It happened so quickly and it was so intense that we barely had the time to experience it properly. The Startup Weekend Cluj - Smart Cities event took place in early April this year and it was fantastic! Hundreds of mails and messages, even more Skype and phone calls, 11 awesome people channeling their efforts towards a common goal - all of these have made it possible. And, of course, we must not forget all our sponsors & partners.
The topic we chose to work around this year is making Smart Cities. In the last few years, the event started receiving more and more attention. Since we are already living in a deeply technologized world, it only makes sense to make use of it in order to make our lives easier and to help move the society and the communities it embraces forward.
To make a short summary, this year we had 60 enthusiastic participants, 11 wonderful mentors, 17 smart ideas pitched, 8 working teams & lots of fun! Now, here are the projects that got to be worked on, as they were chosen after the pitches:
Walk together(3nd prize) - This is a mobile application that lets you see the people nearby, the people who walk in the same direction as you. The application works like Uber, but the purpose is walking.
Smart Compute Grid(1st prize) - This refers to recycling your idle computer processing power and to using it to process big data. It might be also used to accelerate the research for genomics, disease progression and others.
Urbio (2nd prize) - This refers to the GIS agency for data, geo data aggregation & data visualisation whose purpose is to commoditize access to geo data & geo data insights.
PingIn - This is a new app that will help you find more awesome people for the activities you love!
GoCheckUp (special prize) - This is a crowd-sourced health early-warning system. Doctors raise the alarm when they see ailing people in informal settings.
Build the City - This creates a platform that links citizens with ideas with the entities that can put those ideas into practice.
On Sunday, the 8th team announced that they are withdrawing from the competition, due to technical difficulties.
Aside from focusing on ways to develop our cities and to grow their communities, our purpose for this year was to offer our participants more opportunities to learn and to move forward with their new startup ideas. This brings us to the prizes. Each of the winning teams got tickets to Techsylvania, to Startup Safary Berlin (Budapest), and to mentoring sessions from ABC Accelerator. In addition to these, the first-prize winning team gets to go to How to Web conference later this year, the second-prize winning team will have access to one workshop at the MVP Academy (Bucharest), and the third-prize winning team receives lunch tickets to CodeCamp Cluj. Each of the winning teams has also received free co-working space, as follows: Impact HUB, for the 1st prize, Cluj Cowork for the 2nd prize and Cluj Hub for the 3rd prize winners. As for the special prizes, Growster has received a free month access to Cluj Makers and GoCheckUp received access to the OnyxBeacon platform + beacons.
It was a fulfilling experience and we are eager to see how the ideas, the projects and the teams will evolve over time. To get to find out more by yourselves, you can follow our Startup Weekend Cluj facebook page for updates.
Thank you for being an important part of our community, Startup Weekend Cluj 2016 team: Mircea Vadan, Adrian Pica, Cristina Juc, Cristina Tare, Adriana-Elena Pieptea, Mircea Ceobanu, Roxana Rugina, Madalina Grecu, Andrada Diana Todea and Raul Deac.
by Vlad Ciurca
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