entrepreneurship – Kendime Notlar

The winners of IBM SmartCamp Istanbul 2014 are announced!

This year, IBM SmartCamp finals, which brought together entrepreneurs, investors and mentors, took place at Startup Istanbul event. 6 companies competed at the breath-taking finals. “Borda” from Turkey, came in first place for health category while “My VLE” from Morocco retained the first rank for the general category.

Istanbul – 30 Sep. 2014: IBM SmartCamp Istanbul, where next generation and innovative companies that present solutions for the fundamental problems the world faces, including energy, health, e-government competed, took place on September 30^th during Etohum’s Startup Istanbul event, held at Lutfi Kirdar Congress Center.

6 finalists competed to win the prize at IBM SmartCamp Istanbul, which was organized for the fourth consecutive time. In the end, Turkish company “Borda”, which provides products and solutions focusing on RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) and RTLS (Real-Time Locating System) management applications and any type of asset management services to hospital boards, received ‘Healthcare Award’ For the general category, “My VLE” from Morocco, which provides e-learning solution, won the Best Entrepreneur of Year North Africa & Turkey award. “Bilims” from Turkey, a collaborative scenario based e-learning platform was selected as the “People’s Choice” by votes through social media and Internet. At the Mentor Day which was held a day before, Borda and Intest, innovative solution focusing on test engineering shared the first rank for the Best Entrepreneur of Year for Turkey.
More than 50 companies applied for IBM SmartCamp Istanbul this year. These companies were invited for a face-to-face interview in Ankara and Istanbul. Most of the startups were born on Cloud and advanced on “IOT” field. And, almost 80% are using analytics & big data and mobile to create Smarter Planet solutions. Sounds like a strong field of startups!

Startup Istanbul event was available on live stream. And there was a voting for the People’s Choice Award as well!

Their solutions range from smart air conditioning to test engineering and wireless sensor network. Co-sponsoring this year’s event was Etohum, the biggest startup accelerator. The SmartCamp event was a part of Startup Istanbul, a joint event with Etohum, on 29-30 September.

Let’s take a closer look at the startups:

IBM SmartCamp Best Entrepreneur of Year North Africa & Turkey Award: my VLE (Morocco Finalist)

myVLE is an e-Learning platform designed to supplement and support the traditional classroom teaching with a particular focus on developing countries.

IBM SmartCamp People’s Choice Award: Bilims

Bilims is a scenario based collaborative e-learning platform that provides real time communication and collaboration with proven techniques in problem based learning.

IBM SmartCamp HealthCare Award &
Best Entrepreneur of Year Turkey Award: Borda

Borda provides products and solutions focusing on RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) and RTLS (Real-Time Locating System) applications. Develops software and hardware as well as delivers turnkey solutions to its customers. Consistently developed and successfully deployed its, proven, enterprise wide “Hybrid RTLS” solution by combining NFC, UHF Passive and Active RFID technologies into one ultimate software platform called Lighthouse.

Best Entrepreneur of Year Turkey Award: Intest (shared with Borda)

Test engineering is an essential part of the project life cycle in industries such as defense and aerospace, automative, industrial automation and telecommunications. Intest provides outsourcing services, test system design, and consulting services in the test engineering field. Moreover, our firm develops software products in test automation area that are competitive in global scale.

ITECH Electronics is a R&D company that focuses on Wireless Sensor Network, Real Time Locating Systems and Internet of Things applications for businesses. The company was founded in 2011 by the support of Ministry of Science, Industry and Technology. ITECH’s primary project is Wireless Tracking and Control Systems for large working areas to control employees by electronics tags and environmental variables by wireless sensors. Gathering data from sensors and locating system can be used for supply chain management, process control, inventory planning and safety. ITECH is now working on affordable and reachable IoT connectivity platform for small and medium enterprises, whic is called “itech-aim.

(Egypt Finalist)

UserTalk is a voice support solution for online businesses. UserTalk utilizes Voice Over IP (VOIP) technology to enable clients to call customer support agents from any website or smartphone application without having to download additional software.

Agents can answer calls on their laptops or smartphones. UserTalk can also forward calls to on-premise call center hardware using Session Initiation Protocol (SIP).

Our company was recently voted audience choice to pitch at The Next Web Conference Europe and were featured on their TNW publication and our product is being used by some of the leading online businesses in the Middle East.

Last year’s SmartCamp Istanbul winner and SmartCamp Global finalist, Reengen has joined the event and presented a “best practices” talk on IBM SmartCamp for the benefit of this year’s finalists.

Mentor Day: