The third Startup Weekend HKU (SWHKU) concluded last Sunday and it was a day full of surprises. As teams lined up to pitch, reporters from TecHKU (who are also the organisers this time around) kept guessing what the products of companies such as Aftercrap or FaceAsk could be.

The #SWHKU3 judges (from left to right): Ray Chan, Raymond Yip, Nickey Khemchandani, Felix Lam, and Daisy Jiang.

On Saturday, During the final judging, we could clearly see that this year, the ideas, presentations, and pitches were of remarkable quality. Over course of the weekend, 8 mentors, 3 pitch “doctors”, a workshop on UI/UX design for mobile apps and another one on landing page essentials. The participants had come up with amazing products in a very brief period of time. Managing to do market research, make demos, identify any issues, pivot their idea, and then go through the cycle all over again in the span of the weekend! Not to mention they also had to allocate time for consultation with 8 mentors, rehearsed their pitch with 3 pitch “doctors”, and attended 3 workshops specifically on the Business Model Canvas, UI/UX design for mobile apps, and landing page essentials! Although sometimes in such competitions, there are always clear winners and losers, this time at SWHKU it was impossible to shoot down even a single idea because they were all good!

Judge Nickey Khemchandani presents DATAmined with the Best Validation Award at #SWHKU3.

Some of the judges told us that evaluating the winners was a very hard task especially for the prize of The Best Validation. The award finally went to DATAmined, a team of academic researchers who came up with the idea of bridging the gap between researchers who require data that is lying waste with companies. DATAmined will be an online market place that would allow companies to sell their research data to academics in universities who are willing to buy it for their own research. The team spent a lot of time fine tuning their idea by speaking to researchers of HKU and also evaluating the market model to gain the best returns for itself.

Judge Raymond Yip, whose team won the Best Design and Evaluation Award in the April 2013 edition of Startup Weekend HK, presents the same award to Team MusicSpark at #SWHKU3.

The Best Design and Evaluation Award went to team MusicSpark who pitched a business venture to encourage high-school students to collaborate and learn music. Differentiating themselves from the competition, the team gave a live demo showing their prototype’s ability to convert voice into MIDI musical notes leaving the judges very impressed. Although I was personally skeptical about the MusicSpark’s idea, after talking to their team briefly, I realised that the application could have potential as a Slack for musicians.

Judge Daisy Jiang presents the Best Business Model Award to Paperfox at #SWHKU3.

Finally, it was Paperfox, a subscription management platform that bagged the biggest prize, The Best Business Model. A company with the biggest team at SWHKU, Paperfox plans to help its customers reduce their expenditure on their unnecessary subscriptions such as gym memberships and Netflix while customers are away on vacations. The company had a very strong pitch and reassured the doubters in the audience that partner companies that live on the subscription model will like to sign-up for their apps since it promises the companies a chance to auto-renew subscriptions and eliminate the hassle of maintain their personal subscription renewal databases. Judge Daisy Jiang said Paperfox showed the most promise out of all the thirteen pitches that were presented to them at SWHKU.

Team Weavle doing their final pitch on Sunday.

However, there were several notable entries at SWHKU; an interesting one was Aftercrap, an app to register customer complaints of companies, small or large. They wanted to “meme-ify” the complaints by adding hilarious distortions and slogans to the complaint letters. Aftercrap plans to attract companies to their platform to address these complaints in exchange for a fee. Another interesting idea was MELT, a company to eliminate order-time and WAITERS from restaurants. MELT would provide its customers with the ability to place an order to a restaurant while they are on their way to it and provide a payment portal to settle bills. While applications such as Weavle promised its clients an event and location sharing app with a targeted advertising revenue model. We also saw two job-hunting / networking apps and two travel apps among the 13 ideas presented. The pitches also included other companies that offered services such as counselling to graduates, a marketplace for local goods, as well as an idea to make another object-tracking hardware (but with a difference).

Overall, it was very satisfying to see that this year, all pitches were for ideas that were for the betterment of the society. The quality of ideas is only improving every year and I personally, cannot wait to see SWHKU next year!

