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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You always hear about the booming tech scenes in Boulder, Silicon Valley, and San Francisco, but you never really hear much about the blooming tech scene in the Midwest/Bloomington. Why is that? Is it because we really aren’t blooming? Or is it really because we haven’t had enough time for it to blossom to become the next big tech scene? There are probably many reasons why we have yet to be considered a big tech scene, but we are making strides to be recognized.

If any of you attended the TEN Conference in Columbus, Indiana, Brad Wisler, actually listed off six elements he believes are essential for a startup/tech community. The elements are creative culture, education, heroes and soldiers, sense of place, organized capital, and culture of risk. Bloomington and Indy have all of these elements. So we’re ready to take off but what’s the next step?

Getting more people involved is the next step. Many people in both Indy and Bloomington work very hard to put Indiana on the map as a tech hotspot. With groups like Verge, BloomTech, and events like The Combine, many of these heroes, soldiers, and risk takers, are brought together. These events and groups need to be well marketed because when movers and shakers are together great things happen. People collaborate on their ideas and boom, we have a new startup. Little by little these great ideas can help build the road to a big tech scene, you never know what could be the next Facebook or Groupon.

How can you help? Come to the events, spread the word, just get involved anyway possible. SproutBox, for the past few years, has been working hard to showcase the talent of the Midwest. We can only do so much, we need your help. So stay up-to-date on the events going on in Bloomington and Indy. The Bloomington Tech Partnership keeps the tech event up-to-date on their website. Also make sure to follow SproutBox on twitter and we’ll announce important events.

Upcoming Events:

• 11/9: hYPe: Internet Marketing 101: 5:30pm, Ivy Tech

• 11/10: Geek Dinner: 6:00pm, Greek’s Pizzeria

• 11/18-11/20: Startup Weekend Bloomington: 6:30pm, Ivy Tech

• Every Friday: Tech Lunch: 12pm

• Every other Tuesday: Tech Coffee: 9am, Pourhouse Cafe

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