Garden Genie, a new smartphone app designed to help people grow their own produce, has won the latest Auckland Startup Weekend (November 22 - 24) and is the only New Zealand team to compete in the Global Startup Battle of business ideas.
The team behind Garden Genie beat out stiff competition from 11 other innovative startup ideas in the contest that enables entrepreneurs to launch businesses in a single weekend.
Led by Jennifer Clamp, a Growth Programme Specialist at ATEED, the team of six is now campaigning to get as many votes as possible in the Global Startup Battle http://www.globalstartupbattle.co), which runs until Dec 6.
The global competition invites startups from around the world to compete for votes to win a range of prizes, funding and exposure for their fledgling businesses. Vote for Garden Genie at http://gardengenie.co/vote to help the only New Zealand startup team get through to the next round (voting closes December 6)
Garden Genie is an easy solution for people who want to grow their own produce but don’t have the knowledge to do so and are short for time. On downloading the Garden Genie app, users are asked to provide basic information about their garden and what they want to grow. They are then sent instructions for growing produce and reminders for when it’s time sow seeds, prune trees and for watering. Users can also purchase their gardening supplies through the app, and have them delivered to their home.
Mohit Singh from Datacom was also part of the team and lead the technical execution, bringing in his expertise of both Dynamics CRM and modern Windows app development. Singh say's that it's a lot easier to develop now on the Microsoft stack than ever before, with improvements in Visual Studio tooling and Windows Phone technology. This meant that we could build a full working windows phone prototype with dynamics crm integration for suppliers in just 48 hours, which left the judges very impressed!
Garden genie have also signed up to the BizSpark program, utilizing the Windows Azure services which comes free as part of BizSpark.
Sign up to be one of the first to download the Garden Genie app here: http://gardengenie.co/