After receiving an invitation from StartupWeekend Cairo, On Thursday 19th of January 2012 I headed to Smart Village – Egypt to attend their third run of the event.
I had heard a lot of great feedback on the first runs of the event in Cairo and Alexandria and it was exciting for me to get invited to their first 2012 event.
If you don’t know what StartupWeekend is, please read its details here
Startup Weekend is an intense 54 hour event which focuses on building a web or mobile application which could form the basis of a credible business over the course of a weekend. The weekend brings together people with different skillsets - primarily software developers, graphics designers and business people - to build applications and develop a commercial case around them.
I would like to congratulate StartupWeekend Cairo team for their greats efforts, this one of the few events I attended and the event flow was amazing and under control.
Event started with an OK! presentation from Mohamed Abduljalil – Nokia Business Development Manager presenting Nokia products and development tools for OVI apps. it was a typical ready-made marketing presentation lacking enthusiasm and passion.
Next speaker was Dr. Khaled Ismail – Intel Mobile Communications General Manager-Egypt, he delivered great speech about what is a good product and what is a great product. I liked his improvisation, confidence and hitting on the main aim behind the StartupWeekend.
Then at last Abdellatif Olama –Co-founder and CEO of Dare’n’Deal started his speech about elevator pitch it was nice speech with a sense of humor.
After the break all who submitted their ideas started pitching the ideas in 1 minute. It is very challenging to grab attendees’ attention and curiosity in just one minute and the audience should be voting on the ideas they like.
My main reflections on the participants’ pitches are lack of rehearsals, not focusing on core message/value for their product, try to sell the technology not the value or Return On Investment (ROI) and when pitching ROI it was totally subjective nothing tangible or measurable.
My recommendation for all the participants spend more time on rehearsing your pitch, identify core value for your idea and its ROI.
This is my tweets during the event.
