Turning Ideas Into Reality In 54 Hours

Providing a launchpad for ideas, the Sharjah Entrepreneurship Center (Sheraa) hosted Startup Weekend from the 15th to 17th of February 2018. The 54-hour event brought together designers, developers, marketers and startup enthusiasts to share ideas, form teams and launch startups.

The event was held in partnership with Khalifa Fund for Enterprise Development and Sandooq al Watan. They introduced the Emirati Innovator Track prize, that would reward Emiratis innovating in the field of entrepreneurship.

The three-day event kicked off with a ‘pitch-fire’ shortlisting process to decide on the 16 ideas that will be worked on in the weekend. Day 2 saw the teams working on their idea while attending workshops and getting feedback from mentors. Day 3 ended with the teams pitching their finalized ideas to a panel of judges to win the grand prize of AED 35,000, along with enrolment into Sheraa programs, access to the IBM Global Entrepreneur Program, a dedicated 2-hour session of mentoring on customer acquisition from Sendgrid and 3 hours worth design consulting from Maek Digital Agency.

With only 54 hours and a set time-table to accomplish their objective of winning an opportunity to turn ideas into reality, Giftrapp triumphed as the winner of Startup Weekend with the idea of an online platform allowing users to create and share wish lists from any online and offline stores in order to prevent giving and receiving unwanted gifts, beating 16 other teams.