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Three just hatched startups beat 11 others to take home the winners’ prizes at the recently concluded Hyderabad Startup Weekend. Here’s a quick look:

Parkemon, a company that offers a parking management solution using mobile technology, won the first prize of $200 credit to Amazon AWS and 25,000 credits to ZipDial. It allows users to store and use parking related data and information, real time. Potential customers include multi-tenant office buildings, hospitals, malls and hotels. The team behind the solution includes Sudeep D’Souza, Shahnawaz Alam, Krishnamraju S and Jeevan G. Find them on Facebook and Twitter.

Optirate, a mobile app which searches for the best available plan for the customer based on his or her voice, SMS and data usage, won second prize. It provides a single click platform to recharge prepaid accounts or pay monthly bills. It also provides additional features such as push alerts when the user’s data plan or SMS package is near exhausted. The team consists of Aneeq Dholakia, Ashish Shah, Rajagopal Grandhi, Nishant Gupta and Mithun. Find them on Facebook and Twitter.

Desi Karaoke, an online music site where you can record your singing, share your recordings with friends through social media, won third prize. The site allows users to rate friends’ recordings, challenge friends to a sing-off and submit recordings to singing competitions (like Indian Idol). Find them on Facebook and Twitter.

Image Courtesy: Pankaj Jain

The three-day startup workshop at Hyderabad Startup Weekend gave shape to 14 young companies. Take a closer look at the first seven:

Nutreatz: Breakfast chain that aims to offer healthy, customized meals in the vicinity of parks and gyms. It proposes to offer both continental and ethnic cuisine at affordable prices. The company is already thinking along the lines of door-to-door delivery and tie-ups with social and health clubs to build its customer base. Find them on Facebook and Twitter.

Share a Meal: Social startup that seeks to collect excess food from parties and other places and distribute it to the needy. The startup will use social networking channels to create awareness and draw contributors. Find them on Facebook and Twitter.

KidsCloud: Ecommerce site that retails experiential learning tools for children. Find them on Facebook and Twitter.

GSB Interact: An intra-net platform targeted at educational institutes which integrates social media functions with the information portals of the school and the facility and learning management systems. Its main feature will be its security and its intuitive and interactive user friendly interface. The portal can also address the legal issues faced when sharing information copyright material over public forms. The company’s USP will be the high degree of customization that it plans to provide each institute.

M-Kuber: SmartPay financial solutions initiative to provide mobile banking services targeting poor urban households and rural areas which are infeasible for regular banks to operate. The easy-to-use mobile technology will help people perform transactions like depositing, withdrawing, transferring and checking balance through Kuber Agents in every locality. Kuber Centres act as mini banks and customers are provided with mobile sim cards which are directly connected to their bank accounts to enable simple banking solutions. Find them on Facebook and Twitter.

Desi Karaoke: Online music site where you can record your singing, share your recordings with friends through social media, rate your friends’ recordings, challenge friends to a sing-off and submit recordings to singing competitions (like Indian Idol). Find them on Facebook and Twitter.

Tagmycontent: A web application that will allow a user to tag content from existing online sources, which will enable him or her to mark and share the specific time slice of video/audio with relevant tag attached. Find them on Twitter.

Startup Weekend’s Hyderabad edition concludes today. Here’s a peek into what went down during the first 24 hours of the event.

The event is an initiative that seeks to educate entrepreneurs and build communities around the world. Since inception, the initiative has built a network of 25,000 alumni, 150 volunteer organizers and 60 trained facilitators across 100 cities. The first Startup Weekend in India took place in March in Delhi, followed by Bangalore.

Entrepreneurship, technology and innovation have never been as important in our world as they are today. With that, entrepreneurs and innovators need all the help they can get through mentors and meeting the right investors. At Startup Weekend we bring together aspiring entrepreneurs and provide a platform to give shape to their ideas. After Delhi and Bangalore, it is now the turn of the entrepreneurial community in Hyderabad to be part of this initiative.

The weekend starts on September 2 and ends on September 4 and is being held at the Indian School of Business. Sign up here to register for the event.

Startup Weekend is an initiative that was founded by Andrew Hyde in 2007 and is backed by the Kauffman Foundation. It seeks to educate entrepreneurs and build communities around the world. Since inception, the initiative has built a network of 25,000 alumni, 150 volunteer organizers and 60 trained facilitators across 100 cities. The first Startup Weekend in India took place in March in Delhi, followed by Bangalore.

What happens at Startup Weekend?

More than 100 aspiring minds come together to identify and give shape to ideas. All 100 can share their ideas or they can be part of another idea. Ideas are shortlisted, teams are formed and over the next 48 hours, the idea takes shape. We have investors, idea evaluators and mentors available to guide teams through the process. On the last day, the ideas are presented and the shortlisted ideas take away cool prizes.

At the Delhi Startup Weekend, 34 ideas were pitched and 10 teams were formed. The Bangalore event saw 67 ideas being pitched and 15 teams formed. About 20 per cent of the teams in Bangalore won prizes.

You can join the Startup Weekend mailing list which will keep you posted on events and other details. You can also follow us on Twitter.

About the Author: Harinath Pudipeddi is founder of Dazasya, a non-profit organization for social entrepreneurs, and a co-founder of the HeadStart Network Foundation. He is also one of the organizers of Startup Weekend Hyderabad.

Editor’s Note: Startupcentral is an online media partner for Startup Weekend Hyderabad. We will be bringing you more posts and on-ground coverage of the event over the next few days.

Early stage or growth, raising capital has been tough for almost all companies since last October. Declining venture capital and private equity investment numbers over the last several months are evidence — see the latest Grant Thornton report here. For startups, especially, raising venture capital is a challenge even in fair weather. Each stage, from seed through Series A and B, comes along with its own unique hurdles. “There are investment and operational issues at each stage, both for the entrepreneur and the investor. We need to engage in a dialogue on those issues,” says Sateesh Andra, venture partner, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, flagging off the underlying theme for TiE-ISB Connect 2009, scheduled for October 22 and 23 in Hyderabad.

The forum, in its main theme, is asking ‘The Crisis Will Pass…Will You?’ It is a pertinent question. Before the current economic downturn is out, several startups as well as a few venture capital firms, will bite the dust. And going by the rumblings that one is beginning to hear more and more in venture capital circles, the dust is going to kick up quite a storm (more on that in a later post).

Interestingly, the organizers have decided to address funding issues not only at the seed and early stages but also at the growth stage. Read the full story