technology, business and strategy

Startupweekend is a non-profit organization that organizes and facilitates weekend long workshops to pitch ideas, form teams, and start companies. I hosted e-gov startupweekend this weekend (June 15^th -17^th) at Microsoft office in Chevy Chase.

We had more than 100 entrepreneurs registered and with mentors, judges, participants and educator around 150 people took over entire 7^th  floor of our offices.

We had a great panel of judges

• Aneesh Chopra, Senior Advisor at The Advisory Board, and former US CTO         
• Mark Headd, Government Relations Director at Code for America
• Tom Lee, Director of Sunlight Labs
• Dan Kasun – Sr. Director Microsoft Developer and Platform Evangelism

The event was kicked off @ 5 pm Friday, by Todd Park, U.S. Chief Technology Officer and Assistant to the Presidents. Todd Park made an “ask” of the attendees of Startup Weekend DC that I haven’t heard from many government officials: he requested that if they

A) use the data and/or

B) if they run into any trouble accessing it, to let him know.

“If you had a hard time or found a particular restful API moving, let me know,” he said. “It helps us improve our performance.” And then he gave out his email address at the White House Executive Office of the President, as he did at SXSW Interactive in Austin in March of this year. Asking the public for feedback on data quality — particularly entrepreneurs and developers — and providing contact information to do so is, to put it bluntly, something every city and state official that has stood up and open data platform could and should be doing. In this context, the US CTO has set a notable example for the country.

There were 30+ pitches for ideas made in the pitch fire, including a pitch made by 4 11 year olds to improve education and classroom participation by gamification. The attendees voted for their favorite pitches and the “gamification of education” won the most votes.   Top 11 ideas (with 14 or more votes) move to the next stage of team formation and product development.

Teams were allocated office space on Friday evening and began heads down planning, brainstorming, designing and coding solutions.

There was plenty of food, caffeine and energy on the whole 7^rd floor of the Chevy Chase Office for next 2 days for the teams to get their solutions and pitch ready for the judges on Sunday evening. Coaches and Mentors from Business, technical and education, govt fields were floating around, were grabbed by the team. The energy, passion around was unbelievable and each team worked so hard and so long that it was commendable what they produced. By Sunday evening the stage was set for pitching competition. 

I presented BizSpark and Microsoft partner value prop to the audience.

Microsoft BizSpark is an entrepreneur startup acceleration program for software startups. BizSpark offers free Microsoft platform software and development tools to create your software, build your business and run your software in production BizSpark also helps a software startup with sales and marketing. The eligibility criteria to be a BizSpark startup is

1) it is a privately held software startup

2) the company is less than 3 years in business and

3) making less than 1M in software revenue.

The pitching session with each team was given 5 minutes to pitch and 3 minutes of Q/A by the judges began. There were 11 pitches

LitheLaw – Graceful ase management and legal decision support software.

FoodSpotter – present the dietary, availability etc info on food items by aggregating data from USDA and other public datasets.

Dolphin – Gaminfication of learning experience in the classroom and outside. A gaminfication platform and api to easily integrate learning in games and games in learning. 

Business1Stop – making it easy to do business in DC, one stop solution to start a business in DC.

Deedsly – helping communities and nurturing volunteering, match making for volunteers.

GSAgility – Making Govt. Contracting easy with purchase cards. Enabling vendors and Govt Contractors to provide service and facilitating payments using Govt. purchase cards. (Winner)

Oasis Energy – solving the energy creation and distribution in developing nations and villages.

ShowMeTheDevelopmentMoney – Visualization of the public data of development, public funding and investment in public infrastructure. 

Pineapple – Solving the problem of availability of food by delivering nutritional food to the corner grocery store in the poor neighborhoods (Second Place),

Civit – Connecting citizens with the govt and commercial companies to get local civic work done.

N11 – Saving lives by connecting the (off or on duty) emergency responders near by to the emergency.

After the pitches and judges deliberation the results were

First Prize – GAAgility - solution to enable small govt. service procurement done using purchase cards. The team one a place in “CodeForAmerica” accelerator with 25K in funding.

Second Prize – PineApple

Kids team got a special mention and encouragement from Aneesh and Dan.

The event was a huge success, there was a lot to learn about the startup passion passion, community mentors and coaching support and unbelievable entrepreneurial energy. 

Startupweekend is a non-profit organization that organizes and facilitates weekend long workshops to pitch ideas, form teams, and start companies. I hosted StartupWeekend Education this weekend (June 1^st -3^rd) at Microsoft office in Reston.

The Center for Innovative Technology (CIT) and the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) worked to prepare a live link to datasets that was used by teams during the Startup Weekend.
This was the first Startup Weekend to highlight K-12 education data. The dataset puts potential solutions in the hands of the public’s creativity.
The educational datasets are primed for the creation of innovative software applications that can provide unique social value proposition for the developer and educational community to consider, access and use. The released datasets carefully guard student privacy and no data on an individual is released. 

