Standing in front of an imposing panel of judges, Alexander Mimran said he’d had no sleep for two days. He also had no idea if his demonstration of Unbox, an app that turns your email inbox into a infographic, would even work. He and the 14-person team had put the project together that weekend and were running the demo through a cell phone’s internet connection. Thankfully for Mimran, when he pressed click, the app sprung to life, and he and the team cheered and breathed a sigh of relief. It was just that sort of down-to-the-wire edge that characterized Startup Weekend Toronto. After toiling for two and a half days to build and present a workable business, the 20 teams remaining were exhausted and wired. The gathering concluded with the teams presenting their projects to a team of judges. At stake were more than mere bragging rights, as the prize for the winning team is valued at up to sixty-thousand dollars. The array of five-minute presentations were remarkable given the compressed time constraints. The Snapture.it team put together a very clean looking site for capturing snippets of text and images, and even if it was hard to distinguish how it differed enough from Pinterest, the over-the-top salesman pitch was certainly memorable. Cardfox, who spoke to the Standard yesterday, had completed working versions of their smartphone replacement for the loyalty card with a list of ten local coffee shops willing to sign up. Similarly intriguing was Pictagram, which lets users post pictures and get real-time responses from friends. Other pitches initially seemed promising, but suffered from a lack of clarity or purpose. Housify.us, for example, provided a compelling idea in combining house listings with user-focused information like school quality or neighbourhood amenities in order to personalize house buying. When pressed by judges as to what differentiated the service, the team was unable to clearly give an answer, which seemed to leave the panel of judges unimpressed. It highlighted how ideas, execution or presentation skills alone don’t make a project; the successful pitches relied on all three. And at the end of it, it was that combination that saw Herobox HQ picked as the winner at the award presentation at the Drake Hotel. The service provides incentives for online consumers at targeted moments while browsing, like a coupon for a free appetizer while looking at a restaurant’s website. With venture capitalists and angel investors in the room, the emphasis was often on real-world results, and founder David Tran was able to pull together nearly twenty-five thousand dollars in “letters of intent” from prospective businesses, impressing the judges and crowd alike. It was that unabashed hustle–in which Tran even snuck in an extra chat with the judges while another team had technical difficulties–that won the day. Runner up prizes went to Unbox and a promising product called Code With Friends, which seeks to add social and game elements to learning how to code. Navneet Alang is the Toronto Standard’s Tech Critic