Singapore’s Teamie wins Startup Arena competition, and a US$10,000 check

There were plenty of distractions at Startups in Asia, the first-ever tech startup event organized by Asian tech blog Penn Olson — including a couple of Kimono-clad ladies and helpers in tight skirts.

But the star of the show remained the Startup Arena, a pitching competition where 19 startups vied for the top prize of a US$10,000 check, as well as some Lenovo laptops and Nokia Lumia 800 mobile phones.

The winner, announced yesterday, on day two of the conference, turned out to be Singapore-based startup Teamie, which is building a social learning platform that aims to make learning more fun, social, and intuitive.

The judges for the competition consists of investors and entrepreneurs like Ash Singh, CEO at InteractiveSG (which is producing Angel’s Gate), Daniel Saito, co-founder at SkySQL and an angel investor, Eric Koh, CTO at Jobscentral and partner at Iconic Ventures, and James Tan, co-founder of 55tuan (his experience in China) and managing partner at Quest VC.

Teamie, founded by Shivanu Shukla and Ashwin Singh, is building a tool that allows students to collaborate with one another, complete quizzes, and submit assignments. Teachers can also use Teamie to track and analyse student performance, as well as grade assignments.

There’s even some gamification elements thrown in: Students will be placed on a leaderboard and ranked according to how much they interact with others.

Teamie hopes to target two industries: The education sector, which consists of universities and private schools, and also the corporate training sector.

First runner-up:  Innova Tech (Singapore)

Prizes were also given to the runner-ups. In second place was Innova Tech, a startup which has the simple aim of preventing you from losing your stuff.

To achieve this, it uses a really thin black device (picture), which can be slipped into a wallet, bag, or even taped to a child. Paired with a smartphone app, the phone will ring once the user steps too far away from the black device. The distance is customizable.

What happens if a user misses the ring? They will be able to track the last known location of the lost item on the app, which is integrated with Google Maps.

Already, the device has already garnered US$10,000 in sales after being placed on IndieGogo, a US-based crowdsourcing platform. It retails at US$30.