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"If you are in the North of England, you might already know that this weekend saw 70 entrepreneurs gathering at\u00A0Newcastle\u00A0University Business School for a Startup Weekend event. This evening the winners were announced after 54 hours of toil, pivots and pizza.\r\n\r\nThere have been over 400 Startup Weekend events to date \u00A0with 12 other gatherings taking across the globe this weekend alone. This was the first one to take place in the North of England and it's clear that Newcastle is switched on and ready for acceleration.\r\nEvent organiser Howard Kingston says that the weekend was a great success,\r\n\r\n&amp;quot;Startup Weekend Newcastle is the first one we've run in the UK outside the London area. We were a little unsure what to expect but this weekend's talent, passion and quality of ideas really shows that the North of England can match London's any-day (or weekend).&amp;quot;\r\nThe early pitches on Friday saw a ton of ideas submitted. Twelve teams\u00A0made it to the final show and tell and those\u00A0were then whittled down to five winners.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nThe top winners were\u00A0JobLog, a team that hopes to flip the\u00A0recruitment\u00A0industry\u00A0on its head by offering a video recruitment site with no jobs. Runners up included Playzee, a soccer startup that allows users to share videos of 5-a-side goals across social\u00A0media,\u00A0Triptab, which provides inflight entertainment on demand,\u00A0Mymenu a customized food\u00A0ordering\u00A0app and Zeniality an emotional Intelligence Game App for children.\r\n\r\nAs ever with these events technology was built, ideas were scrapped and reformed, some seriously\u00A0impressive \u2018pivots\u2019 took place (social music voting to car insurance aggregator), teams worked until 6am and there was apparently even some Salsa dancing. The dancing may seem a bit strange, but as we know, it's good to take a break and do something different when you need to solve a problem.\r\nHeaded for the North\r\nAttendees travelled from across the UK for the event with some heading to the Newcastle from Leeds, London and Scotland. Some also came from much further away, including participants from the USA and Spain. \u00A0Mid-way through the event, one participant Laura, was unsure about her travel plans to get back home,\r\n&amp;quot;I booked my flight once I heard about the event. I want to take every opportunity \u00A0that comes\u00A0along and this is one of those events that can really shape your future. I don\u2019t know if I\u2019ll go back to\u00A0Majorca after this. We\u2019ll see how we do on the Sunday night pitches, we\u2019ve great team and I think\u00A0we can really win this.\u2019\r\nIt turns out Laura was right to hold off on her decision as she is a member of the winning team, JobLog.\r\n\r\nThe mentors available over the weekend included Paul Lancaster of Plan Digital,\u00A0Peter Hirst, founder of Every1Speaks, Elizabeth Scott\u00A0and Jenny Evans\u00A0of Rainbow's End Coaching, \u00A0Yousaf Khalid, MD of Different, Linda Koritkoski, director of marketing at .CO\u00A0and many more experts and industry leaders all willing to lend a hand to these budding new endeavours.\r\n\r\nMentor Paul Lancaster was allegedly last seen clutching a well-earned beer after spending 12-hours mentoring the teams, he said, &amp;quot;I\u00A0just wanted to make sure I saw every team, I\u2019m really impressed with some of the ideas here.&amp;quot;\r\n\r\nThe winners received over \u00A315000 in business support prizes and are likely to be headed for a bit of a rest after the weekend's excitement. If you want to catch up on the Newcastle flavour for a Startup Weekend event, check out the hash tag #swnewcastle on Twitter."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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