After a successful Echelon Satellite back in March of this year, where 13 startups competed to represent Hong Kong at Echelon 2014, Ambi Climate stood victorious and had the monumentous task of representing us against the 9 other top Asian startups that each won their own city Satellitte’s.
Ambi flew down to Singapore to compete at the Launchpad…and won! Another win for Hong Kong startups after Bindo.com won Startup Asia 2014 Singapore last month.
Hong Kong had quite the presence at e27’s Echelon 2014, which ran from June 10-11 in Singapore. We also saw Hong Kong startups Shopline, Craftyful, Ipselex, Spacious in attendance as well.
Our own Casey Lau, 9GAG’s Ray Chan and AliveNotDead.com’s Stephen Wang were on the dynamic and diverse speaker list during the two-day conference, while Julian Lee of hardware startup Ambi Climate represented for Hong Kong at the Top 10 Launchpad competition.
The competition consisted of startup finalists chosen from a wide pool of 400 submissions and 180 pitches at 12 satellite events all across the Asia Pacific. At Hong Kong’s satellite pitch event, both the audience and the judges were unanimous when choosing Ambi as the startup to represent our city in Singapore. Read about this year’s Hong Kong satellite here.
After a very impressive stream of startup pitches from Taiwan and Thailand, Ambi picked up the ‘People’s Choice Award,’ while Taiwan’s iChef, which took the ‘Global Brain Award.’ The top prize went to Thailand’s Taamkru, an e-learning platform for kindergarten children, which announced at the conference that they’re the number one kid app in Singapore. Read e27’s full coverage of the competition here.
“The competition was pretty good for Ambi at the startup Launchpad, to see how it stands up against other Asian startups – I liked the 6-minute pitches from both iChef and Taamkru which I knew would place in the winners circle alongside Ambi,” Casey shared with us via a WhatsApp message.
Casey continues, “I thought the quality of the pitches and the ideas were better than last year’s Echelon and that the judges did a great job of poking holes into the presentations – which is also a very important part of the presentation process that I think a few of them weren’t expecting.”
“Some take-aways for startups practicing pitches for events like this: show as soon as you can: traction, accolades and humour. Traction gets everyone excited no matter what you are doing, accolades like newspaper clippings and reviews in other tech blogs makes everyone know someone is talking about you and if you can get everyone to laugh with a video of a baby dancing with your product I would say you’re halfway into everyone’s heart.”
“And of course Passion – there is a thin line between passion and arrogance – so tread it carefully, but if you love what you do and you can convey that love then the judges and the audience will feel it too.”
We will plan later this month for Julian Lee to do a talk for us about what he learned, what worked at the pitch and his experiences in talking to startups, investors and media at Echelon 2014. Stay tuned to the calendar for that announcement soon.
