Summer is leaving us, in the coming fall we have new Pitch Events! CoCoon Pitch Night Series is holding its semi-finals for the new season on September 26th 18:30-20:30, check here for the details.
According to the event holder, so far in 2013 entrepreneurs have received over HKD1,000,000 funding from investors they met at CoCoon. This is an exciting number, isn’t it!
Guess who’s featured in US App Store Life Style section main banner#1 as well as the main banners on App Store Home Page in other 13 countries! It’s Worthy, a newly launched social app developed by our local startup InnoPage. A huge congratulations to them!
In case you didn’t visit App Store this week – Worthy is a social app that gamify the way people make friends. It allows users to set up 3 questions and answers that represent who you are, and if someone wants to add you as a friend, s/he will has to pick the correct answers for your questions.
If they get the answers wrong, the contact will disappear from the pool, unless s/he sets new questions. Thus you can only be approached or get to know those who share the same values or interests with you, in other words, friend those who are worthy of you.
I just came back from being totally Disrupted!
As part of my work with SoftLayer Catalyst I just spent 5 days at the biggest startup event in the world – the TechCrunch Disrupt conference from Sept 7-11 in San Francisco. A huge event that starts with a 2-day hackathon over the weekend and then culminates in a rapid-fire series of talks, interviews, panels at the conference with heavy pitching at the Startup Battlefield and most importantly the infamous Startup Alley.
Many HK startups ask me if it’s worth it to go to Disrupt at US$3000 a ticket; plus September is still peak season for flying; and the huge America’s Cup is on driving up hotel prices you are looking at anywhere from HK$40-50K for your 5 day trip there. What you get is a booth for ONE day and access to the conference for the rest. The place IS packed and you meet people from all over the tech industry: potential partners, investors and customers so the validation is great. But it is a gamble as you have to really throw everything into that one day.
I was happy to see one HK startup with deep pockets that got a booth – new startup FoodieQuest – a hot or not food app developed by the people behind Fluid and Nest. I spoke to Simon Squibb and Benjamin Hall and they both said they got some great feedback on the app and good face time with different types of people as well as a front page story on TechCrunch.com the day that Apple announced the new iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c!
