The Media Lab of the Communications Commission has awarded the five winners of the star-tup contest “Ideadrome.” The prize fund of the competition was distributed among the winning teams identified by the jury panel. The knowledge and experience gained during the event will help the winners to continue implementing their ideas. Throughout the week, start-ups worked with Media Lab mentors, high-tech entrepreneur, and technology commercialization expert Davit Chechelashvili, and Kerneli founder Beka Dalakishvili on refining, developing and validating their ideas, team management, strategies, prioritization and product testing.

Training was also conducted by the founders of the firm AccountAnts. The knowledge and experience gained during practical training will allow contestants to turn ideas into actual products. During the contest, entrepreneurs worked on simplifying communication in the digital space, educational gaming, protection against fake news and facilitating access to information.

The winners were selected by a jury panel which included the Co-CEO of the US Market Access Center and Global Ambassador for the UC Berkeley Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology, Chris Burry, and the financial modeling and analytics specialist at Y Combinator and co-founder of Cartooli, Ani Kochiashvili.

The Media Lab of the Communications Commission held the contest “Ideadrome” for the third time. The prize fund of the competition was GEL 10,000. The contest is designed to discover potential start-ups and help them turn their ideas into reality. Out of the previous participants of “Ideadrome“ Side Mission obtained GEL 15,000 in funding from Georgian Innovation and Technology Agency (GITA) for product development; the founders of FeedbacKit travelled to Poland to meet international investors and undergo training; while the social media platform Bubbler received GEL 15,000 in funding from GITA and attracted the interest of Arizona State University, which has launched the product in test mode. Another former participant, while abandoning the project presented at “Ideadrome,” later launched another business and is already selling a product on the market.