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Aman Gupta

An everyday tech-enthusiast who runs his own blog, listens to rock and spends more time on 9GAG than reading books. Doesn't understand the idea of playing sports on gaming consoles but loves FPS games. Follows too many TV series and studies engineering (in his free time) - Computer Science usually and sometimes also finance! That is me. *yawn*

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• Blog: Final pitches at Startup Weekend HKU #3 - October 23, 2016
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In my Principles of Journalism class, we were introduced to the concept of ‘news bites’. People don’t have time anymore to carry around newspapers on their daily commute, especially when mobile phones are so much more portable. Here we introduce news bites. Think of it as taking a nibble of news here, a nibble of news there. Read this headline, read a little bit of the article for some more information, then move on to the next headline.

The app is laid out in a way that makes it look very much like iMessage. The Quartz team formulates short, 2-3 line messages that are sent to you after you send them one of their ready-made responses. For example, if I want to know more about the ‘possible smoking gun’ in the Volkswagen emissions scandal, I reply with a message made of the car, gun, and cloud emojis. If I’m not interested, I can skip to the next story by selecting ‘anything else?’

When there are no new stories to show, the app will say goodbye and send you a GIF, like this one of Picard waving goodbye.

It’s like catching up on the latest news with an old friend. And the minimal effort involved on my part makes it that much more attractive for me, since for a journalist, I’m pretty lazy about reading the news. Aside from the emojis, you can also send pre-scripted responses that are specific to the story and, as always, target the heart of the issue and provide you with the most interesting and relevant parts of it. You can also read the full article by clicking a little arrow to the right of the story.

Of course, nothing is without its disadvantages. The Quartz kind of content doesn’t involve hard reporting; you don’t get facts and hard news in double-time like you do with – for example – the BBC app. The amount of content is much lower than on a conventional news app, and not always entirely relevant, important or breaking.

App developers and outside services are increasingly using the chat interface as it proactively prompts actions and minimises user involvement. Examples include the SMS service Magic, which allows users to text operators exactly what they want and have it delivered to their door. Developers are focusing on making the user experience as hassle-free as possible, and outside entities like Magic are capitalising on this trend.

It’s worth mentioning that Quartz has had a news bite-kind of system for a few years already. Every morning, my phone buzzes and delivers my Quartz Daily Brief email, or what I like to think of as my morning newspaper. As I heave myself out of bed and fix a cup of tea, I scroll through the message, which includes everything from economic news, to interesting occurrences, to trivia and strange facts.

Generally when it comes to reading news, I open up BBC or Al Jazeera with the jaded air of an elderly man who’s seen too much of the world. But Quartz somehow makes everything interesting in that they pick and choose the content they report with real diligence. They find the little tidbits of information that make a story interesting and summarise them quickly and concisely, with nice little hyperlinks that go to NYT or Reuters as well as the Quartz site.

In summary, I would definitely say that Quartz knows what the average news junkie wants. Or maybe they just really know what I want. Either way, their new app has changed the way I consume news – definitely for the better.

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Nayantara Bhat

Second-year journalism student at HKU. Book-lover. Food-lover. Music-lover. Chronic procrastinator.

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• From media partner to organiser: We are back at Startup Weekend HKU! - October 12, 2016
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Ever since the advent of Windows 8, the computer has been evolving into a hybrid machine: part Tablet, part Laptop. This decade has been about reinventing the laptop and in hindsight, it has been totally reinvented! A large proportion of laptops we see today are touch-enabled and even Apple, who ridiculed the Hybrid category only a few years ago, has made an entry into this segment with the iPad Pro. Is this really the way forward, or are these hybrid machines all hype?

In order to come to a conclusion, let us examine the products that fit this category and are present in the market today. Just a heads up: all of these machines have touch-screens and a detachable keyboard of some type; the hybrids discussed have the ability to run multiple applications simultaneously.

