June 3, 2016
Five teams from Jamaica, one from Guyana and two each from Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago, emerged as the top 10 tech-entrepreneurs from a total of 25 groups on day one of the PitchIT Caribbean’s tech-entrepreneurship competition and showcase, in Montego Bay, Jamaica today.
The teams include Samelogic, ClickPaye, Money Mobile Solutions, MekUp Jamaica and Bookfusion of Jamaica; Directory.GY of Guyana; Medi Revu and Caribbean Transit Solutions of Barbados and Reach and Wanderscape of Trinidad and Tobago.
PitchIT Caribbean is being staged by the Caribbean Mobile Innovation Project (CMIP) which is part of the Entrepreneurship Programme for Innovation in the Caribbean, currently being executed by the University of the West Indies Consortium, with funding from the Government of Canada and the World Bank.
The aim of PitchIT Caribbean is to enhance the region’s mobile app development ecosystem.
Twenty-five teams consisting of mobile app developers from seven countries across the Caribbean have been, since Friday morning, pitching to a panel of judges and an audience of regional and global investors in a bid to win US$5000 in seed funding to develop their businesses and a spot in PitchIT business accelerators across the Caribbean.
Other entrants were Carib Auto Express of Barbados; Linkup Group of Dominica; GetThere, Eventah, Pandosoft of Jamaica; Ash.co of St. Kitts and Nevis; FARMS of St. Lucia and Kewsplus, SoftDev Interactive, Wallet, Injury Care Utility, Caribbean Treasure, Drop and Lifeball Technologies of Trinidad and Tobago.
Training manager of the CMIP, Craig Perue in explaining the format of the competition, prior to its official start on Friday morning, explained that the project commenced more than 16 months ago - in January 2015 - but only became highly visible in February 2016. “We had approximately 300 persons across the entire Caribbean – from Suriname in the South all the way up to Belize, who applied. A hundred and fifty persons registered for our training programme and participated in 12 weeks of training. From that 150 persons, 80 teams entered the PitchIT Challenge Competition. And today we have 25 finalists with us,” he said.
Perue said the last two days of the preparation phase which took place on June 1 and 2 in Montego Bay, consisted of a boot camp during which the finalists spent copious amounts of time working on their pitch decks, under the supervision of six expert facilitators.
While acknowledging that the Caribbean was highly placed on the world's list of countries with the most start-up businesses, in most cases they were not offering non-traditional or new products and services, which underscored the relevance of the CMIP. “
It’s worth noting that according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, two countries – Jamaica and Trinidad are already in the top 10 in the world in terms of entrepreneurial activity. But it is important to note what this means; it means is that we have lots of starters; lots of new businesses founded each year. There were over 3,000 companies new registered just in Jamaica, in 2014. What is needed therefore, ladies and gentlemen, is not simply more new business registrations; we need more innovation,” he said.
“We don’t simply need more of the same; what we need is new business models; innovative business models, new products and new markets and that is what we are here to assess,” he added.
