SxSW Student Pitch Contest

One of the many activities that has been going during the SxSW Interactive Conference this past week has been a pitch event: Student Startup Madness.  A Michigan startup out of Michigan State University won the event, Temporun.

The Student Startup Madness event started in the summer of 2012, and culimiated into the finals at SxSW last Saturday, March 9th.  Eight teams made it to the finals.  The teams in the “Elite Eight” were from Emory, Illinois, Michigan State, RPI, St. Louis, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UT Austin — the team from UT Austin might have had an edge, being that SxSW is in Austin and the conference wanted to have a local representation 🙂  — announcement of the finalists).  Just like with the NCAA basketball March Madness tournament, the event started with 64 teams, and was whittled down to 8 teams that made it to Austin to compete on March 9th.  Here is a promotional video of the event.

Temporun won.  The founders of TempoRun, Josh Leider and Benny Ebert-Zavos, have created a mobile application for fitness and running enthusiast that allows runners to run at a consistent and enjoyable pace based upon their desired music tempo.  I know when I run with music, my running tempo changes based upon the tempo of the music.  And I have seen it with my son, Martin, who who will pick up the pace when we are running together when he is listening to “faster” music.  It will be fun to see how this company and app  The app enables runners to select the tempo of music that fits their running tempo from their playlist or via TempoRun radio.  Here is a demo of the TempoRun app.

TempoRun from Scott Wasserman on Vimeo.

Hat tip to Jarret Levine: He mentioned this to me earlier this week.  One of his friends, Josh Leider, is a co-founder of Temporun.