This year’s GMIC event was held from April 27-28th in Beijing and was Asia’s largest mobile technology event with over 3000 attendees. The conference was packed with speakers in 4 conference rooms. Events were held simultaneously on the GMIC executive stage, the G-Startup competition stage and 2 appSpace stages for developers, which made it extremely hard to pick and chose which event to attend.
Among the many interesting events was the Global Mobile Game Awards which included top publishers in the mobile gaming space such as: Popcap, the maker of Plants vs Zombies, Ubisoft with Assassin Creed (game prize went to them), Rovio with the infamous Angry Birds, EA with Need for Speed Hot Pursuit. Among other popular games were 3KTD, Guns N Glory, Doodle Jump, Kingdom Conquest, The Whole River Red4.
In the G-Startup competition 20 startups, representing 9 countries were invited to pitch their startup in front of investors. The winners were selected in two categories: early-stage and growth- stage startups. In the seed stage category startups such as RedSparro -Singapore, our own Hong Kong based BookRice, Wiselince- China, Sassor- Japan, SmarTots- China, 云信达 – China MobileApps- Singapore, Fonaja- Indonesia, Kwestr- China presented their startup. The top two winners in the early stage category were chosen SmarTots and Kwest.
In the selected Growth-Stage Startups the following startups competed Qubulus – Sweden, Stream Media Pte Ltd – Singapore, SpeakingPal Ltd – Israel, 个信- China, Nobot Inc. – Japan, Mobimedia Inc – Canada (which was featured in the TV show the Pitch! ) Word Engine – Japan, KAI Square – Singapore, Tagattitude – France, Smoov – Singapore. The winners of this category emerged Word Engine by Lexxica from Japan as well as 个信- from China.
I was surprised to see how humble the CEO of Rovio, Peter Vesterbacka was, whose app Angry Birds topped recently 200 million downloads. I managed to exchange a few words with him and take a picture! You know an app is a household name, when your mom knows about it!
The buzzword at GMIC was definitely location based services, augmented reality and social networking. Augmented reality received quite a bit of attention, considering that the CEO of Layar was present promoting the echosystem. Unfortunately, it was disappointing to find out that many startups were copycats of ideas done over and over again. Location based services that share your whereabouts with your friends, locates them and allows you to see deals around you were one of the many startups.
In all it was a great event with, numerous startups exhibiting their startup and hoping to attract talent or get some attention from investors. Here are a selection of other startups:
Lastly, I got to take a picture with Weibo representatives !!
If you have questions or want to keep in touch, feel free to contact and follow me @lucianl ! See you next year at GMIC 2012!
