The DALATUNES team, nominated by the Kazakh-British Technical University for the international start-up competition, Big Idea Challenge, became the winner of the competition from Kazakhstan, as well as the winner in the “Social significance” category. The competition was held as part of the Creative Spark for Higher Education program for universities and is funded by the British Council.

The DALATUNES, a project dedicated to Kazakhstan and Kazakh music in two categories: Country Winner and Category Winner, beating the teams from Ukraine, Georgia and other CIS countries.  The project was developed by a three member team of young entrepreneurs. Rashida Tyvalivdiyeva is the team leader while Camily Saitova and Salekhan Galiyev are the other two members of the winning team.

Now, the Dalatunes team, as the winner of an international competition, will go through a bootcamp in London and will have experience in promoting a startup and investor relations with the United Kingdom.

Under The DALATUNES project, most of the ethnic musical works of Kazakhstan from ancient times to the present day were found, restored, digitized, and made publicly available on the website www.dalatunes.kz (currently the site is under reconstruction). A series of videos devoted to Kazakh folk musical instruments, as well as video tutorials on playing them, have been created. A mobile application with a folk music recognizer (similar to the Shazam service), which is scheduled to launch in September of this year, has also been developed.

In 2018, KBTU together with the University of Reading (Henley School of Business, United Kingdom) and the Kurmangazy Conservatory received a grant for a 5-year project for the development of entrepreneurship within the framework of the Creative Spark program. In 2019, this alliance of universities jointly held hackathons and bootcamps on teaching entrepreneurship, digital marketing, leadership, and copyright protection courses based at the University of Reading. In April of this year, an international conference on the basis of the KBTU was held, within which large companies and successful entrepreneurs from CIS and foreign countries held entrepreneurship workshops and the start-up competition of British universities IDEA Fest. In June, his winner Aron Karatayev showed his startup using IoT and visited the bootcamp in Reading.

Learn more about Creative Spark for Higher Education: https://creativespark-bigidea.uk