By Joey Ferguson
SALT LAKE CITY — After 54 hours of work, Wizard Wars, a mobile player vs. player online game, won first place during the Startup Weekend event at the Gateway in Salt Lake City, while Map It Track It took second and Ultimate Mediator went home with third.
“Every single startup was legit though,” Alex Lawrence, one of the founders of Startup Weekend Utah, said in a Tweet on Saturday after announcing the winners. “Not kidding.”
Startup Weekend allows local developers and entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas to their peers. After all pitches are made, the best ideas are selected and teams are formed around them.
Each team has about 54 hours to create a business model, develop the product and devise a marketing strategy. At the end of the event, all teams presented their products to a panel of judges.
Judges for the event included Clarke Miyasaki, managing director of Cottonwood Heights-based Kickstart Seed Fund, Jeremy Hanks, chief executive of Dropship Commerce and Alen Peacock, co-founder of Space Monkey.
“Too much fun tonight judging Startup Weekend,” Miyasaki said on his Twitter account following the event. “Crazy what everybody built in a couple of days.”
Wizard Wars, the winning product at the Startup Weekend event, is a mobile game that allows players to cast spells at one another through a combination of finger swipes.
Second place went to Map It Track It, which is a mobile app that allows door-to-door sales tracking.
Different symbols represent the interest level of a particular home, if they have been spoken to and potential sales followups.
The group Ultimate Mediator says they address a market that isn’t really tapped into. The group developed a system to track child visitation in cases of divorce and custody bouts.
Ultimate Mediator won third place as the judges agreed the visitation market is largely underserved.
“I’m always so impressed by the products and progress that happens at startup weekend,” said Joel Jenkins, a web designer who helped create the app Prayer Roll during startup weekend.
Prayer Roll is a religious mobile app that allows users to add items to their daily prayer list so they don’t forget.
“If you didn’t make it to Startup Weekend this time, ask anyone who attended and I bet they’ll say you’ll want to be at the next one for sure,” Lawrence said via Twitter.
