Visiting Shanghai for the weekend I took the opportunity to join Techyizu Demo Day Open event this Sunday.

Techyizu is a young organization born last year in October but their founder have actually been organizing Barcamp in Shanghai since 2009. Demo Day is their second event (first one was Barcamp a few months ago) and is a startup-up competition where the 6 best team join for 1 day of coatching on their pitch (close event only for mentors and teams on Saturday) and then pitch in front of the entrepreneur community on Sunday (hoping to get media attention and angel funding).

The event attracted ~150 people, from what I could see 2/3 expats eventhough Chinese was mainly used in presentations.
I was impressed that they really trie dto make the event as bilingual as possible – a very tricky challenge: the MC was bilingual, most presentations were displayed on 2 screens with different language. In the second half the MC called out who was not understanding Chinese and asked them to request their neighbor to help translate. Good ice breaker 🙂

Pitches were quite mature and answered very well what problem they were solving and what differentiate them from existing solution. 1-2 pitches was a bit too technical (and in Chinese) so I didnt quite get it, and 2 of them particularly marker my attention.

Trader analytics
My favorite presentation was also the winner of the competition: Trader analytics, a game for aspiring traders that provide you some kind of simulation plateform to practice your trading skills (or just learn the basics). It reminded me a bit of a online poker room -which can be very addictive- and because it targets a very specific market (future bankers, banking firms HR department…) that the CEO knows very well, I can see a great potential. As this game can also be used as a training tool for investment firms, and this kind of firm can spend a lot on training…a good product can make good money! Their team is already complete and seems very well balanced on skills. If I myself had some angel money to invest, I would have give it to them without hesitation.

Mamazuofan
An idea largely inspired by the French website born in Startup Weekend Paris, Super-marmite.com It is a community website to connect non-professional cook with potential buyer. We all know how food in important in the French Culture, yes we are well know to take 2h lunch break… Well this website answer a need for young urban who lose the habits to cook but still wanna enjoy home-made food: buy it from your neighbors! I watched the pitch video of Super-marmite a few months ago and loved how the idea was born. The founder – a yougn gentleman- was coming back home from university wondering what he will be eating for dinner and start imaging all the things his neighbor was currently cooking and wished : if only I could have access to their home-made food!!!! An that's it, an idea was born!
The other attractive part of the idea is that, we complain a lot of urbanism and the fact that we don't know our neighbors, big cities are not safe… and this service contribute to give a sense of community in big metropole and give an excuse to get to know people you would usually not talked to. That's great and I though at that time, their is no reason not to bring this idea in other cities around the world, we all deal with this 2 issues:
– no time to cook anymore
– dont know our neighbor.
The presenter for Mamazuofan was French and very humorous, he made the presentation very entertaining. Also, at the very end, he featured 2 starred users and I was suprised that one of them was from my hometow, a tiny French island near Mauritius, called Reunion island. And for that the project deserves a few more points 🙂

Demo Day was also very valuable just to have an occasion to meet all the makers of Shanghai tech community, techyizu but also 3DS (3 day startup that prepare a shanghai event for october), startup weekend that will have their shanghai event in July, a new coworking space called People Squared…. Many initiatives going on and it is good to see them!
As for iWeekend, we are considering bringing the event to Shanghai but it has to make sense with the existing community. To be continued…