StartUpBus GER & FRA make a stop at CODE_n

On their way to the Pioneers startup festival in Vienna, two busloads of young entrepreneurs stopped by at CODE_n on Sunday evening. While en route from Paris and Amsterdam, the passengers developed new startup concepts in the style of a “rolling hackathon” of entrepreneurship. The buses made a stop at CODE_n for their creatively-minded riders to showcase their projects and the associated business development ideas in 3-minute pitch presentations. The theme of the evening: “Growth Hacking.”

Sunday, 6:00 p.m. – a bus pulls up in front of GFT Technologies in Stuttgart-Hohenheim. 20 young founders armed with laptops and plenty of new ideas disembark from the StartUpBus GERMANY. The “buspreneurs” from the StartUpBus FRANCE have already turned up and made themselves at home in the GFT building. Having arrived unexpectedly early that afternoon, they improvised by turning the GFT location into a co-working space. The atmosphere is relaxed, focused, business-like: With the founders gathered around laptops in groups, concepts are discussed, developed and poured into presentations. There’s only time for a quick bite and a short introduction to CODE_n before the “pitch battle” gets underway. Each project team has only 3 minutes to present their business concept and discuss ideas for business development all the way to mass market rollout. 

The following innovations were presented at CODE_n:

• Problem Hunt
  Problems can be solved much more easily in a group than in isolation – but which problem should take priority? Leave that up to the community at ProblemHunt, a tool for reporting, describing and prioritizing problems. The team believes that companies and local authorities might be particularly interested in a solution like this – one which builds groups that are aware of the most important problems and how to best tackle them strategically.
• Any Pass
  “A passport for the digital nomad” – that’s the aim of AnyPass, a solution that brings together all the services that any globally operating digital worker might need. Searching for overnight accommodation, reserving a workstation in a co-working space or getting in touch with the local community – AnyPass aims to offer all of this in a single, comprehensive service. They plan to initially launch in five major metropolises in North America and Europe.
• Never Eat Alone
  This app is intended primarily for employees at medium-sized to large companies looking for one thing in particular: to spend their lunch breaks with colleagues, preferably those they haven’t met before. Why? The app’s developers think it’s tough for company employees to meet co-workers from other departments. They see this as wasted potential and plan to put an end to that with this service.
• Krawd
  This service is designed to get people talking about brands. It’s about trying to create crowd-powered buzz by inspiring and directing creativity among an interested community, and also boosting the community’s reach.
• Trak
  Awesome night, great event, the music was off the charts – but what were the tracks we were dancing to all night? Trak is the perfect solution for anyone looking for the answer to this question. After all, no one can know every single song out there. Trak is an armband that tracks the music you partied to last night. The French entrepreneurs behind the solution hope to pique the interest of clubs and festival/event organizers.
• Spicer
  The people at Spicer want to fire up intimacy on a global scale. The project’s slogan: “Spice up your love life.” With this app, couples and strangers can talk about their sexual desires, hook up and make it happen.
• TimeFlow
  The makers of TimeFlow believe that there’s plenty of room for improvement when it comes to our digital calendars. So they’ve created a superior digital calendar app boasting ingenious design and flexible time management.
• Dashr
  Participating in sports is good for you and a lot of fun. And it’s all the more enjoyable when you’re not alone. That’s where Dashr comes into play: the app brings people with similar sports interests together via intelligent match-up and communication functions.
• Seven
  Today, fans can communicate directly with almost all leading movie stars, music artists and media figures online via social media. But how can you get ahold of Barack Obama’s contact information to give him a call? Based on the sociological concept of six degrees of separation, this app aims to bring fans and stars closer together – in a community based on give and take, everyone will ultimately find the person they are looking for.

Winner of the day: Spicer
The jury – made up of CODE_n PR rep Felix Jansen, Kathleen Fritzsche from Startup Stuttgart and some of the StartUpBus organizers Romain Dausset, Oliver Gassner, Ruben Evens and Marko Müller – decided in favor of Spicer – an idea they saw as well thought-out and offering exciting possibilities.

Saying goodbye
Shortly after the pitches – which ran until after nine in the evening – the buses drove off. The buspreneurs closed their laptops, packed up their cables and got back into their rolling offices. It was on to Munich, after which the next stop would be the Pioneers Festival in Vienna. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank them all once again for their visit to Stuttgart. It was really interesting and we met a lot of highly engaged new people with original ideas.

Link: StartUpBus Europe

We published some fotos of this event at Flickr …