Booming app innovations boost youth IT entrepreneurship

With a growing number of local youths participating in information technology (IT) entrepreneurship in recent years, the industry is seeing a diverse range of innovations, many with the intention of improving everyday life via mobile apps.
Awarding prizes to three new concepts — apps that will allow users to locate check-in counters in airports, predict traffic on the road ahead, and seal a special message into a certain location — the annual “InnoICT Business Plan Competition” that concluded yesterday again bore witness to this trend in the industry.
The contest, jointly organized by the Macau New Technologies Incubator Centre (Manetic) and the Tertiary Education Services Office since 2010, aims to foster innovations and promote ICT development in Macau by offering support for the winning teams to convert their business plans into a reality. Initially intended for residents who are studying at a local tertiary education institution, the competition was later expanded to accept entries from Macau students studying abroad.
This year, the contest saw the participation of 31 teams comprising of 90 students, with 19 teams from local institutes and the rest from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and England.
Standing out from the 31 submissions, engineer Lo Kuok Chi’s design for a Bluetooth indoor micro-localization system was crowned the champion for its potential to be used in a variety of different ways.
The electrical engineer, who previously studied part-­time at the Open University of Hong Kong, introduced his app as a way to allow drivers to record their parking location in an indoor lot and later find their way back to their parked car through Bluetooth positioning. He explained that the app needs tailor-made maps for each venue, such as airports and shopping malls. The app will not only assist general users but also guide people with visual impairment.
Manetic’s executive director, Gibert Chan, told the Times that “the winning design has enormous potential to be applied in a wide range of fields, which gives it a good chance of succeeding and being further developed.” He added: “the first runner-up submission is a novel idea that we have never seen before.”
Representing the first runner-up team, Chim Chi Wai, a senior undergraduate from the National Taiwan University, explained that their mobile app allows users to leave a message at a chosen location, specifying that the message can only be retrieved from that precise position.
“It’s not only text messages but also audio, images and videos; all these messages will be kept in Cloud storage,” he said. The youngster added that although Macau’s IT industry hasn’t matured, his team is planning to set up a company here and launch their app while they finish studying. “Because most of our team members are from Macau; besides, Macau has been promoting entrepreneurship,” he explained.
Chim and his team are not alone in planning an IT startup in Macau. Ms Chen Min-Chi, studying information technology at the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, has also decided to move to Macau with her teammate after graduation to complete and implement  their traffic monitoring system.
“We’ve seen many applications demonstrating real-time traffic conditions, but our software is able to predict traffic through data-­processing such as vehicle speed,” she explained.
Apart from cash prizes, the winning teams will all receive support in registering their business and incubation services from the sponsors to help convert their business plan into a reality. With the competition in its sixth year, Mr Gilbert Chan recognized that “many of the previous winners have established their startups and are to date running a sustainable business.”
“They have been providing various services to government departments and organizations, especially through app development,” he said. However, he added that the lack of human resources is still causing a bottleneck in their long-term development plans.
The new champion, Lo Kuok Chi, further acknowledged that the quality of resources being put into the IT industry differs greatly from those contributed by the neighboring city of Hong Kong, a better place for entrepreneurship than Macau.
“Whether due to the well-­established grooming of engineers, or the suitability of supporting facilities, HK already has all that and that’s what Macau needs to think of,” he suggested.