The start-up event “Meet Taipei” organized by Taiwan’s entrepreneurial magazine “Business Next” has opened at Taipei Expo Dome in Taipei City. The event will be held over a three-day period from 14 to 16 of November, and was attended by more than 400 startups from all over the world, mainly in Asia, as well as a total of 26,000 visitors, entrepreneurs, investors and ecosystem officials. The event, which is the sixth time in its series, is to be the largest ever since 2014. There were many amazing Taiwanese teams MENEWS met, here were some of them:
To bring products to market, many people will choose to raise funds through crowdfunding platforms. Taiwan Backer Founder company helps local innovative products reach crowdfunding platforms to attract money. Mr. Lin Dahan, the Founder & CEO of Backer Founder, revealed his company has so far supported more than 250 innovation teams, raising a total of T$1.5 billion (about HK$384 million). Backer Founder is a consulting firm that helps startups looking for crowdfunding projects. Taiwan’s largest crowdfunding consulting firm is responsible for everything from marketing, video production, and public relations strategies for funding projects. The Backer Founder has a revenue model in which a consulting company takes 10% of the funding amount as a fee if the crowdfunding is successful. If the funding is not successful, there is no fee. So far, about 96% of the companies supported by The Backer Founder have successfully funded the fund. Support ranges from performances, movies to products, and has successfully completed about 250 projects on popular crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter, Indigo, Jackjack, Campfire and Makuake.
Rockquist, another scooter sharing company, offers a service that allows you to share your personal scooter with others through a special scooter lock developed in-house. The owner of the scooter pays a membership fee and becomes a member of the Rockquist, and is granted smart locking permission. The owner of the scooter can set the rental period and the usage fee on his or her own. Rockquist has the advantage of reducing waste of resources and batteries in the sense that it shares an unused personal scooter for the desired period, and wants to become an airbnb of scooter sharing.
O2O discount app “RE Red Bao”, As an extra edition, I’d like to introduce the recently popular O2O app in Taiwan, “RE HongBao, RE stands for Red Envelope, which translates red bao into English.” The red package is a traditional New Year’s gift-like custom that has become established in the Greater China region, and startups and tech giants who apply this concept to O2O in the digital age have been glimpsed mainly in China.
RE Red Bao, which launched in July 2017, received 600,000 downloads and about 4,000 actual stores in Taiwan as of September this year. Users can use credit cards and cash to charge points to RE red packages, and users can purchase items by presenting barcodes at the store. RE Red package is subtracted from the store 10% of the actual transaction price as a customer or marketing fee at the time of closing the transaction, 40% of which (3.5-4% of the total price for the user) is a mechanism that is returned to the user. Once a point is charged, it can be used in stores or given to other users, but it cannot be withdrawn as cash. The wave of cashless payments is also coming to Taiwan, and payment methods such as Google Pay, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Taiwan Pay, Jkopay and LINE Pay are becoming overcrowded. By giving the function equivalent to the de facto cashback, RE Red Bao seems to be making a breakthrough in a slightly different ring from the payment app.