Live From Garage48 Or How To Prototype Your Idea in 48 Hours

Garage48 is at it again, creating the next batch of exciting prototypes in just 48 hours. Over the course of two years they have gone through 600 ideas, 200 working prototypes and already three teams secured funding from SeedCamp: Campalyst, Mightyfingers and Qminder. There are about 100 developers, marketers, entrepreneurs and designers here in Riga who are going to form about 10 teams that will bring an idea into a prototype by Sunday.

(P.S. Let you in on a secret, they are also organizing one on the 19-21 of November in Helsinki, which you can sign up for here.)

This time around we decided to provide some Live Coverage to the event, in the hopes to catch the next Facebook in the making. @DSarle is going to be in Riga, bringing you the newest updates from the event:

Friday 18:00 The teams have started pitching, there are going to be about 20 or so ideas, before the teams will be formed. Here is a short list of the pitches so far:

Ideas Part 1

20:15 Pitching goes on after the break. Riga seems like a family time, at least half the pitchers state how many kids they have…

Ideas Part 2

Friday 21:49 Wow, now that was a lot of typing and listening to ideas. It would not be possible to share the atmosphere with you as there were jokes about sofa’s and Nicholas Cage, playing with your problems, it’s called BETA because it’s “Better than Nothing”, using any app for dating, and many more. In fact I am not sure if this is a hackathon or a comedy show. Let’s see which ideas will be chosen.

Friday 22:02 Pitching is complete! Its now up to the participants to choose their favorite idea. There was a total of 35 ideas pitched and my fingers hurt from typing. So without further ado, let the voting commence.

Friday 23:00 After a lot of networking, haggling, bribing and hard-core negotiations, the teams have been selected and accepted. They are going to head off to their respective working spaces and start the 48 hour hackathon to showcase amazing prototypes during the final event on Sunday at 17:30. Updates will be provided in the morning (Hope that it will be about the prototypes and not crazy parties).

The Chosen Teams List

Saturday 10:01 The first checkpoint. The approach to the problem is different amongst the teams, where some have elected not to sleep at all while others decided to get a few healthy hours of rest. The fantastic thing is that many of the teams have working “BETA Prototypes” (I am going to go ahead and coin that phrase) or perhaps “prototypes of prototypes”. Still, this is very impressive considering it was done through the night.

Saturday 11:31 Some teams are completely devoted to hacking, while others are still trying to decide they idea name and to create a logo. It looks like the creators of the “Make Ordered List” are in need of their own app in order to prioritize what they need to do next.

Saturday 12:43 The 10 mentors from Rubylight, Samsung, Microsoft and Skype are visiting the teams and seem to be impressed by the selection. From the looks of it this Garage48 is all about visualization: Music Notes, Music, Math Exercises, etc. And now it is time for lunch.

Made a short time-lapse video of the pitching event from Friday. Check it out here

Saturday 21:01 Who needs 48 hours if you can do it in 24? All the teams have working prototypes and are getting ready for a “relaxing” night. The teams are very introverted it seems, as all they want to do is code and get things done! Impressive.

Sunday 10:49 Maecenas.me programmers are revolting, as they want to build everything from scratch (?!?!?!?) while the project leader is insisting to keep thing simple with the open source software. Great ambitions! Elise from Startup Wise Guys is about to start pitch training.

Sunday 12:33 G48 is taking place in university halls and just as during the student times, the biggest challenge is to stay awake during “lectures”. MediaHit got an applause for a great pitch, Jukebot has a great script but needs some funding to get a actors on board and we are seeing some kung fu on stage with Client Kung Fu. Can’t wait for the final event at 17:30.

Sunday 17:30 The final event has started and all teams confirmed that they are ready. Tune in here for a live stream: http://www.garage48.org/riga/live

Click here for a complete description of all the projects as well as their websites.

Sunday 18:45 We are half-way through the final event and ArcticStartup has three favorites so far. MediaHint – Use Netflix and other streaming services anywhere in the world, probably illegal but as the project leader said: “Definitely legal for Garage48” (Made by just one developer, one designer and one project leader). DriveWiz – Car sharing service for family, friends, co-workers, works great and fully functional in 48 hours. Interactive Sales Training – Great tool for training and perhaps even children, very good prototype and very flexible platform. Well done!

Sunday 19:45 Pitching is complete and once again, ArcticStartup has three favorites. Press4More is creating a solution for commenting on and liking printed media articles and items using image recognition (Perhaps the Press Media can still be saved?). Visound created an app for music creating and visualization in just 48 hours and it looked amazing (The developer is at his 7th Garage48 event, so that might have something to do with it). Finally I loved the idea of MorningList, they created a great app (That failed to work during the pitch, but worked perfectly before) for quickly sorting and prioritizing your to-do list, the great thing is that they managed to pivot and rebrand themselves in just 48 hours to what I think is a great product I will start using tomorrow. Winners will be announced in about 20 minutes. Stay tuned.

Sunday 20:29 This was a great event and here are the results:

Favorite of the Audience – FortaNota
Rubylight Special Award – FortaNota (2000 EUR)
Most Fun Project Award – Visound (Galaxy Note)
The Overall Winner – Interactive Sales Training

Thank you all very much for reading this live feed. See you at the next Garage48 in Helisnki!

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Ideas pitched during the first day:

Healthy Lifestyle – Become healthy by choosing activities or get punished.

LoyalWall – Getting rid of loyalty cards with QR codes.

Save Print Media – Trying to save the print media?

DoTogether – Daily traveling arrangement/sharing with family and friends. (By car)

Audio Photo Albums – Something to do with photo albums and tagging. (Same guy as Healthy Lifestyle)

Recipes Roulette – App to choose your dinner. (Same guy as Audio Photo Albums, I wonder how many ideas he has got?)

Driver’s App – Find the cheapest gas in town.

MonsterRoom – Training games for kids by shooting monsters.

House App – Manage your house with an app.

Interactive Dialogue Authoring – Virtual customer service training.

Tvaik – No more grocery shopping. Get them all with an app.

Make Ordered List – Task list decision making.

Math – Visualized math educational app to play with your problems (Copyright Mari Suviste)

Swipe Left – App to start any app by swiping left. Seriously.

App Watcher – App usage statistics and automatic homescreen selection.

Product Review App – Exactly what it says.

PartyRace – Races. QR codes. Competition.

ForeStream – Increase your upload speed anywhere. Magic?

SPenMusic – Create music with the S-Pen on Samsung.

Maecenas.me – First crowdfunding platform in Latvia.

Gints Turlajs – 4 ideas on the slide. Erm?

Music Notation in HTML5 – Music Notation in HTML5. Wait, did I already write this? Renamed to FortaNota

Partynoia> – No more party paranoia.

Collray – Local interest based information sharing. If you can rephrase that, tweet me.

Case Emotion – Emotions displayed on your phone case through NFC.

MuzVIz – Swipe your ipad to create music and visualizations.

MyWorstCustomer.com – Share your worst customer experiences.

Media Hint – Make Netflix, Spotify (And others) available anywhere. Probably illegal, but it never stopped Napster?

Audio-Comics – Crowdsourced audio comics.

Custom Design Covers – Custom Design Covers for Furniture.

Menulet – Digitize all restaurant menu’s with tablets.

Ideas without slides – 1. App for collecting mushrooms (Not sure which kind). 2. Get rid of stuff you do not need. 3. Your playlist at the club 4. Draw something (Kid game)

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