An NTU student entrepreneur has become the first one from Taiwan to qualify for entry into the finals of the Global Student Entrepreneurs Awards. Though he is still pursuing his bachelor's degree in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, third-year student Andy Yu-Hsiang Tseng has already founded the company WeCare, a crowdsourcing platform for charity projects. As CEO of this innovative start-up company, Tseng made it through the competition's Asian regional finals in January, and is set to compete in the global finals in Washington, D.C. this month.

The Global Student Entrepreneurs Awards are organized by the Entrepreneurs' Organization, a non-profit association boasting a membership of over 10 thousand businesspeople with 146 chapters across 47 countries. Now in its 17th year, the competition attracted more than 1,700 student entrepreneurs from more than 20 countries this year alone.

WeCare is an information company that exploits the opportunities of crowdsourcing to connect people with the kinds of non-profit organizations they are most interested in supporting through donations or volunteer work. The company's handy mobile application helps people to easily identify charities they would like to support, track the flow of their donations, and also receive follow-up notifications regarding the projects they have helped. It features another novel tracking function called WeInvolve, which aims to actively facilitate volunteerism by sending notifications to users when they come within the vicinity of a volunteer project.

Tseng's thoughtful combination of crowdsourcing and charity work is already making the world a better place. For instance, WeCare has helped a culture foundation established by the renowned hotelier and philanthropist Stanley Yen to collect more than one thousand iPads that were provided to schoolchildren in remote communities to ensure they could enjoy access to digital learning opportunities.

The platform's tracking system enabled the foundation's benefactors to follow the specific ways each iPad was being used. According to Tseng's research, the great transparency and feedback afforded by WeCare's tracking and notification functions serve to substantially boost people's willingness as well as motivation to continue supporting a charity.