London Startup Weekend

London Startup Weekend

I happened to be in London this weekend after attending Endeavor Investor Network Event. So I was invited to attend SWLondon as a guest. It was a great opportunity to compare this same event with SWs of Amman, Cairo, and Riyadh as I was judge/mentor in them.

The event has the same theme of all SWs all over the world. It’s mainly about a 100 people gathering, some of them pitch ideas, and then people vote. Winning ideas get developed, or converted to a minimal viable product MVP or an alpha version within the weekend. Everyone should join a team of an idea. Participants are mainly Developers, Designers and Marketers/Business People. Other than that, it’s up to the organizers to innovate to create a nice atmosphere for participants.

This one, was organized in Google’s Campus in London. Which is a cool place to be in anyway. It is also in London’s Tech City, which is being promoted by the UK Government to be Europe’s entrepreneurial and tech hub.Participants had diversified nationalities! I met people from UK, India, Spain, USA!, Italy, Denmark, Iraq, Jordan (me), etc… Most of them have just moved to London for a full time job. Only few of them moved here to find a job at a startup or to start one.

Unlike the ideas of SW Amman, Cairo, and Riyadh, where most of the ideas were local/regional, at SWLondon, most of the ideas were global, with only few local ones targeting the UK user. As usual, there were some obvious ideas, clones with a twist, and some new innovative ideas. Here are the ideas I still remember after 24 hours:

• Space Bunny: A platform where you take a photo of an empty space or corner at your house, and post it for decoration suggestions by experts.
• Lift Me App: A location based app where you find people who have just dropped off someone at the airport and ask them to pick you up on their way back.
• Vubester: A tool that enables you to click on objects within a video and read more about it.
• Stuck: An educational peer-to-peer Q&A mobile app for Kids, that could be used for cheating!!!

I also noticed that the average age of participants was more than what we had in Arabian SWs! I’ve seen senior developers and business people, senior consultants as well.

one more funny thing happened, idea owners didn’t put their papers on a wall for votes, they were asked to move around asking other to vote for them! It was like “Souq Wasat Elbalad” ;-)

Regarding logistics, to be honest, they were not better than any other SW team in Arabia. They started more than half an hour late and let us all waiting outside! However, they offered Sushi for dinner :-)

I will leave you with some photos from the event: