Offline telecom startup takes grand prize at Twitter Hatch contest

The 2015 edition of Twitter Hatch proved to be both exciting and challenging for the participants. Having been picked from over 600 startups at more than 30 countries, the contestants presented their projects in front of a crowd of +200, with a dynamic pitching format of 2 minutes and no slides or demos.

After deliberating, the judging panel, made up of Wayne Chang, Jana Messerschmidt, and Prashant Sridharan, returned to announce the winners.

Taking third place was Haystack, a personalized video news channel you can watch on mobile and desktop.

The runner-up was London-based City Falcon, a crowd-sourced, crowd-curated, real-time financial news platform based on Twitter feeds.

First place and grand prize winner was the San Francisco-based team of Mexican founders running Bridgefy, the mobile messaging app that works without Internet or SMS that is blowing up in South America and the Middle East. The Bridgefy technology, said the founders, is being developed into an SDK that will be adaptable by existing platforms such as Uber, Facebook Chat, Whatsapp, Snapchat, etc. so people can keep using these apps even when they don’t have access to Internet. Taking first place had the founders jumping with joy after hearing their startup be named winner of the international pitching contest.

The Bridgefy team’s prizes included $25,000, personal mentorship from the judges and from Twitter execs, and Twitter ad credits. The team is currently based in San Francisco and is seeking to close its seed round to continue working on connecting the unconnected.

Racing for a reason in Hong Kong : the Bibtag Chip

As said in my past blog, it is the year of the horse and everyone is supposed to run “the race”. So, I did. Last weekend I travelled to Hong Kong as I was invited by a good Mexican friend living and working there to run the 10K run of the Standard Chartered, Hong Kong Marathon.

We were more than 73,000 runners “running for a reason”. It was my first 10K so I wasn’t expecting a great performance as I had trained indoors on a treadmill. The first 4 kilometers were my hard time as the cold wind was affecting my breathing. But once I made a ‘U’ turn I used the wind in my favor and speedup. My time was 1 hour and 15 minutes according to the “MyLaps” Bibtag chip, the official timing system provided for the marathon.

#beerchallenge

So I don’t really know how this chain started (most posts are from Germany and Eastern Europe, so who knowsit is still only beer …not like the neknominations that have gotten out of hand in the UK and Ireland)… for those who don’t know what this is…. there is this thing on Facebook/Instagram/youtube called neknominations where someone is challenged to drink a beer cou sec/bottoms up/a fondo and then if he or she fails to drink that beer in a video and pass it on to three people, that person has to buy a crate of beer for the person who challenged them.

It is indeed a step up from the boring  I will assign you a director, painter.. bla bla bla that most people are doing… and still tame and fun unlike the Australian neknomination which is just a peacock contest where ppl overdo each other rather than have fun.

So we hope the beer challenge string coming from Europe (France, Germany, Czech, etc….) stays a gentleman’s sport like rugby, rather in the riddiculous neknominations that are more like American Pie or Spring Breakers…

Anyways….

So I got challenged by one of my best friends who lives in France, it was kinda fun to do something silly like this and have fun with it……So I did and decided to pass it on to Finland, Spain and left one here in Mexico… might not get done by them, but that just guarantees me a free crate of beer.

My Beer Challenge.. I’m a good sport so I had to do it.

Social Media has finally met the social drinker…

Cheers!

…and please avoid twerking and drink with moderation