Weekend events that concentrate on creating a start-up idea and building a prototype are becoming quite popular in Nordics and Baltics. The latest addition to the recently held events is Startup Weekend Lithuania. It was held for the second time in Kaunas and gathered around 200 guests. One of the key organizers, Justinas Katkus, shared with us the event's outcome. Throughout the 54 hours that the event lasted, 17 teams were formed and at the end 6 best projects were chosen.

Mentorship is big part of any Startup Weekend so the event in Lithuania hosted ten leading local entrepreneurs, investors and developers. As one of the mentors and investors Darius Lebedzinskas commented, most of the projects were heavily oriented towards e-commerce.

The winning project was Fbsells that developed an application to easily set up webstores on Facebook. On top of that, judges offered investment for the development of another project called Work-shop, a communal website for artists and craftsment to sell their work and offer ideas for gifts.

TouchMessenger was chosen as the best mobile application. The application is a kind of pictionary for texts: it lets you draw your messages instead of typing them. Creativity prize was given to Stars Dating, a Facebook application that helps discover compatible partners among facebook friends using astro-numerology.

The top projects also included Fishlistapp, which helps bookmark potential e-purchases across different webstores, and Subinbook, a social network for butts. The latter is the most amusing and possibly the most ambitious of all. Subinbook's founders shared an aspiration to raise 1M litas. So far, however, their website is down.

One of the event's top guest was US ambassador to Lithuania Mrs Anne E. Derse. According to the organizers, Mrs Derse came on her own initiative as soon as she heard about the event. "A lot of young Lithuanians are very enterprising and creative. It is very good that there is a place, where one can turn the ideas into businesses", she commented.

Another Startup Weekend event in Lithuania is already being planned for early autumn. Having continuation to gatherings like that is essential for the development of any start-up ecosystem.