I am currently sat in Belfast airport writing a blog post (and review) on my experiences with StartupStay. In a nutshell, StartupStay is couch surfers for the startup generation. I have followed them on Twitter for a while and I sent a tweet of support a month or so ago after reading about their offering. Although they haven’t officially launched yet I thought it would be worth contacting them to see if they had any suitable hosts in Belfast ahead of a three day business trip to the City.
I was given three offers. The first offer pulled out due to it being inconvenient. The second person accepted however due to me being out of the country when she did (at The Next Web’s Startup Rally) I was slow responding and the host unfortunately had left to go to Scotland before I had a chance to reply. However, StartupStay came to the rescue at the last minute and found an awesome host. Richard Brown, a developer and entrepreneur based in Belfast put me up for the three days and was a awesome host. I spent most of the time in Belfast at an external office but did manage to have a few pints and a meal on the last day.
I would like to thank StartupStay and Richard for helping to make my stay in Belfast awesome ‘ it “was a good crack, so it was” (sorry I had to get this quote into the post). Anyhow, I would also like to recommend startup stay to founders, VC’s and entrepreneurs of all ages.
Dungville was a location based game created for The Next Web Conference 2012. It included a real farmer, a cow called Klara and a field divided into 48 squares to roam in. The winner of the game was the person who predicted which grids would attain the most dung over the conference. The poo was weighed by an independent referee to ensure that there was no 'foul play'.
HOWEVER there was an element of controversy surrounding Dungville and it's star Klara. It seems that Klara's real name is not actually Klara! Klara is a stereotypical name given to Dutch cows. My interview with the cow and the farmer can be seen below:
