From the 18th till the 20th of March, the Glasshouse at Kelvin Grove hosted Australia’s first creative tech start-up weekend. As participants pitched their initial ideas on Friday, excitement was high in anticipation of the voting and team formations to take place later that evening.
I voted and became apart of the team for Shario – a platform for musicians to share, sell and trade musical equipment, providing a solution for musicians to gain access to otherwise extremely expensive equipment.
Hosted by Dwight Gunning, participants had access to valuable advice from mentors such as:
- Greg Hearn
- Stephen Phillips
- Kylie Lamprecht
- Marcus Foth
- Dean Brough
- Chris Carter
- Deb Polson
- Kaisu Christie
- Peter Nink
- Peta Ellis
- Josh Anthony
- Aysegul Kayahan
- Mandy Thomas
- Kaye Petherick
- Melissa Witheriff
- Oksana Zelenko
- Gavin Sade
- Lex Van
- Brian Richards
- Tim McLennan
These proved extremely useful and critical for groups to perfect their business models and pitches to be presented the following night.
The start-up weekend attracted many different types of professions and areas of interest, these were filtered into the following categories;
Hackers – Coders
Hustlers – Entrepreneurs
Hipsters – Designers
I personally was labelled a hustler but found myself also highly involved in the graphic design process of the presentation. Within our group, we found that multiple members dabbled in other categories. We can attribute our success of the weekend to this interconnected format of our team.
Speaking of this success, the Shario team was awarded first place for this event, and presented with multiple prizes to assist us in the start-up process. Ecstatic with this result, we intend to develop our start-up. If you are interested in our start-up idea, you may keep up to date with all developments regarding Shario via our Facebook page or our website, www.shar-io.co
Additionally, the ‘Moon Shot’ Award was presented to ‘Transactly’, third place was awarded to DiscoveredFM, and second place was presented to Splash. Steve Baxter, Elaine Stead, Michael Smellie, Drew Koven, and Professor Carol Dickson, as the judges, determined these results.
Overall, when presented with an opportunity such as this I would recommend to be as involved as possible. Having been sponsored by the Business School to attend the Start-up Weekend Brisbane – Creative Tech, I thought it would be a wonderful learning experience to be able to integrate into my academic work. However, I was surprised by the end of it to be a co-founder of a start-up. Events such as this are an opportunity of a lifetime, and I would recommend investigating and participating in events like these whole-heartedly.
Chelsea
