Member Article

Sheffield creates seven tech startups in weekend of innovation

An out-of-office initiative to support Sheffield startup businesses has unearthed seven new technology ventures and promoted the two most promising to a global competition seeking to identify the world’s most innovative startups.

At 5.15pm on Friday 15 November, 43 developers, designers, marketers, product managers and startup enthusiasts came together for Startup Weekend, a University of Sheffield hosted event designed to bring business ideas to life.

54 hours later, AirStock, a venture conceived to provide broadcasters with an affordable source of production quality aerial video footage, was named the winner. The judges praised the team for identifying a specific niche and creating a straightforward business model with clear benefits.

AirStock and runners-up Goodvid.io, which was created to help retailers find user generated video content for their websites, have graduated to the world’s largest startup competition, Global Startup Battle. They will compete with other ventures created at Startup Weekend events around the world to win funding and business support from Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

“Startup Weekend brings together designers, coders and hustlers to form teams and take ideas from concept to launch in just 54 hours,” said Samantha Deakin, founder of Startup Weekend Sheffield. “There is huge educational value in creating, sharing and crash testing ideas, and – with a third of startups created at these events going strong three months later – we hope to have unearthed gems that could add significantly to Sheffield’s growing technology cluster.”

The team that created AirStock over Startup Weekend comprised VuAir founder Andre Ferreria, sales and marketing manager Giles Moore, marketing professional Rob Barr, software engineer Manu Matute and three students from the University of Sheffield: Jack Ross, Cyrus Sahirad and Dan Cunnington.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by James Taylor .