Pitch & Pizza Competition Winners
We are thrilled to announce the 8 teams who will advance to the Semi-Finals on March 1st. Watch highlights of their pitches here. You can read about their businesses below.
Consumer Website Help: Peter Smith, SMG ‘13 – Many people are interested in Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Apple products. Many people own them and constantly get stuck. Clueless about how to add contacts to their iPhone – many turn to the Internet or trusted relative to get advice. We are pitching a company that will be THE trusted source for consumer help, using video and interactive features, we will teach people how to use their social networks, YouTube, and iPhones, to the fullest.
Customized Cupcake Bar: Jill Acquarulo, SMG ‘13, Soliel Schwabe, SMG ‘13 and Emily Burdett, SMG ‘13 – Our cupcake business is a shop that allows you to come in and create your own cupcake by choosing frosting, your cake base and toppings!
DiagnosQuick (People’s Choice Winner): Timothy Chanoux, SMG ‘13 – Sepsis is a leading cause of mortality leading to 210K deaths and an economic burden of $24B in the US. The diagnosis process of this condition remains unchanged from the mid-1800s, a time-intensive step of culturing for 1-5 days. Detection of the infecting pathogen is essential to identifying patients and initiating the proper antimicrobial therapy. Because of this, antibiotics are initiated without waiting for laboratory results. Yet the primary determinant of patient outcome is the timely and appropriate choice of the initial antimicrobial therapy! DiagnosQuick is developing an innovative new assay that enables a culture-free approach shortening time to pathogen identification from days to under 3 hours.
euMetrica Project: Dmitri Boulanov, ENG ‘10 – The holy grail health IT system – taking in diverse sensor data, analyzing it in real-time using cloud resources, and providing real-time decision support to people and their healthcare providers. Capitalizing on the ever-present, pre-existing and diverse sensors that are revolutionizing today’s healthcare systems, the idea for this app would let patients and their doctors pull together a patient’s own health data in real-time for speedy, comprehensive diagnosis and crisis prevention. This concept has broad application, from home monitoring and doctor-patient interaction to hospitals having access to patient records located anywhere in the “cloud.”
I.Deal.Lokal: Sinisa Baranac, SMG ‘13 – We are providing a loyalty/rewards program and location-based mobile advertising platform to local businesses. Our goal is to help local businesses establish stronger relationships with their respective local communities and its residents. The platform is designed to provide customized loyalty/rewards program unique for each business, and an efficient mobile advertising that allows them to connect with their customers. Our mission is to encourage local residents to THINK LOCAL!
NineBrain, Inc: Arun Rai, MED ’14 and Ruby Kandah – NineBrain is a social brainstorming ™ platform for connecting unmet needs with aspiring entrepreneurs and/or innovators. We are creating interactive dialogue between 60+ industries by enhancing accessibility to problems, critiques and unmet needs. This accessibility will help innovators and aspiring entrepreneurs understand and access market needs easily, thereby, allowing them to start successful, and valuable small businesses. We are revolutionizing the way science, engineering, medicine and 60+ other industries find, collaborate, and brainstorm with each other. NineBrain will create a dent in the universe.
Read Ahead: Matt Uvena, GSM ‘14 – Read Ahead enables increased involvement for parents in their child’s education. By providing parents of K – 12 students with advance updates of the course concepts that their children are learning, parents can take a more active role in learning. Messages including key concepts, assignments and tips for reinforcing these concepts at home are pushed to parents’ email accounts or mobile devices. Read Ahead stimulates conversations at home, gives parents tools to make concepts stickier and improves parent-teacher communication. Read Ahead also delivers data on the relationship between parent engagement and student performance.
TownRally: Asad Butt, GSM ‘12 – TownRally is an online community-based network that connects citizens and local leaders to address issues and promote government transparency and accountability. The company’s mission is to become the leading platform that fosters engagement. It achieves this goal by giving citizens tools to report, support, and track local issues while also giving local leaders tools to respond to citizens and their problems. In achieving its goal, TownRally generates valuable data on issues and efficacy rates that promotes open government practices. TownRally believes it will become the standard platform for collaboration and communication for municipalities across America.
Our New Venture Competitions are generously supported by our Premier Sponsor
