Auckland Startup Weekend

10 Apr 2011 by Nigel Sampson

Last weekend I participated in the first Auckland Startup Weekend, an awesome experience run out of Biz Dojo. The weekend kicked off friday night with around thirty people pitching their ideas to the crowd, we ended up pruning the list down to around seven different teams of biz guys (and gals), designers and devs.

As I’ve been looking to push my Windows Phone 7 skills and possibly do a little evangelising about the platform (especially around the ease and speed of development) I looked for the teams where I could add functionality through a WP7 app.

Ultimately I ended up working with a group putting together a business tentatively named Hotspot built around social recommendation / reputation and location. We had a great team for the weekend with five developers, a designer and three guys dealing with the pitch and direction. By lucky coincidence I ended up in the same team as the guys from Touch Maniacs who have just released their New Zealand business directory application named Poqet Directory.

With so many developers on the team we managed to get quite a bit built, including a Python server feeding JSON data down to an .Net MVC website and the WP7 app. On a side note it was really interesting to see the different teams using different technologies for the startups, the winning team Taxi Surfer built a pair of iOS apps powered by an WCF REST service. It really was a case of using the best tool at hand for the job for every team.

Our team had a great strategy in that by the end of Friday night we knew we were going to be building some sort of location / social / recommendation system, the specifics around the business would still need some ironing out. This let us developers concentrate on building the backbone to the technology without the inevitable pivots affecting us too much, ultimately our superb business guys work away through the weekend on the idea knowing they’ll have a good amount of tech backing them up.

To increase the drama a little our PowerPoint presentation failed completely, full credit to our team doing the presentation to the judges as they carried on like nothing was wrong. In fact I think the strength of the presentation despite the lack of slides really did us proud and we ultimately were awarded third!

Overall it was fantastic weekend, it was a great opportunity to meet a lot of similar minded people in Auckland. The amount of energy you get from participating in an event like this lasts for weeks and the seriously talented people you meet really pushes you on. Can’t wait for the next one.

On a side note the winning team Taxi Surfer has already received their first C & D.