For 54 hours, those with the entrepreneurial spirit to create something connected with each other at the Atlanta Startup Weekend Hacker & Maker event that ran April 10-12.
The event, hosted by the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), was designed to bring entrepreneurs, developers, makers and designers to create a technology tool or product.
Taking first place at the event was SpotlightCAR, a marketplace that brings together car dealers and car buyers with pre-negotiated prices of overstock inventory.
Second place went to In D Loop, a crowdsourced in-app customer support solution for mobile applications.
Third place went to Smart Shopping Cart, a maker project. That team created a smart shopping cart that follows a shopper around a grocery store that then automatically returns to its home base when the shopper is done.
“The goal of the weekend is to have a minimally viable product and pitch that you can present to investors,” said Maria Joyner, an event organizer and past attendee. “This is a weekend that I’m surprised more people don’t take advantage of because it’s probably one of the best relationship building events I’ve ever experienced.”
During the weekend, the 52 participants broke up into 15 teams where they leveraged one another’s skills to create a product or software application.
Those who with an idea to pitch had it vetted by their peers. The most promising concepts will be selected and teams formed based on those ideas to help make it reality during the weekend period.
The weekend culminated with the teams making presentations before metro Atlanta entrepreneurs.