Start IT Up winners get funding

Innovation Minister Bill Marmion has named the three inaugural winners of the Start IT Up WA Challenge, with the teams to share in a $100,000 prize pool to develop their projects in collaboration with the state government.

KinChip Systems took the largest share of the prize pool for its Kindom app, which has been developed by directors Gry Stene and Catherine Resnick to help parents with children with developmental challenges.

The project will receive $50,000 and will work with the Department of Health.

“Kindom links health, education and social services, allowing a parent to have all of their child’s medical records, prescriptions, school reports and development charts at their fingertips,” Mr Marmion said.

Ms Resnick said using Kindom could provide a full holistic and relational view of every child’s development.

“Kindom provides one place where parents can store their entire child’s health, education and social records,” she said.

“We also take a parent-centred approach to data sharing to every member of a child’s care team, which means that we can facilitate collaboration, communication and ultimately reduce misdiagnosis and over-servicing.”

Another winner announced today was mental health awareness and evaluation application All of Me.

All of Me is a spin-out of local startup Tap Into Safety, created by Tap chief executive Sue Bahn and 2016 40under40 winner Philippa Vojnovic.

The project will receive $20,000 and will be working with the Mental Health Commission.

“We launched three weeks ago, and we’re developing early intervention mental health applications,” Dr Bahn said.

“We’ve already developed one for workplace and another for education, and they’re being rolled out through workplaces and schools right now.”

Ms Vojnovic said there was a lack of available and effective mental health early intervention strategies.

“There’s a call to action to do more to bring down mental stress levels, and All of Me is going to help to provide this,” she said.

See yesterday’s coverage on All of Me by Business News here.

The final winner was Hacker Pals for its Binary Crate project.

Developed by Hasib Sarvari, Mark Lockett and Shivlal Rajendren, the project received $30,000 and will be working with the Department of Education.

“Binary Crate is a web application where we teach people how to code,” Mr Savari said.

“The fact that it’s in a browser means that people can code anything they want, from HTML, to Java, and to C+++, and that’s all on the web.

“The problem we’re trying to solve is basically in schools right now, for children actually coding they have to install some technologies like code editor ID’s. The computers are locked down so it’s hard to install and maintain those technologies.

“That’s why we made (Binary Crate) in the browser; so it’s easier for kids and the education department to teach people how to code.”

Mr Marmion said governments should be the first customers for innovation.

“New approaches enable us to optimise interaction with government agencies and improve services to the community,” the innovation minister said.

“This process also means we can provide a reference site or ‘starting point’ for startups that will allow them to commercialise their ideas.”