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*

Latest posts by Aman Gupta (see all)

• 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 third Startup Weekend HKU have officially kicked off yesterday. Almost a hundred developers, entrepreneurs, and designers joined the first pitching session. Many different ideas were attracted, totaling at 28 pitches. There were both promising business plans and, frankly, ideas that were just weird.

In the promising camp, we have Personal Contract Management. It does what it says on the tin: manages contracts, including reminders on payment deadlines, trial periods, and other important dates and information. I can clearly see a market in such a product as I often find myself digging through papers to find some old signed contracts just for data and contract terms.

I also liked the proposal named DataMined, a platform connecting companies with a huge amount of data from researchers. As a computer science student and a tech enthusiast, there is no way I will be against the idea of sharing such data. More data for use in machine learning is always beneficial to the development of Skynet, I mean, smarter artificial intelligence.

On the other side of the spectrum, You Are So Mo Liu is one of the ideas in the weird bunch. Yes, that is actually the name of the app pitched. Mo Liu is Cantonese for “bored” or “silly”, while the app is supposed to be inspiring and be able to relived boredom by providing games for entertainment. I still have no idea how that is going to work at all.

After fierce peer voting, the ideas that came out on top formed 13 teams, including the above mentioned Personal Contract Management and DataMined. There are also other teams whose execution in the coming days will undoubtedly interest me. For example, Dude, Where’s My Wallet? aka DWMW?, promised a tracking solution for wallets. This idea might as well be impossible as it is likely the most hardware-dependent of all pitches. It steps into the ever-evolving genre of the Internet of Things (IoT) and was not that novel of an idea. I look forward to seeing its minimum viable product.

In the end, I am not able to discuss the business side of the pitched ideas since I am simply not good at it. But that is good, because I know I am going to learn a lot on that aspect from the workshops and the final pitches. Follow @TecHKU and #SWHKU on Twitter and on Facebook for more updates in the coming days on the workshops and the final pitches!

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Erik Chan

Erik Chan is a fourth-year Computer Science student at HKU. Gadget geek. Knows a bit on everything techy, from mobile phones to graphic cards, from photography to video effects. Plays with the Rubik's Cube.

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• Blog: Startup Weekend HKU #3 Day 1! - October 15, 2016

It’s that time of year again – Startup Weekend is back at HKU for the third year running, and this time it’s bigger than ever.

The past two years saw exponential expansion in both the number of teams competing and the variety and depth of the pitches that were proposed. With this year’s SWHKU preceded by three pre-event bootcamps, we’re all looking forward to seeing what is sure to be an even better line-up of ideas and innovation.

Given the marketability angle of Startup Weekend, one of the pre-event bootcamps was on conceiving of viable startup ideas. The other two was about building the “MVP” (Minimum Viable Product), from designing a user interface to creating a responsive web app to show off at the final pitches.

Not only were the bootcamps intended to boost participants’ odds for the competition, they’re also aimed at building a startup community. The hope is that the bootcamps and the competition itself will combine to create a collaborative environment where engineering and non-engineering majors can work together and maintain their momentum to carry the idea forward.

Many other hackathons have been characterised by problems of communication and momentum, and this year’s SWHKU aims to solve this through the workshops, which addressed the basic techniques of UI/UX and mobile app building and gave a multi-disciplinary grounding to students of all majors. This will enable effective communication between business majors, developers and designers, leading to faster and better prototype design.

As always, participants of every major – not just computer science – are invited to join the competition, giving students from different majors a chance to meet and take ideas forward. The workshops are intended as a guide: you may be a business major or an arts major or an engineering major, and you may not even remember the exact techniques, but the idea is for you to come out of it with a knowledge of the tools available to you for idea-building. You may even meet your business/technical co-founders through the competition!

Ultimately, Startup Weekend is not limited to CS majors, nor does it exclude the many innovators who don’t have a technical background. As always, it’s a good platform for people of different disciplines to meet, create, and participate in the growing startup environment.

In previous years, TecHKU was the official media partner for SWHKU. This year, the SWHKU organising committee is mostly made up of our very own TecHKU writers and editors, along with a fresh team of undergraduates, who are all working together to kickstart the rise of HKU’s startup community.

–All of TecHKU’s coverage on past Startup Weekend HKUs
–Register for Startup Weekend HKU #3 Oct 14-16
–**40% OFF for developers**

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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
• The Quartz App: My New Favourite Thing - February 23, 2016
• Six Questions for Credit Suisse - June 19, 2015

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.

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

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*

Latest posts by Aman Gupta (see all)

• 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

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