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

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
• 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**

• About
• Latest Posts

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

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

• 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

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