Amman- 9 April, 2015
Startup Weekend GJU was launched in GJU’s Jebel Amman Campus “Darat Othman Bdeir” on 2 April 2015.
The Innovation and Entrepreneurship Team (PIE) at GJU’s Office for Industrial Links organized the event, in coordination with Startup Weekend Amman team. Startup Weekends are 54-hour events where participants get the chance to share their ideas, form teams, build business models, and launch startups! Startup Weekends are weekend-long, hands-on experiences where entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs can find out if startup ideas are viable.
The journey to innovation and being a successful entrepreneur can be a rocky one, and for university students it can be hard to overcome without a little push, just a nudge in the right direction is what most of these students need, and that’s what Startup Weekend GJU was all about.
Enthusiasm levels were over the roof, and with an unlimited supply of Coca-Cola, and daily meals courtesy of the USAID JCP program, participants were set on the path to failure, not because their ideas were bad, but because if you fail fast, you will succeed faster. As a reward for their efforts, Oasis500 and Shopify provided prizes for the winning ideas.
Startup Weekend GJU was among the first Startup Weekends to be held for university students not only in Jordan but in the MENA region and #SWGJU was among the top 10 discussed hashtags in Jordan on Friday. Around 50 GJU students and graduates from different majors signed up for the event and the judges were very impressed with the ideas of the teams.
Team “Positron”, the winning team according to the judges in Startup Weekend GJU, had the idea of a wireless electric devices control application. It put the audience in awe, as they were able to control the lights of the venue room and impress everyone.
The crowd favorite however was “Pickmeup”, which won the hearts and souls of GJU students, as they were proposing a solution to both transportation and the environment with their carpooling app. There were other teams solving traffic issues, like “TJam” who wanted to track traffic jams around Jordan.
Whether you want a device to help you cool the water in the heat of summer, to get closer to your blind relatives with an app that reads braille writing, or your chance to drift with professionals in a track, Startup Weekend GJU has got you covered. Some ideas were in the direction of websites, with “Spinist” and “Typefaces” launching sites to better connect people, or sell Arabic fonts respectively.
Some comments from the participants included: “This weekend was beyond expectations.... This is just the start!”, “It was an amazing event and I learnt a lot of things either it was related to programming or team management”, “I can never thank everyone for everything they gave me. It was a pleasure to meet such people. And special thanks to Dr. Jamil for this amazing weekend, to you and the organizers”. And as Anthony Volodkin, the founder of Hype Machine once said: “Be undeniably good. No marketing effort or social media buzzword can be a substitute for that.”
We hope to continue to hear good stories about it and about the teams and wish them all the success in the future. Startup Weekend was made possible with the support of local sponsors USAID JCP program, Oasis500, GJU and Shopify.
