THE first night of the Malaysia Social Media Week (MSMW) 2012 recently saw the first “Developer Launch Pad” programme where 12 homegrown start-up companies showcased their products.

The start-up companies presented a range of products to the audience at Zebra Square in Kuala Lumpur including event-management and location-based advertising software.

A panel comprising technology editor Karamjit Singh from The Edge business daily, Time dotCom CEO Afzal Abdul Rahim and Cradle Fund manager Chris Leong also lobbed questions at the presenters. To determine the top three start-ups for the night, audience members were encouraged to vote through MSMW’s facebook site.

NEST Apps, headed by Fadzli Shah Anuar, 26, won first place with their location-based advertising app “Voucheres”. According to Fadzli, the smartphone app would link the user to the most relevant deals based on the smartphone user’s GPS location.

Aside from a book prize, Fadzli and his team won an overseas monitoring trip to study how foreign start-ups developed their products and thrived.

“The beta version of Voucheres was launched in the Mid Valley area in January, and we have nearly 100 brands to place in our beta version,” said Fadzli during his pitch.

“Voucheres” garnered 25% of the votes for the best start-up, followed by automated marketing mechanism “Octopost” with 22%. Third-placed “CloudStat”, a cloud-based statistical analysis tool, gained 10% of the votes.

The NEST Apps development team, aside from Fadzli, also consisted of Harris Rajuddin, 29, Arsyan Ismail, 28, Hanif Sofi, 27, and intern Chee How, 23.

“It feels really good to have won first place. We have seen some very good start-ups on show tonight. But I think we came up with substantial answers to the questions lobbed by the panel.

“The larger part of the credit has to go to my development team for those long nights of work for this to happen,” said Fadzli.

Bryan Gan, whose start-up developed second-placed “Octopost”, said that although the software was developed, the next challenge would be finding strategic partners in terms of market access and publicity.

“Octopost is just part of an “Octosuite” we are working on for businesses to better manage their social media marketing better,” said Gan.

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