Startup World is a global competition with an aim to find the next great startup outside Silicon Valley. The competition is being held in 36 cities world-wide including the recently concluded Cape Town and Nairobi with Kigali and Dar es Salaam coming up.

Up for grabs for the grand prize winners of Startup World – to be carried out in 36 tech hub cities across the world:

• 3 month incubation period worth $30,000 at i/o Ventures
• 1 year of Rackspace hosting worth up to $24,000
• 5 million Echo real-time streams per month for 1 year worth $30,000
• International media coverage of your startup (it’s headed up by The Next Web‘s Hermione Way)

6 startups from Nairobi (dubbed the Silicon Savannah) were chosen to pitch. Joel Macharia CEO of Pesatalk and Martin Nielsen in charge of Business Development at 88mph were among the judge panel at the event.

The finalists selected to pitch were:

1. Usalama – Anti-fraud system for commercial banks
2. Pesacard by cardplanet. Allows one to do mobile money transfers without a mobile phone. Ideal for high school students.
3. Hypercentury – Various web services including an ecommerce site for books
4. PPOLL – PPOLL adds a layer of emotion to social networks. This can be used to manage and monitor a brands’ performance online.
5. Sematime – After a successful bulk SMS solution for schools, Tusqee’s system launched a new product Sematime that is targeting organizations and the government to manage their communication channels.
6. Mobile/SMS/SIM-based Printer – In a mashup of industrial design and tech, a hardware device that directly prints any mobile content was showcased. Useful for storing hard copy of important messages like those of mobile money transactions.

With a range that wide, it would be good to understand the background to the judging criteria was:

• Concept’s potential to be disruptive
• Scalability of the idea
• Innovation in the pitch
• Regional/PanAfrican/Global rea
• Human impact

88mph funded startup (and Pivot25 finalist and IPO48 winner) Tusqee’s product Sematime beat the other five to grab the top position. They’ll be heading to Silicon Valley for a grand showdown to battle it out in front of a panel of expert judges to be crowned the world’s best startup early next year.

The Startup World team led by Hermione Way (seen inset with winner Boniface from Sematime) will be heading to Kigali, Rwanda  then Dar es Salaam, Tanzania as their final African destination so register with the links above and you could be selected as a finalist with a chance to participate.

Image Courtesy of Hermione Way.