IN ORDER to make active again the tech start up community in Davao City, which had been dormant for a few years, TechTalks PH, will conduct the 3rd Tech Start Up Weekend which targets to bring together web designers, web developers, and aspiring entrepreneurs.
The 3rd Tech Start Up Weekend in Davao City will be on December 1 to 3 at the PLDT Office, Ponciano.
Mary Rose Rontal, co-founder and community hacker of Dreamspace PH, said the event will teach participants on building a business solution in 54 hours.
She added this would be an exercise both on innovation and entrepreneurship. This initiative is part of her advocacy in strengthening the start up community in Mindanao, particularly in Davao City, as she said that it had been lagging behind Manila and Cebu City.
In the previous Tech Start Up Weekend where most of the participants are students, Rontal said there was no follow through that had happened which might have caused the inactive status of the community. This year, they are targeting about 80 participants.
“What happens is after the weekend, there is no follow through already. It became an exercise for them to build a business over the weekend using business tools by techstarts. Hopefully with this version of Start Up Weekend, we can continue the process even after the start up weekend happens,” she said.
During the event, the participants are to develop solution for high growth businesses which would particularly involve development of mobile and web applications and the internet of things among others.
Rontal cited as examples Davao-based developers Erik Su and John Naranjo who had been successful in the industry and who started building a product for the local community and finding solutions to a specific problem.
Mobile apps Grab and Uber, according to Rontal, also started up as start ups. She said the developers of these have a common goal when starting, and that is to provide solution to the transportation problems.
ICT Davao, Inc. president attorney Samuel Matunog said the digital transformation of the different sectors of the Philippine industry – may it be agriculture, tourism, trade, or health – is crucial in today’s digital age. Matunog added the only way for any business to survive is to go digital.
“Everyone is going digital. You cannot do anything now without being (digitally) equipped. The companies that grow and expand and continue to be profitable are all digitally-equipped companies,” Matunog said.
“Many of the app developers in the region already have many tractions. There are users already. We will use the opportunity to highlight and promote them more. We also want to know how many are already using their app and which direction they are headed because it seemed that Davao do not have a common source of information about these existing apps,” he added.