Intel + UC Berkeley Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge
Intel sponsors another significant event annually, the Intel + UC Berkeley Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge. This year, the two events overlapped. The Intel Capital CEO Summit was November 16-18, and the Entrepreneurship Challenge was November 17-19.
I don’t have anything to do with the Entrepreneurship Challenge, but I was invited to the dinner on the 18th. Sadly, I had to miss it since I was still in Huntington Beach at the Summit. However, I was able to attend the Challenge final event tonight, the 19th, at the Haas School of Business at University of California at Berkeley.
The Entrepreneurship Challenge is a business plan competition for teams from all over the world. The semi-finalists and finalists presented their plans tonight in a public forum, and the four winning teams received cash prizes totaling $45,000.00.
I love business plan competitions. I’ve been a judge in the Haas Business Plan Competition for over five years. Generally, the judging day is the most exciting day of the year for me. It’s exciting because I get to meet some of the smartest and most enthusiastic people in the world.
The semi-finalists received 30 seconds each to deliver their ‘elevator pitches’. The finalists received about 10 minutes each. The finalist presentations were outstanding, but I did not capture them on video for this blog, as I consider them to be somewhat confidential. Yes, they presented in a public forum, but I don’t think the teams would want the presentations to be posted to the Internet. I did capture the elevator pitches on video for this blog, however, as they were so brief that I think sharing them online is not likely to harm the companies.
As you can see in the clip above, the ideas are quite varied, and are of high quality.
The winners of the competition were all non-US based teams. One team was from China, one was from Germany and one was from Singapore. The team from China won two prizes, the first place prize and the audience awarded prize for favorite team.
The winners were:
1st prize and people’s choice: iHeath Group
2nd prize: CaptchAd
3rd prize: Zimplistic
Here are the descriptions of the winning companies from the event’s website (EntrepreneurshipChallenge.org):
Ihealth – Tsinghua University, P.R. China
Ihealth Group aims to improve life quality with its revolutionary new product—MPHB biodegradable bone screws. Ihealth has developed MPHB bone screw in light of bionics which has been granted a national patent in China. Our product overcomes the disadvantages of the existing materials and provides a nearly perfect solution for the rehabilitation and fixation of bone injuries.
CaptchaAd – Technical University Munich, Germany
The CaptchaAd GmbH is the world’s first company to combine enhanced SPAM protection with interactive video advertising and thus increase the security on websites and facilitates visitor’s use, while at the same time ensuring a more conscious perception of advertising by the user. Instead of distorted codes conventional CAPTCHAs (an anti SPAM function used more than 250 million times a day worldwide) use to differentiate between humans and machines, CaptchaAd (Captcha Advertising) uses questions concerning the content of the spot. A CaptchaAd is a short commercial including a question which can easily be read and answered by site customers to substitute the “normal” CAPTCHA process. This results in a higher level of attention and involvement by the user to the viewed content.
Zimplistic – National University of Singapore, Singapore
Roti is staple diet of 800 million Indians eating 2.4 billion rotis everyday. Making rotis is a very time consuming, tedious and skillful task and since there is no fully automatic home appliance that makes rotis, people resort to unhealthy and expensive alternatives like frozen rotis. Zimplistic is a Singapore based startup that has designed & developed the first ever, fully automatic “Rotimatic”. It is like a coffee machine. It is the size of a mini microwave oven, the user just has to enter no. of rotis, and it measures, kneads, flattens, roasts and puffs rotis out.
