So Atlanta Startup Weekend morphed into StartAtlanta.

On Friday night about 110 people in a geek dominated crowd walked through the doors of ATDC. About 50 entrepreneurs stood up and pitched their concepts in 60 seconds. This was whittled down to about 25 for a second round from which 12 projects emerged. Teams were formed and after a weekend of coding, food, beverages, and more geek humor than one can stand, the team leaders got up to talk about their applications and what they accomplished. Here is a quick run down in the order they took the podium.

C4 Atlanta. A rogue project that did not pitch on Friday night. C4 is building an arts service platform to empower artists and arts organizations. They built an app store for artists over the weekend. You can take a peek at a special version with some of the applications of the Start Atlanta companies here. 

Minglle. An opt-in sms-based meeting utility to make new connections based on common interests. Stealing from Stephen Fleming, it's FourSquare meets LinkedIn. Presentation started out great until the demo blew up.

Ask One Question. Simple one question email/sms surveys with instant feedback. Great design. Nice demo. Reasonable business model.

Reach Me Later. A sms-based mobile application auto-responder to prevent driving distractions, with analytic capabilities. Concept was the brain child of Georgia Tech third year senior (which means it only took her two year to become a senior) Joy Buolamwini. This is not a make in a weekend app but they did a nice demo.

ConnectMe. A Facebook dating application that connects people based on their rich profile preferences. Liked this one when it was pitched on Friday night. I sat with them a bit as they were building this thing. The info that an app can pull out of your Facebook profile is astonishing.  

Swipemotion. Painless gesture based publishing for enterprises. Nice concept.

JayTalker. Netflix behavior pushed to Facebook and Twitter. App is live. And yes there is a business model.

TripLingo. Mobile/web application that generates custom linguistics platform for specific destinations. Entrepreneur Jesse Maddox is going full-time on the project. 

Cineminder. Application to remind you when movies that you want to see hits the theaters, DVD/Bluray distribution, Netflix and the like. Application is live. Concept from Tim Dorr who sold A Small Orange for a big chunk of change.

FindTime. Serverless iOS app that integrates with calendar apps to automatically assign time to complete tasks. Got the app to live demo.

Mark It Eight Dude. A Smartphone app to capture bowling statistics with numerous external variables including alcohol consumption.

Repulicious. Another rogue project. A searchable listing of reputable designers, developers, and marketers for your startup projects.

The projects did darn well. Five have a live product of some sorts and there were four demos. Good stuff. Atlanta knows how to do a weekend startup hackathon. TripLingo won the vote for best startup. Cineminder earned my vote.

The quality of the people walking in the door to participate in these weekend marathons increases every year. More people that can contribute are making the scene. That is not too surprising. What was surprising was the effect a tweak the StartAtlanta team made to the weekend.

They invited mentors. I am going to tell you something right now, it is really difficult to get a bunch of people driving toward a launch to sit down with a mentor.But it happened. And the mentors, which in some circles is code for angels and those that are connected to angels, hung around or came back for the Sunday night presentations (something that has not happened much in the past).

And guess what? The angely mentors liked it. They liked it alot. Requests for StartAtlanta to happen more than once a year. Interest in follow up advising roles. Talk of investing. Good stuff. We are building bridges and mixing the types. Kudos to the StartAtlanta team. They succeeded in their quest of "building something even better." Passing the torch was the right thing to do.

What started back in 2007 as an effort to build Atlanta's technology startup community is evolving. After four years it seems to not only be taking hold but building momentum. With that momentum things will continue to change. Perhaps change into something that is much more than a weekend community building experience.