Surface Pro 4

Microsoft’s Surface Pro series has been well accepted as the leader of the hybrid segment. The just-announced Surface Pro 4 (which has been available in the US and Canada since yesterday) has configurations that beat those of a conventional desktop. With the option for a 1TB SSD, i7 Skylake Processors and a humongous 16 Gigs of RAM all attached to a display that packs five million pixels into a 12.3-inch screen. It is understandable that these high-end configurations are for a limited number of customers with very deep pockets, but even the basic configurations that come at a price of USD 900 are enough to get you through the day especially with a battery that lasts 12 hours. The Surface Pen that compliments the Surface Pro is engineered to give more precision than a mouse. It not only enables note taking but also gives the designers an edge to sketch and design directly on the screen.

iPad Pro

Apple introduced in September its “Surface Killer”, the 12.9-inch iPad Pro. Although it isn’t out yet, it is believed that the iPad Pro packs a punch. It takes advantage of the fact that the Operating System is designed for the hardware (vis-a-vis Microsoft), and iOS9 is a highly-regarded mobile OS; the iPad Pro increases the productivity of the already efficient iPad with its larger form factor. Apple has also engineered a Surface like keyboard and pencil for the iPad Pro which I believe will be on-par with, if not better than, Microsoft’s. Moreover, Apple’s fan-base will make sure the product is a huge success. The iPad Pro is 78% larger than the iPad, retains Apple’s famous Retina Display and supposedly has an amazingly fast processor. All these features accompany the slew of applications and integrations that make Apple products unbeatable. However, it falls short on the number of different configurations available – but it is available in 3 colours.

Surface Book

The Surface Book is a glorious piece of engineering dressed in alumnium. It has specifications even higher than that of his younger brother Surface, and like the Surface, it also has a detachable keyboard. Microsoft has been able to create a “dynamic fulcrum hinge” for its keyboard, which makes the screen sit back when using the keyboard. The Surface Book has a “Muscle Wire Lock” which helps the screen attach and escape from its keyboard; a keyboard they claim is the best keyboard in the world. The best part about this machine is that the keyboard assembly also houses a dedicated NVidia Laptop class GPU that makes this hybrid like no other! It has all the USB ports one needs, however, they are only in the keyboard housing which makes it impossible to add a thumb drive when you are hopping around without it.

Google Pixel C

Google Pixel C is one of the most talked about Android Tablets. Although its specifications will make it look ridiculous in front of the iPad Pro or the Surface series, it can’t be ignored in this discussion. Android tablets were among the first hybrids, with the new Android Marshmallow software and the Pixel C- the Android tablets/hybrids have certainly raised the bar. Honestly speaking, the Pixel C is a great piece of machinery for its software but not for its hardware. It packs only 3GB of RAM (the Samsung Galaxy S6 phone has 4GB) and houses a NVidia Trega Quad-core Processor. It isn’t much when it comes to computation, speed or power, but it is wallet friendly. Even though Marshmallow has not been tested on tablets or large displays, it is a beautiful, material design OS that should function smoothly.

Since Microsoft has been toying with hybrid machines for a longer time, they will have more expertise and experience. Their Surface line-up surpasses Google’s and Apple’s when it comes to computation. I believe it is more because of the OS available to them; Windows machines run on the same native desktop class operating system, Windows 10, whereas the iPad Pro and the Pixel C run on Operating Systems better suited for and designed for mobile devices. The iOS and Android Marshmallow put both the tablets at an advantage in terms of the App-Gap. On the other hand, Microsoft significantly lacks on their part; however, Microsoft and their OEM’s offerings allow for native desktop apps to run fluidly on their hybrid machines; the App-Gap is compensated for even if the apps are not touch ready.

We live in a day and age where the Moore’s Law has been broken, yet we are getting smaller and faster chipsets simply because we are using power more efficiently. A mobile phone today has more computation power than all the processing it took to land a man on the moon! Obviously, a 8.2 mm-thick piece of machined aluminium can compensate for a fat overweight machine that we only use to browse 9GAG. The modern user has minimum requirements from a laptop: a word processor, a web browser, and a web browser– all of which can be satisfied by the hybrids we had yesterday. Today’s hybrids can do much more. They are beautifully crafted and are suitable for even someone like me, who needs the power for Adobe Software, high-end graphics for gaming, and portability to make notes in lectures.

