This post was contributed by Johnson ZeCheng, an Information and Systems Management student from Singapore Management University.
At Echelon 2011 held in Singapore, a web and mobile start-up competition was held. To unearth the start-ups, Satellite events were held in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta and Hong Kong where start-ups could pitch their idea. From 40 companies, the top 10 were chosen.
Here are 6 of the top start-ups.
PlayMoolah is the Launchpad winner of Echelon 2011. It is a lively educational portal targeted at kids aged 5 to 11. This platform aims to equip children with finance knowledge which is not usually taught in school
Kids can gain finance knowledge through different channels such as interactive games and quizzes. Points can be used to exchange for prizes or allowance from parents and will be given out based on the kids’ performance. Parents have their own portal from which they can monitor their kids’ progress on a weekly basis.
The website is currently in a private Beta and the completion of a questionnaire is a prerequisite for invitation.
Pigeonhole is a simple real-time conference Q&A tool on the mobile which ‘Echelon 2011’ employs for Q&A engagement between speaker and audience.
No registration is required to use the service. Once the event passcode is entered, the attendee will be directed to the event’s homepage where they are given a certain amount of points that can be used to ask questions and vote for others’ questions. The questions with the most number of votes will be answered first.
Currently event organizers have to send an email to request for Pigeonhole’s service. However, they will soon come up with an online portal to deal with customers’ request at ease.
A good application essay is the key for entry to top universities in western countries. However, writing an application essay has always been a pain for most Taiwanese students.
Top Admit aims to solve this pain point. It is a start-up based in Taiwan and committed to provide professional editing services to improve their clients’ essay substantially. At the back of the company is an editing team comprising of alumni from top universities like Harvard and Stanford. Although the company is based in Taiwan, it has large exposure in mainland China as well, where half of its revenue comes from and uses Alipay, the Chinese version of Paypal.
Tribute Balloon is a web community which allows people to share stories and create tributes for loved ones in a bid to raise the awareness of their cause.
Users can launch a balloon with a short story attached to it. After launching, the balloon will be ready to travel around the world. People who are moved by the balloon story will grab and pass the balloon along and thus have the story heard by the masses.
Over 7 million people have used ‘Tribute Balloon’ and it’s now also available on the iPhone and Andriod devices.
Pointstar is the cloud consultancy which is committed to provide tailor-made cloud solutions that are in line with the business goal and needs of customers.
Among the many services that Pointstar provides, ‘cloud implantation’ is the hottest. The ‘cloud implantation’ helps companies to shift their old systems to the cloud through a systematic approach which includes three simple steps: set up the necessary spaces in the cloud; migrate the data from the existing system to the cloud and craft the cloud infrastructure to ensure the smooth flow of the process.
And when necessary, Pointstar will also help to integrate companies’ legacy applications with new cloud systems.
It has now served over 200 clients in various industries and successfully migrated data from different legacy environments such as Lotus notes, Domino and Microsoft Exchange to the cloud.
Justaple is a cloud service that can help users to archive their favourite web pages.
It exists in the form of ‘extension’ in Google Chrome and ‘plug-in’ in Firefox so that archiving one’s favourite web page is simply one click away.
In the latter phase of the project, they are going to have their own browser whereby users can refine their search results by leveraging the archived database stored in the cloud.
The team has an ambitious vision in building up the largest filtered internet information database in the world and thus optimize the users’ surfing and searching experience.