Having impressed the final judges with its augmented reality (AR) smart glasses, Cyberport start-up MAD Gaze was named this year’s champion at the “Maker in China” SME Innovation and Entrepreneurship Global Contest. Another homegrown innovator, I2Cool from City University of Hong Kong’s HK Tech 300, bagged the runner-up title for its energy-free and environment-friendly passive radiative cooling paint. This is the second time that a project from Hong Kong has won the championship since 2018.
MAD Gaze and I2Cool competed against seven other delegates who were winners of other regional chapters of Central and Eastern Europe, ASEAN, Japan and South Korea. This year a total of 236 enterprising teams from 18 countries and regions joined the annual global contest, who have high aspirations to scale their innovations to the Greater Bay Area (GBA) market.
The brand director of MAD Gaze, Chelsea Miu echoes this sentiment. She shares, “The competition has gathered so many top companies around the world. We are very excited and honored to be in the first place.” Expressing her optimism about the Greater Bay Area, Miu notes, “I believe that the national policy will be conducive to the popularization of AR technology and the application of smart glasses, and that domestic companies have abundant resources and cross-channel platforms to help us build a more prosperous ecosystem and industry chain.”
MAD Gaze has been developing smart glasses since 2013, establishing a large developer ecosystem to expand the applications beyond traditional smart glasses. Its new generation of smart glasses aims to optimise the digital entertainment and smart living experience of personal consumers.
Cyberport’s Chief Public Mission Officer Eric Chan shares, “I am very pleased that both Hong Kong projects, among the 200 plus global projects, have excelled in the ‘Maker in China’ Grand Final.” For him, this success demonstrates the strength of Hong Kong’s science and technology development, and innovative capabilities. He believes that as more Hong Kong start-ups set up in the GBA, “we can create stronger synergy to promote the development of the GBA and Hong Kong as an international technology and innovation hub.”
The “Maker in China” SME Innovation and Entrepreneurship Global Contest (SME IEGC), focally directed by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People’s Republic of China, is an annual global contest aiming at connecting innovative technologies with enterprises, innovation and technology (I&T) projects with industrial parks, marketing operation with government policies, and facilitating collaborative innovation in the industry and industrial upgrading. Its Hong Kong Chapter contest was co-organised by Cyberport.
