Thirty students sacrificed their weekend to create six new web start-ups in the inaugural Student StartupCamp at the University of Melbourne.

20th April 2009, Melbourne - The entrepreneurs, coders and graphics designers, all students, were divided into six teams late on Friday, and immediately set about brainstorming and building legitimate start-ups from scratch

Running on no sleep, students launched their websites to the public a little over 24 hours later, with live product demos broadcast through the internet. By Sunday afternoon they had pitched their businesses to a panel of investors, entrepreneurs, and business academics.

“It was an excellent immersive experience watching distillation of ideas into a plan and working model.” said Investment Director of Information City Australia (ICA), Drew Williams, “some of the startups had good possibility to become a good commercial solution, but need more work analyzing the market.”

Camp organizer and founder of Student Entrepreneurs | Agents of Change club, Amir Nissen, said he thinks “the number one take-away for students was the value of doing. You can achieve so much if you just get moving.”

“It’s the best weekend I’ve had” said camp participant and developer of ibrewit.com, Gaurav Dadhania, after programming continuously for 24 hours, “I’m amazed at how much we have achieved in one single weekend.”

The six new web start-ups include:

http://www.conversionspace.com/ provides an easy and reliable email based conversion service for people to convert Word documents to PDF files

http://ibrewit.com/ is a social network designed specifically to link the dispersed home brewer community around Australia

http://www.microjobs.com.au/ offers a job advertising website that focuses on short-term “micro” jobs.

http://www.chorecop.com/ has developed a “share house management system” with in-built monitoring and punishment mechanisms for people not completing their domestic tasks in a shared house.

http://www.oneoffjobs.net/ helps to facilitate job seekers and individuals needing one-off tasks completed.

http://www.ratemyguts.com/ creates a space for people to relieve tension and share their ‘gutsy’ stories.

About Student StartupCamp: the concept was based on the original StartupCamps in Sydney and Melbourne for professional coders and entrepreneurs. The Student StartupCamp is organized by Student Entrepreneurs | Agents of Change with the help of the original StartupCamp organizer Bart Jellema and Commerce Student Experience Team at the University of Melbourne.