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Seedstars World 2014 startup competition kicks off in April
Seedstars World has recently announced that it’s gearing up to continue its global startup competition for emerging markets and fast-growing startup scenes in 2014.
Earlier this year, we saw the 20 regional startup finalists (five of them from Africa) of SeedStars World 2013. Hailing from Dubai to Rio de Janeiro and Seoul to Lagos, these businesses pitched their innovative ideas to a global audience in Geneva, Switzerland in February.
Seedstars World will hit the road in April. The organisers will head to 30 different startup ecosystems like Co-Creation Hub in Nigeria, Startup Chile in Chile and so forth where it will be meeting more than 600 entrepreneurs selected from nearly 2 000 applications.
At the end of 2014, 30 regional winners will be invited to a final round of competition to compete for an equity investment of up to US$500 000.
The 2013 SSW winner was Flitto from South Korea, an innovative crowdsourcing translation platform that gives customers access to all kinds of content in their native language. Flitto has over three millions users from 170 countries and with more than 800 000 translators.
The African startups that participated were SimplePay, which is Nigeria’s answer to secure online payment services, social gaming network Jooist, which enables users to discover games, play with friends, compare scores and share achievements, and South Africa’s Gust Pay, which is a quick and easy mobile payment experience that works in shops and at music events using smartphones and NFC wristbands.
Other African participants include Foyo from Rwanda, which is an application that sends daily SMSes to subscribers about the composition of a balanced diet, and RetailTower, which specialises in creating ecommerce marketing software in Ghana.
The Seedstars World Final Event, in collaboration with the Lift Tech & Innovation conference, will select a winner from a group of semi-finalists, which will be chosen after an extensive round of mentoring and pitching session.
