Silicon Valley comes to Southampton StartUp Weekend

On 9th – 11th November Southampton University will be hosting a Silicon Valley comes to UK 2012 StartUp Weekend. It is a 56-hour, non-stop national competition where teams with individuals holding different skill sets compete to build a successful start-up business. The winner of last year’s event was Alejandro Saucedo from Southampton, and he is organising this year’s event with Petar Trifonov and Mariam Elbadri, one of our Student Digital Champions. Click here to register and for further details.

What is amazing about this year’s event is that Startup Weekend and Silicon Valley comes to the UK are teaming up to bring the craziness of the events simultaneously in London, Manchester, Sheffield, Southampton and Cambridge. These events will bring together developers, designers, marketers, product managers and startup enthusiasts to share ideas, form teams, build products, and launch startups!

The teams will be free to work on any startup they want but they have to use Open Data and hence they will have access to UK government data sets from data.gov.uk to build startups. Participants will use this data to produce high impact applications/websites to unlock the power of public data to help “rewrite the rules of the new economy”.

A few days after the event, the top startups will be invited to attend an exclusive awards ceremony in central London and will also get the chance to fight in the Global Startup Battle taking place between the 130 Startup Weekend events. Last year the awards were presented by David Cameron. Prizes included a fully paid trip to Silicon Valley, California, where winners had the amazing opportunity to visit companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, between many others.