The Rock Center for Entrepreneurship and Alumni Relations are pleased to announce the winner of the 2010 Alumni New Venture Contest.
Winner of the 2010 Alumni New Venture Contest and the $25,000 cash prize.
Krishna Mahesh, MBA ’05, CEO
Press Release - Video Interview
Sundaram Medical Devices brings the engineering rigour, high quality standards, and cost control of the Indian automotive industry to deliver a high-tech, low cost tailored medical bed that meets the highest standards in quality, safety and usability for both the patient and the care-giver within the environment of small and large Indian healthcare institutions. With a population of a billion people, and a shortage in excess of 3 million beds (and over 350 thousand in advanced ICU beds), the market for locally manufactured medical beds is dramatically under-served.
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Boston
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Video Interview
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Sponsored by the HBS Association of Boston
iSpecimen - Mike Pierce, MBA ’01, Interim COO
iSpecimen’s mission is to build the world's largest biobank without the need for giant freezer farms that hold millions of specimens. Instead, iSpecimen’s network connects clinical laboratories and hospital EMR systems at leading institutions, providing researchers a platform by which they may query for desired specimens in real-time. Compared to traditional commercial biobanks, iSpecimen is highly customizable in terms of both the characteristics of the specimens sought as well as the degree of annotation to be delivered. iSpecimen does for biospecimen procurement what Amazon.com did for books: large selection and customization with negative inventory.
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Chicago
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Video Interview
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Sponsored by the HBS Club of Chicago
Cinekin - Constance Freedman, MBA ’06, Chief Strategy Officer
Cinekin is a recommendation engine that predicts consumer choice behavior. We use a statistically proven algorithm to derive
accurate personal taste profiles from movie ratings, and from those profiles, we recommend salient products and services to
individuals, based on their unique tastes. Consumers are bombarded with countless choices in almost all avenues of product and
service offerings. Our system provides a valuable filter, recommending products and services of greatest interest to consumers on an
individual basis, from personal matchmaking to movie preferences to other consumer products.
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India
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Video Interview
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Sponsored by the HBS Club of India
Sundaram Medical Devices - Krishna Mahesh, MBA ’05, CEO
Sundaram Medical Devices brings the engineering rigour, high quality standards, and cost control of the Indian automotive industry to deliver a high-tech, low cost tailored medical bed that meets the highest standards in quality, safety and usability for both the patient and the care-giver within the environment of small and large Indian healthcare institutions. With a population of a billion people, and a shortage in excess of 3 million beds (and over 350 thousand in advanced ICU beds), the market for locally manufactured medical beds is dramatically under-served.
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London
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Video Interview |
Sponsored by the HBS Club of London
Qtara - Steve Berry, MBA ’79, Chairman
Qtara is a UK company that builds next generation intelligent virtual assistants (‘IVAs’ - sometimes known as 'avatars') for use by both organizations and individuals. The IVA’s from Qtara are different as they use artificial intelligence, speech & face recognition to: recognize and remember their primary user; hold conversations with them; learn about their tastes and preferences; find information from the internet and also connect to each other. Qtara has applied for a patent for its technology. Qtara’s technology can address multiple markets, but our focus is on the markets that have been identified by industry analysts as those that are experiencing rapid growth namely: Enterprise, specifically customer service; Public Sector, specifically healthcare and energy efficiency and Consumer, specifically home automation and personal assistance.
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New York
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Video Interview
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Sponsored by the HBS Club of New York
TwoChop - Mo Lam, MBA ’05, Founder
Games that come to you. TwoChop is a contextual microgaming platform that pushes relevant quick engagement games to users providing low commitment entertainment repeatedly throughout the day. Microgames are ultra-short games that last only a few seconds, but are pushed to the user multiple times a day. By using mechanics of pushed microgames, TwoChop will be the game-ification platform for our users’ lives. TwoChop utilizes a user’s existing digital life as the context for fun, additive games that are pushed at random across the web, mobile, and other connected devices.
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Northern California
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Video Interview
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Sponsored by the HBS Association of Northern California
Redbeacon - Ethan Anderson, MBA ’03, CEO
Redbeacon is a website to help consumers find the right business or person to handle any local service need. Request virtually any service (e.g., movers, carpet cleaners, photographers) and qualified local businesses and professionals receive the request and respond with price quotes to do the job at the time and place requested. It’s free to use for consumers but service providers are charged a small commission whenever they win a job. Redbeacon launched in September 2009 and won the top prize at the 2009 TechCrunch50 Conference.
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Southern California
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Video Interview
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Sponsored by the HBS Association of Orange County,
the HBS Club of San Diego, and
the HBS Association of Southern California
Kiwilimón – Deborah Dana Beyda, MBA ’08, Co-Founder
Kiwilimon is a food and recipe internet portal for Spanish speaking users that generates revenues through partnerships and advertisements with food brands. It serves as a community for home cooks to interact via recipes, and as a tool for food advertisers to effectively target consumers via food-related content. The business will capitalize on the opportunity of 190 million Spanish speaking users on-line who have a very limited content offering due to their language barrier (only 5% of internet content is in Spanish) and the high growth in penetration which has been forecasted during the next 5 years. A recipe community is one of the largest opportunities present at the time due to the millions of consumers searching monthly for recipes in Spanish and the fact that food and beverage brands are responsible for 45% of total advertising investment. Cooking is an important aspect of the Latin American lifestyle, with 80% of Latin households cook on a daily basis. Kiwilimon.com will serve this unmet need for regional recipes, provide users with social interaction and provide advertisers with a high engagement marketing tool.
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