We had more than 90 education entrepreneurs registered and with mentors, judges, participants and educator around 150 people took over entre 3^rd floor of our offices.

We had a great panel of judges

• Jim Duffey, Virginia Secretary of Technology
• Janet Yang, Partner at Novak Biddle Venture Partners
• Tom Adams, Chairman, Rosetta Stone
• Caton Burwell, Manager, QED Investors
• Bobbi Kurshan, Fellow, Education Impact and Executive VP, Educorp Consultants Corporation
• Tom Weithman, Vice President and Managing Director, CIT GAP Funds
• Andrew Ko, General Manager, Microsoft Education
• Dan Kasun – Sr. Director Microsoft Developer and Platform Evangelism

The event was kicked off @ 5 pm Friday, the awesome Khalid Smith from Startupweekend EDU facilitated and drove the whole event. 

The event was kicked off by Dan Kasun, Sr. Director Public Sector DPE. Dan talked about Public Sector, Education and Microsoft’s passion and vision to enable entrepreneurs in education.

There were 37 pitches for ideas made in the pitch fire followed by participants voting for their favorite pitches.  As a result, the top 13 ideas (with 11 or more votes) move to the next stage of team formation and product development out of which 13 ideas.

Teams were allocated office space on Friday evening and began heads down planning, brainstorming, designing and coding solutions.

There was plenty of food, caffeine and energy on the whole 3^rd floor of the Reston Office for next 2 days for the teams to get their solutions and pitch ready for the judges on Sunday evening. Coaches and Mentors from Business, technical and education fields were floating around, were grabbed by the team. The energy, passion around was unbelievable and each team worked so hard and so long that it was commendable what they produced. By Sunday evening the stage was set for pitching competition. 

There was a mock pitch session on Sunday noon for the teams to get a feel for what to expect and how to make the best out of the opportunity. By Sunday evening passion, stress and motivation cocktail was all around as judges arrived and the final program of real pitch and Q&A began at 5.

I presented BizSpark and Microsoft partner value prop to the audience.

Microsoft BizSpark is an entrepreneur startup acceleration program for software startups. BizSpark offers free Microsoft platform software and development tools to create your software, build your business and run your software in production BizSpark also helps a software startup with sales and marketing. The eligibility criteria to be a BizSpark startup is 1) it is a privately held software startup 2) the company is less than 3 years in business and 3) making less than 1M in software revenue.

Andrew Ko, GM Microsoft Education Partner/Learning kicked off the event with innovation Microsoft is bring in the education space.  Tom Adams, Chairman Rosetta Stone gave the key note address.

The pitching session with each team was given 5 minutes to pitch and 3 minutes of Q/A by the judges began. There were 13 pitches

K12budget – “make sense of school budgets”

According to K12budget, the budgeting process is extremely complex because revenue streams are coming from various federal and local levels. Each of the sources requires a unique set of regulations to comply with and the only tool that is currently in place to battle with the complexity of budgeting is Excel.

The goal of K12budget is to empower administrators to make smarter budget decisions that increase student achievement via historical analytics and regulation management. K12budget will allow administration to track results over time via data visualizations and will help to budget in compliance with the regulations.

Eluminate.me – “B.Y.O.T. – bring your own teacher”

Eluminate.me brings interactive and adaptive instructions to the electronic text. Teachers can embed quizzes inside assigned readings and add explanations on vocabulary where students may struggle the most. “The major reason why kids are not interested in reading is because it’s really, really hard”, says Adnrew Ravin. The goal of Elluminated is to help students read faster, more efficiently and have fun along the way. The content will be created by “expert teachers” but any other teacher who has the access to the service will be able to customize it in order to make the content fit better with his/her lesson plans.

MyStuDebt – to helps students to repay their student loans – to stop “nation’s time-ticking bomb”

This web-based product is aiming to prevent defaults on student loans. It provides a dashboard where you can see all your loans side by side and a customized roadmap on how to repay them. You can create your financial goals, limit your repayment streams to fit your budget, and find better ways to repay the loans. MyStuDebt are differentiating themselves from competitors by providing a personalized repayment plan.

The service will be free for students and will be sponsored by schools which will benefit from the decline of their default rates.

Goal Tracker – “measurable results and resources for teachers and parents to help increase student achievement”

Goal Tracker makes it very simple for teachers to input test results, get analytics on student scores, and have worksheets automatically generated for failed questions. The platform even can use a built-in camera on a computer to input tests results. After aggregating the data, GoalTracker provides teachers with the class work that students can use in order to improve their knowledge and test results.

Veritas Study – “ebay for education”

This is an online marketplace for teachers to sell their educational content to parents. Veritas Study allows teachers to be entrepreneurs and parents to provide their kids with more variety in learning. The system also recommends content to buy based on child’s learning needs and style.

