Startup Weekend – Day 1

I just wrote this article in a rush to remember everything that has happened in the past 15 hours since Startup Weekend Manila – 2012 has started.

So I arrive around 7:30pm at the Startup weekend venue, and I didn’t feel like pitching. I can do halubilo on my spare time and it’s not a real startup. Just a tool to allow people to display what’s happening to others.

I heard a lot of pitches. Some of the notable ideas:

  • A way to travel with other people in the Philippines.
  • Commuting Tips / KomyuTips – a way to help you navigate the various cities of the Philippines.
  • A way to shoot a person’s picture and identify and find out their name and maybe say Hi. (Have you heard of color?)
  • Ragebook and Gov.IO – ragebook is notable in that it will reward people and promote top complaints. Gov.IO is a way to put up problems around government people and promote government transparency
  • BackApp – a way to keep connected online and even when there is poor signal
  • SpinMeBuddy – who could forget this guy? Need a new girlfriend, a new place to dine or just offer random places to have a date – WEEE! (Yup – your buddies will be on a spinwheel and the app will tell you which one you should go with and where – randomly)
  • Pasabay App / and others regarding commuting together or sharing a cab ride – it’s been pitched before, or I had the same idea but it needs a lot of marketing/awareness campaigns.
  • Taxi Cab watcher (I forgot the real startup idea’s title) – some sort of way to track if a taxi has good reputation
  • Jekket – jekket.com – I actually like that he has a website. BUt he didn’t put his idea on the website. So it’s like.. okay…
  • Gradeful-like app – to help parents take note of their children’s scores or something, but in a task-oriented manner. So for household chores for example, you could award your kids points. I don’t know if this continued.
  • The first one to pitch was 1share 1life – sort of like grouphug.
  • The last one to pitch was something about marketing and attracting tourists to eco tourism destinations around the Philippines. This pair of ladies actually came all the way from Subic!
  • What I did not pitch – halubilo.com . You can visit it if you want. It’s a simple event list site which allows people to like post up any events. A virtual corkboard of events happening around the IT industry. It’s not really a money making venture and I was tired during pitch night, having fulfilled some contract signing in Eastwood in the afternoon and fixed some medical records

After the pitches, I stayed on til around 11-ish, I’m actually already part of a group already so pitching my idea would just conflict. It’s called Mentor’s Dojo. We will launch it as soon as we have everything ready. We’re just finished with the wireframes and basic functionality. All we need is a cool hip design and do some marketing efforts/ as well as user testing.

I have several more pitches/notes about pitches last night up on my twitter at jpalala.

Have a happy startup weekend, may luck be forever on your side :)