Thursday, November 22, 2012

Global Startup Battle - 2012

We finally managed to get the Global Startup Battle of Startup Weekend to Hyderabad in 2012. The Global Startup Battle is 138 Startup Weekends happening across the world on two consecutive weekends where the winner from each of the startup weekends gets to upload a video which is open to a global voting. The top 15 teams in the voting get into a semifinal and finally the winner gets a trip to Rio and the Google office in the US along with a lot of other goodies.

Since we were time constrained in organizing the event we had less than a month to plan for it and also it happened to be right in the middle of the holiday season and exam season in Hyderabad tickets were hard to sell. We finally managed to sell about 60 tickets with a lot of enthusiastic and excited participants making it down to the Progress office at Madhapur on Friday evening. The event started off with the surprise visit of the Hyderabad Angels who had an open Q and A session with the participants. After that we had short talks and again Q and A sessions by Santanu Paul from TalentSprint and Abhishek from GharPay.

With that over we started off the event with an exciting Pitch Fire session where participants pitched their ideas to the other participants in one minute. We had about 40 high quality pitches which was followed by dinner and networking. After dinner participants were asked to vote on 3 pitches that they like. On completion of the voting we picked 10 teams who got the top number of votes led by the person who pitched the idea. Over the next one hour teams were formed and they got working on their ideas.

On saturday we had mentors come in to help the teams consisting UX experts, Angels, CEOs and Entrepreneurs. Teams worked on their business plans, development of MVP and doing customer surveys and interactions and final presentations which were to be done in front of a panel of judges on sunday evening.

On sunday evening at 5 the final presentations were done where each team got 5 min to present and 2 min of Q and A with the judges after which the winner was announced and our entry into the Global Startup Battle was LEBTOP - Learn English By Talking on Phone. You can vote for this team by visiting this website.

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