Cambridge, Mass., October 18, 2013 — The first-ever Taiwan IDEADS Day Boston was held at Cambridge Innovation Center on October 17. Founders of eight start-up teams of Taiwanese origin delivered their pitches for an audience of investors, mentors and members of Boston’s start-up community who packed the conference room.
Taiwan IDEAS Day at Cambridge Innovation Center.
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Four of the eight teams made the trip from Taiwan, with four more teams boasting local roots, including teams with alumni and graduate students from the MIT Sloan School of Management and MIT Media Lab. Taiwan Youth Chamber of Commerce of New England (TYCCNE) and Monte Jade both co-hosted the event.
This event is part of the greater Taiwan IDEAS initiative sponsored by Taiwan’s Office of Science and Technology, Executive Yuan (Executive Cabinet) and managed by Institute for Information Industry. |
In the end, Harris Cheng and his company Greenvines took first place at this year’s competition. Mr. Cheng also serves as the board director of Evergrowing Enterprise, the market leading company for natural detergents in Taiwan. Previously, he was the Management Trainee and Premier Propositions Manager in HSBC, where he was in charge of Greater China propositions.
“Feeling blessed to hear all the great innovative ideas from the top entrepreneurs from Taiwan,” Lisa Kang wrote on TYCCNE’s facebook page.
The four teams arriving from Taiwan include:
Accuvally – Accupass.com, the award-winning service from Accuvally, is a social ticketing service that helps organizers from individuals to corporations manage an online box office, accept registrations and host events. The service enables organizers to publish events, accept payments, deliver e-tickets, and manage & promote their events on the cloud with reasonable costs. Accupass.com.com and its sister service, Huodongxing.com in China, are the top social ticketing providers in Asia.
bYAPPY Digital Media Group Ltd – bYappy’s mobile app, iCallMe, provides a free reminder, fake call, fake text, and instant fake call functions to help end users to management their time. Simultaneously, the company also provides a platform for voice interaction between end users and advertisers to promote their product(s).
CliPick – CliPick is a clothes recommendation search engine based on image recognition and other technologies. By creating millions of connections, CliPick provides a better search experience through which customers can search clothes by style, features, color and similar items at a click. CliPick provides and implements an image-based recommendation search engine within partners’ websites. The search engine has proven to offer superior user engagement growth and increased revenue.
Eee Holter Technology – Eee Holter Technology is the first customer-oriented brain-computer interface (BCI) company established in Taiwan, providing products and solutions for physiological signal recording and biologically inspired information management. As a leading technology developer on brain research and signal processing, Eee Holter cooperates with universities, research centers, clinical facilities, government associations and companies around the world.
Teams with local, Boston roots include:
Greenvines – Greenvines specializes in growing and supplying organic, living sprouts, to consumers, as the company believes that food needs to be re-invented to meet people’s real health needs. Greenvines is leveraging its technology to introduce fresh new product lines, and the world’s first sprout-themed personal care brand.
The co-founder of Greenvines is a current MBA student in the MIT Sloan Graduate School of Management.
CharmPI – CharmPI is a product that enhances activities based on instant photo-collecting and live interactive displays. The photo stream is set up on large, shared displays at the event venue. As users take pictures using smart phones, tablets, or DLSRs, we make all these photos immediately sharable to our server. Therefore, no more events photos forever forgotten in cameras! Instead, they can be shown off on TV, at the moment they are taken!
The founder of CharmPI is a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab.
IOH, Innovation Open House – IOH is a social enterprise that aims to democratize personal experiences in the areas of study, work and entrepreneurship. IOH intends to tackle the issue of uneven distribution of information and resources, and believes that these resources should be shared freely and accessible to everyone to let youth people to achieve their greatest potential. IOH intends to host online-to-offline formal talk events to bring face-to-face interactions between speakers and audiences in addition to hosting workshops for users to experience learning by doing.
Mimi Open – Mimi Open is an online experience-sharing web platform that allows users to search, schedule, and connect to experience holders, i.e. coaches mentors. Users can connect with experience-holders via video chat for a fee using an online payment system. The mission of MimiOpen is to “open experiences.” For individuals from low-income and middle class families, getting a college degree can be a daunting financial investment. Mimi Open aims to provide equal access to the experience and knowledge that college students and alumni have to anyone who needs them. These are not experts with professional advices but real people with real experiences.
The founder of IOH and MimiOpen is an alumni of the MIT Media Lab.
Pitch Judges
The Judges were three members of the local start-up community:
Stephen Davis, Managing Director from venture capital and marketing company CXO Advisory Group. Steve has 28 years of experience as a senior executive, including COO and CMO roles with P&L responsibility in the computer, software, consumer electronics and Internet industries. He has successfully built, managed, and restructured numerous sales and marketing organizations and introduced over 300 new products into various industries.
Ken Huang, Sr. Systems Architect at Forester Research & Co-founder of WebNotes & Sayagle. Ken has been working in the IT industry for over 13 years with a particular focus on E-Commerce. He has worked for Lucent Technologies, Nortel Networks, IBM Global Services, JPMorganChase, and has in depth technical knowledge and vast hands-on experience with the IT infrastructure – from systems security to performance tuning to disaster recovery and business continuity.
Yoni Samlan, Head of the Mobile Team at LevelUp. Yoni is responsible to build the apps and SDKs that thousands of LevelUp businesses rely on. He also cofounded Active Frequency, a web and mobile consultancy, and has presented onstage at Google I/O
Local Visits by Taiwanese Delegation
A group of 15 will be traveling to Boston from Taiwan, including startup founders, journalists and members of Taiwan’s government and quasi-governmental institutions. Here they will get acquainted with the local startup community and begin building long term relationships with local organizations.
Members will visit and become acquainted with several entrepreneurship ecosystems, including:
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MassChallenge, the largest start-up facilitator and competition program in the world, located in Boston’s newly developed and booming Seaport district.
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The Cambridge Innovation Center, a complete startup ecosystem that boasts more startups than anyplace on the planet, in the heart of Cambridge’s Kendall Square
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Bolt, a new, world class hardware startup facilitator that features over $1million in machinery and equipment, and a 9,000 square foot shop floor in the heart of old Boston
Members will also tour some of MIT’s most innovative research and entrepreneurship institutes, including
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MIT’s world renowned Media Lab, which focuses on a broad range of human-machine research, focused on machines with common sense, viral communications, “smart” prostheses, advanced sensor networks and more.
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The MIT Senseable City Lab, which is pioneering a new approach to studying our urban environment, using the vast network of already deployed sensors and smart devices.
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The Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, MIT’s facilitator and ecosystem, which provides connections needed for MIT students to become entrepreneurs.
The entourage will also pay a visit to local Boston technology startup Level Up, which is pioneering a new electronic payment system
The Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) hosted a welcome lunch on October 16th, and Taiwan’s Institute for Information Industry (III), the organizer of Taiwan IDEAS Day Boston, hosted a thank you banquet at the Harvard Faculty Club.
Mass Challenge / III Memorandum of Understanding Signing
Mass Challenge and the Institute for Information Industry (III) will sign a Memorandum of Understanding to cooperate on startup facilitation and strengthen cooperative bonds between the two institutions.