The latest exhilarating Launch 48 Weekend took place at the University of Edinburgh Business School this past weekend.

The Launch48 Weekend introduced talented and diverse mentors to 4 teams, formed from 90 participants. These mentors brought a wealth of experience in business and software development to each team and they individually worked tirelessly to form internet start-up businesses in just 48 hours.

We are proud to present to you the four unique start-ups created from our weekend:

Compare The Universities
CompareTheUniversities.com allows prospective students to fully investigate their options for attending universities by aggregating information about each university, programme of study, and associated tuition fees. By inputting their qualifications, skills and interests, users are provided with potential prospects for further education.
http://comparetheuniversities.tumblr.com/

run2see
For those who love to run and travel this is a one stop site. Arrive in a new city and keen for safe routes to go running? Look no further. The run2see mobile app harnesses the inbuilt GPS in smartphones to provide users with the safest running routes nearby. Along the way, the app will narrate a guided tour giving the listener interesting information about historical landmarks and sites of local significance.
http://run2see.com/

Social Catalogue
Find products and services in your local area, compare prices, and read reviews from other users. The team made a bold statement that they are looking to change the culture and process behind purchasing decisions. They believe that accessibility and availability to information will assist the provision and recommendation of goods and services.
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=socialcatalogue

Zzzappa
Choose a date and time to have information delivered in the form of a phone call, which in turn acts as an alarm clock service. Consider being called by a hotel receptionist with a morning wake up call, but then that person also provided you with a quick update on local weather and traffic reports, the news headlines, and perhaps even the number of unread emails you have.
http://zzzappa.posterous.com/

Launch48 Edinburgh final presentations will be starting at 5:00 pm GMT and run to 6:30 pm GMT.

If you’d like to chat with other viewers please visit the Ustream Launch48 page.

What kind of a day has it been?

Exhausting. Exhilarating. Those are the two words I think I would use to describe Launch48.

I’ve only experienced two nights and one day, but each session has sent me away with my head spinning. Trying to digest all I’ve learned, thinking where will I go from here, what will be my next move, what I will do 6 steps from now.

I’ll be honest. Today I’ve made some major mistakes. I haven’t delegated properly. I haven’t communicated with the team properly. I haven’t monitored progress effectively and I even failed to diffuse a conflict which meant we lost an important member of our group.

But I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned that as the leader of a group I can’t just be thinking about what’s next but I need to be thinking what will happen 6 moves from here.

What’s the end game? What am I trying to shepherd this team to achieve? Because that’s all I need to do. Gently prod the team in the right direction and then the talented individuals I’m so lucky to have here will run with an idea and produce some outstanding results.

So I promised some talk about our business plan, let’s starts with our mission statement:

“By using our site, in 30 seconds a young person will be able to make a decision that will affect the rest of their life.”

We are building a site that will help people make one of the most important decisions they will ever face. We are supporting that decision.

James

CEO – CompareTheUniversities.com

As a traveller running in a new city, have you ever been afraid of getting lost or running in the wrong parts of town? We have, and we hate it.

run2see is a brand new mobile* application for running designed specifically for travellers. After downloading the safest routes rated by peers, it guides you through the points of interests that you´re nearby while running. An alarm prompts you when you wander off the selected route (so you don´t get mugged or eaten by bears). Of course, it tells you where to run and how to get back to your place.

run2see it!

*Designed for iPhone and Windows Phone 7

Great news! We just finished our alpha (internal) testing.

In fact, we already have people woken up through our service this morning! Starting 12pm Eastern Time today, we are offering free trail service for the first 200 sign ups!

Just go to our website Zzzappa.com. Unfortunately, this offer only applies to U.S. customers at the moment.

Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and of course, our blog, for the latest information and offers!

Discussions about the scope for this service seemed to dominate activity yesterday. The project initially deviated towards becoming a rival to Lonely Planet, but has now come full circle back to the original pitch.

The Run2See team is quite large, so by splitting into small teams overall productivity has improved since yesterday.

The business team is formalising a plan and revenue model which we hope to hear more about at the next board meeting.

Tech team is working diligently with a prototype of a Windows Mobile 7 app in progress. A rough technical architecture and a plan for future development is in place to serve the content.

By making use of rival services feedback, the team are hoping that they can learn from competitors mistakes.

Some of the team took to the streets and asked the public for their thoughts on their running app.

Two key findings emerged – firstly that dedicated running devices are quite expensive, so the price point for this app could be a differentiator as a lower cost alternative.

Secondly female runners wish to avoid running in rough neighbourhoods, so an app that guides the runner through safer routes could be an attractive proposition.

First test of the platform took place this morning. It worked!

The team has drawn up a long term plan from which they have derived what’s possible today. We should see the alarm clock system go live and the prototype demonstration later on.

The service can deliver information about the weather, news headlines, and even jokes. Users set the time they want to be woken up each day and will receive a phone call at that time.

Zzzappa could eventually become a much more personalised service. Spin off ideas are in the pipeline such as providing stock information for day traders.

Check out the team’s blog on Posterous and please give them some feedback via their post to HackerNews.

A prototype iPhone app is in the works, the mockup looks great. Website is working with basic functionality, hoping to add a few more elements before this evening.

Social Catalogue aims to create a cultural revolution. Bold.

With no brand name and the team still operating under their project code name, no marketing / pr efforts have taken place yet.

Nevertheless you can see what’s happening on Twitter, the team are using SocialCatalogue as a hashtag.

This is a small team, which started as 10, and now 7 are sat here. Their progress is impressive. A business plan is ready which we’ll hear about that at the next board meeting.

Good work guys.

A landing page is live at comparetheuniversities.com and the team is keeping a blog of their progress this weekend on Tumblr, you can follow it here.

Development is going well, the team is confident that they will have a basic first version live this evening.

The platform will initially offer services to two universities for free, one of which will go live today.

The business team has pieced together a plan and they have a set of revenue models based around advertising and charging universities for ranking to test.

Marketing team is developing a campaign they hope will go viral through channels like Facebook.

Apologies to all for the silence on this blog, there are really no excuses other than that we’ve been having too much fun!

The Launch48 Mini-Conference was incredible. I was genuinely astounded by the quality of our speakers and personally took a lot away from each presentation. Stay tuned, we’ll try to get the videos edited and published as quickly as we can.

The first day of the Launch48 Weekend was rather frenzied, with our astute mentors pushing the teams to clear the initial hurdles. Defining the scope of each project and choosing a target market seemed to be the greatest challenges.

Once everyone had settled into their team spaces, development generally began to take shape and I’m confident that by the end of today we’ll see some working prototypes and great presentations.

I’m going to attempt to combine notes I made yesterday with the latest news I receive from each team at our first round of Day 2 board meetings. That should give you a quick snapshot of each project and how each team has flourished.