The team developing Ludo, a smartphone application that helps athletes efficiently arrange workout times with training partners, won Startup Weekend Halifax last night at Dalhousie University.
The event at Dalhousie was one of more than 150 Startup Weekends held around the world in the past two weeks, at which groups of entrepreneurs come together and spend 54 hours putting together a company. More than 5,000 startups have been launched through these events in the past few years.
This weekend’s event was the third hosted at Dalhousie, and organizers Ed Leach and Mary Kilfoil said this startup weekend had a higher turnout, with 11 teams participating compared with about eight in the two previous events. “It’s bigger, and there’s greater expertise,” said Leach.
Customer validation has become such a key element in business models that the teams spent much of the weekend contacting potential customers, including various surveys on twitter.
The winning team came together to design a simple but efficient smartphone app that will allow sports people to easily arrange training times or find a group of people available to play a pickup game. The Ludo team will now have the opportunity to make a video about their product and submit it to the international Startup Weekend organization. The public votes on the videos, and the winner is flown to the international Startup Weekend in Rio De Janeiro.
The runners up were GetNimbler, an app that helps people to develop fast reflexes, and Back Stage Sessions, an app that allows musical acts to broadcast private acts to livestream acts to exclusive audiences.
The other participants were:
- Vital Guardian, a team from University of New Brunswick that is designing a non-invasive device that monitors the vital signs of nursing home residents and notifies emergency personnel of perilous changes;
- CoPounder, a website that allows entrepreneurs to rate the people they’ve done business with;
- Global Mikes, an online tool that connects comedians with events and venues;
- Strings.fm, an iOS app that helps people choose music based on their mood;
- PickYourCredit.co, a website that crowdsources consumer loans, matching people who have savings with people who need to borrow;
- Puddle Jumping, an online tool to help people find their optimal career path and to help companies retain staff;
- Squivex, an app that cuts delivery costs by connecting businesses with commuters so the latter could deliver a small package to someone in his or her neighbourhood;
- And Boondoc, a social network for Canadian doctors.
