One of the coolest things about start-up and entrepreneurial events is the amazing ideas people come up with. Internap and Voxel sponsored one of these events here in Atlanta called Startup Riot, organized by Sanjay Parekh. Part of this year’s event was a 48-hour “hackathon” called the Startup Riot Make. In the Make event, 11 “make-shift” teams participated by conceptualizing an idea, planning and implementing it over a 48-hour period. I specifically say “48 hours,” since many of the team members worked until the wee hours of the morning, slept at their workspace in a conference room at the ATDC (Advanced Technology Development Center) and then picked right back up where they left off when they awoke a few hours later.
In some cases, the teams didn’t even have a working idea to start with. Some people had registered as individuals and formed a team on Friday evening. These teams had never worked together before, so seeing what they were able to develop with their new “co-workers” was impressive.
Among the amazing ideas and projects were:
- A “document policy management” site where companies can manage documents and request others to indicate their approval
- A ticket app where people can directly buy or sell tickets last minute
- A 2D gaming physics engine with a sample game demonstrating the engine
- A travel application that includes up-to-the-minute travel information with articles, news and common foreign language phrases
- A data visualization site where one can upload a set of data and have it graphed
- A group travel organization site where you can organize a trip, invite friends, organize the activities and track each person’s payments toward the cost of travel, hotel, airfare, events, etc.
- A site for maintaining “virtual” office hours, complete with video and audio chat
- A system for restaurant managers to manage shift openings, notify staff who want extra shifts and make it easier for employees to trade shifts
- And lots more…
The grand-prize winner was ticketstreetapp.com, which is a clever way to enable last-minute ticket sales directly between buyers and sellers. The winning team put in a lot of work and integrated location tracking as well as Twillio’s API to enable direct communication between the buyers and sellers. If you’ve ever tried to sell last-minute tickets on Craigslist or eBay, you’ll appreciate the simplicity of this app. The hard-working guys who created this application will go on to present their project to the Startup Riot Show, where hundreds of start-ups and entrepreneurs will present their ideas for a chance to win funding and other prizes to help incubate their start-up.
Internap and Voxel are proud to be a sponsor of the Startup Riot this year, and we appreciate the hard work Sanjay and his team have put into making this a quality event.
What great start-up or entrepreneurial event have you been to recently?
For more information on Internap and Voxel joining together to offer high performance and flexible IT Infrastructure solutions, visit our page “We Add. You Multiply.”
