New ideas for success

Competitors, mentors, speakers and judges at the 54-hour Startup Weekend Bahrain, organised by Batelco and backed by GulfWeekly and other local businesses, hailed the event as a huge success.

Ten teams worked around the clock from Thursday night through to Saturday evening to develop a business model in the hope of winning prizes at the telecom giant’s staff centre in Hamala.

The competing business ideas were entitled Charitime, Paycell, Ally Pha, EveryWeb, Peasy, Future Mobi Network, Student Tube, Gozilla, Recell and Search Bahrain. 

On Saturday evening, each team had to present a business plan in front of a panel of judges made up of experienced senior management and business leaders.

Following in-depth discussions, Charitime was declared the winner, with Students_Tube in second place and Paycell taking the third spot. The top three teams walked away with BD4,000, BD2,000 and BD1,000 respectively.

The final presentations, which were filmed, will now be reviewed by Tenmou, the Bahrain Business Angel Company, with a view to providing any ideas deemed to have economic potential with up to BD20,000 funding to develop and launch as businesses.

The top three teams will be given free enrollment into Bahrain Development Bank’s (BDB’s) Entrepreneurship Development Programme. Additionally, BDB who evaluated the projects during the weekend as part of their Pre-Seed Capital Support Scheme, that is jointly run with Tamkeen and which includes a grant of up to BD5,000, announced that three of the 10 teams – Peasy, Students_ Tube and Ally PHA – have been shortlisted for further evaluation and an announcement will be made soon.

Charitime also picked up the Batelco Innovation Centre’s ‘Ideas’ project prize for coming up with what it considered to be the most innovative project. The award consists of a smart-phone, tablet, personal computer and high-speed broadband connection for one year.
 
Batelco stated its appreciation to the speakers and mentors from inhouse and leading companies including Mumtalakat, Microsoft, Ericsson, BDB, O2, Venture Coms, Dynavate Technologies and 4 Spots, who all volunteered their time to support the teams in developing their business ideas during the event.

Charitime: A website that enables one user to post about a job requirement (for example – ‘I need someone to build me a website’) for a certain amount, and other users volunteer to do the job. Once the job is done, the person who requested the website pays Charitime and the volunteer who completed the work chooses which charity will receive the money paid. Are you feeling charitable today?

Students_Tube: Parents these days can get very busy, and have probably forgotten all about primary school subjects, and therefore find it difficult to help their children with their homework.  Students_Tube is a website that will contain instructional videos of lessons that are concurrent with the unified GCC curriculums of various subjects.

Paycell: A mobile payment method where the customer uses an app to scan a QR code (matrix barcode) to purchase items and charge his credit or debit card for merchants in Bahrain. No need to carry cash or cards, just your phone! The merchants would have software that can easily create the QR codes and can use them in-store, on their websites, even on brochures. For use with websites and brochures, the goods can be collected or delivered.