The hunt of the world’s best technology startup continued in Cape Town thursday as eleven startup regional finalists battled to be crowned winner of Startup World: Cape Town.
The judges — Andy Volk, VP of Developer Relations at MXit, Matthew Buckland, of Creative Spark / Founder of Memeburn, Vincent Maher, Founder at Motribe and Adrian Varkel, Head of Ogilvy Interactive Cape Town – scored Pashash the highest, crowning it the winner of Startup World: Cape Town.
Pashash is the first mobile app funded by the Google Umbono incubator and it is named after the South African slang for something that is considered “cool”.
The service is a mixture of Instagram and Pinterest. When you see an item you want to buy, you take a picture of it, tag the store and price and share it. Everything you share is then added to your profile, which serves as a virtual reflection of the things you love.
Following the judges decision, Pashash‘s founder Faheem Kajee will now compete in the Startup World grand final in San Francisco 2013.
Over 100 startups applied for Africa and eleven were chosen to compete in the Cape Town final held at Frieda’s on Bree.
The other Cape Town finalists included: 5 Ounces, Snapplify, Dream Mobile, Every1mobile, Calibre Apps, Myows, Business Optics, Hiring Bounty, SuperSimpleSurvey and MyDorpie.
Not even a power outage could stop proceedings as the startups continued on, pitching in the dark. Each was given three minutes to pitch after which they received two minutes of valuable feedback from the judges.
We would like to thanks our Cape Town partners Ogilvy, Cape Town Tourism, Escape To The Cape, Icon Villas, media partner Silicon Cape and advisors Hannah Deall and Chris Rawlinson.