I believe, and as every keynote speaker (be it Apple’s or Microsoft’s or Google’s) says, the finger and the touch screen are the most human way to interact with a machine (until dictation evolves from being more than a personal assistant). We may be able to remove the touchpad but because the keyboard is still the most important input device, we need a physical keyboard. That is why the Big Three offer physical keyboards for their tablets. However, at times and places where we can make do without, why not just walk around with a screen? In my opinion, it makes a lot of sense to have hybrids around. The hybrids we discussed are based on similar chains of thought.

I give a thumbs up to hybrids. They are not just substitutes to laptops anymore– they are the future of desktop computing.

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Aman Gupta

An everyday tech-enthusiast who runs his own blog, listens to rock and spends more time on 9GAG than reading books. Doesn't understand the idea of playing sports on gaming consoles but loves FPS games. Follows too many TV series and studies engineering (in his free time) - Computer Science usually and sometimes also finance! That is me. *yawn*

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• Blog: Final pitches at Startup Weekend HKU #3 - October 23, 2016
• Examining the Hybrid Theory and Microsoft’s Brand New Entry - October 27, 2015
• Geeking Out: Testing the Windows 10 Insider Preview - July 16, 2015

The opinion and views in this article are that of the authors and do not reflect the opinion or views of The HKU Journal of Technology, or the TecHKU Editorial Team. You can comment below to let the authors know what you think.
To submit an opinion piece of your own, send an email to techkueditors@gmail.com or use the contribute button on the top right of this site.

Spoiler alert! You might want to read our Day 1 blog before proceeding.

Natalie: Can I just start by saying how proud I feel for everyone involved? I was at the first Startup Weekend HKU, and I must say the quality of presentations and prototypes this time were at a whole other level. Perhaps the massive venue they booked and the cocktail bar they had this past weekend contributed to that.

Nayantara: HKU’s second Startup Weekend was definitely on a bigger scale than last time, with much more diverse and ambitious creations. I wasn’t around for most of the creation process, but it definitely looked like an exhausting weekend for some of the participants. Now that the 54 hours have come to a close, they’ll finally be able to get some sleep – and some of them have gone home victorious.

Natalie: All of them have gone home victorious with the new insights and new connections they have made. We live-tweeted all the 13 final pitches on Twitter, and if you haven’t heard already, here are the results:

Overall winner: ShopIG
1st runner up / Best business model: Botomatic
2nd runner up / Best customer validation: CollegePars
Crowd favourite / Special mention: I’M IN by InJoy@HKU
(FYI: Poll results)

Nayantara: I’m happy to say that the products I was most fond of made it into the top four, although one of my personal favourites, HappyCorner, didn’t. Their idea of creating an Airbnb-like platform for rooftop events and parties was something I really liked, but it might have been a little too niche market for the judges’ tastes.

I’M IN was something we were quite happy about, and they won the Crowd Favourite award by a landslide. Think Facebook events but tailored to your preferences, with a special little calendar showing all the events near you. Definitely something that could be used to create a good few crazy house parties (see Project X!) Their concept, bolstered by a snappy presentation and a well-designed prototype, definitely had the votes of most of the audience.

Natalie: I thought HappyCorner was a breath of fresh air among the fitness and social apps we have today. Rooftops are quite an integral part of urban culture in Hong Kong, yet their scalable business model allows for renting out under-utilised private spaces across the globe.

Let’s talk about our grand prize winner. The team of three at ShopIG offered a rather all-round solution to leverage the e-commerce potential of Instagram. Instagram shops are really popular among locals, but the app limits its own ecommerce capabilities because it doesn’t allow hyperlinks in posts–so no link to purchase or to more product information, unless it’s a sponsored post or the “link in the bio”. But the team took it to the next level by feeding Instagram content onto their own e-commerce platform, which makes much more sense with a Buy button and a shopping cart.

My concern, though, is that ShopIG is built on the assumption that Instagram would allow their own content and user database to be fed into a third-party platform for commercial purposes. Remember when Twitter cut Meerkat off its social graph? Ouch.

I do look forward to what these guys would create in the future. Nelson, one of the technical co-founders, told me he sees himself working with his business co-founder Louis, whom he had just met this weekend, in the long run. Looks to me the team has great chemistry for the #startuplife — and for that I am glad events like Startup Weekend exist.

Nayantara: I thought ShopIG was definitely one of the better ideas, and I wish I’d paid more attention to it during the initial pitches. The same goes for Botomatic, a multi-tasking app that allows you to do several things simultaneously by using a custom-developed ‘bot’. For example, a bot might allow me to tweet, send an email, post to Facebook and check Pinterest all at the same time. The group’s revenue plan was to charge a certain price for the API keys, so any programmers who may want to develop a bot would have to pay for the privilege. It’s also worth mentioning that the group’s prototype app was really aesthetically appealing.

Meanwhile, there were a lot of apps that some members of the audience felt were quite superfluous. Prof. Mandarin (learning purpose-specific Mandarin with the help of a specially selected online tutor) and CollegePars (aggregating job/internship opportunities and student-led initiatives specific to each university) were two of these apps, with some audience members claiming that TutorMing.com and Jobsdb.com respectively are more or less substitutes. However, the CollegePars team impressed me during their pitch, and they definitely seem to have impressed the judges enough to get through to third place despite the audience skepticism.

Natalie: I like the fact that CollegePars included job listings for student-led initiatives alongside jobs on the market. Student groups like TecHKU mostly rely on Facebook, physical posters, and mass emails for recruitment (from my personal experience, those are methods with pretty low ROI). Our message could have better reach on a college-oriented careers platform like CollegePars; Facebook’s news feed algorithm can leave Page owners disappointed at times.

(And yes, TecHKU IS indeed recruiting. Shoot us an email if you are interested to join us as an editorial contributor / video producer / branding strategist, covering the burgeoning tech & startup scene in HKU and beyond! :D)

Nayantara: Can’t have a tech event without at least one vaguely sexist app, so I had my dose of that with Fitland, an app for women’s health that combines fitness with a game by a team called Hello Fitty. Cute idea. Very cute, had the team not opened their pitch with “Women complain a lot about their appearances, but never really do much to fix it.” In my humble opinion, if you need to make a joke about women to sell your app, it’s probably not a great app.

Natalie: If I may interrupt — Regardless of what you say about the nature of their app, Fitland had hands down the best original graphic designs out of all the prototypes. Props to their designers.

Nayantara: Then that’s great for them I suppose…

There was also a product called Micro Probe, which we were very skeptical about during pitching, as you can see in our Day 1 blog. The final pitch did not make me any less skeptical, to be honest. It’s a great idea in theory but developing something like that would take a seriously intense research budget and a lot of time. I really do admire your ambition though, guys, although I was a little confused about whether you were selling the Micro Probe or an insurance plan.

Natalie: Let’s talk about Tour4U. I am surprised they pursued the original idea from the first pitch on Friday. This travel app is definitely one that’s on the creative end. People who cannot travel, perhaps due to their disability or financial ability, could log onto their platform and join tours by local tour guides in the format of “follow-me-around” live video. A lot of attendees I talked to agree that it is a unique way to experience the world without setting foot outdoors as you get to interact with your tour guide, but I can foresee several problems when it comes to implementation. First, since the quality of these tours depend highly on live stream quality, it would not be feasible for users to have guides visit remote terrains like Mount Everest for them, however exciting that might sound. Perhaps better QC has to be done to ensure that guides have stable Internet connectivity when conducting tours. This leads me to the second point: Can the monetary return from the app cover the guides’ costs of having a good cellular data plan?

I do appreciate the team for letting their imagination run wild– they hope to integrate their service with the 360° camera and VR headsets.

That sums up the final pitches at SWHKU #2. We believe we will be around to witness a third SWHKU in the future, hopefully with even more participants and exciting product developments. (Organisers said it might be held at a joint-university level.) We wish all newly-admitted Startup Weekend alumni the best of luck in their future endeavours!

Be sure to keep an eye on our Facebook page as we will be posting video recaps of the event (with exclusive interviews) over the next few weeks!

Disclosure: TecHKU was a community partner at Startup Weekend HKU.

Related posts:
Blog: Startup Weekend HKU #2 Day 1
For HKU, Startup Weekend HKU is just the beginning
See more Startup Weekend coverage on The Lion Post!

