Peter Farrell Cup Finals Night recap

Pluvision, developer of a unique eye-wetting solution, took first place at this year’s Peter Farrell Cup Entrepreneurship Competition, held Wednesday 26 October on the UNSW Kensington campus.


Team Pluvision, from L to R: Hye Won Lee, Eric Wei, Noellie Garand,
Dr Wallace Bridge (lecturer), Niklas Olsson, Maurice Chiarello (lecturer)


In addition to going on to compete in the John Heine Entrepreneurial Challenge in December, the Pluvision team is heading to Sweden to compete in the I2P Idea2Product® competition in November.

“We’re really excited about getting selected as one of the top 15 finalists,” says student Niklas Olsson of Pluvision. “But I can’t believe we just won the Peter Farrell Cup. When I first started at UNSW I heard about the Cup but I never dreamed we’d win it!”

Of the 17 business plans submitted, eight were selected to present on the finals night. Each finalist is invited to present their enterprise to NewSouth Innovations Concept Development Meeting.

“It’s great to see students across campus identifying and tackling real-world problems. Their energy and passion was clear to see in the final pitches they delivered,” says Dr Steve Brodie of NewSouth Innovations. “I have no doubt that some of these students will go on to become successful entrepreneurs.”

Further commercialisation services are offered to 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners, and to the teams meriting Honourable Mention from the judges. 

RevoSen, developer of a myocardial ischaemic detection method, and Future Surgical Solutions, who have developed a novel bone-healing technology, won Honourable Mentions from the judging panel.

 

Judges, from L to R: Dr Kevin Cullen (NewSouth Innovations),
Anne-Marie Birkell (OneVentures), Peter Davison (Fishburners),
Simon Pinson (BSF), Bryce Summerell (Posse)

"It's clear to me there is no shortage of innovative research and enterprising individuals across a wide range of disciplines at UNSW,” says Peter Davison, one of the judges and a founder of co-working space and entrepreneur community Fisburners. “It’s tremendous to see students learning the basics of entrepreneurship within the university environment…the teamwork between postgraduates, undergraduates and academics to produce plausible business plans was a feature of the competition - innovative and promising in itself. I hope the University continues to make strides towards fostering student entrepreneurship."
This year’s competition featured a People’s Choice Award which was handily won by BioMark, who also placed 3rd overall.


BioMark team members, from L to R: Hayley Cullen, Arjanna Chitranjan,
Dr Wallace Bridge (lecturer), Timothy Couttas,
Maurice Chiarello (lecturer), Sasa Mitric.


Professor Greg Whitwell, Deputy Dean of Programs and Students at the Australian School of Business, remarked on the high levels of collaboration evident in presentations.

“And it’s collaboration of different sorts, between disciplines certainly, but also, remarkably, between undergraduate and postgraduate students, which is extremely rare,” he says. “I commend all the teams who made it to the finals and presented some really quality and high-level ideas.”

NMT (Novel Muscle Technologies), presented their business plan for an enterprise utilizing a unique synthetic gel that, when inserted into the body, can temporarily replace muscle tissue and provide a framework for new cells and muscle fibres to grow on.



Novel Muscle Technologies (NMT) team members, from L to R: Shruthi Hariharan,
Dr Wallace Bridge (lecturer), Scott Jamieson, Maurice Chiarello (lecturer), Anishka Tewari

Based on research done by Scott Jamieson, their business plan and presentation impressed the judges enough to award them second place, with remarks about the sophistication of both the idea and its development into a business. Judge Simon Pinson says,“It really is impressive what we’ve seen here this evening!”










We are pleased to confirm Ernst & Young and RosesOnly as sponsors of the CIE. We would like to thank the Farrell Family Foundation and Gary Zamel for their generous donations. We also acknowlege the continuing support of the Australian School of Business. All of our sponsors help provide the means to host networking events, award prizes, and reimburse our suppliers and service providers. In exchange, these donors receive good karma and public recognition as supporters of innovation and entrepreneurship. To become a sponsor of CIE and support our community engagement activity, please contact us at cie@unsw.edu.au.

UNSW Inventor of the Year Awards

NewSouth Innovations presents the UNSW Inventor of the Year Awards on Thursday 1 September at 6:30 PM in the Tyree Room of the John Niland Scientia Building (G19).

The UNSW Inventor of the Year Awards celebrate and reward UNSW researchers that are making a positive difference to the world.

Watch some of the finalists discussing their passion for innovation. 

Special guests at the UNSW Inventor of the Year Awards include:

• Professor Fred Hilmer AO, UNSW President and Vice-Chancellor,
• Professor Les Field AM, UNSW Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research)
• Dr Kevin Cullen, CEO, NewSouth Innovations Pty Limited (NSi)

Please take a few moments to view some extraordinary achievements from last year's winners and finalists. Click here to view a YouTube video of last year's winner - Thorsten Trupke and here for our Student Inventor of the Year - Henner Kampwerth.

Enquiries please contact Michelle Evans on (02) 9385 4374 or email: events@nsinnovations.com.au

 

Peter Farrell Cup competition RESULTS!!

Mobile phone-based taxi booking and payments platform developer TaxiApps took first place in the 10th annual Peter Farrell Cup Business Plan Competition last Thursday. The event was hosted by the Centre of Innovation & Entrepreneurship (CIE) in the School of Strategy & Entrepreneurship at the Australian School of Business (ASB). 

The competition offers teams of students the opportunity to create and develop an innovative business idea,  then present it to a panel of five judges comprising business founders and venture capitalists.

“The whole process, from coming up with idea and then thinking through what we wanted to do and how we were going to do it – the whole thing just gathered momentum and then I started thinking `Hey, we could really do this’ and now it’s just really exciting that we’re going ahead with this,” said TaxiApps team member Ned Moorfield, a student of the AGSM. “The contest really gets you going.”


Dr Peter C Farrell with 1st place winning team, TaxiApps. From L to R:
Trung Nghi Tiet, Ned Moorfield, Dr Farrell and Andrew Campbell

Other winning ideas were: on-site toxic halogenated waste recycling, hangover and osteoporosis medications, and an online social network for casual workplaces.
“I was really impressed at the sophistication of not only the presentations but the ideas themselves,” commented Axelle Marjolin, UNSW student and spectator, at the evening’s events. “I certainly wasn’t expecting so many technical ideas with that much development behind them.”

Judge Gareth Dando, founding Managing Director of Southern Cross Venture Partners, also expressed surprise at the ideas presented, saying, “I’m quite impressed with the calibre of the ideas and businesses [the teams] put together. There are some quite good ideas here, and not just for students.”

Teams were judged not only on their written business plan – which determined, from the initial 25 applicants, who would go on to win one of the ten spots in the finals presentation roster – but also on live presentation and their ability to field questions from a tough judging panel.

“The Peter Farrell Cup is about articulating a business idea, and doing that through a brief written plan and verbal pitch. It provides an opportunity to experience what it’s like to actually have an idea, develop a business model around it, and then solicit interest and feedback about the opportunity from real investors - people who know what they’re talking about and evaluate such opportunities on a professional basis,” said Dr Martin Bliemel, CIE’s Director. 

“Sure, the judges are looking for a unique selling proposition, a clear market and risk analysis, and investment attractiveness, but what else they really want to see is that spark in the eye of the person telling them about it, they want to see that passion for the idea,” he explained.

Dr Peter C Farrell, AM, Founder and Executive Chairman of ResMed Inc, sponsor of the competition, was on-hand to announce the winners and present awards.

Ernst & Young and TiE also sponsored the event by offering full membership with the TiE and attendance at Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur Of The Year ™ awards dinner to the winners.

A special addition to this year’s competition was the unveiling of the new Peter Farrell Cup competition trophy. Jointly designed by Selena Griffith, Lecturer at UNSW’s College of Fine Arts (COFA), Dr Miles Park, Senior Lecturer in UNSW’s Faculty of the Built Environment (FBE), and Industrial Designer Hugh Worthington (BSc. Design UNSW) of Vert Design in Redfern, the uniquely stylized cup is representative of the “crucible” effect of the competition on rough business ideas that are distilled and concentrated through participation in such competitions.

New Peter Farrell Cup trophies by UNSW's COFA and FBE, and Vert Design


Made from recycled aluminium bicycle tire rims, the outside of the hollowed half-sphere has a roughly mottled surface created by a process called lost-foam casting. As the surface turns the edge from the outside, the level of polish increases until it reaches the centre of the hollow, which is almost a mirror. 

“We wanted it to represent the ideas [in the competition] needing to be polished, and be something of value to hold. The polished texture changes the form, and it looks different and feels lighter as the texture changes,” said Andrew Simpson, Principal Industrial Designer at Vert.

First, second, and third place winners each receive a smaller replica of the Cup engraved with their team name to take home. The original Cup will remain on display at the CIE with the first-place team’s name engraved on the highly polished steel plate on which the trophy rests.  

“Although it’s a long evening with ten 15-minute presentations, the level of activity and networking at the event was tremendous,” stated Dr Bliemel. 

“One participant, Sampath from Solbij, which is a provider of solar chargers for mobile devices, did not make the finals but still came to the event and guerrilla-pitched the judges in their break to demonstrate the massive progress he made since his initial submission. Now that’s taking initiative and being entrepreneurial!” said Dr Bliemel with a laugh.

