Finding Sponsors for my Local Hackathon Tour

by Kin Lane on 04/17/2012

I’m currently planning a 9 city hackathon tour, starting with the CityGrid Los Angeles Hackathon, and following up with Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, NYC, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Austin.

The CityGrid Hackathon tour is meant to bring together commercial and civic hackers to build the next generation of apps we use in our everyday "local" lives.

I’m trying to find a blend of developers, business, marketing and advertising folks that will come together and develop commercially viable ideas that can also make our cities better places to live.

So I'm looking for sponsors that really enhance the local theme of the event, so I started with:

Local API Stack - These are APIs that I track on for CityGrid, providing direct value to local mobile and web app developers.
Mobile Back-end as a Service - Service providers that exclusively provide back-end platforms and tools for mobile developers.

I’d be happy if all of these companies could provide the sponsorships that I need to support the event, but it probably won’t be enough. So I’m looking elsewhere with some of the usual suspects like Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and Twilio.

Regardless of what my sponsor line-up looks like I think I will still provide a directory of local APIs for developers to use, so that they have a robust listing of high quality APIs to choose from when building their local web and mobile apps.