Garage48 Tartu winner is the queue management system Qminder

Paypal, Nokia, Skype, Estonian Air and other innovative companies joined forces with Garage48 Foundation to hold the latest ICT bootcamp in Tartu University, Estonia. With the main focus on developing mobile apps, a weekend-long intensive event resulted in 14 new prototypes. 

The winner of Garage48 - Qminder - got jury’s attention with it’s ability to considerably improve customer services. Jon Bradford, a man behind two most well known UK startup accelerators Springboard and Ignite100 sees Qminder’s potential in replacing current legacy systems with new queue management application working in new technologies. He also brings out the dedication of the team and wishes to see what they can do not only in 48 hours but within the next 48 days.  

Special prizes went to  Weather.me, Shakebeet, TakeIt/LeaveIt, Facebook on IPTV. 

Nokia Special Prize were split to Shakebeet and Qminder to provide both, the entertaining feature and serious business application a possibility to develop the project further, said Nokia Senior Technical Consultant Andreas Jakl. Both teams get brand new Nokia MeeGo phones as a prizes.  

Estonian Telecom Elion, who opened it’s smartTV platform for developers this weekend, is going to introduce newly developed Facebook in IPTV for users in coming weeks.

To motivate teams to further develop the projects, the final winner of Garage48 will be announced within the next month. Garage48 team will pick the most dedicated team by the end of September to give it a direct access to Europe’s most valued investment programme Seedcamp. 

„Garage48’s biggest success-story Garage48 comes from Riga this spring, it’s the start-up Campalyst which provides analytics to Facebook. Only two months after the event they won the first investment from Seedcamp.“ sais Ragnar Sass, founder of Garage48.

„This is the clear sign that Garage48 holds a lot of potential when it comes to creating real businesses out of an initial idea,“ sais Jüri Kaljundi, founder of Garage48.

Garage48 continues it’s hackathons in Kenya and Uganda, Africa in September. The next events in Europe will take place in Finland, Latvia and Ukraine in October. Garage48, a weekend-long intensive development event designed to work out new web and mobile applications, started in Estonia and has now been held on 10 occasions. It has been receiving wide media coverage in technology- and start-up circles.

See all the teams and projects realized at Garage48 Tartu 2011.

Sponsors: