Batelco's Startup Weekend, which concluded at the company's Hamala headquarters last night, has been hailed as a great success with competitors, coaches, speakers and judges saying the 54-hour event had been a fulfilling experience.

Nine teams worked around-the-clock from the start of the event on Thursday to develop a business model in the hope of winning the top cash prize of BD4,000 ($10,454), said a report in the Gulf Daily News, our sisiter publication.

The nine competing business ideas were Lantern, BLBL (Baby Language), Anacodist, Instapay, Raikom, Letz Hub, U Track, Promolio and Treq.ME.

Last night, each team was given five minutes to present their business plans in front of a panel of judges comprising experienced senior management and business leaders.

Following in-depth discussion, U Track was declared the winner, with Raikom being awarded second place and Treq.ME in third place. The top three teams walked away with BD4,000, BD2,000 and BD1,000 respectively. Four members of the winning team are students with Arab Open University, one of the event sponsors.

The first three teams will be given free incubation services by Bahrain Development Bank (BDB) and free cloud services from The Cloud.

The nine final presentations, which were filmed, will now be reviewed by Tenmou, the Bahrain Business Angel Company, with a view to providing any ideas deemed to have economic potential with up to BD20,000 funding to develop and launch their business.

Earlier, the event opened with speeches from Tenmou chief executive officer Hasan Haider, Qualcomm International global business operations head of Middle East operations and Central Asia senior director Ziad Matar and Charitime co-founder and CEO Yazin Al Irhayim.

The event was facilitated by Jaroslaw Bialek, who flew in especially for the occasion.

Leading companies including Mumtalakat, Microsoft, Tamkeen, Ericsson, BDB and Tenmou supported the event, while Gulf Air was the official carrier.

Red Bull, Expression Computers, Mathias Tourism, Aries Designs and Trading, Union Press, Palace Enterprises, Arab Open University, efood.bh, InterContinental Regency Bahrain, Fluid UI and Vahid Associates were the other sponsors. The Media sponsors included the GDN and Gulf Weekly.-TradeArabia News Service