Loyalty-card startup Stamp took home the top prize on Saturday afternoon at the Thailand satellite of e27’s Echelon Ignite 2013 . The company will go on to Echelon’s final round in Singapore in June.
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The Stamp team celebrates winning Echelon Ignite 2013.
With well over 200 people in attendance (and god knows how many mobile devices), the Thailand satellite was reduced to standing-room-only even before its opening remarks. Keynotes followed, covering best practices, company culture, the mobile app market in Thailand and eCommerce.
“You can say no to [venture capital] anytime if you believe you can grow yourself,” cautioned Mr. Patai Padungtin, the founder of Builk, which won last year’s Echelon contest and subsequently received $400,000 in funding.
The keynotes were really just a lengthy appetizer, though. The real fun was the startup pitches. Each of the 12 invited startups was given 10 minutes to pitch to a panel of judges, many the heads of regional VC funds. The judges then had five minutes of Q&A to grill the speaker.
Tensions ran high, and a few speakers had to be cut off for running over time. Delivery styles ranged from nervous to charming to strikingly similar to a movie-trailer narrator, and no startup event would be complete without a healthy dose of whimsical branding.
The Thai winner, Stamp, is an app that replaces the age-old customer loyalty program of paper cards and hole punchers. Instead, customers download a simple app, and vendors use a physical stamp device to leave their mark. Yes, there is an actual little plastic device, developed and made in Thailand, that is used by vendors to “stamp” your phone.
Though they won’t get a free ticket to Singapore, the other contestants had some great ideas on display and are a great sign of things to come from tech in Thailand.
Infinit Closet, which already won first place at Bangkok Startup Weekend and came in seventh at the global Startup Weekend contest, is a social fashion platform for borrowing, trading, and selling clothes.
Noonswoon is the latest entry into the dating app scene. It draws from a pool of your Facebook friends’ friends and is geared towards people who want a high degree of privacy. Notably, it also only gives you one profile to view per day, so you can’t just spend your day perving away on profiles.
The founder of Mnemonic, a user-driven photo-moderation app, came all the way from Russia to attend Echelon. The app turns photo moderation (keeping inappropriate photos off websites) into a money-generating game. For those of you who already like looking at disgusting and dirty photos, look no further.
ClickSendGift is a social “gifting” platform for referral marketing. When a customer sends a gift using ClickSendGift, the platform rewards the sender and also generates social media coverage. Thus, companies get social-media exposure, and customers get rewards.
No, it’s not a new cosmetic surgey procedure. HipFlat is another contender in the crowded real estate website sector, but it does things differently by aggregating data from other sources and creating analytics to help guide buyers and sellers.
Cardsmile’s Tabshier hopes to replace traditional cash registers with an easy-to-use tablet app. Kinda is a sharp, mobile-only food-delivery service with a hammerhead shark as a logo. Privépass is a “portal” that connects users to different premium travel products. Splashpost is a business tool for generating sales with Facebook likes. Tourn is a platform for matching bloggers with ‘native advertising’ buyers.
Now in its fourth year, Echelon is a conference and contest that puts Southeast Asia’s most promising startups in front of seasoned entrepreneurs and investors.
Originally located in Singapore alone, the conference has grown to include nine “satellites” in other countries in the Southeast Asia region. This year’s satellites were Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.
The satellites hold conferences in March and April, and a panel of judges picks winners who then compete at the main, two-day conference, which will be held in Singapore on June 5th and 6th
