10 Startups Compete – Hong Kong Pitch Event at Bloomberg Offices

Sometimes I feel like its a reality tv show, heck maybe it will become one. Many of my friends abroad as well as in Shenzhen wished they could have attended today’s pitch event in Hong Kong, but because they couldn’t, I’m doing my best to blog about each startup, quickly below:

There are ten startups here in Hong Kong, competing to attend the Echelon pitch in june in singapore. Casey Lau, ( @hypercasey ) was the moderator and host of the event.

Casey briefly went over about the startupshk, at the end 2009 silicon valley investor @davemcclure visited Hong Kong at Cyberport and discussed the startup world / environment in Silicon Valley. Those attending Dave’s speech asked how they could do this in Hong Kong, build this network and community. Dave suggested to just start casual meetings in coffee shops and see how it goes. So it started with six people meeting in coffee shops, help each other with their company pitches, business models.

Then the first pitch event in Hong Kong was August 7, 2010 in cyber port with an impressive turnout.

From it, the hong Kong coworking boot hk started.

Also from that, weekend bootup startup launchpads came, bringing more and more startup energy to Hong Kong.

Recently a new online community, techisland .hk is moving to allow people to find staff, investors, clients, and partners.

So basically, things are moving very quickly in the past almost 2 years. For the event, we used #hksat hash tag

We had a panel of judges, some of which were Arthur chow from six waves, jon chi from boton investment, vincent from laforia. Ranking each startup for a total of up to ten points.

Here are my best summary of the 10 startups pitching their idea. One will move on to Singapore:

1. hometasty the “couchsurfing” for sharing home cooking skills. Invite people from the internet to your apartment to try your cooking skills. This came from the bootup 2 weekend I was in.
2. job tiger – by 213stompers from japan saying headhunting is dead. A disruptive headhunter social media platform
3. compath.me, from japan. compathme (another from japan), helping people find relevant events from their friends, using tags / meta. Unfortunately the english language level of the entrepreneur was low and it was hard for me and the rest of the audience to understand…..too bad.
4. social job posting facebook app – another Japanese job hunting application, this is pure play facebook, allowing you to show your friends you are looking for a job, get connected to others hiring, etc.
5. moglue – interactive ebook maker, add sounds, from korea. Speaker brought up his childhood drawing, danny doomsday, the storyteller, helps you to share from your phone to an audience. Its an interactive way for publishers to drag and drop to create story books and not pay expensive developers.
6. tributeballoon – video presentation from korean startup, dig ur balloon to support various causes.
7. flipter, sharing your opinion online, ask questions, get feedback & you see the demographics of people answering
8. jellybus from korea, “happy-ware” for your mobile. a games and photos mashup both for android & apple. app makes 400-800usd/day income, 70% from android, 30% from apple ios
9. makible – by boot hk founder Jon Buford. Allows niche products to be made, small production runs direct from factory to end consumer. licenses idea from designers, pays 10% royalty, does the rest.
10. trustcircle, help you get dates from your friend network. Also not just date, maybe business partner introductions, customer introductions. An easy way rather then sending separate messages in facebook, 1. do you like my friend, 2. do you like my friend, 3. introducing the 2 in a message.

The winner turned out to be Jon Buford’s Makible startup,, with the 2nd being trustcircle. Overheard some saying that it may not be completely fair, as the first few startups didn’t have the full audience in attendance, and some of the earlier attendees had left earlier. But alas, tis life.

Congrats Jon!
Here are some photos I snapped with my tablet: