Second win for Taylor’s University at MIT Global Start-up Labs

Duncan Tsen, a Foundation in Computing (FIC) student from Taylor’s University School of Computing & IT (SOCIT), was announced as winner in the ‘Best Prototype’ Award for his innovative mobile application, FeedOn!, at the MIT Global Start-up Labs (GSL) recently. FeedOn! is a social community app designed to bring industries in food and beverage as well as organisations to fight food scarcity amongst the less fortunate. This is the second win for Taylor’s University since the launch of MIT GSL last year.

“The School is honoured to win an award in this category for the second year in a row and we are proud to support our students’ commitment to employ their skills and use it to benefit the community,” said Professor Dr. Hiew Pang Leang, Dean of School of Computing & IT (SOCIT). “Our School strives to nurture Technopreneurship in our students and help them to take their productive place as leaders in the global community.”

Duncan clinched the grand prize during Demo Day, competing with 35 student-finalists from 16 universities within Malaysia. Each group was given the chance to present their projects to MIT Instructors Ammar El Seed, Technical Lead; Perihan AbouZeid, Country Manager and Daniel Chen, Entrepreneurship Assistant.

Duncan Tsen (first, right), standing with his peers after being named winner of the “Best Prototype” Award at MIT Global Start-up Labs recently

According to Duncan, “I am lucky to be in an environment where there are many opportunities to do explore my interests, one of which is to be an entrepreneur. Computing has given me a platform to showcase my skills because our lecturers actually encourage us to join competitions and there are a lot of clubs in Taylor’s where you can join to improve your communication skills, leadership skills and teamwork.”

MIT Global Start-up Labs (GSL) is a multidisciplinary group of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) which promotes development in emerging regions by cultivating young technology entrepreneurs. Complete curriculum materials, software technologies, platforms, and networks have been developed to enable undergraduate students to innovate in the area of information and communication technologies (ICT).

The programme is run within universities and courses are taught by MIT instructors. The courses focus on mobile and Internet technologies, and are structured so that the students are awakened to the commercial possibilities of the technologies. The MIT GSL Malaysia is organised by Entrepreneurship Unit, Ministry of Education Malaysia (MOE), and Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC).