Groupnotes: The 2012 Global Startup Battle Champion!

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Thanks to an amazing lineup of teams from around the world, Global Startup Battle was bigger, better, and more exciting than ever this year. With over 137 events in more than 60 countries, the global impact and the competition were at an all-time high.

To get to this point, competing teams had to beat over 1,000 other teams, putting them among just a handful of over 10,000 entrepreneurs who entered a Startup Weekend event during GEW hoping to win.

The dust has finally settled and we are extremely proud to present your top 3 Global Startup Battle startups!

3. Smart Ward - video

2. Beethoven - video

1. Groupnotes (video) as this year’s 1st place GSB champion!

 

What’s next for Groupnotes?

Groupnotes will be awarded with over $35,000 of in-kind prizes including Google cloud, legal support, design assistance  and PR services.  The team will be headed to San Francisco to tour Googleplex and meet with investors, founders, and mentors and in March, they will be flying to Rio de Janeiro  to participate in the annual Global Entrepreneurship Congress. We’ve also decided to award all of our top 15 with prizes to help their startup along the way!

At Startup Weekend Toronto, over the course of 54 hours, GroupNotes developed from one idea pitched in 60 seconds to a functioning company,  and then entered into the world’s largest startup competition.

Here’s a quick re-cap of their story:

Groupnotes came in third for votes from Friday night’s pitch fire at SW Toronto and decided to stay the rest of the night until the space closed at 2 A.M.  - at which point, the team continued to code at another location late into the morning.

Most of Saturday was spent doing customer validation while simultaneously developing the brand for Groupnotes.  That afternoon, the team earned their first sale from local educators that they had talked to that day.  Groupnotes closed down the venue once again and geared up for pitch day.

On Sunday, after wrapping up last minute details, finishing out code and design, and prepping their pitch and demo,  Groupnotes  was ready for the evening presentations.

Upon being announced the overall winner of Toronto Startup Weekend, Groupnotes was awarded some exciting initial prizes: rotation through local incubators, credits for Gotstyle and Uber, business consulting services, $20,000 in-kind services from Switchvideo, and more.  That following Tuesday, GroupNotes opened the Toronto Stock Exchange.

As all Startup Weekend teams are a part of our global community, we want to support everyone as much as possible, and we hope to see everyone go on to do big things.  We want to remind teams that this is just the beginning of their startup story.  It is with gratitude and pride that we congratulate everyone on their accomplishments so far.