Portland Startup: Interview With ShopMyPin, Winner Of Portland’s Startup Weekend

by Kyle in Competitions, Everywhere Else, Featured, Oregon,
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Vanessa VanPetten, Shopmypins, Startupweekend portland

26 year old Vanessa VanPetten emerged from the chaotic Portland Startup Weekend as the winner with shopmypins (photo: V. VanPetten)

Portland’s sixth startup weekend will go down in history as one of the craziest startup weekend’s ever. If you were checking up on Nibletz over the weekend you would have read this story about a man who was asked to leave Portland’s startup weekend. After he left he started tweeting that he was going to come back with explosives and guns. The organizers of the event increased security and had the event on a near lockdown for the rest of the weekend.

26 year old Vanessa VanPetten emerged from the action packed weekend as the winner with her new startup idea “Shop My Pins”. It wasn’t easy for VanPetten though, even with the disruption on Saturday she was still pitted against 16 other teams.

Game it up, a startup geared at teaching kids coding for video games won the award for “Outstanding Customer Validation”. “Outstanding Business Opportunity/Business Model” went to Matchable, which is a cell phone dating app. “Outstanding Execution” went to 15 year old Jackson Gariety for HashTraffic, a cross platform hashtag maker.

The Williamette Week reports that 15 year old Gariety and his HashTraffic were big hits and that Game It Up had already talked to Nintendo, Electronic Arts and IBM who had already started showing interest.

More after the break
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Oregon: StartupWeekend Near LockDown; Man Threatened Explosions And Guys

by Kyle in Everywhere Else, Featured, Oregon, Startups
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It’s unclear if the man removed from this weekend’s startup weekend event in Portand Oregon was a contestant or not. Oregonlive.com is reporting that a man who was removed from the event started tweeting threats of explosions, guns and violence.

The threatening tweets have been removed however as a precaution the rest of the event is near lockdown with only one guarded entrance being used for the remainder of the event.

According to the report, police responded to Portand’s first StartupWeekend event at 10:39am this morning. The man had gotten loud with event organizers and eventually left on his own. Later in the afternoon he started tweeting things that had event organizers concerned.

One of the organizers told oregonlive.com “They were very strange posts that were interpreted as maybe threatening to the people at the meeting,”

Portland State University beefed up security at the event and the StartupWeekend organizers offered refunds to anyone who didn’t want to  stay after the disruption. From what we can tell the event has continued.

Portland Police spokesperson Sgt. Pete Simpson said “There’s no criminal act based on what the officer learned from talking to the people, but certainly concerning enough that calling the police was the right thing to do,”. Police apparently contacted the man again who said he has no intention on returning to the event location.

source: OregonLive