If the kind of Kingston BETA we had on Thursday April 25th is any indication of the kind of 2013 we’re going to have, then the word awesome will not even be enough. We had a guest speaker talking about a hot button topic – Mr Livingstone Morrison- Deputy Governor, Bank of Jamaica who spoke about Mobile Money and the Opportunities for Entrepreneurs and the Q & A section was hot with information and no holds barred revelations and suggestions.
We had a 4 person panel of entrepreneurs and developers – Lloyd Laing- Founder JL Mobile
Gordon SWaby – Founder, Edufocal.com, Khary SHarpe – Founder, Bakari Digital, Wayne Jones Jr – Founder, Hybrid Tech talking about STARTUP CITY: Kingston- How to make the city a hub for tech entrepreneurship & development. This was engaging and challenging to to the business and government officials who were in attendance.
We had 3 teams pitch their tech ideas and a full house 130 attendees. All at the headquarters of our gold sponsor JAMPRO-Jamaica’s Trade and Investment Agency. Our other Gold Sponsor was Jamaica Gleaner/DIGJamaica and our Silver Sponsor was My Virtual Offices.
We had 3 teams pitching with 2 registered teams as no shows.
THE TEAMS
#1: Team FarmScore:
Farmscore is credit score service to banks for our local farmers leveraging open data. Its called FarmScore. Basically, the web application will pull open data through the Open Data API under the following categories:
1. Economic data (market size, government spending)
2. Farming data (prices, agricultural output)
3. Population data (employment data, distribution of population)
More data sources will be added as required and will form the inputs for our model which determines a credit score or Farmer Risk Profile which the banks can use in assessing the inherent risk in lending to a particular farmer. In addition, other outputs of the proposed application are:
Farmer self evaluation
Location based risk profile
Product based risk profile
#2 Team Student Resident Web ( SRW)
Student Resident Web-It is a online business that advertise and manage housing accommodation specifically for students who are attending tertiary institution across Jamaica. It will cater to both Home owners and students by offering package deals and subscription period respectively. the website is currently been develop by a developer and we are looking to do a soft launch this summer by doing a manual run of the business without the website.
#3. BlastJA
BlastJA is a deal site for Jamaicans.
Link to Site here