The 5 Top Winners at mLab, East Asia’s First Mobile Innovation Challenge

mLab is an initiative from the World Bank and Infodev to support the startup and mobile innovation scene in Vietnam and across the world. It’s a newcomer to the Vietnam startup scene event circuit and has been making a few interesting splashes lately by sponsoring events like Mobile Day and Start Me Up. Along with that, mLab organized a cool hackathon-to-incubation event last week.

In total, 106 mobile teams participated and 25 teams passed to the final round on May 23rd. Of those 25, each of them got to present a 15-minute presentation of their product before the judges selected five teams as winners. The winners split up a total enticing sum of VND 300 million ($14,400) and also get the chance to be incubated by mLab.

Let’s take a look at the winners:

• Tapi, an Android app that is designed to help users find and explore all the hottest events in Vietnam.
• Linpax is an iOS app that uses barcodes to allow users with smartphones to purchase a product by scanning a QR code. The product is then shipped directly to their home afterwards. It’s one attempt at growing mobile commerce in Vietnam.
• New Way is an Android app that allows tourists and locals to check out all the best street food and roadside cuisine in Vietnam.
• MGTS Taxi is a location-based taxi finer app for Android.
• Terrabook is an Android and iOS app that we wrote about before that basically creates books for children on mobile operating systems.

There was also a special award that went to Kid’s Garden, an iOS app which is rather similar to Terrabook, in that it is about teaching children new vocabulary through mobile apps.

mLab is also planning yet another hackathon for the end of June, and Keewi is also organizing a hackday for June 8th. There’s a rumor of a product hackathon coming in August. Looks like Vietnam’s startup scene is heating up.