Lebanon hosted its first-ever international start up conference - Bank du Liban Accelerate 2014 - in Beirut, from 20 - 21 November 2014. With over 1,500 people in attendance from over 25 countries, the event was a success.

With big names like Governor of the Central Bank of Lebanon Riad Salameh, President of the Association of Banks in Lebanon Francois Bassil, British Ambassador Tom Fletcher, former Minister of Telecommunications Nicholas Sehnaiou, TechCrunch's Editor at Large Mike Butcher and Chair at MIT Enterprise Forum Hala Fadel, the two day event featured interesting panels, keynote speeches and fireside chats.

The best part of the conference - outside of the free ice cream - was the start up competition, hosted by the organization Seedstars World. Searching for start ups from emerging markets, Seedstars World invites winners from each of their regional competitions to travel to Switzerland to take part in a final competition. The Final Winner receives an equity investment from the organization.

Here were our favorites that made it to the first round of the regional competition in Beirut.

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, Go Ejaza,
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An Arabic language travel booking website, this start up was founded by Yemeni Hussein Al-Sakkaf. Currently based in Egypt, they are in the final months of immersion with the accelerator Flat6Labs . They have received $200,000 as part of their Series A funding and are hoping for more, as they would like to continue to expand in the region. Currently, their main focus is on the Gulf market.

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, Presella,
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The Lebanese event crowdsourcing team behind Presella is now based in Dubai, where they are continuing to work on their disruptive product. They were the first start up in Lebanon to receive funding through the highly-publicized Central Bank's Circular 331 .

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, Feedeed,
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We might just like their name, but Feeded does lofty ambitions. After spending three months in Amman with accelerator Oasis 500, they want to be the "Amazon" of the service industry.

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, Ki,
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Offering a solution to the multi-password life that we all lead, Ki is an app that stores all of a user's passwords and then, using location targeting, automatically logs that user into their various online accounts. The judge's panel liked this Lebanese start up as well, and chose them to move onto the final competition in Switzerland.