IBM Watson Sparks Innovation across Asia Pacific

SINGAPORE – 11 MARCH 2016 – IBM(NYSE: IBM) today announced the 12 winners of the first IBM Watson Asia-Pacific New Venture Challenge, a pitch competition targeting start-ups and tech companies to build new cognitive-enabled applications that can solve a variety of local industry needs.

The six-week challenge attracted a diverse mix of developers, software engineers, data scientists, and entrepreneurs from across the region, giving 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 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.

Winning the top three spots of the Watson New Venture Challenge were Singaporean teams, Raydar and Snapask, and 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.

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 at Build Amazing Startups Here’s (BASH’s) first anniversary party, the programme contributes to Singapore’s Smart Nation vision of using technology innovations to improve life and business throughout the country. The programme offers members co-working space at IIPL’s BASH, education, mentoring and demo days.

They winners will also become part of IBM’s growing Watson Ecosystem, a community of more than 80,000 developers globally that are tapping into Watson APIs through the Watson Developer Cloud to pilot, test and deploy new business ideas. The ecosystem represents more than 500 partners across 17 industries and disciplines, 100 of which have already introduced commercial cognitive enabled apps, products and services to the market.

“The Watson Ecosystem is fundamental to the transformative power of cognitive technology across industries,” said Tim Greisinger, Managing Director, IBM Singapore. “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.  The Watson New Venture Challenge is just the beginning and it shows there are many brilliant ideas in this region we can’t wait to see come to life.”