Project Policy wins the SVC2UK Startup Weekend finals using data from import•io. The team was built last Friday the 9th of November 2012, with a concept pitched by Nathan Boublil and Agastya Muthanna. With Matthew Painter (import•io CTO) as their mentor at StartUp Weekend Cambridge, the team was selected as finalists for their innovative product.
Silicon Valley gathered all UK winners for the finals on Thursday the 15th at Google Campus in London and each of the teams travelled from the different cities that Startup Weekend took place in last weekend (9th-11th of November 2012) to present their product. The judges choosing the winning team were Tim Foster (Sydney Olympics gold medalist), David Levison (healthcare CEO), John Bradford (Springboard), Geoff Ralston (Y Combinator)and Kim Polese (founder of Marimba). The winning team from Cambridge impressed the audience with their well-rounded application.
Project Policy is an online, intuitive tool, bringing in data from many different sources to help the world make sense of policy. They will compete for the GlobalStartUpBattle which includes all winners of Startup Weekends, with an online voting mechanism, but you will need to hold on that until the voting process opens on 21st of November at 8pm.
Nathan Boublil commented on their Startup Weekend experience: ”StartUpWeekend Cambridge was an intense 54 hour accelerator hosted at the Uni of Cambridge. It allowed us to turn an idea into a concept, then into a pitch, and finally a functioning product. Without a doubt, I would recommend the experience to anyone. It is quite incredible to see what a few minds can do by putting their head down, working intensely and simultaneously. We also had lots of fun with the team throughout the weekend. The event was perfectly organised by Hanadi Jabado and Donald de Santis and being mentored throughout by experts like import.io was invaluable and certainly a very good fit for our project. Obviously, winning SW Cambridge was also an important external validation of the project’s potential and a great conclusion to an intense collective effort.”
He commented on their win as well: ”Silicon Valley comes 2 UK was very emotional, the competition itself at Google Campus of course, but also the 3 days that preceded it as the whole team continued to work non-stop (on the demo, video and pitch)! The standards were very high, the judges very demanding and we’re all extremely grateful to have won the UK edition. The last 5 days have been amazing for Project Policy and for us personally. We now look forward to taking Project Policy to the next stage, which includes a trip to Silicon valley in January sponsored by Google. And of course, we look forward to continuing to draw on the expertise of the whole team at @importio, who have been so generous in supporting us throughout the experience.”
The runners up, ”Hands Free Cook Book”, also used import•io to access data and had Nick Scott, our Data Manager, as their mentor. This team again impressed the judges and were told: “get yourselves a patent lawyer!”
Well done teams! Congratulations to all the participants!
Startup winners celebrating their success. BL-FR : Low Wen Xi Aylwin, Will Damazer, Simon Stockley (Cambridge Judge Business School), Nathan Boublil, Elliott Verreault, Donald de Santis (Liffft), Agastya Muthanna. Front row from left to right: Hanadi Jabado (Accelerate Cambridge), Rich Wilson (VP Sales & Marketing for import•io), Ravi Kammaje.
by Eleni Velonaki