Atlanta Startup Weekend is an annual event designed to foster relationships among individuals in Atlanta’s technology community. This is part of a greater effort to gain awareness of Atlanta as a center for technology innovation. This year, the three day event was held Nov. 13-15th at the Atlanta Technology Development Center – Georgia Tech.
Over 100 participants met on Friday night to kick off the weekend with “pitch night”. Anyone with a project idea was able to pitch it to the participants and put it up for a vote. The most popular ideas where kept through several rounds of voting until a small selected group of viable ideas were chosen for the teams to work on for the weekend. These teams came together to form a mock “company” for the weekend. I joined a group that became known as Touchdown Nation and we set out to develop and promote a football game application designed for Facebook. Being an IT salesman by profession, I was seeking a creative outlet to explore and volunteered to help the group with their marketing and monetization strategy. On Sunday evening, each team gave a final pitch where they presented their working prototype along with a monetization strategy and market analysis. This simulated pitching a startup idea to potential investors. The ideas and projects created this weekend were very impressive and I would expect that some folks will continue to work on their ideas after the weekend in hopes of building something more.
