These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2011 Spring edition. This post is from the VoiceU team, formed by Iuri Aranda, Joan Casas, Miquel Las Heras and Miquel Puig.
Yahoo organizes every year a competition called Hacku.
In this competition that lasts 24 hours there are several groups ( between one and 4 people) whose aim is to develope a hack during 24 hours. HackU has 7 years of history where important American universities have been involved, such as University of Washington, Georgia Tech, etc.. And this year Yahoo! boys decided to cross the ocean, and the UPC was chosen to host this competition. This has been the first time in Europe.
When we found out that this competition was going to be in our university, we knew that we could not lose this opportunity and we decided to participate without knowing the idea we were going to develop.
After the kickoff and the first dinner with the boys from Yahoo!, we began thinking in our idea that eventually would become VoiceU, and just the next day we started the non-stop 24 hours of developing, hours full of code and caffeine.
During these 24 hours there were moments of euphoria, depression, discussions, etc. .. but we never lost the illusion of working together and developing an interesting hack.
After these 24 hours were nobody slept a single minute, it was the moment where each group had to do a 120 seconds presentation about their projects. VoiceU received great and positive reviews from both competition´s members, other participants and the competition judge. This year a lot of interesting projects were presented, like a robot that moves itself by twitter, a timeline of news or different games for facebook. After all the presentations, the jury chose 3 finalists and VoiceU was one of them. This motivated us to develop this platform, so we can say that Hacku is our origin.
