“Don’t give up hope.” – Shirley Wong
“Deadline to fighting, make it work, and move it on.” –Frank Levinson
“Persistence, the market is always good to be sought out from.” –Slava Solonitysn
The panel, which was made up of four distinguished people from the tech industry, discussed several topics – ranging from financing to marketing and reaching out to funders, to surviving without funding, and general changes to the product, and how the local system is different from the one in Silicon Valley. The discussion was moderated by Pierre Hennes, and delivered great value to the audience who are a good mix of aspiring women entrepreneurs in the scene, or people who wanted to just explore what the opportunities are, as well as the more established women in the local startup-scene.
The four groups that pitched in thoughtful succession were the main highlight of the event.
The first startup to pitch was Flipperworkz, a first-of-its-kind educational media marketplace created to encourage proactive and collaborative learning, with their business proposition mainly as an educational platform and which needed to get some form of scale.
The second startup involved giving away freebies to moms. An iPhone application called GiveMeCity Freebies was developed and involved lending an ear to the cause, establishing time-and-money crunched mothers being in need of extra loving in the form of merchant perks, and to be able to utilize it as an advertising platform to this freebie-loving target market.
The third startup called Social CV, involved a proposition that created a better way to centralise one’s social information into a platform that gets rated into a system similar to Klout, which measures everyone’s aggregate influence from the various networking sites, including the ones from Asia for eg, RenRen, QQ, etc. With a 43% retention rate, the 20,000 downloads are attributed to their secret sauce, which was the scratch card that users get to uncover the prize underneath, such as the different perks and discounts by the different merchants involved on those social platforms.
The fourth startup called LoveByte is a mobile app platform that is used by couples to help them get closer together. It revolves around the service of coupledom, and expands and leads into the social cementing of flourished relationships by providing a private space for couples to communicate and share things.
At the end of the presentation, Ruvento Ventures (MDA iJam Incubator), together with Exploit Technologies (commercialization arm of A*STAR), presented some technologies available for commercialization. One of which is Fashion Latte, which used advanced technology such as vision algorithms, audience measurement, locomotion technology, voice-recognition, and mobile prowess to index fashion from leading stores across the web.
It was great to witness a terrific turnout, despite the rainy weather. Thanks to everybody for taking part in this fabulous experience! To be in the midst of all the energetic pitching, as well as hearing feedback from the panel of mentors will serve to inspire the startups going forward.