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Natalie Lung

A final-year Journalism and Computer Science student at HKU. News and Internet junkie with deep appreciation for the performing arts. Favourite music genre: retro, house.

Latest posts by Natalie Lung (see all)

• Blog: Final Pitches at Startup Weekend HKU #2 - October 19, 2015
• Blog: Startup Weekend HKU #2 Day 1 - October 16, 2015
• Four Engineering Undergraduates to Represent HKU at First Ever Amazon Picking Challenge - May 27, 2015

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Nayantara Bhat

Second-year journalism student at HKU. Book-lover. Food-lover. Music-lover. Chronic procrastinator.

hit me up

Latest posts by Nayantara Bhat (see all)

• From media partner to organiser: We are back at Startup Weekend HKU! - October 12, 2016
• The Quartz App: My New Favourite Thing - February 23, 2016
• Six Questions for Credit Suisse - June 19, 2015

The opinion and views in this article are that of the authors’ and do not reflect the opinion or views of The HKU Journal of Technology, or the TecHKU Editorial Team. You can comment below to let the authors know what you think.
To submit an opinion piece of your own, send an email to techkueditors@gmail.com or use the contribute button on the top right of this site.

We are at the second Startup Weekend HKU, a three-day event for participants to meet like-minded peers to take their startup ideas to the next level. They will be pitching, validating, and prototyping their ideas all within 54 hours. The organisers just wrapped up the initial round of pitches– here are our thoughts and insights.

Natalie: What did you think of the ideas pitched? I can definitely sense a recurring theme here – matching apps, i.e. Uber for X apps. Amongst others, there was an app matching fashionistas with those who may not have the sharpest fashion sense when choosing outfits, a platform to find an owner for your old furniture, and an app to find someone with free time to clean your house.

Nayantara: Yeah, and there were also some ideas that were similar enough to be streamlined. They could integrate their ideas and business models and make something really great. The Surprise app combined with the Plannable app for example – a surprise event planning platform mixed with a way for busy parents to plan their children’s birthday parties more easily. I actually really liked Surprise in particular; I thought their idea of “gift-giving consultations” was really cute.

Mass-market oriented things like this are all good, but there were a lot of ideas that seemed super unrealistic though, don’t you think? For example, ProCram, or as the would-be creator describes it, “Reddit with an academic twist”. In theory, I like the idea. I like it a lot. Who wouldn’t want teachers and TAs on standby to answer questions that the lecture slides and textbook can’t? The issue I find with this though, is that why would professors and TAs even be on standby? They would almost definitely have better things to do.

Natalie: Yes. There was an idea for a biomedical startup to detect and offer treatment for different stages of cancer. Finding a cure for cancer has been a long-time challenge for the medical field – How would the team here be able to prototype this idea in two days? And they hope to offer treatment- that’s what hospitals are for, right?

Another problem I noticed across the pitches was that they were super niche. A rating platform for dog salons only caters to dog owners. Perhaps this team could upscale it by rating vet clinics or grooming centres in general. So OpenRice but for pet care.

I liked the idea of a platform for sharing mistakes. Experience –not Google– is the best teacher. What better way to learn than to learn from others’ mistakes? But I am not sure what their business model is. After all startups got to be sustainable and earn profit. We haven’t heard a lot about monetisation from the participants.

Nayantara: A lot of the pitches seemed very hardware-oriented as well, so I’m interested to see how they’re going to implement them. One of my special favourites was the idea to create a vending machine with ‘fun’ food: pizza for example! Look and Taste would let users select their food and watch it being made. This pitch came from the frustration of being on campus until late and having absolutely nothing to eat – a frustration I can definitely understand when writing this on campus at 10:20 pm! I can definitely see a lot of robotics going into the ‘Look’ part of it though, so let’s see if the group refines their plan to just the ‘Taste’.

Smart bands are also featured heavily in this year’s pitches. Eric, the man behind I-Care, pitched a medical smart band with basic biometric sensors for blood pressure and heart rate, and also special features like reminders for taking medicine and a way to automatically alert hospitals to any medical emergencies.

