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11/22/11 | Uncategorized

Day 3: Final Presentations At Women 2.0 Startup Weekend 2011

By Christina Gunarto & Angie Chang (Co-Organizers, Women 2.0 Startup Weekend 2011)
On Sunday, the teams wasted no time working on their projects. The Hatchery was filled with both excitement and anxiety building up to pitch time.

Everyone was full of energy, squeezing every last ounce of thought from their brains and coding away to put together the final product, presentation and hopefully, a working demo for the judges.

At 6pm, all 150 participants squeezed in for a group photo. One last hurrah before demo time!

Sunday Night: Pitches

First to present, Denise Minter, founder of SoupIsLove, explains that her product allows you to send loved ones a delicious bowl of soup from a volunteer chef nearby.

Caroline Gogolak, Remmie Maden and Katie Johnson of Carbon 38 flew in from New York and Los Angeles. The team includes a trainer to fitness-crazed celebrities such as Kelly Ripa. Carbon 38 showcased their idea for the “Zagat of Fitness” — sign up here.

PointAtoZ presented their idea for peer-to-peer shipping, connecting those who are driving and those who want to send packages at a lower price point.

The Where’s Busy team demoed a fun video of their smartphone app that helps barhoppers see if a bar is happening or not by showing how many people have checked in there.

The pitch for TellTale is to evoke emotions through real live storytellingavailable a click away.

Smartphone app Stylematic provides instant style recommendations via pictures and barcodes, and suggests colors and styles while you’re looking in the store. Watch their Women 2.0 Startup Weekend pitch here.

The demo for Easy Does It showed how the product helps people grasp the gist of a review in a sea of information by providing tag clouds. While they aimed to target the consumer market, judge Cathy Edwards (Co-Founder & CTO of Chomp) suggested that they should consider developing this as an enterprise solution for word summarization.

The small team of two (Alison Wong and Dean Mao) at Gusto impressed the judges by building a fully functioning product with an amazing UI in 54 hours. Judge Sarah Tavel remarked that she was impressed by how well thought out the features were for an app built over a weekend. Gusto aims to make cooking class invitation sharing easy and social.

The Words With Bears team with Judy Tuan, Elsa Kim, Lukas Blakk, Jennifer Arguello, and James Elkins rocked the pitch with a live demo (video available on YouTube) showing how the Kinect can be a powerful learning tool. Check out their website here.

The pitch for D4 focuses on providing awareness of problems with bike products via data.

Parking Gods is a parking app that sends reminders as to when to move your car, utilizing existing information from DataSF.

Reality kicked in when Kristina Varshavskaya, a 17 year old high school dropout-turned-entrepreneur, and Eric Duarte from Team Wedding Planner shared their Startup Weekend failure story of “what went horribly wrong” — their group fell apart because of bad chemistry and inability to plan. They were courageous enough to still present their experience and inspire the audience.

Joseph Okafor pitched Living With Me pitched a website to help people find roommates via matching social reputations.

Jen Pleimann of Kavita Health pitched an idea of a full care network for the entire spectrum of one’s medical and care providers.

Tricia Rampe led GetArtUp, a website that allows startups and businesses to rent art from local galleries for a month at a time.

The pitch for Perfect Beauty introduced popular beauty video blogger Daisy Jing, engineer Lori Lee, startup advisor and angel investor George Kellerman — and his two tween daughters. The team worked on a social beauty product review and rewards website to empower and connect girls everywhere.

FloDeck was presented by Grace Ng and Nick Frost. A “Tumbler for Pitch Decks”, FloDeck is a slideshow creation tool with design friendly templates — perfect for use at future Startup Weekends.

The Fly With Me pitch includes a former Google search engineer talking about match criteria like friends/connections, business and social aspects for their matchmaking plan in the sky.

Alexis Finch’s pitch for _theKofP is about how the service helps companies find quality, local available freelancers through trusted networks.

Citizen App was presented by Anca Mosoiu and James McBryan, who built a site that helps communities connect around local projects that benefit from citizen participation.

The SafeSteps smartphone app by Adele Burnes, Marie Ettema, Anne Spalding and Zanoon Nissar helps give you peace of mind when you leave to walk home under questionable circumstances. The app will map the safest route for you, integrating information about local crime reports and statistics.

The MixItMakeIt team demoed Kayak.com for recipes.

And The Winners Are…

After hours of pitches, the judges deliberated… and decided that the big winner of the evening was: Words With Bears! Along with winning the Women 2.0 Startup Weekend 2011 and prizes from Heroku, the team is invited to present at next month’s TEDxBayArea TEDwomen event.

Second place went to Gusto and third place went to Carbon 38. Needless to say, everyone was a winner for toughing out the weekend and creating their own startups (and lessons learned!).

Everyone had come a long way from Friday night when we came together as 150 strangers, and Saturday when teams were working hard.

Sunday is a celebration of everyone’s hard work, learnings and entrepreneurial accomplishments.

That’s It, Folks!

A BIG thanks to all our sponsors, supporters, mentors, judges and volunteers for helping make Women 2.0 Startup Weekend a success! Stay tuned to Women 2.0 for more great events for women entrepreneurs.

Thanks to Marc Picornell for taking many great pictures of Women 2.0 Startup Weekend’s final day.

Startup Weekend mentor Adria Richards also has pictures of the stress-filled last day before final presentations.

Thanks to Doug Latimer for recording the pitches, so the Startup Weekend attendees can learn from watching their presentations.

And of course, we are happy and thankful to Franck Nouyrigat for flying in from Startup Weekend’s Seattle headquarters and helping us facilitate the Startup Weekend event with Women 2.0 here in San Francisco.

Hope to see you at the next Startup Weekend!

About the guest blogger: Christina Gunarto is a Strategic Alliances Manager at Smaato, a leading global mobile advertising startup. Previously, she co-founded Dogopolis, a startup focusing on unique, creative and fun ways to enjoy life with your dog. Christina enjoys meeting new people and learning about innovations and ideas in tech. She graduated with a degree in Architecture from UC Berkeley.
About the guest blogger: Angie Chang co-founded Women 2.0 in 2006 with Shaherose Charania. She currently serves as Editor-In-Chief of Women 2.0 and is working to mainstream women in entrepreneurship. Previously, Angie held roles in product management, web UI design, and entrepreneurship. In 2008, Angie launched Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners, asking that guys come as the “+1” for once. Angie holds a B.A. in English and Social Welfare from UC Berkeley. Follow her on Twitter at @thisgirlangie.

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