(From L-R) Mr. Den Macaranas of Vigattin Radio, Mr. Paul Paju of Smart DevNet, Ms. Riela Isabel Antonio & Mr. Marlo Lao of Team Quotable, Mr. Jaymar Cabebe & Mr. Earl Martin Valencia of Ideaspace Foundation, Ms. Arne Barcelo of Vigattin Radio, Atty. Bayani Abesamis, and Mr. Elison Barcelo of Vigattin.
Last Saturday on Vigattin Radio they talked about the recently concluded AngelHack Manila Spring 2014 and discussed technopreneurship in the Philippines. Angelhack is the largest hackathon in the world at the Manila leg was recently finished; it was held at A-SPACE Manila last July. The event was attended by more than 100 developers, coders and designers and 36 teams competed.
With anchors Den Macaranas and Arne Barcelo including guest anchor Paul Pajo (evangelist from Smart DevNet) they discussed the event together with Earl Martin Valencia (President and Co-founder) and Jaymar Cabebe (Designer) of Ideaspace, Riela Isabel Antonio & Marlo Lao of Team Quotable (winning team of AngelHack Manila Spring 2014) and Atty. Bayani Abesamis (who is based in Ontario).
Earl told Vigattin Radio that we can bring the best of the world in the technology in the Philippines. He never thought that it would be possible that the Philippines can have a high concentration of investor from Silicon Valley and Europe. “Now is the time for the community to engage with each other and collaborate because we can’t do it by ourselves. We have to do it together and make the Philippines known in the tech world,” he said.
Anchor Arne Barcelo then asked guest anchor Paul Pajo if how many applicants participated in the AngelHack Manila that was sponsored by Smart DevNet. He responded that there are 500 who registered but there are less people who attended and when it comes to pitching he told Vigattin Radio that out of 32 teams they picked 12 and from the 12 they choose the top 2 and from there they decided who will be the winner.
Chosen teams pitched to a panel of judges that are composed of at least twenty professionals. Paul Paju told us that Kamrin Klauschies (AngelHack community manager) was so very happy because for her it was one of the most amazing hackathons where the set of judges are just like what they have in San Francisco.
One of the judges was Melvin Ryan Fetalvero who used to work for Chikka, he was the first runner up of last year’s Angelhack. Now he is a full blown technopreneur and wants to give back to the community. He is part of the code reviewer of AngelHack Manila. “You see how all systems intertwine and grow and support one another, it’s fascinating how to see it,” Paju uttered.
Team Quotable was the winning team and bagged the grand prize for this year’s AngelHack Manila Spring 2014. Marlo Lao told Vigattin Radio that Quotable is based on the idea of their team member Luigi Dolosa and it is an app where one can save, curate and share notable lines that they can read on the web. It will be an extension that can collect the highlighted text that you made and the app will categorized them.
Afterwards, Riela discussed on how she has done the pitching. She told us that it was very easy because she’s the one who conducted users acceptance test and she was immediately addicted. “I was just generating contents for demo purposes and I end up sitting there for more than one hour, reading articles and highlight it,” she said.
When asked if what’s the role of Ideaspace in having this kind of talents, Jaymar told Vigattin radio that there role is to provide entrepreneurs investors and help them create something meaningful for the country. He is the one who helps to design their actual product and also the design processes so that a startup can move forward quickly. “We do workshops with the entire group and also try to cater our support to the needs of those specific entrepreneurs or teams,” he said.
On how equity works on crowd funding, Atty. Bayani Abesamis told us that there is a need for capital funding of startups that’s why he is asked to draft an equity crowd funding bill. He believed that there can be an entrepreneurial revolution here in the Philippines so there is a need for such bill because our capital here is very limited. “Equity crowd funding is offering equity or shares in the company to the world at large that’s the crowd,” he said.
Meanwhile they asked answered from the listeners. When asked if when Quotable will be available in Google Play Store or App Store, Riela answered that they need to wait because they just recently win the AngelHack Manila Spring and it will be in development very soon for public usage and they will improve it.
The winning team of AngelHack Manila will get a spot at the Spring 2014 Hackcelerator program in the US. They will also be introduced to startup incubators and investors in Silicon Valley. Aside from this, Quotable team won about $20, 000 worth of prizes including mobile devices and Microsoft software. They took home technology packages from Microsoft, Opera, Voyage and Nokia Maps.
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