New Travel App by NTU students wins competition by Tencent

NTU Engineering students apply their technical knowledge and expertise to compete and create the best innovative app for Tencent’s WeChat Smart Platform.

By Saranya Mahendran

PHOTO: BENEDICT YEO

An app created by NTU students, which can identify local landmarks in Singapore, beat five other teams to win the 2014 edition of the WeMage Challenge, a competition to develop the best app for the WeChat platform. Hosted by China’s biggest internet portal, Tencent, the WeMage Challenge premiered in South East Asia on 16 Jan.

The winners of the competition, first-year PhD student Liu Kai, 24, and final-year undergraduate Li Jing, 22, both from the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, walked away with the grand prize of $10,000, as well as funding from NTUitive, NTU’s very own innovation and enterprise company.

Their winning entry, UGuide, is a ‘personal tour guide’ for independent travellers. Users only need to snap a picture of a local landmark — such as Marina Bay Sands — when it appears on television, magazines or in real life. The app will then pull up an audio history of the subject to simulate a tour. The information is retrieved from Wikipedia and YourSingapore website.

When asked if UGuide will be implemented onto the WeChat platform, Juliet Wang, Corporate Vice President of Tencent, said: “There is actually a significant gap from coming up with an idea in a competition to actually implementing it in business. It is not easy to apply it in real life, a lot of work needs to be done. It is not possible to do it by ourselves, we need help from investors and partners.”

Future plans

The team behind UGuide has confirmed that their next step will be to work with NTUitive to develop UGuide into a standalone app. However, it would require an immense amount of work and manpower.

“If we want to commercialise it, we have to consider how accurate the information will be. Because we (have) limited manpower, (the app) doesn’t recognise a lot (of landmarks),” said Kai.

Currently, the app can only recognise buildings around the bayfront at Marina Bay, such as the ArtScience Museum, Marina Bay Sands, and Gardens by the Bay.

Though the app is largely reliant on information to be optimally useful, the team said they could not turn to crowdsourcing to generate information, similar to how Google Maps allow its users to review landmarks.

“We thought people (would be able to) write their own travel guide, but the problem is, who will do the editing? Who will do the checks? You cannot just push everything out,” explained Jing.

The team will spend a month refining their idea and conducting further market research in order to optimise the functionality and public reception of their app.

Professor Alex Kot, Director of the Rapid-Rich Object Search (ROSE) Lab at NTU and Associate Dean (Graduate Studies) for NTU’s College of Engineering, shared his hopes for the teams that participated in the competition: “Some (students) have the idea, and we have the technology. (We know) what can be achieved and what cannot be achieved. Hopefully we (can) generate something like Alibaba or Facebook.

“I think it’s very important that we open up the opportunity to undergraduates to taste this kind of challenge, and to throw in their ideas,” he added.

Opportunity to grow

This inaugural competition was open to all in Singapore. NTU, along with Tencent, had agreed to ensure that each team consisted of at least one NTU student. However, all participants were from the university this year.

When asked why they decided to partner with NTU specifically, Tencent said: “We have always had a good impression of the school in terms of language and work culture, and this partnership has proved our impression right. We hope to encourage the growth of a group of developers on this open platform. We need these developers to help us grow.”

Chief Judge Viktor Cheng, Chief Executive Officer of TechBiz Xccelerator, said that he wanted the students to get the most out of this competition.

“As we speak, I already have people at my door, knocking and saying they want to invest in these projects. And I say, ‘you don’t talk to the students directly, you talk to us because we will prep all these people’.

“We are open to people coming in, but we want to manage this in an orderly fashion so that students can get the maximum mileage,” he added.

The teams that placed second and third were also offered the opportunity to be incubated at NTUitive should they wish to commercialise their application. If incubated, they will be given a grant of up to $10,000 in seed funding.

“Even those who didn’t make it to the finals are still winners. It’s about trying. If you don’t try, you don’t understand how difficult is it. And you don’t know if you really like it or not,” said Cheng.

“We don’t expect everyone to be an entrepreneur. Those who are, we want to give them a chance to try,” he added.

All the applications in the competition were created using Tencent’s WeChat Smart Platform software development kit and technology from ROSE Lab. The latter was jointly set up by NTU and Peking University, drawing on each university’s strengths in media, computer vision, and cloud computing technologies.

The ROSE Lab specialises in enhancing online search beyond just text. It utilises rapid, real-time object recognition to better meet user demands.

Other finalists in the competition harnessed ROSE Lab’s technology differently from the winning team.

One team developed Snap & Eat, an application that supplies users with information such as average prices of dishes, locations of nearby restaurants as well as reviews — just by taking a picture of a particular restaurant.

Another team created a visual matching app, which helps the user plan his or her outfit. Aptly called the Shirt & Tie Advisor, it leverages on a database drawn from online merchants to recommend an outfit for the user.