A lot of students take the summer to get a part time job. Others might travel, visit with family, or take summer classes. For seven Lexington students, this summer has been spent starting companies out of Awesome Inc.
Team Alpha, Awesome Inc's incredible team of high-performing interns, saw an influx of talent throughout the late spring and early summer. To accommodate this wave of talent, Awesome Inc launched a summer program called Team Alpha X - a miniature start-up accelerator program for young and aspiring entrepreneurs to turn their ideas into companies over the course of a summer. In essence, it's a boot camp for entrepreneurs. The program includes a rigorous schedule of mentor sessions, project management planning meetings, pitch preparation, and product development. By the end of the program, the teams are expected to have an alpha version of their product launched, a subset of customers using their product, and a pitch deck ready to show off to future customers and investors.
Team Alpha X is emulated after successful accelerator programs such as YCombinator and Techstars, headquarted in San Francisco, CA and Boulder, CO respectively. Mentor-driven programs, such as Techstars, have seen tremendous success over the past few years. In fact, 
Techstars' most recent Boston class accepted 12 teams into their program this summer, and by the end of the program, all 12 of those teams had raised their targeted round of funding.
2011 Team Alpha X mentors include Randall Stevens, of Archvision and Punndit, Lexington Mayor Jim Gray, Fark.com founder Drew Curtis, Sean O'Leary of KSTC and many others. The seven participants of Team Alpha X make up three teams all in the software sector. Descriptions of each team are below.
Meet the 2011 Team Alpha X teams:
Kingdoms of Eternity: Virtual Trading Card Game
Team members: Lawrence Rogers, Andrew Derenge
Kingdoms of Eternity (KOE) takes the successful market of trading card games and eliminates the hassle of managing your cards and finding players to trade and play against. Users will join for free and will spend money to gain access to other parts of the game.
Stadionaut: An In-Game Sports Trivia App
Team members: Scott Wagner, Evan Leach, Ranajay Sen
A mobile application combines the competition of trivia and the excitement of live game stats into a new, fun experience for baseball fans. In between innings and batting changes, players will answer trivia questions to gain points - and subsequently wager these points on live play predictions, sent from their mobile phone. Eventually, we hope to have the entire crowd using our application simultaneously, and competing for accolades, bragging rights, and prizes.
In short - our mobile application takes the game from the field into the stands, and the advertisements off the back wall into every ones back pocket.
Personal Goals Dashboard - PGD
Team members: Ethan Smith, Zack Anderson
PGD is a virtual dashboard that is designed to track your personal goals in a neat and organized fashion. Our product provides users with the most structured and user-friendly dashboard available. PGD is a tool to track your daily life, similar to the way mint.com tracks your finances.