Startup Dhaka along with Grameenphone celeberates Grameenphone Demo Day
On May 12, GP House showcased an event, presenting twelve ‘startup’ companies before successful entrepreneurs, companies and top management executives from Grameenphone. The program initiated with a lightning round with 2 minute-long presentations for each contestant or representative of the respective ‘Startup’ Brand. The following ‘Startup’ ideas have been presented:
Tapstar
An online gaming app firm, which makes various games for Android. You can find their games on Google Play.
Lightcastle Partners
An analytics, planning and intelligence firm. It focuses on businesses in emerging markets.
Loosemonkies
An online Human Resources/Jobs firm. It serves as a personalized profile driven job portal.
Monasa Learning Centre
Monasa is an after school learning center for children where learning is innovative and fun.
Team Engine OCR
A firm building a Bangla OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software, which makes Bengali documents searchable online.
Singularity’s Lifeline
This can help people seek blood donors via mobile apps.
Bongo
Bongo provides access to Bengali movies and TV shows, via a Netflix-like service as 3G spreads across the country.
City Scope
A real time Dhaka city traffic data system, which uses Google maps, and around the clock statistics.
Dhaka Beats
This startup is devoted to keeping tabs on events happening across Dhaka city. They cover all sorts of events and provide information, venues and dates to customers.
After the lightning round, a discussion on networking commenced with Sana and Sayma Rahman of Grameenphone, Sajid Rahman and Shabab E. Khan from Bangladesh Enterprise Institute took seat. The speakers spoke at length about entrepreneurship in Bangladesh, its exciting prospects, obstacles, and the business environment. Issues like poor internet connectivity and the difficulties budding on entrepreneurs faces due to legislature and policy regulations have been addressed. During the discussion, everyone in the room were encouraged to build strong networks and communities throughout the country, and requested to spread this word of advice to all the young entrepreneurs in the country. Erlend Prestgard, Director Strategy & Project Management at Grameenphone, announced that they are looking to work with companies that create content or technological services in the areas of Agriculture, Health & Education.
Samad Miraly (co-founder of Startup) ended the event with a concluding note about Grameenphone, encouraging them to increase their participation as ‘enablers’ rather than just a corporate powerhouse, and to aid startup businesses.
