All posts by : mshahin

In the past some of the greatest technology companies, including Amazon.com, Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, emerged from humble garages in the United States.

But these days, some expect a new wave of tech ventures to arise from emerging markets such as the UAE and other countries in the Middle East and Africa. Some organisations are also awarding big bucks to find the next generation of change-makers from new markets.

Global Innovation through Science and Technology (Gist), ChallengePost, XPrize and Hult Prize collectively have already awarded millions of dollars in their quests to discover new start-up ideas, which often have a significant tech component. And they are planning to offer even more money, and other support such as mentoring, to nurture companies to the next level.

“We focus on early-stage entrepreneurs who have already set up a venture and have signs of traction,” says Ovidiu Bujorean, the senior programme manager for entrepreneurship and innovation at Gist.

“We have judges who are very experienced entrepreneurs and investors that provide validation for [winners] to attract additional funding from local investors or government-backed support.”

The Gist initiative, which supports ventures that are fewer than five years old in key areas such as IT, health care, energy and agriculture, provides funding, training and mentoring to a select group of entrepreneurs across the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

One of its competitions last year was held in Dubai, where a local company called AdvanTag, which also has an office in Canada and has been incubated in Doha, received an honourable mention.

Launched in December 2012, AdvanTag tries to make it easier to collect and redeem loyalty rewards while eliminating hassles such as blackout dates, points that expire and other conditions. The service, which is free to join, provides partner companies with a single loyalty platform where shoppers at certain stores and restaurants can immediately redeem rewards.

“Our main focus market is the Middle East at the moment,” says Mo Shahin, AdvanTag’s 33-year-old co-founder and chief technology officer. Yet he is also exploring opportunities to take AdvanTag to other parts of the world. Some of these possibilities arose after the company participated in the Gist contest, as well as in the MIT Enterprise Forum’s Arab Business Plan Competition in Abu Dhabi in 2012, where AdvanTag was a semi-finalist.

“We like to be around other entrepreneurs and to help to grow the entrepreneurship community within the region, and that is why we participate in these events,” Mr Shahin says.

“Although winning a prize at such events is a good thing, our aim is not just to get the prize,” he adds. “We go to these events to get feedback from experienced mentors as well as build new relationships to help us in the future.”

ChallengePost is another idea catalyst in this sector.

Government agencies and software companies use this online platform to help address various social problems. A few years ago, the World Bank challenged software developers to utilise data and tackle some of the most pressing development issues in the world. The winning team, from Australia, earned a share in more than US$55,000 in cash prizes for developing an app that visualised and compared data points for more than 3,000 economic, social, human development and other indicators.

All told, more than 100 entries were received for this particular challenge from 36 countries, including nearly a third from Africa. One participant who won an honourable mention in the contest went on to lead the Kenya Open Data initiative, which made Kenya the first country in Africa to release government data freely available to the public through a single online portal.

The XPrize Foundation is perhaps the industry’s most well known funder of innovative competitions.

This 18-year-old nonprofit group positions itself as “a facilitator of exponential change” and helped to launch the $1.5 billion private space industry by creating a competition in this sector to make flying in space more affordable.

The foundation is now trying to help overfished and polluted oceans, and it warns that oceans absorb about one quarter of the carbon dioxide that human begins release into the atmosphere, which changes the chemistry of the water and makes it more acidic. Over time these changes will imperil ecosystems, says Paul Bunje, a senior director at the foundation.

“That’s where technology comes in,” he says. “It’s not sufficient for solving ocean acidification, but necessary for those tools to be created.”

In September, XPrize launched a $2 million challenge to spur innovators to create pH sensors to better understand ocean acidification through new technologies. Some of the teams behind innovative ideas have emerged from India and Indonesia, and Mr Bunje says the winning tools could end up being used by researchers as well as tourism industry workers or just regular individuals in bodies of water such as the Red Sea.

“With reference to the Middle East and North Africa, I do expect really great ideas to come from everywhere,” Mr Bunje says. “Sometimes we need innovators coming from places like the UAE who are seeing the world in a different light.”

It seems that the last thing that startups in customer loyalty want these days is to be called a loyalty program. Echoing UrbanBuz, a rewards platform that recently closed a Series A round, Dubai’s AdvanTag is also insisting on a new vocabulary. “We [don’t] say that it’s a loyalty program,” says Troels Andersen, the company’s new COO. “It’s a loyalty tool, and a marketing tool. We call it the AdvanTag engine.”

AdvanTag, previously GenieTag in Canada, offers targeted marketing campaigns, customized to enhance customer retention and address specific pain points that businesses have when attracting clients, explains Anderson. Whether it’s to address a slow Friday night or to simply gather more data to better understand their fans, clients can choose from a variety of features to reward regulars.

Social media campaigns that provide a reward, like free ice cream or the opportunity to skip the line, are the most popular, Andersen says. AdvanTag’s in-store setup also allows customers to register with an RFID card or check-in via their iOS and Android apps, and play games such as scratching a card or spinning a wheel on a tablet, to win prizes.

These days, an instant reward system receives better feedback than a traditional system that allow a customer to accumulate points over time, Andersen says. His conclusion matches that of the UrbanBuz team, which has built their platform to offer customers rewards in person, tracked via e-mail address or phone number rather than NFC.

