Caribbean peo­ple are full of ideas that could make a great busi­ness or change the world. Too of­ten, how­ev­er, there isn't the time, re­sources, con­nec­tions or skills to bring those dreams to life.

Start­up Week­end was de­signed with just that hur­dle in mind. Backed by the U.S.-based non-prof­it Kauff­man Foun­da­tion, the event's Caribbean de­but was in Haiti af­ter the 20107.0-mag­ni­tude earth­quake dev­as­tat­ed the coun­try. Since then, it has been rolled out in Puer­to Ri­co (Oc­to­ber 2011, Oct 2013), Trinidad and To­ba­go (May 22-24), Ja­maica (Oct 4-6), Mar­tinique (Nov 29 to Dec 1).

Start­up Week­end brings dream­ers to­geth­er with peo­ple with the tech­ni­cal and busi­ness skills to turn those dreams in­to suc­cess­ful small busi­ness­es--all in just three days.

Wikipedia de­scribes a start­up as "a com­pa­ny, part­ner­ship or tem­po­rary or­gan­i­sa­tion de­signed to search for a re­peat­able and scal­able busi­ness mod­el". Some 82 start­up en­thu­si­asts showed up at One Wood­brook Place on No­vem­ber 22 for T&T's sec­ond Start­up Week­end. Twen­ty-six of them pitched their ideas in six­ty sec­onds to an au­di­ence of fel­low start­up par­tic­i­pants. Each pitch sought to ex­plain the core busi­ness idea and out­line what skills a team would need to in or­der to bring the vi­sion to life.

One par­tic­i­pant, David Hamil­ton, lit up the crowd when he rapped his one-minute pitch about an idea for a mu­sic stream­ing site (We Mu­sic).

Once the pitch­es were made, the next step was the self-se­lec­tion of the most vi­able ideas. This was done very quick­ly by crowd vot­ing, a process in­tend­ed to sim­u­late the much slow­er--and ar­guably, more dev­as­tat­ing--re­al-world process of cus­tomer val­i­da­tion. In the start­up world, gen­er­al­ly on­ly the ideas with the most trac­tion go for­ward.

Col­in Ali of Trini­Trol­ley re­mind­ed the at­ten­dees of some strug­gles that typ­i­cal­ly await star­tups, but en­cour­aged them to stick to what they be­lieved in and per­se­vere through the dif­fi­cult times to achieve their dreams. The top ten ideas with the most votes were an­nounced and teams formed around them, and the work be­gan.

Over the course of the week­end, par­tic­i­pants had ac­cess to a dozen or so coach­es who gave ad­vice on mar­ket­ing, le­gal, busi­ness strat­e­gy, graph­ic de­sign and soft­ware de­vel­op­ment, as the teams tried to re­fine their core ideas and build work­able busi­ness mod­els around them. Start­up Week­ends are known to be in­tense, as teams must learn to work to­geth­er from the very first day, lever­ag­ing in­di­vid­ual strengths in­to a group ef­fort, to nur­ture one cen­tral busi­ness idea un­til it is ready to be pre­sent­ed on the evening of the fi­nal day.

As one par­tic­i­pant, Is­mail Bar­ton said, "Quite a lot can be ac­com­plished in a short pe­ri­od of time. It's eas­i­er to start a busi­ness than most peo­ple think".

The teams made their pre­sen­ta­tions on Sun­day evening to a pan­el of judges that in­clud­ed Derek Chin of Movi­eTowne, Der­rick Lewis of Is­land Peo­ple, Kim Mal­lalieu of The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, and Claude Mar­shall of DMS Dig­i­tal and Byte Acad­e­my.

E-Sports Caribbean League (ES­CL), a com­pa­ny aim­ing to stan­dard­ise dig­i­tal and on­line gam­ing in the Caribbean by host­ing tour­na­ments and rank­ing users emerged as first-place win­ners.

"It has pushed me to ac­tu­al­ly start. I have been on­ly think­ing and pro­cras­ti­nat­ing with the idea. Now that I have peo­ple watch­ing my back I am forced to get it off the ground," said Kevin Lee-A-Ping of ES­CL.

In sec­ond place was the Play Whe on the Go team, whose com­pa­ny aimed to al­low users to play the game from the con­ve­nience and com­fort of their mo­bile phones, any­where in the world.

TOUT, a mo­bile ap­pli­ca­tion aimed to make peo­ple's dai­ly com­mute eas­i­er, won third place, while Shab­bac Sweet Pota­to Flour won the au­di­ence prize.

Cap­i­tal­is­ing on Glob­al En­tre­pre­neur­ship Week, which ran from No­vem­ber 15 to 24, over 200 cities across the world al­so host­ed their own Start­up Week­ends from which teams would be se­lect­ed to com­pete with each oth­er in an in­ter­na­tion­al com­pe­ti­tion called the Glob­al Start­up Bat­tle. From T&T, two teams sub­mit­ted video pre­sen­ta­tions of their ideas to the Glob­al Start­up Bat­tle: ES­CL and Team Ah See, whose com­pa­ny aimed to cre­ate a mo­bile ap­pli­ca­tion to im­prove com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the hear­ing im­paired.

Events like Start­up Week­end are not a fi­nal des­ti­na­tion but a point of de­par­ture for en­tre­pre­neurs. ES­CL has al­ready start­ed prepar­ing for its first gam­ing tour­na­ment, which is sched­uled to take place in the near fu­ture.