Our neighbors over in Bismarck are hosting their first-ever Startup Weekend on January 23-25, 2015, and they’ve just announced a partnership with Bobcat that will provide a sweet event location and rapid prototyping tools, according to Prairie Business.

Garrett Moon, co-founder of Coschedule and steering committee member of Start Bismarck and Matt Sagaser, Bobcat Co. director of the North American Acceleration Center in Bismarck announced their partnership the morning of December 3, at Bismarck’s 1 Million Cups event.

Moon also announced the opening of ticket sales for the event, available for purchase now ($25 for students, $45 for early bird sign-ups.)

“We want to make sure that Startup Weekend was affordable for everyone,” Moon said in a recent article from Prairie Business. “It is a great opportunity to learn about entrepreneurship, so we wanted to make that very accessible.”

Thanks to the partnership with Bobcat, the event will be hosted at the brand new North American Acceleration Center in Bismarck, which just opened up three months ago.

“It’s a great opportunity for participants to be able to experience an innovative workplace,” Moon said in the Prairie Business article. “The space itself complements what we are hoping to accomplish with Startup Weekend.”

According to Prairie Business, many of Bobcat’s rapid prototyping tools will be made available for the participants of Startup Weekend to use.

Not familiar with the Startup Weekend event? It’s basically a weekend-long event where designers, developers, entrepreneurs, marketers, students, and anyone in between come together to launch a small startup in 54 hours.

Those with ideas kick off the event by pitching them to the crowd, teams form around those ideas, and the rest is a lot of hardcore team and idea building with the help from experienced mentors.

The event concludes with teams pitching their ideas to a mock panel of investors.

Fargo held our own Startup Weekend this past March, and plans for next year’s are already in the works with a date slotted for March 2015. Startup Weekends, which are powered in part by Google for Entrepreneurs, are widely hailed as one of the most successful programs for promoting technology-based entrepreneurship in local communities.

We look forward to the startups that will emerge from those intense 54 hours in Bismarck!

Interested in going? Buy tickets today, here.

Read the full Prairie Business article here.

Photos courtesy of Start Bismarck.