RIT48: 48 hours to pitch, plan, and launch a web or mobile startup

Pitch videos from every team & live voting for a 6th Fan Favorite to make the finals going on now at: http://vote.rit48.com

gkoberger and I are 2/5 judges and after visiting with a bunch of the teams throughout the weekend, I'm super pumped to see what they end up with tomorrow!

I'm probably a lone voice here, but why the obsession with speed? Speed of execution is only one (tiny?) component of innovation.

I understand the need to ship, and fast iterations can be useful, but whenever I see these 24 and 48 hour Launch a Startup! projects I wonder how much better some of them could be if the thinking had been refined for more than a few hours. Business that are worth owning (and running) probably deserve more careful and deliberate upfront thought.

Maybe these events are just about practice in rapid prototyping and discovering teammates, and not really intended to be "businesses"?

EDIT: on further thought, maybe it's just that the participants' opportunity cost is sufficiently low to make doing anything the more attractive option. In that case, Get Out There and Make Something.

We have something very similar in he UK called http://launch48.com

These are great events. Can't recommend them enough, especially for developers looking to learn more about the 'business process'.

I've participated in this twice; it's pretty fun, and has more of a business focus than many similar hackathons. It's a good experience for developers like me to work on a small team with bizdevs and designers.

Great to see my alma mater doing competitions like this! Looking forward to seeing the results.

I'm interested to see how this turns out.

I was actually shocked by the list of sponsors, because it looks like they didn't have a couple hundred for a quick professional design job. Text gifs, inline script tags, default UA fonts.

Yes, I understand that the site isn't the focus here -- but no web startup would get away with a mess like this, making this whole thing feel very ironic.

Not to mention that you're making an unfavorable impression for your new startup when your intro video link looks like it was made in MS Paint.