{"id":43803,"date":"2023-10-20T15:31:16","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:31:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/language-learning-game-wins-inaugural-startup-weekend-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:31:16","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:31:16","slug":"language-learning-game-wins-inaugural-startup-weekend-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/language-learning-game-wins-inaugural-startup-weekend-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"Language learning game wins inaugural Startup Weekend – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"

A game that was developed to help people learn Mandarin has taken out top honours at the inaugural Startup Weekend in Melbourne.<\/p>\n

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The Native Tongue team, which included six core members randomly put together for the competition, came up with the winning idea in the fast-paced competition, which demands that teams produce a complete business idea in just 54 hours.<\/p>\n

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The game, called Mandarin Madness, helps English speakers learn the language by challenging them to match characters with the visual representation of their meaning.<\/p>\n

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Native Tongue took out $8,000 in prizes after being voted number one out of 10 teams by a panel of venture capitalists, including web development, business consulting and office hosting, provided by sponsors including Microsoft and Sensis.<\/p>\n

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Startup Weekend works by pitting teams against each other over a 54-hour period to come up with the best business idea, plan and route to market, before making a five-minute pitch to a panel of judges.<\/p>\n

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Previously held in locations across the world, the Melbourne version of the event<\/a>, organised by Olga Titarenko, marks the first time that it has been held in Australia.<\/p>\n

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Matthew Ho, who led the Native Tongue team, says that he came up with the idea for Mandarin Madness through his own struggles to learn the language.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been learning the language off and on since the age of 12, so the game was born out my frustration with that,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

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\u201cA lot of the teams had Powerpoint presentations, but we built a website and also showed the market potential of the game. There are three million people a day who get on planes, so there\u2019s a big target market of travellers, as well as students.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cAngry Birds has had 100 million downloads, which shows there are compelling numbers in gaming. But you need to have a niche. Ours will be in language-based gaming.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cI thought the Startup Weekend event was awesome. I came interstate from Sydney to see what the competition was like and I was very impressed.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Ho says that he has resigned from his job at digital agency Next Digital to devote more time to developing the game. He is also the first Australian-based employee of AirBNB, a US travel website set to launch here.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s anticipated that Mandarin Madness will launch within two months on the iPhone, to be followed by other language apps.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A game that was developed to help people learn Mandarin has taken out top honours at the inaugural Startup Weekend<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":59596,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43803"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43803\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}