Ask HN: Feedback for SXSW Startup Contest (and paid project)

10 pointsby hurricane15 anni fa2 comments

We are planning to run a startup contest for SXSW and need help and suggestions. We plan to ask startup participants to post a short video clip explaining their technology or a visual demo, then have an internet audience vote on their favorite entry. The top 5 startups would be flown out to SXSW, put up in a hotel, given free passes, and will be able to present to a panel of judges at a large event where a winner will ultimately be crowned.

We were hoping to run the contest through an additional page on our website www.thomvest.com and my initial thoughts on how we wanted to do this:

A clean design that shows small video clips as they are uploaded in either rank order by the number of votes or by latest upload. Was thinking that porting YouTube video might be best, but open to suggestions? I would think that for those entering there should be a few fields such as name, email, website url, and perhaps a posterous-like simple "paste your video link" that would automatically post onto the website.

For the users deciding on which startups make the final 5: a voting mechanism that would use Facebook and Twitter as login credentials to help reduce fraudulent votes. I realize that twitter will most likely contain additional spam accounts, so if it is possible to make some type of following/follower ratio requirement or number of tweets that would be helpful. I don’t know if IP vote tracking would be difficult as well, but perhaps there could be an additional anti-spam layer through insuring the same connection doesn’t vote multiple times. Some type of vote count tracker would be helpful as well.

Moderation tools that allow for curation of videos, potential to flag and invalidate spam votes as they come up.

I am sure there are other things I am not considering, and I would be open to hearing any other suggestions. While I have been searching around for other examples of a similar contest, I haven’t found many that fit the bill (I am most likely missing something so links would be appreciated). In addition, we are looking for someone that can code the above and has some ideas about the design, please feel free to send some information about your ideas and a price quote to info (at) thomvest (dot) com. Thanks!

1 comments

tech915 anni fa

I know that vator.tv was running a competition for startups in a similar fashion: http://vator.tv/competition/splash-competition-san-francisco...

I like the video concept though as it would be more interactive.

hurricane15 anni fa

Appreciate the link, that was one of the contests we checked out while thinking about the SXSW concept. I think that the design and interactive nature (no video) of vator's contest could be improved a bit but it is a good example.