Seeing how local communities develop and grow is what inspires Garage48 to go back to emerging ecosystems like Moldova. We held our fourth event there on the last weekend of April and felt truly happy and glad to see familiar faces among the participants.
It's appropriate to quote our host Kai Isand here :"You all know the story of MSQRD, but it’s worth reminding just one more time that these guys came to 5 hackathons before they developed the app that was later sold to Facebook and made these guys financially independent and the success story of Belarus."
In June we’re co-organising the Garage48 Visual Hackathon together with them and we couldn’t imagine a partner who would know the whole hackathon drill better than these guys!
Something similar is taking place in Chisinau - young and bright talented people keep on coming to each of the hackathons we organise, regardless what the subject is and invest their weekends to accept the challenges and come up with new ideas. This is how the community of next generation entrepreneurs is being built.
A great example is Sergiu Negara who has been taking part as a participant at the previous hackathons in Chisinau. He impressed us with his talent and ambition so much that this time we invited him to join us as a mentor and we will definitely continue working with him in the future. Great results take a lot of time and effort but are definitely worth the hard work.
But enough of the sentimental part and let’s start introducing the results of the past weekend.
On the Friday evening, after a successful day at Rockit conference we headed to Tekwill - a recently opened co-working space and event venue. We were joined by around 70 people who all were ready to work hard the next 48 hours at the event co-organised with Civitta Moldova.
The event was hosted by Kai Isand - the longtime face and heart of Garage48 who was joined by a team of mentors we would like to thank a lot : Jaan Sarapuu, Maxim Bircu, Sergiu Negara, Sven Kirsimäe, Vasile Valcov, Joao Rei, Marko Oolo, Maxim Abdusha, Tudor Mardari, Sergiu Kirillov
After the welcoming words 12 ideas got pitched and 10 of them went into the development process. Head over the blogpost from the first evening to check out all the ideas.
But lets go to introducing the results of the event
Favorite of the Audience
Starbot
Fintech Spezial Prize
Aiwaska
Starbot
Healthtech Spezial Prize
Spherelab
WINNER
The Comics
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We would like to thank everyone who were involved in the hackathon either as participants or organisers and would like to finish by repeating what one of our long time mentors Joao Rei said : "I know how hard it is to come this point after 48hours and announce just one winner. I also know how demotivating it may be if you don't get the first prize. My advise is that don't give up if you don't get a prize. Keep on developing what you started and keep on going to hackathons and similar events! You still are a winner!"
Thank you everyone once again and see you soon here and there!