Edunomics – “freakonomics of education”

This analytics tool, built on the Microsoft platform, aggregates data, analyzes it based on the terms you selected, and visualizes the output. The goal is to show relationships between seemingly unrelated datasets.  The data comes through various government and public sources via RSS feeds and APIs. For example, you can see easily how teen pregnancy affects drop-out rates in various states or countries. This tool, however, is not limited to education sector, the visual representation of data can be applied to any industry.

Quume – “a cumulative IQ”

Quume is a learning search engine: it aggregates online and offline educational resources under one umbrella creating a one-stop resource for all your knowledge needs. In addition to aggregation, they give you the opportunity to rate the course, blog, meetup, personality, or other resource…and define and track your learning agenda. Whether you’re jump-starting a career switch, building a network, looking to join a professional association, or simply just adding to your knowledge base, Quume will help you find the right resources with minimal effort.

Pigeon – “we get you”

Pigeon delivers messages to teachers and parents in any language by email, phone, text or print.  The goal is to help teachers communicate with non-English-speaking parents, facilitating cross-cultural interaction and preventing misinterpretation. Pigeon creates personalized messages to parents in their native tongue. For example, if a teacher wants to write a note to a parent about their kid having difficulties with reading, Pigeon has templates which the teacher can use. The message will be translated, let’s say into Spanish, and the parent, in addition to receiving this message, will also receive a list of actions he/she can take. The most crucial part about Pigeon is its ability to translate messages without grammatical and syntax errors, which Google Translator doesn’t always do.

PeerPower – “the OPOWER of education”

Most of the time we use the expression “peer pressure” in a negative sense, however, PeerPower aims to use it to motivate students to do better in school. PeerPower visualizes how a given student compares to others who took the same standardized test. It also helps parents to better understand their child’s test scores and may be used when picking a school by using the comparison metrics of a student body.

Wishbooks – “transparency in fundraising at schools”

This platform allows teachers to create Wishbooks with a dashboard where they show what they are raising money for, how much they need and what has already been collected. The goal is to bring transparency into school fundraising and build lasting relationships with companies that contribute to schools. It shows, in real-time, how much money was raised and encourages you to spread the word about specific fundraising projects. Wishbooks are not limited to money contributions; this platform can also be used to bring volunteers and professionals to schools for various projects.

Animatron – “game is a great way to teach programming”

Animatron creates a virtual world with animal avatars that can be controlled by students with code. The goal is to increase the number of students participating in Computer Science courses in schools by providing an engaging, active style of C.S. education to instructors. The first iteration of the game uses dog avatars, but they plan on adding more animals in order to build the whole ecosystem. Animatron will first be sold through licensing arrangements with a eye toward selling to all U.S. school districts.

HelpNathan.com – “match.com for kids”

This mobile app allows teachers to create sitting charts where students that are more proficient in one subject can teach other students. This is live peer-to-peer teaching in a classroom. Execution is simple: you assign yourself a number which represents the strength of a particular skill you possess. The app then matches you with another student who is either more or less proficient in that particular skill, according to your mutual needs. In other words, you end up either a teacher or a student, depending on other peoples’ skill sets in your group. Helpnathan currently focuses on middle schools only, but this app can be applied in any setting where you need to encourage collaboration between team members.

RealWorldNetwork – “connect professionals with schools”

Real World Network  intends to source experienced professionals to give talks in classes while forging lasting relationships between schools and companies. The startup is building a centralized network to help professionals give back to the community.  They provide a tutorial which explains how to “talk to kids” and prepare your talk accordingly. This is a non-profit organization which will be sponsored by participating corporations.

After the pitches and judges deliberation the results were

First Prize – Pigeon

Second Prize – GoalTracker

Third Prize – HelpNathan

Best use of VDOE data - Edunomincs

The event was a huge success, there was a lot to learn about the educators passion, community mentors and coaching support and unbelievable entrepreneurial energy. 

One of the key takeaways for me from the event was that there is a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs in education. The education system is broken, we are lagging behind, our class room sizes are increasing, our teachers do not have the right tools, students are not encouraged and motivated to over achieve, there is a lack of focus from the policy makers, lack of funding and many more issues.  With all these challenges our next generation is suffering and our country’s future may be in jeopardy in tomorrow’s competitive and flat world if we don’t take an action today.

But all is not lost, there is a lot of education data and the technology is here to make sense of that data, to gain insights and make it actionable. There are self-driven educators and entrepreneurs who are challenging the status quo and taking charge to change the system, want to use the data and the technology to secure the future of America.

The winning team “pigeon” is infact a team of elementary school teachers wanting to solve a real problem of parent teacher communication, hence making sure that the message to build the next generation is not lost in translation. 

All the above solutions which were ideated, made and pitched in 54 hours are solving a real problem and it is very reassuring that entrepreneurs and educators do have the mission to change the future by helping students to achieve their full potential.

If you are feeling left out of being a part of this amazing event, do not worry I am hosting Startup Weekend DC e-Gov on June 15 and you can find out about future events on the main Startup Weekend DC site.