RISE Hong Kong 2018: Day 2

We arrived at the convention center at 8 am to set up and make sure we had ample time to mentally prepare for the pitch at 9 am; we were the first startup to pitch at the RISE 2018 Pitch Competition.

9 am, everything’s ready, our fearless leader goes up to pitch, and it goes something along these lines:

From all the pitches we’ve ever done, this was one of our better performances. No stumbles, no technical issues, to ‘ahh’s’ ‘umms’ or ‘like’s’. We would find out if we move on to the next round the following morning (we didn’t), but as far as we’re concerned, we already won just by pitching a decent pitch!

The rest of the day went according to script, with start-up founders from all over the world coming over and inquiring about how our tech exactly works, how we can be of use and how we can collaborate. One of the highlights was meeting SONM, a decentralized fog computing startup from Russia. At first, we thought these guys were being wise by calling themselves a fog computing platform because cloud computing is ancient history now. but was not at all the case.  I’m still a bit foggy about the whole concept, but the big idea is to bring data processing power and IoT devices closer together.

Another startup that came by to visit us was a user listening startup, Streamics Lab, which, from what we understood, scours the internet and collects what people say and what feedback people leave about certain brands and products around the internet. I’m sure they do a lot more than that, but it was fascinating to learn that everything we write on the internet can now be interpreted into an emotional attitude we have towards a certain brand, which is hugely valuable to know for every brand.

It became more and more apparent that our product should integrate with as many services as possible. Diversifying when it comes to service integrations will give the company strength and flexibility to maneuver in the future. We don’t want to wind up in a situation where we’re so tightly integrated with one resource, that we lose all agility for future development.

As day 1 came to a close, tired and hungry, we wrapped everything up, dropped our stuff off at our very cozy hotel, and headed to a dinner with our fellow startuppers from AppWorks Accelerator we just graduated from. Describing the rest of the night would be a waste of your valuable time, so I’ll just sum it up and say it was a standard bar scene, made up of hopelessly optimistic idiots like ourselves, trying our best to seem more accomplished than the people we’re talking to.