In addition to the prizes initially offered, the winning teams have also been invited to pitch to more investors at Seed Accelerator’s upcoming Sydney Startup Networking event on 9 December. TaxiApps is also going on to compete in the John Heine Entrepreneurial Challenge in Adelaide, and Solbij has received further advice from one of the founders of Sydney Angels. 

Winners were:

1st place - TaxiApps (mobile phone based taxi booking and fare payment platform)
2nd place - ACIRO (on-site toxic halogenated waste recycling) 
3rd place - OsteoPlus (osteoporosis medication)
4th place - Resaca de Borrachera (hangover cure at the molecular level)
5th place - Shiftr (online social network for casual workplaces)

Winning teams of the 10th annual Peter Farrell Cup Entrepreneurship Competition

For more information please contact the CIE at +61 2 9385 9730.

CrisisCamp Syd a huge success. Thanks volunteers!

Reposting from http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Sydney/meetings/04-Sept-2010#Summary

The organizers of CrisisCamp Sydney exceeded their expectations and objectives for the geocoding and crowdsourcing event planned for the weekend despite a rainy start on Saturday. Fifteen volunteers joined the first day and nine showed up on Sunday. We were lucky to have very talented, hardworking and committed volunteers. Here's a wrap up of what happened.

Originally, we were hoping to group the number of volunteers depending on their skill sets. In every group, we planned on putting a developer or two, a researcher and one or two members with Pakistani language proficiency. But as everyone got more settled with geocoding, a number of our developer experts were able to improve on the work flow specifically in making the geocoding less laborious. In just a few hours, they were able to reconfigure how to make the workload more efficient.

Paul helped us in designing a more efficient work flow by creating GIS layers which added context to the mashup application. From this, Luke wrote a script that summarized village data on the OSM. Meanwhile, we had our other volunteers, Adam, Fadhillah, Umair, Eva, Joel, Warren, Rene and Ping continue to do geocoding and crowdsourcing (using Crowdflower). Another volunteer, Lachlan, was tasked with helping automate some of the tasks needed to be performed on Crowdflower. These allowed the tasks to be automated and made it easier for our geocoding and crowdsourcing volunteers. He did this using a grease monkey script. One Pakistani volunteer, Anita, was also connected with Anihi at CrisisCommons to help with translating in Urdu a wiki page.

Another important task completed was when Pamela, Hassan and Ivan, using a JavaScript/Mashup, created an application whereby the villages that had been geocoded were in bold and this information was then matched against the spreadsheet of flood affected villages found a http://bit.ly/pkflood_kp.

As the first day rolled along, our volunteer videographer, Tolmie shot and produced a tutorial video on geocoding villages using OSM and US DMA data. After editing, he uploaded it on Youtube and the CrisisCommons wiki. It will also be uploaded in the Drumbeat site.

On both days, Aram, wrote an application using Django that pulled out of Crowdflower messages based on their urgency, prioritizing these messages to be processed by crowdsourcing volunteers.

All in all, our team had processed over 200 SMS messages in Crowdflower. We added about 300 or so villages on the Open Street Maps.

Our student partners, Khiem and Sandy have done a great job in helping us secure the venue, helped with the catering and the other logistical details that needed to be attended to for the two day event. Martin has shown his support, sponsorship and troubleshooting when necessary. Organizers Shoaib and Vicky, after doing all the coordination, finding partners and planned how the event would unfold, were running around doing all sorts of tasks that needed to be done druing the two days, aside from providing instructions and orientation on geocoding, crowdsourcing. In between, the two were also seen geocoding, crowdsourcing, writing blogs, monitoring all the channels with other CrisisCamp groups in Toronto, Bangkok and London, making contact on the IRC web chat node, skype, etc. We thank all our sponsors and partners: CrisisCommons, CIE, Humanitarain OpenStreetMaps, Mozilla Drumbeat, SIFEUNSW, and the World Bank.

To all our volunteers - what a fantastic group of people. You've done us all proud!!!! Big, big thanks.

UNSW Inventor of the Year Awards

Entries for the 2010 UNSW Inventor of the Year Awards are now open.

Presented annually by NewSouth Innovations, the UNSW Inventor of the Year Awards
recognise and reward inventors that are making the world a better place.

Boasting a total cash prize pool of $28,000, the awards are open to UNSW academics and
students who are commercialising their research with NewSouth Innovations, the
university’s commercialisation company. This year’s awards will introduce a new Student
Inventor of the Year category and a category to recognise Intellectual Property Notifications
(IPNs).

NewSouth Innovations annually receives in the order of 100 new IPNs. These are the
starting point for commercialising new inventions that can make a positive impact on the
world. All IPNs submitted in the 12 months to 30 June 2010 will automatically be entered
for the IPN award.

Please visit the competition web site for further details and application forms.
http://www.unswinventorawards.com.au 

Entries for the awards competition close 22 April 2010