2012 has been a year of great progress for the CRDF Global GIST team. The team engaged with energetic start-ups throughout the year, starting with entrepreneur boot camps involving participants from over 40 countries and ending with five GIST Tech-I winners and five honorable mentions. Following are highlights from some of the year’s larger events.

GIST Transformers Journey – Seventeen emerging entrepreneurs journeyed across America from the Middle East, Africa and Asia. They were competitively selected to visit entrepreneurship and innovation hubs in Silicon Valley, New York, Boston and Washington D.C., and to share high-tech inventions that will help address challenges in medicine, the environment, mobile phone technology and more. In Washington, D.C., the Transformers took part in a panel discussion co-hosted by CRDF Global and the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship and the Senate Foreign Relations Committees. The event highlighted CRDF Global’ s innovation programs with a particular focus on the (GIST) initiative. Speakers on hand to highlight the value of GIST and other innovation initiatives included Jeff Hoffman, co-founder of Priceline.com and a member of the GIST Advisory Group, Faysal Sohail, a Venture Capitalist from CMEA Capital, and Scott Hartley, of Mohr Davidow Ventures. Follow this link to learn more about the GIST Transformers.

GIST Tech-I Competition – GIST Tech-I recognized the top ventures that CRDF Global has worked with in the GIST program for 2012. Thirty semifinalists were chosen to attend the finals of the competition, and each will receive three months of mentorship and coaching by experts. Ten ventures were selected from among the semi-finalists to compete for top honors. First Place went to Natali Ardianto, Co-founder and COO of Tiket.com, an ICT company based in Indonesia (Watch the video pitch here). Tiket.com is an online travel and entertainment gateway where you can buy flight, train, hotel, concert events and movie tickets all in one convenient place. First Runner Up, a $15,000 prize, went to Mohamad Taha, Founder and CEO of ma2too3a!, a crowd-sourced mobile application that offers real-time location-based news and traffic updates for Lebanon (Watch the video pitch here). Complete descriptions of the event and the other winning competitors can be found at the CRDF Global GIST website.