Since closing $750,000 USD in early stage funding in late 2012, from “friends, family, and fools,” and two angel investors in Dubai, AdvanTag, which was founded by Adam Eldaba and Mo Shahin, has signed up around 10 stores in Canada, where Eldaba attended college and where Shahin is based, and 20 to 30 stores in Dubai, where Eldaba lives.

The most famous of its clients is Dubai telecom company du, which, during multiple social media campaigns this year, saw over 4,000 click-throughs on Facebook posts.

Another client, Dubai-based restaurant Arabiska, brought 107 new customers on board in one evening and saw its posts go viral on Facebook thanks to a raffle campaign. Advantag’s biggest Canadian client, Wine Country Ontario, registered over 4,300 customers during two events, with 14% opting to receive emails.

The company is working to build upon its momentum after winning an Honorable Mention at the GIST Competition at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Malaysia this year, and presenting at the Web Summit in Dublin this year. While AdvanTag is, at its core, a B2B business model, as Anderson sees it, it doesn’t have a target audience more specific than “where people repetitively come back.” Although, he says, the consumers that it typically serves via its clients match those of Groupon: they’re young, between 18-40, and live in Dubai or in the Toronto area.

When it comes to facing off against daily deals, which many small business owners in Dubai perhaps associate with loyalty programs, AdvanTag has taken the step to partner with its counterpart, GrouponUAE, rather than treat it as competition.

In light of the fact that daily deals have received criticism for failing to generate repeat traffic, this partnership seems like a win-win: Groupon UAE can refer companies to a loyalty program that will help them retain their new customers, while AdvanTag gets access to Groupon UAE’s database and pipeline, to target its customers and draw in new clients.

In the US, Groupon Inc. launched its own loyalty program, called simply “Rewards,” in late 2012, in a bid to expand the business. Yet, it paused the program this July, apparently to better incorporate it with the company’s existing point-of-sale system and prepare it for international roll-out. Five months later, the program is still paused, perhaps an indication that partnerships with loyalty programs will be more efficient for Groupon than truly pivoting its model.

For now, AdvanTag is looking to continue growing at a manageable pace, perhaps a wise tactic given the difficulties that daily deals companies had when trying to make a regional land grab.

“When it comes to a startup like this, it’s actually a bit dangerous to grow too quickly,” Andersen explains. “We need to have as many product iterations as possible [in order] to optimize our product, to have product that suits our customers needs, before scaling. If we got 100 clients tomorrow, we wouldn’t know to gather all of their feedback,” Anderson explains.

After working very closely with their existing clients, AdvanTag will, by Q1, like have a product that is “actually scalable; that’s when we’ll start to look for [more] funding,” Andersen says.

2014 may also see the company streamlining its offerings as it continues to test. When asked whether the company will standardize its offering, Andersen replies, “You could say that’s the original hypothesis that we’re testing: Do we need to be that flexible? Or can we come up with a product that is more standardized?” Andersen affirms. “We need to gather more feedback from the clients that we have.” 

Hamilton-based social media incentives company Advantag has been invited to participate in Dublin, Ireland’s The Web Summit, “Europe’s SXSW” late next month.

The Web Summit is a global gathering that features more than 10,000 of the world’s brightest minds in technology, including the planet’s leading technology and startup companies. It also has quite a long list of big-name speakers too, no doubt a morale booster for the attending startup from “Steel City”. Among the speakers are Dave McClure of 500 Startups’, former pro skateboarder Tony Hawk of the Tony Hawk Foundation, Shane Smith of Vice, Tom Conrad of Pandora, Ryan Holmes of Hootsuite, Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures and many, many more.

For a startup coming out of “The Hammer” it’s a good opportunity, especially since few startups west of Toronto on the QEW seem to be gaining spotlight. The startup, lead by cofounders Drew Thachuk, Adam El Daba and Mo Shahin, is based out of the Don Pether Incubation Center at the McMaster Innovation Park.

AdvanTag specializes in providing small, medium and large sized businesses with an easy to setup, low-cost platform that delivers measurable loyalty, social media campaigns and gamification. The point of purchase and events based software tracks loyalty and provides customers with incentives for making multiple purchases, sharing to Facebook and Twitter, filling out surveys, and giving customer feedback. The platform also provides digital gamification through tablet based “spin to win” and “scratch to win” contests. The innovative technology leverages consumer’s social networks and creates valuable word-of mouth advertising. It costs $250 for a tablet, so customers can swipe and gain rewards offered by the company.

The company has also won some positive accolades already too. Since it has offices in Hamilton, Dubai and Cairo, it was recently able to take advantage of an 2012 MIT Business Plan competition with over 4500 participants, where it placed in the top ten. Subsequently the startup received seed funding from a Dubai-based angel investor. It also landed Du, Dubai’s second largest mobile carrier, as a client, as well as five more Canadian clients.

They were also recently featured in the Hamilton Spectator, where the newspaper reported that the pair met at the first Startup Weekend hosted by Shahin’s tech company Soft Mills and Innovation Factory. Shahin is a graduate of McMaster’s masters program in engineering, entrepreneurship and innovation, while Thachuk is a graduate of Mohawk College and Davenport University.