Bloomington’s Startup Weekend winner, Fundships, participated in the Startup Weekend Global Battle this past week. Fundships enables people and their friends to create scholarships around causes they care about. Fundship’s team consisting of IU students and alums, and even a lone Purdue student, worked for over 54 hours in one weekend to develop their product and winner’s video for the global competition.

Last week, I blogged and asked you for your help. Fundships needed anyone and everyone to vote for them in the Global Battle. For six days, voting was open to the public, anyone could visit the Global Battle website and vote for any of the 50 contestants. Yesterday, Fundships held their breath while winners were announced. There were over 32,000 votes cast all over the world. Over 29 countries were represented in the battle and the ideas fell into nine different industries. Of those 50 contestants, Fundships, unfortunately, did not win. AwesomeShip, from Hong Kong, which pushes notifications of shipment status to customers via twitter, SMS, Facebook, or email, won pulling in over 5,000 votes. Fundships did however, place in the top 20, coming in at 17th place. That ranked them at 4th in the US! What an awesome accomplishment for Bloomington and the Fundships team.

What’s next for them? Even though they didn’t win, they are going to continue working to finish the product. All of the support they received over the past six days has really fueled them to get things really going to get a working product up for everyone to start using. So if anyone is interested in lending a helping hand, don’t hesitate to contact one of the team members.

We are very excited for you guys and very proud of what you have done to help put Bloomington on the map, globally and with Startup Weekend!

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How did you spend 54 hours of this past weekend? I bet you weren’t as productive as the 40 participants who competed in Startup Weekend Bloomington. About 20 business ideas were pitched Friday night at Ivy Tech. From those 20 ideas, nine progressed into complete business plans, prototypes or actual working products. These ideas ranged from geofencing coupon notifications, or a mobile app for loyalty cards, to a guide to becoming an expert planter, or even a platform enabling you and your friends to create scholarships.

After 54 hours of hard work, the nine companies presented their product to a panel of five judges. The judges deliberated and decided on the winner. Fundships, the winner of Startup Weekend Bloomington, enables people and their friends to create scholarships around causes they care about. You can choose the amount to donate and ask friends to pitch in and then decide who is the most deserving for the scholarship. Fundships makes building a scholarship easy and personal. It makes funding and finding a scholarship simple for both, the funders and scholars.

So what did they win? A million dollars? No, the winning team received development resources from local companies. They also won the chance to compete in Startup Weekend’s Global Battle. Global Startup Battle allows winners from any of the Startup Weekend events that were held in the past two weeks an opportunity to meet leading investors in Silicon Valley and participate in great events worldwide. How do these winners battle it out? Each winning team had 24 hours from the end of the event to upload a 90 second video about their product. From there, the world decides the winner.

How awesome would it be if Fundships, the Bloomington winner, which includes five Bloomington teammates and one teammate from Purdue (he was smart and joined Startup Weekend Bloomington), won the Global Battle?

Here’s what you can do to help:

• Vote for Fundships!
• Like Fundships via Facebook and follow them on Twitter.
• Spread the word about Fundships by signing up for their newsletter and sharing with friends.

A special thanks to Kevin Weaver and Blueline Style and Media Productions for all the hard work that went into making this amazing video:

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Can you take an idea from pitch to launch in 54 hours? Nearly 100 cities are participating in the Startup Weekend Global Battle for Startup Weekend and this can be your chance to experience one of the most intense weekends of your life. Startup junkies, this is your chance to build a company and relationships.

I participated in Startup Weekend Indianapolis 2010 and joined a team to get the app, Notesee, launched in 54 hours (53 hours by the time the pitch session was over). The team consisted of five team members: me as a front-end developer, David the Ruby/Rails developer, Joel the excellent designer, and two business developers. We jumped into a quiet space and started planning with a montage of discussion, writing, coding, and strategizing to make this app functional. This went on for the rest of Friday and Saturday, then Sunday rolled around. Sunday was a blur with all of us rushing to make sure the app was running and the final presentation was ready for the judges. It’s difficult to really explain the roller coaster of a weekend, the whole event was amazing and exhausting, and I’m ready to do it again.

You have the chance to make something great and launch a real company in 54 hours, but more importantly, you can meet driven individuals in your community. Take this opportunity to build a disruptive company and join a class of startups grown out of Startup Weekend like LaunchRock, Scanadu, and Mingly. Did I mention you will be participating in Global Entrepreneurship Week?

Startup Weekend Bloomington 2011

Register Now!

$15 off registration Promo Code: sbox

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