The following is part of a journal series written by Pintails engineers during their trip to San Francisco as winners of the AngelHack global hackathon series. By winning the Jakarta event, the Pintails team were entitled to participate in the AngelHack accelerator program, pitch at the Global Demo Day, and participate at TechCrunch Disrupt. This post by Asep Priandana describes his view of the Global Demo Day for AngelHack winners, held on 5 September.
The Global Demo Day for AngelHack winners was held on 5 September at NestGSV, a co-working space and entrepreneurship center, in Redwood City. The demo day was the culmination of the spring AngelHack series of events with 36 startups from all over the world pitching on the same day. I noticed a good balance of hardware and software startups that made it to the final stage.
Among the 36 startups, it seems that there was a clear split between the hardware and software startups at the event. Prety much all of the hardware projects came from the US while the software projects are almost entirely European or Asian in origin.
There’s a number of startups that caught my eye at the event, one of which is Arcticpod, a device that promises to help us get a good night’s sleep and save energy at the same time. Driblet is a device to monitor water usage at home and can be controlled from the web or from mobile devices. Hotspot is a real world analytics tool which calculates the crowd density by reading the cellular signal being broadcasted from a particular area. Hotspot also happens to be the winner which received the USD 25,000 from AngelHack.
While startups get to pitch, we also were allocated a booth to showcase our products. We didn’t know that there was going to be a booth so with very little preparation, we set up our booth with an iPad showcasing our app. Ours was very barren in comparison to other startups who had set up all sorts of banners, signs, and attributes, but apparently it wasn’t too bad. A good number of people visited our booth looking to find out what we do, about the e-commerce field, and startups in Indonesia. Many of them were also curious of our presentation and our BlackBerry 10 app.
Speaking of our presentation, we received a lot of help from Greg Gopman, AngelHack CEO, in polishing our deck which we completed the day before. He made sure that our deck explained why we picked the BlackBerry 10 platform for our app instead of iOS or even Android which are dominant in the US.
The Global Demo Day event didn’t have that much of a crowd unfortunately, many in the audience are students of campuses around the venue or AngelHack participants themselves, there weren’t that many investors or non AngelHack people.
There seemed to be a lack of coordination between the SF AngelHack team and the local organizing team in Jakarta about what’s involved during our time at AngelHack accelerator such as global demo day itself. We weren’t informed about the availability of a booth or about business cards from AngelHack which were meant to be exchanged during the demo day, because we saw that other teams had them.
Overal though, this is a good event to get startup people from all over the world to gather in one place for mentoring purpose and to get to know one another so we can expand out network.
What surprised us about the event is that many of the winners of each AngelHack city actually came from people who worked at digital agencies, an industry that is often shunned by tech startup companies because agencies don’t build their own products, but create apps and games for client projects and campaigns.
As it turns out, AngelHack shows us that many of these digital agency people are skilled enough to create cool products on their own. Because Radita and I also work for digital agencies separately, it inspires us to develop our own products.
