Notes From Stockholm's 24 Hour Business Camp

This is a guest post by Pejman Dashti (@pejman), Chief Elk of Swedish startup (and Arctic15 finalist) 46elks. Read more about his daily activities at his startup blog.

Sweden is the land of entrepreneurship. Though the population is rather small, the rate of innovation makes it to the top of the list in the world. Over the last five years, the entrepreneurship ecosystem has been flourished much more and now there are more monthly events, mingles and conferences for entrepreneurs. This post is my short notes for one of the famous events called 24 hour business camp.

24hbc is an annual event which is held in a Japanese resort in one of the many islands of Stockholm. Lots of entrepreneurs and people who have an idea attend this magnificent event. The goal is to build your idea or startup in just 24hours of coding, designing and delivering.

While everybody enjoyed the drinks and snacks in the ferry on the way to the island, by the time we reached the entrance to the Japanese resort in the evening, I was really amazed by its relaxed environment, Japanese baths, massage rooms and great view outside to the sea. However, relaxation is word far far away since as soon as people arrived, lots of notebooks appeared on the conference room and people started to figure out how to connect to the internet and prepare themselves for tomorrow.

Time to wear a kimono and enjoy a meal, which is always a good time to mingle and know about other startups. During the night some teams started to prepare themselves, while the rest enjoyed the swimming pool and japanese bath.

In the morning after a nice breakfast and introduction from the organizers of the event, the hackathon and real coding started. it started at 12 noon and the big clock on the projector screen shown the countdown for the next 24hours.

46elks was happy to sponsor an idea in this event. The idea was killersupport.me. The ambition was to make a customer support service with ability of interaction with the customer via Voice and SMS technology based on 46elks API, in just 24hours and yes he did it. Thanks to easy to use API, his great talent and perseverance.

After lots of sweats of teams in the span of 24 hours, lots of coffee cups and energy drinks, what each team got was one minute pitch on the stage about their effort and executed idea. Though I think 1 minute is very short to show the fruits of such a hackathon but well that was what everybody got to impress the judges and the audience. If you are interested you can Watch all the pitches (in swedish). At the end, all the participants took the bus to come back to stockholm city center while some really begged for sleeping. The luxury hackathone for this year was over 🙂