Lincoln’s first JumpStart Challenge is in the books and we are proud to announce DigiWidgets as the winner of the inaugural contest.
The concept behind the challenge is simple: Lincoln is a community full of creative entrepreneurs, talented software designers and unmatched application developers. We are also the home to dozens of businesses who lead their industry in production and innovation.
Why not try and put the two together?
We partnered with NMotion, Fuse Coworking, Nutech Ventures and Nebraska Innovation Campus to make it happen.
In February, nearly 100 people attended our opening session to hear from business representatives. The entrepreneurs in the room were presented with a list of technological challenges facing businesses every day. After hearing the challenges, the competitors were asked to come back in April and pitch their solutions.
DigiWidgets came up with the winning idea and took home the $1,000 prize and free coworking passes from FUSE Coworking.
The DigiWidgets team was comprised of Stacy Carlson and Carl Steffen. Carlson runs a home-based business called Gotta Pixel that provides digital scrapbooking and Steffen owns Stone Fin, a web and mobile programming company.
Their concept? A simple new platform designed to create digital scrapbooks in a web browser.
Here is a summary from their Facebook page: “While digital scrapbooking is where we’re heading first, DigiWidgets will allow any business that needs digital creative space built into their website to use it. DigiWidgets will be subscription based and free to try for businesses that want to test the waters. Businesses like Gotta Pixel can easily use our graphics editor to empower their users. Gotta Pixel’s customers will be able to create scrapbook pages within the website using any modern web browser, save them, and then open them from any other device to continue their work. We are building DigiWidgets to be easy to use and customizable to fit any website. Our vision includes deployment being as simple as installing a WordPress plugin.”
The DigiWidgets concept was entered in the “Wild Card” division, but Home Services of Nebraska (who sponsored the Real Estate division) also saw the idea’s merit for real estate applications and declared DigiWidgets the winners of that division in conjunction with the win in the wild card division.
We’ve received tremendous positive feedback from our inaugural event and we will do this again in the future. Contact the Lincoln Partnership for Economic Development if you are an industry in need of a solution or if you are an aspiring entrepreneur looking to show off your creative problem solving skills.
by Wendy Birdsall, President
Lincoln Chamber of Commerce
402-436-2350
The Chamber’s mission is to improve the lives of Lincoln residents by providing increased economic opportunity and can only be accomplished together. Networking opportunities, business advocacy, and creating economic viability are critical to our success. We encourage you to become a member and help us achieve these goals for Lincoln. For more information, please contact our Membership Director, Kristin Holmes, kholmes@lcoc.com.