Entrepreneurs from Indonesia, Lebanon, Egypt, and Malaysia Win GIST Tech-I Competition 2012
The Global Innovation through Science and Technology (GIST) Tech-I 2012 Competition came to a close yesterday at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Dubai, winnowing 30 semifinalists from the Middle East, Africa, and Central and Southeast Asia down to four winners and one top female entrepreneur.
After submitting two minute video pitches detailing their ideas and go-to-market strategy, these 30 entrepreneurs from the 44 countries that GIST supports workshopped their ideas over the two-day event and pitched ideas in ICT, Health, Agriculture, and Energy sectors to a panel of judges at the finals yesterday. The winners will receive support to build their technologies through GIST's wide-reaching networks and mentorship programs.
Meet the Winners
The winner, Natali Ardianto, Co-founder and COO of Tiket.com, took
home $25,000 for his idea for an online travel & entertainment
gateway for Indonesia that will sell flight, train, hotel, concert
events and movie tickets. Hopefully the prize will help him develop
the platform and peripherally support #StartupLokal, the biggest
startup community in Indonesia, which he co-founded. Watch his
initial two-minute video pitch here.
The runner-up, Mohamad Taha, Founder and CEO of ma2too3a!, comes
from Lebanon, where he built the crowdsourced mobile application to
offers real-time location-based news and traffic updates, initially
offering updates on outbreaks of violence and protest. Now, the
platform is diversifying to focus on a range of topics; the $15,000
prize from GIST won't hurt their expansion. Mohamad has also built
software development company La Roche Soft. Watch his video pitch
here.
In second place (GIST has both a runner up and a second place
winner) was Egyptian entrepreneur Khaled Wagdy, who, along with his
co-founder, won $10,000 for Motion Capture Systems, a tool designed
to assist animators and 3D artists with character animation. Watch
his video pitch here.
Two co-founders from Pakistan, Saman Khan and Syed Irteza Ubaid,
took home $5,000 in third place with their idea for Nanocides, a
custom self-sanitizing surface which reduces the spread of
infectious diseases by decontaminating the surrounding environment.
Self-sanitizing surfaces technology uses normal daylight to
eliminate nearly all microorganisms on medical devices and
high-touch, near-patient surfaces. (Watch their video pitch
here).
The top female entrepreneur awarded came from Malaysia; Jolene Sim
presented Centsless, a Malaysian company that offers a gamified
twist on loyalty programs, allowing users to earn points both
offline and online and redeem them for rewards using their mobile
phones. Jolene, who took home $5,000, develop Centsless from
Mainstream Online Buzz (MOB), a social media company that she
founded, which turned a profit within its first year and which was
selected to represent Malaysia at the 10,000 Women Entrepreneurship
Program. Watch her video pitch here.
Honorable Mentions include:
- Laurent Liautaud, Founder of Niokobok, ICT, Senegal
- Rachid Harrando, Co-founder and CEO of ”COREvidence” by NETpeas, ICT, Morocco
- Bassam Seif and Nadi Chemali, Co-founder of Kactus, ICT, Lebanon
- Tamer Ahmed, Founder of Assly “Original,” ICT, Egypt
- Abedul-Azez Kasaji, CEO, Mallna, ICT, Jordan
Ahmad Al-Mubiden of Jordan won the most crowd votes
for his idea, Mubstar (see more on all winners on the GIST Initiative blog). The winning
entrepreneurs will get a huge boost from the large cash prizes
given- hopefully they will implement wisely to grow slowly and not
splash out their cash in one fell swoop.
ma2too3a! especially I would love to see grow
into an application with trusted, real-time bilingual information
in Lebanon that covers political events well, which is what earned
it popularity in the first place. The team has confessed that they
want to pivot into traffic updates for Lebanon, which could be
useful; perhaps it's only those of us that have grown terribly
cynical that assume the traffic jams are never-ending between
certain hours. Yet any help escaping the gridlock in Beirut is also
welcome.
A Note to Online Voting Platforms
Not everyone is happy with the video-focused submission process.
Crowdsourced vote is a noble approach when it can be truly
democratic, but, as one applicant pointed out to Wamda, "sometimes
these competitions really come down to popularity contests,"
because applicants can simply buy votes online.
This issue is hardly exclusive to GIST, but applicant Maha Khatib,
who did not attend the finals, reached out to address an issue that
any online voting platform- including Wamda, when we run online
competitions- has to be vigilant about. "It seemed that some of the
contestants were cheating with a huge lead ahead of everyone else
just one day after voting began," she recalls. As momentum gained,
it was hard for her to tell how much was organic.
It's hard to tell without deeper analysis of the traffic, but CRDF
Global, which supports GIST, has taken steps to minimize the
effect of these factors, changing the voting procedure this
year so that 30% of the selection was based on popular voting and
70% was based on expert judging. It's also critical to have
final pitches done in person, as GIST does. At the end of the day,
entrepreneurs' ideas and résumés speak for themselves.
Alumni Success
One thing is for sure- GIST alumni, 6 of whom were also in
attendance, have been accelerating on their successes this year.
Hind Hobeika, who also won the MIT Arab Business Plan Competition this year
for reinventing the swimmer's goggle with Butterfleye, was in attendance, as was Perihan
Abou-Zaid of MIT Second Place Winner Qabila, an Egyptian media company that
works to produce progressive multimedia narratives, and Ziad
Sankari, who is steadily working on building his heart monitor,
CardioDiagonstics, and has a few announcements
coming soon- stay tuned for more on these GIST alumni.