Geekdom–the San Antonio coworking space founded by Rackspace’s Graham Weston–announced today that they are partnering with HeroX to launch an entrepreneurial challenge aimed at helping Mexican businesses with their US expansion plan.

Dubbed the San Antonio Mx Challenge, the contest will award $500,000 to the team that creates and implements a repeatable business model that will help Mexican companies come to the US, specifically to San Antonio.

With the Mexican economy growing, the folks in San Antonio want to be on the forefront of partnership with Mexican entrepreneurs as well as American companies looking to expand into Latin America.

“This challenge will be the catalyst between the San Antonio startup ecosystem and Mexican entrepreneurs wishing to expand into the US,” Rackspace cofounder and Chairman Graham Weston said in a statement. “We are already famous for this in San Antonio. Now we are going to show the rest of the world.”

The challenge will run for 26 months, with teams able to enter as late as January 2015. Participants will earn points through a number of ways:

Number of Mexican companies they attract over 2 years
Total combined revenue for those companies each year for 2 years
Sustainability of the companies
Sustainability of the model

The challenge will be run through the HeroX platform. A spinoff of XPRIZE, HeroX seeks to solve world problems through incentivized contests and challenges.

“I am proud to see the first competition launched on HeroX. It has been my dream for years to offer a platform that allows anyone to use incentive competitions to solve problems and drive innovation,” said Dr. Peter Diamandis, Chairmand CEO of XPRIZE and Co-founder/Board Member of HeroX. “By bringing in solutions from anywhere, I’m convinced that competitions like this one will have a bright future for social issues and for driving innovation faster than we can imagine.”

There are various events during the 2 year competition, including a summit this September. The first year leaderboard will go up April 2015, and the final winner will be announced (and awarded $500k) on May 4, 2016. Find out more or register for the challenge here.

The “Must-Attend Conference for Entrepreneurs” Everywhere Else Tennessee is headed back to Memphis this Spring. We’ve released the early adopter tickets, and they’re going fast. Don’t miss your shot by signing up here!

Boston Startup Skit is a mobile app that lets you take your photos, and drawings and easily turn them into an animated story. The user doesn’t need to know a thing about animation. The app itself is all gesture based and easy for anyone with a little bit of mobile experience.

Skit is a lot more than an animated gif creator you can take your photos and drawings, turn them into a story, whatever story you want. Then you can share them with the Skit community and all of your friends through your social channels. Once you’ve shared your animation, anyone can “remix” it and make it their own.

You start with a blank canvas and Skit allows you to choose from art they provide for free or you can use your own photos and drawings from your iPad’s library. You can choose weather the photo or drawing is a character or a background, and the app provides you with tons of props as well.

Robin Johnson and Max Woon the cofounders of Skit both have animation backgrounds. Johnson has experience working on the Medal of Honor franchise, among others, while at Electronic Arts. Woon tells Silicon Hills founder Laura Lorek that he also have gaming and animation in his background but became obsessed with this animation idea after watching the making of South Park. In the video interview at SiliconHills website, he talks about how the creators of Southpark would sit in a studio and do the script first and then the animators would get to work.

Both Johnson and Woon wanted something easier and quicker to animate whatever the user wanted and to tell stories.

After the user finishes creating a skit they can save it locally or share it via Facebook and Youtube.

The team behind Skit launched it to the iTunes App store back in February and were chosen for the coveted last pitch position in the recent Techstars Cloud investor day pitches.

Check out our interview with Johnson below and for more information visit skitapp.com

We’ve got more startup stories from TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 here.

Rackspace Cofounder Looks to Bring Mexican Entrepreneurs to San Antonio

The “Must-Attend Conference for Entrepreneurs” Everywhere Else Tennessee is headed back to Memphis this Spring. We’ve released the early adopter tickets, and they’re going fast. Don’t miss your shot by signing up here!

Animate Your Life With Techstars Cloud Alum Skit [video]

We’ve got more startup stories from TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 here.