[UK] The Launch48 event in London this weekend has seen six teams attempt to launch a startup in, you guessed it 48 hours. The event, which was basically created by some UK startup enthusiasts, is different to StartupWeekend in that separate teams come together to each work on their own project rather than one. After frantically coding for the last couple of days, the results were presented tonight at the event, so here they are in order of presentation. I liked Given and Grapeshots. As you can see some were more fully formed than others:
Wraply is a kind of Amazon wishlist focused on one thing you want to get. You submit what you want your friends to buy you. Provided that gift is on Amazon the details will be imported to Wraply. Payments through Paypal. Revenue model: affiliate and deals with Skimlinks. Competitors – where do we start? Er, Amazon?
Grapeshots.com lets you capture the moment when you find a great wine using your mobile. Using image recognition, barcode scanning, you can then share your find with friends, and it will deliver info about where to buy the etc. Later you can look up your lists and purchase the wine: “Capture, buy, boast, remember”. Cortexica and Snap Tell are potential competition but they don’t target wine specifically. Revenues would come from affiliates. The idea is to have a paid iPhone app and a free app. Several APIs for wine data are out there apparently. We’re waiting for the Real Ale version.
iRaceU is a mobile app that lets you take part in any kind of race using GPS. The web site lets you create challenges and set prizes. You organise events, routes, and even “no rules events”, like races. You can share the results on Facebook and Twitter. It takes commisions on entry fees for races. Competition might be Four Square or Bragster, but this adds prizes and race elements. The application not ready yet.
TaskDoer is about freeing up your time. The idea is about outsourcing transferred to individuals. This is an agreggator of personal assistant services that helps you get boring and repetitive tasks done. They can be work-related of personal. Example: Blogger – Helps with basic fact checking online (bloggers needs this…). You can search for tasks or fulfill them (for money). Search for people based on expertise etc. Site still very much at concept stage. Aiming to target time poor people who might use concierge services. Competitors however, are myriad: elance, hiremymum, guru.com, UrbanPA etc. However it may have hope as an agreggator of these platforms.
Protected.cc lets you have your creative intellectual property recorded by a third party and thus verified as yours. This replaces that old standard of mailing your idea to yourself in the post. When you have an idea you simply CC the email to Protected. It puts a date and timestamp on the idea. It’s a receipt for third party verification of your ideas. Who’s it for? You creative type people who share ideas with others. Freemium service as obviously you might start to need to back-up you amazing idea-based emails. Video:
Given.org was probably the best formed and most fully executed of all the startups all weekend. It’ll be a non-profit. This is pitched as an evolution of corporate giving. It lets you create a cause and then target the 20,000 companies with Facebook Fan pages from within Facebook. Companies can then sponsor causes “publicly” by sponsoring individuals on FB. They might select causes based on the number of Facebook friends a person has and other filters. The fund raising activity is publicized via feeds to friends of the fundraiser and fans of the company and charity. Obviously this spread viraly through Facebook as companies start to sponsor individuals via their raising of money for causes through Facebook. So gives companies get more control of where they are giving and a way to embrace social media. This appers to be the only Facebook app which targets companies for giving – all the others target individuals. Payment via Paypal means it’s global. The Facebook app is due to launch any day now. Here’s the Fan page for now. Here’s a video:
30 Seconds about Given.org from Given dot Org on Vimeo.