Philly Startup Weekend kicks off Philly Tech Week presented by AT&T

Last night over 150 people met at Hamilton Hall at the University of the Arts with a simple but ambitious goal: create a startup in a single weekend.

Kicking off the first day of Philly Tech Week presented by AT&T, Startup Weekend challenges designers, developers and “non-technical” attendees to put their heads together to create as many functioning companies by Sunday night. Then the companies will pitch to a panel of judges to determine the winner.

Now in its third iteration locally, the attendees spent Friday night meeting one another and pitching their ideas to one another in rapid fire 45-second speeches in front of the entire group. The attendees will then determine which startups they’d like to help with and team up to make them a reality by Sunday.

The winner, of course, gets a invitation to demo at Switch Philly 3.

We’ll have more Startup Weekend coverage later this weekend.