Cowgirl App! wins MediaLab Session startup competition! 

Here in France there's an exciting new startup starter (kind of like sourdough starter, but for young companies) called MediaLab Session. Romain Saillet (cutie pie above center-left), a 20-something French journalist, is the founder of this event. He thought it would be a good idea to apply the hackathon model to creating "the media of tomorrow." I have to agree with him. So, since Cowgirl App! is a media channel (yes it is!), and because we have big plans for it, I applied for one of three spots being offered by FrenchWeb, the best tech news site in France. I wanted to test our idea of turning Cowgirl App! into something bigger...

And I won a spot! (I never win anything.)

So it went like this: I got there and pitched my project and two people decided to work with me: developer/designer Arthur Violy and HR consultant Véronique Olivier. Throughout the weekend, we got invaluable feedback from some high-powered mentors from the media and the Web -- the kind of people whose brains you don't just get to pick every day! The three of us spent about 36 hours together over the weekend of March 22-24, taking the project I initially proposed and transforming it into something I was very happy with: an app! (Read the details in my HuffPo article, "Extreme Creation: Hackathons are Top Chef for Geeks and Entrepreneurs.") And we won the competition! (I never win anything!) The prize included mentoring from crowdfunding platform KissKissBankBank and Cap Digital, "a major European cluster dedicated to the digital creative industries." Sounds impressive, doesn't it?

The whole thing was incredibly well organized, and the line-up of speakers, mentors, and judges (you've heard of Le Monde, right?) was truly worthy of a serious player in the startup scene. And MediaLab Session has only been around for a year... The next MediaLab Session will be in Brussels in a few weeks (end of May), and another in Nantes in June. Shouldn't be long till the event flies across The Pond... Scroll down through this site to see the people who made this event so extraordinary, and check out this site to see all the fun we had!