I think another thing that really stood out to both of us was one of the last pitches, one that proposed to produce menstrual products for women in developing countries. Cost-effective to produce, reusable and supposedly with fewer health risks, the proposed products could really make all the difference to women on their periods. As a supporter of both feminine hygiene and the use of the word “vagina” in public, I loved the pitch, but unfortunately I don’t really see how it’s a startup, and I really don’t see how it relates to tech. It’s an R&D-intensive, biology-related project and in this case the R&D has already been done. Which leads me to ask, what exactly is the group planning to do with this idea?

Ideas we liked

Natalie: Ricky’s Seat Finder uses the WiFi access points at computers or smartphones in the library or a canteen to generate a virtual map of the space, so that students could easily find vacant seats once they enter the premise. In fact the official HKU app has this feature implemented for the Main Library, the Oval, and the Chi Wah Learning Commons. It would be cool if Seat Finder could provide the same solution for virtually any public space– I totally see myself using it.

I’M IN would sound exciting for those who want company at an event, like watching a movie or having hotpot. You get to propose, browse, and join events by saying I’m In on the platform. I personally don’t mind experiencing things alone, but it would suit those who want to make new friends, especially when you are in a new country or environment, as the creators have mentioned.

There was this feel-good app that gets people to think positive by sending encouraging messages when they check-off items on their to-do list. It may well be just a to-do list app, but it does help restore my faith in humanity, a bit.

Nayantara: Look and Taste, once they’ve solidified their concept – I could definitely do with some hot pizza in the middle of my midnight studying. At this point, it’s unclear how they’re going to achieve what they’re envisioning, especially if they’re set on having the vending machine cooked from scratch. There’s this and a hundred other problem points to consider, but hopefully they get it together and we’ll see a prototype on campus soon! I can definitely see myself single-handedly making up half their revenue.

There were a lot of ideas that seemed great in concept but would be tough to implement – for example, there was an idea proposing selling warm, home-cooked meals to people. I can definitely go for a warm, home-cooked meal at any time of day, but not personally knowing the cook would be awkward. Not to mention, the person cooking the meal might not want to let strangers into his or her home in the first place. And there’s just something very secure about knowing (or at least hoping) that a restaurant is only operational if it follows government-mandated health codes. So I’ll put this idea down as a maybe. Again, if they can figure out the kinks in their model, then I’m all in.

(Side note: apparently I’m only interested in food-related apps. Huh.)

Natalie: I’m looking forward to how these ideas would pivot in the coming two days– after all participants had only 60 seconds to pitch their idea. It wouldn’t surprise me if we end up having a whole new set of startup ideas from the teams on Day 3. Follow us on Twitter for live updates at the final presentations. Goodnight!

Disclosure: TecHKU was a community partner at Startup Weekend HKU.

Related posts:
Thoughts on Final Pitches on Day 3 here
Recap of first Startup Weekend HKU back in March

• About
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Natalie Lung

A final-year Journalism and Computer Science student at HKU. News and Internet junkie with deep appreciation for the performing arts. Favourite music genre: retro, house.

Latest posts by Natalie Lung (see all)

• Blog: Final Pitches at Startup Weekend HKU #2 - October 19, 2015
• Blog: Startup Weekend HKU #2 Day 1 - October 16, 2015
• Four Engineering Undergraduates to Represent HKU at First Ever Amazon Picking Challenge - May 27, 2015

• About
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hit me up

Nayantara Bhat

Second-year journalism student at HKU. Book-lover. Food-lover. Music-lover. Chronic procrastinator.

hit me up

Latest posts by Nayantara Bhat (see all)

• From media partner to organiser: We are back at Startup Weekend HKU! - October 12, 2016
• The Quartz App: My New Favourite Thing - February 23, 2016
• Six Questions for Credit Suisse - June 19, 2015

The opinion and views in this article are that of the authors’ and do not reflect the opinion or views of The HKU Journal of Technology, or the TecHKU Editorial Team. You can comment below to let the authors know what you think.
To submit an opinion piece of your own, send an email to techkueditors@gmail.com or use the contribute button on the top right of this site.