This past weekend, over 125 people descended on the City of Baltimore from as far away as New York City for the chance to jump start a business that could become the next big thing.

The first ever Startup Weekend Baltimore kicked off on Friday April 15th and concluded the evening of April 17th with the announcement of winners. This was an awesome event, showcasing not only the talent and business savvy that is in ready supply in Baltimore, but also the willingness of others looking to start a business to select Baltimore as the place to do it.

You can see a few photos from the event this weekend here.

Tropo is proud to have been back in Baltimore for this event, helping teams with technical questions and in building communication apps to support their ideas. It was interesting to see the numer of ideas that centered around SMS messaging, and a number of attendees commented on how they liked Tropo’s pricing structure for developers (it’s 100% free for development!).

Quite a few teams made use of Tropo including TrakFit (a service for recording information about exercise, nutrition and health) and Localize (a service for real estate owners to poll their communities on new business ideas to inhabit vacant spaces).

Localize went on to win second place overall in the event after the judges heard presentations from all of the teams that participated.

Credit goes to the organizers of this outstanding event – they worked exceptionally hard pulling it together and it showed in the overall quality of the event. The entire weekend was well organized and perfectly executed. This event could serve as a template for other such events in different cities.

Congratulations to Team Localize and all of the other winners and participants in this outstanding event!