Team Call Spinner poses for a picture after taking first place at Startup Weekend Omaha. From left to right, John Hobbs, Alex Gates, Zach Leatherman, and Cody Peterson. Photo by Danny Schreiber.
Congrats to Call Spinner for taking home top honors at Startup Weekend Omaha, a 54-hour event challenging attendees to present ideas, form teams, plan, implement, and then finally present their just-born startup to a panel of judges.
Second place was awarded to Everpresent, a web and smartphone app that prompts you to record important moments in the life of your kids. The judges for the event were:
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The winning team consisted of John Hobbs, Alex Gates, Zach Leatherman, and Cody Peterson. In one weekend, they took an idea pitched by Gates and turned it into a working service. The winning prize was $300, a one-month membership to CAMP (which was passed down to the second place team), and an invitation to demo their product at midVenturesLAUNCH.
To try Call Spinner out for yourself – an experience which can best be described as Chatroulette for the phone – call (402) 318-3150. Screenshot from callspinner.com.
Call Spinner is free to use, but to cover the costs of the technology behind it (built off the Twilio API), they’ll be serving you an advertisement before your first connection is made. Part of their service is this unique advertising platform in which it should take an advertiser no more than five minutes to insert an ad into Call Spinner. Additionally, they’ve created a slick reporting feature that, on the press of a button, sends a text message to the advertiser reporting the number of ad impressions. To learn more about Call Spinner, watch the team’s presentation in the video below.
Here’s the list of ideas presented (in alphabetical order):
- Call Spinner – Call (402) 318-3150 to randomly connect with someone via phone. Think Chatroulette for the phone. (Originally pitched by Alex Gates.)
- Everpresent – A web and smartphone app that daily asks you a question about your baby. You answer, the app keeps the data and at the end of certain period of time you can turn that data into a baby book (Originally pitched by Nia Nielsen.)
- Focus Group Up – The Groupon model applied to finding people to participate in a focus group. (Originally pitched by Joe Frost.)
- Keepum – An online Twitter archiving service keeping your tweets and favorite searches and allowing you to explore, export and embed those tweets. (Originally pitched by Danny Schreiber.)*
Note: Buzz, which was originally pitched by Grant Stanley did not be present.
*I’m both covered Startup Weekend Omaha for Silicon Prairie News and participated in the event.
For more information on Startup Weekend Omaha, check out omaha.startupweekend.org or our past articles at siliconprairienews.com/tags/startup-weekend-omaha.
Here are the videos from last night’s demo presentations and winner announcement (big thanks to John Henry’s son, Isaiah Müller, for the filming of the presentations):
Call Spinner, Presented by Alex Gates & Team
Winner Announcement, Presented by Cassius Almeida of CrowdPicks (one of three judges)
Focus Group Up, Presented by Joe Frost & Team
Everpresent, Presented by Nia Nielsen & Team
Keepum, Presented by Danny Schreiber & Team
