much on the web page) this is a social network for students, helping them to find a job. The tool will allow companies hire students on a project basis and evaluate their performance, thereby giving good performers a transparent way to build their professional reputation. Given that in the United Kindgom alone 20 000 graduates remained unemployed in the first half of 2011, the problem is a big one. Don’t expect much more until the team comes out with a working product. For as a blogger, the company’s twitter page is disappointing. It says, ” We do not talk. We do not tweet. We work!” Fair enough.
The runner-up Healthy.ly aims to develop a mobile application which will monitor levels of glucose and protein in urine based on a wireless sensor installed in a toilet. The team innovates in a field similar to Austrian MySugr, the diabetics treatment gamification startup and the winner of Startup Week 2011. In fact, MySugr is already included as a potential partner into the startup’s marketing plan.
The toilet theme appears to dominate creativity at the Startup Weekend Bratislava, as the third place went to a toilet spotting and ranking service Choco Challenge. The service would fall flat in Germany (no complaints about cleansiness here), but may be in demand on a large Russian market. Will there be premium toilet chains which will sponsor the projects? I doubt that, but perhaps a bleach manufacturer may find the application appealing enough to advertise its brand.
That will do for a weekend of creative brain-storming. The organizers requested English as an official language of the event (excellent), and even provided a live video stream (fantastic), which unfortunately did not work for me, but worked for David Bizer of HackFwd, which is much more important. I will add videos of the pitches once they will appear online.
