TECHdotMN: News about Minnesota Startups

Whether it be against themselves or within their peer groups, programmers live for a good challenge. And the competition du juor is Node Knockout: a 48-hour hackathon (inspired by last years Ruby Rumble) organized and promoted by fortnight labs.

Starting last Friday at midnight (UTC) through Sunday at midnight, over 200 different teams of 1-4 people went heads down for the weekend to build the coolest web app using node.js,  an evented I/O framework for the V8 JavaScript engine with the purpose of providing an easy way to build scalable network programs.

Representing Minnesota in this battle for the best is a foursome led by Andy Atkinson who recruited complimentary talent including designer Nate Kadlac and developers Paul Armstrong and Zachary Johnson for the event.

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MinneSpark, the newest addition to the Minne* family, announced today the three beneficiaries of their first crowdsourced micro fundraising initiative.

Less than two months ago, MinneSpark kicked-off its innovative approach to funding early stage ideas, concepts, plans and prototypes. From the MinneSpark website:

“MinneSpark will award 1 to n grants of at least $1,000 to Minnesota-based teams who demonstrate to our trustees the ability to take that money and turn it into something real. This is about doing more with less, and building a profitable business from day one. Winners will get some help along the way in the form of mentoring from the trustees and services from sponsors.”

Fast forward: with over 30 entrants and roughly 6k raised in $100 increments via “trustees”, three winners have been selected to each receive $2,000 cash + $4,000 worth of in-kind services including:

• Hosting / internet access services from ipHouse
• 1 month of full-time coworking space at CoCo
• Months of Startup Saturdays at The 3rd Place
• Legal services from New Counsel
• Tax Startup Package Tax services from Kaiser Tax
• Backup Services from Crash Plan
• 1 year subscription to Milemarker Idea

The three winners are:

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