Singapore shines in IBM Watson APAC challenge

• Two teams in the top 3 amongst the total 12 winners
• Winners now part of the growing Watson Ecosystem, says IBM

IBM Corp has announced the 12 winners of the first IBM Watson Asia Pacific New Venture Challenge, a pitch competition targeting startups and tech companies to build new cognitive-enabled applications that can solve a variety of local industry needs.
 
Winning the top three spots were Singaporean teams Raydar and Snapask, as well as Silverlake MyNet from Malaysia, under the smart lifestyle, smart city and smart banking categories.
 
The remaining nine teams from Singapore, India and South Korea include Cogniant.co, Embodied Sensing, Konversations, LocoBuzz, MobiCart, mClinica, Stock Flock, Swizzle, and Zumata, IBM said in a statement.
 
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The six-week challenge attracted developers, software engineers, data scientists, and entrepreneurs from across the region, and gave them access to the full suite of Watson cognitive services and mentorship from IBM and industry executives in the lead-up to the final pitch showdown, the company said.
 
The winners selected by the judging panel were evaluated on the feasibility of the use case, the degree of uniqueness and solution differentiation, and their vision of how the app will address the identified issue for a specific target market.
 
The winning teams will be the first cohort to join the Tag.Pass for IBM Watson accelerator programme, jointly run by IBM and Infocomm Investments Pte Ltd announced in February.
 
The winners will also become part of the growing Watson Ecosystem, a community of more than 80,000 developers globally that are tapping into Watson APIs (application programming interfaces) through the Watson Developer Cloud to pilot, test and deploy new business ideas.
 
“The Watson Ecosystem is fundamental to the transformative power of cognitive technology across industries,” said IBM Singapore managing director Tim Greisinger.
 
“Our ecosystem growth is enabling our partners across the world to build a variety of applications and services embedded with cognitive technology, and Asia Pacific is poised for remarkable advancements in this area,” he added.
 
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