Min­is­ter of Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment Camille Robin­son-Reg­is says her min­istry via its Glob­al Ser­vices Pro­mo­tion Pro­gramme (GSPP) is spon­sor­ing ten start-up com­pa­nies from T&T to ob­tain a busi­ness men­tor­ship op­por­tu­ni­ty from Sil­i­con Val­ley ex­ec­u­tives dur­ing a tech­nol­o­gy con­fer­ence in Ja­maica at the end of No­vem­ber 2018.

Dubbed Tech Beach, this is a pre­mier con­fer­ence in the Caribbean which has con­verged lead­ing minds and founders from You Tube, Twit­ter, Face­book, Four Square and oth­ers among the lead­ing tech com­pa­nies from across the world, a re­lease stat­ed.

The Tech Beach con­fer­ence is in its third year, and through a call for start-ups to ap­ply, which is cur­rent­ly un­der­way, par­tic­i­pants will have the op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­ceive men­tor­ship from top ex­ec­u­tives in Pixar An­i­ma­tion Stu­dios, Linked In, Air BnB and Face­book to name a few. The ten start-ups will be se­lect­ed via a judg­ing process based on on­line sub­mis­sions which in­clude a de­scrip­tion of their busi­ness idea, a video pre­sen­ta­tion and oth­er de­tails about their start-ups.

The com­pe­ti­tion was launched on No­vem­ber 17 and 104 ap­pli­ca­tions have been sub­mit­ted with 45 per cent in the range of 25-34 years old, 15 per cent in the 18-24 year age range, 29 per cent in the 35-44 year old brack­et and the rest rang­ing from 45 to 64 years old. In­ter­est­ing­ly, one per cent of par­tic­i­pants are in the 12-17 year old cat­e­go­ry so far. There are ap­pli­cants in the area of events ser­vices, con­struc­tion, ed­u­ca­tion man­age­ment, en­vi­ron­men­tal ser­vices and more.