Tim and Aaron, Temboo’s Technical and Design leads, found themselves in Guadalajara, Mexico, this past week as two of the official coaches for the Internet Of Everything vertical at Startup Weekend Mega. This is an annual event for people to develop ideas for startups and build an all-inclusive business model in the span of a weekend; as the word “Mega” implies, the one in Guadalajara is the world’s largest. We’ve briefly summarized the happenings here, but their adventures are far too interesting to reside in a tiny paragraph. This is a tale of combat, surprise, and immense creativity.

But first things first. Upon his return, Tim couldn’t stop raging about the superiority of Mexican Fritos, and Aaron agreed their lemony spice elevates them to a whole new level in the junk food pyramid. Thankfully, Tim brought back a large bag of the goods, and we concurred with their judgment! The heavenly Fritos were not the only pleasant surprise Tim and Aaron encountered in Mexico; from the minute our heroes arrived on Thursday night, their stay was jampacked with action.

Upon arrival, Tim and Aaron went straight from the airport to the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente, where they presented our Twitter Choreos using both our site’s interface and Eclipse. They then used Nexmo Choreos to call members of the audience and have them turn on the LED’s on an Arduino Yún from their phones. The Temboo magic show was a big hit, especially after the audience got involved!

The next morning, Tim and Aaron visited HackerGarage, a cool space for Makers in Guadalajara that hosts workshops and tech events and provides tools for Makers. They were honored to be greeted by Hackeroso, HackerGarage’s “el perro guardian,” a guard dog who even has his own twitter. At HackerGarage, they coached a “Bootcamp” session where they introduced Startup Weekend competitors to Temboo, arming them for combat with our Choreos. After that, they returned to ITESO for opening ceremonies, where videographer drones patrolled the air and everyone engaged in a giant “Rock, Paper, Scissors” icebreaker battle.

After opening ceremonies, the participants split up into their verticals; there were over 100 contestants in the IoT vertical, which was a hot draw for attendees (Tim and Aaron would like attribute this to their own celebrity, but we have no way of confirming this). Within their verticals, aspiring entrepreneurs shared their ideas for startups, and everyone voted on their favorites. Out of over fifty pitches, eleven final projects were chosen by sticky note ballot, and teams of five to ten competitors formed to start working on each. The teams got busy working, and some even continued all night!

Saturday, Tim and Aaron spent all day helping the participants build with Temboo, working with projects that ranged from surveillance and agricultural irrigation to pet social media.

On Sunday, they helped contestants with last minute questions before they presented their prototypes to the judges. Winning projects ranged from Ecoville, the irrigation project that used Temboo, to a laser tag system called Cryonix.

The weekend ended with an afterparty in Chapultepec, where Tim and Aaron were happy to see another one of the Temboo projects, “Check In Shot,” fully functional and dispensing free shots to people who checked in on FourSquare.