Entrepreneurs noshed on cupcakes, sandwiches and potato chips as they hammered away on their laptops, trying to create a new business that could benefit the world.

About 60 college students and members of the community signed up for UMass Dartmouth’s second annual “Startup Weekend,” which was held from Nov. 13 to 15 at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Fall River.

The contest, which pits teams against one another to find the best business idea, is part of a larger contest called the Global Startup Battle. Between Nov. 13 and 22, there are 900 entrepreneurial contests happening around the world.

The theme for this year’s event was social entrepreneurship. Teams were encouraged – but not required – to develop ideas that could fulfill a social need using a business as the driving force for change. There were two winners, one in the social category and another in a more generalized "innovative" category.

The event began on Friday with a brainstorming session.

“Everyone has sixty seconds to pitch their idea. After that, the group in total starts choosing which ideas they want to work on,” said Sergio Ferreira, a global facilitator for Global Startup Battle.

There was also a voting system to help determine which ideas were popular and which ideas wouldn’t work. The group came up with about 20 pitches that were posted for everyone to see, and the participants gravitated toward one of the ideas. In the end, there were eight teams competing.

“Over the weekend, we teach them the process of how to go from idea to concept to actually launching,” said Ferreira.

After devising a plan, the teams had to set their plans in motion. On Saturday, groups were told to leave the building and find potential customers that their businesses would target. This enabled group members to weigh the merits of their idea and change course if they couldn’t identify people interested in their products.

Many of the ideas used technology to bring people together. One group developed a smartphone app that would help people achieve their goals through social networking. Another aimed to connect people living with disabilities with caregivers through a connectivity website called Enable. One team was looking at a way for citizens to get involved with improving their hometowns.

The PRIDE app (which stands for People, Responsibility, Innovation, Development and Engagement) would use an algorithm to report metrics for a city’s wellbeing.

“Our core mission is to make the people of the community feel prideful. We want to make positive change in a community,” said Danny Kirshner, a resident of Providence, Rhode Island.

He said the app would give citizens a way to decide what’s most important to them in their community, whether that be safety, the economy, culture, civic engagement or government responsiveness.

“We have an algorithm that takes data from all these core metrics and gives the city a score. We’re calling it a PRIDE score,” he said. “If safety is getting a low score, the government can go in, see that citizens care about [safety], work to improve it, the score goes up and citizens feel safer.”

Derek Benjamin, founder of R-Cade Entertainment in Fall River and a member of the PRIDE group, said that each member originally had an idea of his own.

“We have a very unique group. We combined a number of projects into one entity. It made for an interesting weekend,” said Benjamin.

The winner of the social entrepreneur category was the website Enable. The winner in the innovative category was a group that worked on a product called Smart Case. The phone case would enable the user to dial for an emergency by pressing a button on the case, rather than dialing 911.

“The ideas here were terrific,” said Tobias Stapleton, the director of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. “We’re hoping that a least a couple continue with the idea they started this weekend.”

“We had a solid mix of products, apps, websites and services. We want these ideas to take root, start up and create jobs in southeastern Massachusetts – particularly Fall River, Westport and Dartmouth,” he said.