Geisha Kow­lessar-Alon­zo

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

Re­gion­al en­tre­pre­neurs will have the chance to win US$15,000 in cash and prizes when tele­coms provider Flow Busi­ness hosts the third edi­tion in its se­ries of free “InKnow­va­tion” vir­tu­al con­fer­ences, live-streamed from the Ba­hamas on Oc­to­ber 28.

The theme is Work Smarter, Not Hard­er: Get­ting It Done in The Dig­i­tal Age and Flow is again of­fer­ing cash and prizes as part of a busi­ness pitch com­pe­ti­tion to a live au­di­ence.

“Now is the time for small busi­ness­es to be trans­for­ma­tion­al and our con­nect­ed land­scape has the po­ten­tial to trans­form our re­gion in to a more ag­ile, al­lied, and se­cure des­ti­na­tion that is eas­i­ly ac­ces­si­ble and al­ways pro­tect­ed.

“At the mi­cro lev­el, this points to in­creased lev­els of em­ploy­ment and mo­bil­i­ty, while at the macro lev­el, an im­prove­ment in the stan­dard of liv­ing for all,” Nico­las Col­lette, vice pres­i­dent, B2B, C&W Com­mu­ni­ca­tions said in a state­ment.

Pre­sen­ters for the event in­clude so­cial me­dia spe­cial­ist Don­tell An­to­nio, cre­ative busi­ness coach Michelle Brown-Davis and tele­vi­sion per­son­al­i­ty and con­tent cre­ator Ianthia Smith.

“Flow Busi­ness is here as a part­ner of choice to help Caribbean en­tre­pre­neurs seize to­day’s chances and pre­pare for to­mor­row’s op­por­tu­ni­ties.

“The sec­ond se­ries of InKnow­va­tion was sim­ply phe­nom­e­nal, with more than 4,000 peo­ple reg­is­ter­ing for the events, so we ea­ger­ly look for­ward to our sus­tained col­lab­o­ra­tion with re­gion­al start-ups and en­tre­pre­neurs,” Col­lette added.

As part of the se­ries, small busi­nes­sown­ers were in­vit­ed to sub­mit a two-minute video to win the op­por­tu­ni­ty to pitch their ideas to a live vir­tu­al au­di­ence at the InKno­va­tion se­ries fi­nale.

Ni­ma An­var of GuestChat, the Grena­da-based on­line start-up that aims to in­crease di­rect book­ings on ho­tel web­sites us­ing its spe­cial­ly de­signed book­ing bot and live chats, was the over­all win­ner of the pitch com­pe­ti­tion in the last edi­tion.

He re­ceived a prize pack­age of US$5,000, pro­duc­tion of a tele­vi­sion ad­ver­tise­ment plus free TV air­time, free con­nec­tiv­i­ty for a year and a suite of ‘smart so­lu­tions’ from Flow Busi­ness.

Run­ner-up was Jo­van Miller of Poly­Cloud In­ter­ac­tive (Ja­maica) who re­ceived US$3,000 plus free busi­ness in­ter­net and smart so­lu­tions, while Niko­lai Gillezeau of Sphare Mar­ket­place (Trinidad) copped third place re­ceiv­ing US$1,000 plus free con­nec­tiv­i­ty and smart so­lu­tions.