About 13 weeks ago, a group of teams wandered up to a loft in Newcastle to begin the gruelling process of developing an exciting start-up. Here’s a quick peek at what the first Ignite100 teams have created.

IT’S less than a week before the Ignite100 teams are due to present their businesses at the first investor day at the Tyneside Cinema.

Fingers scurry across keyboards as presentations are fine-tuned and the folk behind Rentmama are discussing their marketing plans in the main room of the Adamson House loft.

They’re at a small table with fellow Ignite100 member Pete Kindness, chatting about potential hooks while other teams work through their notes and add extra flourishes to the platforms.

We’re near the end of a 13-week process in which teams have met a stream of mentors.

Rentmama’s founders had already taken part in the Start-up Bootcamp in Copenhagen, but have found Ignite particularly useful for building contacts in the UK market.

“If you don’t have a network in the country, Ignite can really help,” says co-founder Gunars Grundstoks. “But it’s important to know what to ask, otherwise mentors won’t know what they need to tell you.”

The team had produced a proof of a concept version of the platform in Latvia, but what it’s really aiming to do now is to tap into the 25,000 independent rental car companies in the EU. There are already a few people interested within the North East.

Co-founder Grundstoks says: “We created Rentmama because when you’re travelling around looking for cars, you can get offers of around $100 a day. But if you start searching around on Google, you can find offers of $50.

“There are a lot of bargain hunters doing this right now, but a lot of people don’t know there are a lot of companies out there.”

Rentmama offers a platform through which customers can specify how long they want a car, which model they prefer and how far they’re going. In this way, smaller rental car firms get access to more customers and users get more flexibility.

“You can get better deals”, says co-founder Vilnis Sluka. “Sometimes that means the price is better and sometimes the deal is more flexible.”

When the concept of Ignite100 was launched earlier this year, it was mentioned that the level of funding involved would allow the organisers to attract high-quality teams to Tyneside from all over the globe.

Many will stay on in the region in some form in the months to come, maintaining the contacts they’ve built with mentors and other start-ups and interacting with the project funders and interested investors.

Another company that arrived is CrowdIPR, which is trying to establish a network of experts which can help companies looking for high-quality patent and technology searches.

Co-founder Mikk Putk believes the concept could appeal to a number of companies and universities wishing to assess whether there are similar products on the market and who the competitors are.

He says: “This is a crowdsourcing platform for technology searches. If you do a basic search nowadays, it can take a lot of time and end up being quite costly.

“What we want to do is bring together researchers from all over the world, combining that knowledge and skill and offer better and more effective searches.

“We’re hoping to get thousands of people involved, as there are many different technology fields and it’s important to be able to answer the client’s requirements on time.”

The team has already tried out the system on the teams in the loft, and will be sticking around in the space after the investor days are over.

Putk says: “We believe the UK is the best place in Europe to start. We’re planning to keep our working space in Newcastle and also open in London.”

The teams are pitching their ideas today and have another investor’s day in London in January, but that won’t be the first time investors have seen them.

Representatives from companies including main funders IP Group and Northstar have been in on a regular basis, taking part in events and helping to hone the ideas.

The Ignite organisers see the project as a 12-month operation and will be continuing to work with the teams long after the showcase days are over.

IP’s investment manager Nick Edgar admitted he’s impressed by the way some teams have developed already.

“There’s been a good balance of people coming in and giving the teams a hard time, but also challenging them to do things. There are definitely teams in there that have surprised us in terms of the amount of progress they’ve made between mentoring sessions every three weeks.

“Some started with a raw idea and a talented team, but have genuinely pivoted and changed direction.”

An interesting feature of an accelerator is tracking how business ideas change throughout the process. The team behind Vibetrace came to Newcastle with a desire to create a general recommendation engine on shopping, but they have changed tack slightly during its development.

Co-founder Alex Topliceanu says: “We figured the online fashion industry is very large right now and we could fit into this niche as a customer-facing platform rather than business-to-business.”

Topliceanu and co-founder Alex Rada created PinorPeg, a fashion discovery platform which allows people to receive recommendations, follow trends and discover products while shopping. They hope to launch in the new year.

While it’s designed to help people find clothes they like online, it also bears in mind what’s in their wardrobe already. Topliceanu says: “Everyone has a friend that knows these things and acts as a personal stylist. We want to automate that through the power of community.

“We want to encourage users to create outfits. It’s basically saying that you have these clothes in your closet and you can put this outfit together because other people have done the same based on these outfits. It’s supposed to be fun and creative.”

Pete Kindness wanted to create a business that enabled amateurs with a particular interest to offer “experiences” to members of the public.

This concept became Blink Collective, a site for “non-guidebook” experiences which will initially be particularly focused on the food and drink industry.

“People are realising that life is better when you’re doing stuff rather than just having stuff,” he says.

“It’s more and more difficult to find Christmas presents nowadays and you could argue that’s because people already have enough stuff.

“Food and drink experiences can range from food foraging to cake making or wine tasting to chilli blending, and these are experiences that can stay with us for the rest of our lives.

“It empowers people to understand the world a bit more and be curious.”

Kindness aims to get professionals and amateurs involved across the UK, starting with London and Newcastle.

Blink quality-controls the offerings through the site and encourages those who’ve had a good time to post comments and photos.

“We’ll be moving more into other spheres in time as there are big opportunities out there”, says Kindness. “But I think the big change through the programme has been the route to market. Rather than being everything to everyone, we’re recognising the value of being one thing to one person and going from there.”

The team behind social media analytics start-up Odimax turned up in Newcastle with a business more or less developed, but they were surprised by how much they found themselves taking it apart.

The platform has emerged as an easy-to-use dashboard which tracks what people are saying about a firm on social media, offers a brand health score based on a range of accessible factors and helps you track progress.

Chief marketing officer Punam Sandal says: “We went right through this whole cycle of meeting mentors and everyone was saying so many different things. We thought we had an OK product and the last thing we thought we would have to do is completely redevelop it.”

CEO Atal Malviya adds: “Our big change was to shift our target market. It used to be very much targeted at small businesses, but it’s now aimed at marketing and PR businesses.

“A lot of mentors have given very good feedback about the system, but we had to change a lot of features in the product.”

One interesting feature is the crisis management system, which will alert the relevant executive if certain analytics reach a particular level and allow them to take action.

Usable was Newcastle’s only representative in the diverse class of 2011. The three-person team of Alex Kavanagh, Alistair MacDonald and Chris Neale were keen to develop a project management tool which could help people interact better.

“There were a couple of mentor meetings where they were really enthusiastic”, says Chris Neale. “These are people with big companies, saying this could solve a real problem they have.

“We’d always believed this was useful as we were effectively scratching our own itch, but it was definitely good to get the confirmation”, added Kavanagh. “However, this process has altered our focus on how we do things, like in how we let people collaborate and change things.

“We’re working towards our beta product next year and hope that within the next six months we’ll be launching a product that will help people collaborate, specify and agree on things between different companies.”

Many have teams commented on the value of the mentoring advice they received, but admitted it was occasionally overwhelming. Deciding what to keep was crucial and something teams handled in different ways.

“My approach was to write up notes the day after“, says ArtSpotter founder Raphaelle Heaf. “I figured that if certain things stuck in my head I’d remembered them for a reason.”

ArtSpotter has already received a fair bit of attention in the tech and art world. It creates an interactive art map which allows users to discover what’s going on in the art world.

An iPhone app has recently been released which enables people to search for nearby exhibitions, post photos of events they’ve visited and even add and read recommendations.

ArtSpotter has so far worked with events such as the London Art Fair.

“The scale has grown so we’re definitely global now”, says Heaf. “The focus on the business really helps you push things forward. It’s about being smarter about your business and really understanding where you’re going.”

The process has involved 13 weeks of hard work and working nights, but that doesn’t mean the teams have been cocooned.

Many participants have taken the opportunity to make contacts at local events such as the Pud, the Codeworks networking event held this week.

Ignite100 has also put on its own events, such as introducing the teams to the North East tech community and organising a Pitching to Tech Media event at Gateshead Town Hall.

There’s very little we’re allowed to say publicly at the moment about the interesting concept behind Blooie, as intellectual property rights are still being secured. The team has been hard at work on a concept that will allow people to engage with content-driven sites in a different way, but they’ve also been active in networking and making friends around the area.

Notably, donation start-up Givey even had its own event in the North East. Stitch Your Friends Up challenged people from the tech scene to take part in challenges for charity, with money donated through the Givey system.

“We managed to get [Codeworks CEO] Herb Kim to dress up as a geisha,” says Givey’s Dave Erasmus.

“We had a live donation feed up on the night, with a totaliser so you could see where people were with the fundraising.”

Erasmus devised Givey as a way to make donations through text messages, Twitter and other social media platforms, as well as track your donation history.

Before he arrived in Newcastle, he’d already taken the idea live at the launch of the Government’s Giving White Paper alongside figures such as Prime Minister David Cameron.

He says: “What I wanted to do here is to get the product as good as the chat. You get really good work done without even trying. Four of the lads were sitting having a Subway one day and we started talking about a problem.

“Within 15 minutes, we came to a solution. That’s not the real world.”

The teams have also been able to talk to someone who’s been through the process recently, as Love Your Larder founder Tristan Watson is also based in the Adamson House loft.

“It’s amazing to be part of an office where you can take a half hour out, sit at the back of a room and hear some of the best minds in business talking about how to improve,” he says.

“We were in the offices a month before these guys moved in and it was a bit like being in the second year of school. But as the teams have developed, we’re now basically in an office full of businesses.

“If you’re in a regular office, you close your door behind you and sit at your desk. Here you can call on the experience of people with a range of connections. Someone will always have the answer or be able to point you in the right direction.”

Love Your Larder’s vision of being able to connect food lovers to interesting providers from around the UK has already won it investment from Northstar. The teams emerging this year are hoping to get some interest themselves from events in Newcastle and London.

While discussions still need to take place between various funders after the investors’ days, most people are keen to see it come back.

“The ones that will succeed are squeezing every drop out of it,” says programme manager Paul Smith.

“Accelerator programmes are not for everyone as they’re very stressful and pressurised. It’s relentless and not all teams necessarily cope, but the ones that do, thrive.”

It’s relentless and not all teams necessarily cope but the ones that do, thrive