At Start-Up Weekend Taipei the Winner is… FoodJing

The inaugural Start-up Weekend Taipei wrapped up yesterday evening, and local foodie site FoodJing.com emerged the winner. For impressing the judges with a lively presentation and promising web and mobile app prototypes, the FoodJing team walked away with a cheque for NT$60,000 (US$2,100).

Led by founder Adarsh Menon, FoodJing aims to list the menus of restaurants in Taipei, for an in-depth look at what you can eat inside. The service will also incorporate user reviews, with a sort of upvote/downvote system.

Adarsh Menon and his FoodJing team pick up the winner's cheque. Image courtesy of TechOrange.com

At the moment, there’s no indication of how Menon’s team might monetize FoodJing, or how they could make it more social, like its ‘game’-like location-based service (LBS) competitors such as Vpon, Foursquare or Jiepang.

One path forward might be to follow the Southeast Asia-oriented app Menoo, which we looked at last week. It mashes-up menu-listings, location, and even NFC, and already has 38,000 venues listed in Indonesia alone.

Taiwan-oriented start-up site TechOrange did a sterling job of covering the whole Startup Weekend Taipei event, including live-tweeting the finale. Its chief blogger, Jeremy Brand Yuan, checked up on founder Menon’s background, and reported:

Adarsh Menon of FoodJing indicated that he may well take the business further depending on the availability of investment. He said that he pitched this specific idea … because it was a more capital-intensive project appropriate for a larger team and the investor judges.

Menon, a Taiwan resident, came to Taiwan to teach English but has used his computer science degree to start a pair of language learning websites that served as the technical foundation and entrepreneurial push for FoodJing.

Hit the source link below for the full results from the Taipei event, and also check out this cheeky introductory video by the FoodJing team, to the tune of Killing Me Softly:

[Source: TechOrange]