TiEcon Sydney - Pitch Event

The TiEcon Pitching contest was a fast-paced event with over 15 contestants vying for the chance to pitch to Sydney Angels to win funding for their endeavour.

The event was MC'ed by talented young industrial designer and winner last year's TiEcon Pitching event, Eric Chau. Judging was conducted by an impressive panel featuring Dilip Rao, President & Director of Mentoring at TiE Sydney, Mathias Kopp, Co-Founder of Sydney Angels and Simon Raik-Allen CTO at MYOB.

Due to the overwhelming number of entrants, the planned 2-minute question time following the pitch had to be cut out. Additionally, pitchers were not allowed to read from notes, nor were they allowed any presentation materials. Death by Powerpoint avoided!

There was a really interesting array of pitches including Waterline Foundation (nationwide fitness charity event), Shop2 (social recommendation engine for clothes), CEO hire business,  3d games animation company, Teebii (textbook rentals) and Locongo (community marketplace where people can buy and sell local experiences).

The event attracted entrants from a range of backgrounds, ages and industries. It was interesting to see the energy and passion in these entrepreneurs and how they responded to questions from a discerning panel of judges. The fact that they only had three minutes challenged contestants to be concise and connect with the audience quickly. After 15 rapid-fire pitches, the judges were sent out to deliberate while the audience voted for the people’s choice winner.

Entrants were judged on clarity, the size of the problem, the compelling nature of the pitch and the judge’s belief in the team. Before the winners were announced, the judges gave their thoughts on the pitches and how they chose the winners.

Mathias Kopp from Sydney Angels mentioned that angel investors not only back the idea but the person and team behind the idea. They were looking for a start-up with high growth potential and a strong team.  Similarly, Simon Raik-Allen said that investors don’t just invest in the business, they invest in the person. As such he was looking for passion and drive along with business viability.

The winner of the people’s choice award were UNSW students Zhiyi Tan and Eric Hercog from Teebi.com, student textbook rentals. They also went on to win second prize, two hours of Mentoring by Bill Bartee of Southern Cross Venture Partners.

As for first place, the judges said that the winner had spotted a significant and easily understandable problem, and announced that first prize went to Kevin Truong, also a UNSW student, from Locongo. Locongo is a website where real people can offer local experiences direct to travellers and other locals.

Kevin stated “This is a great way to bring authentic experiences to the masses and is going to solve the problem of what to do when you arrive in a new city and how to truly engage with the local culture.”  Kevin now has just over a month to prepare a pitch to Sydney Angels for funding.  Kevin is also looking for anyone that could provide experiences that others enjoy, anything from small bar crawls to lessons in for just about anything. Check out locongo.com for more information.

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.

Peter Farrell Cup winners WIN AGAIN!

First-place Peter Farrell Cup Competition winner TaxiApps has won again, this time at the John Heine Entrepreneurial Challenge at the University of Adelaide (in partnership with Queensland University of Technology) on 9 & 10 December 2010. Taxi Apps is a mobile phone-based taxi booking and fare payment platform.
Team TaxiApps not only won First Runner-Up, which comes with over $7,000 in cash and prizes, but also the Outstanding Showcase Display Award, and the i.lab technology incubator Award. 

Team member Andrew Campbell says, "[We] embarked on this journey because we perceived it would be a great process to go through to refine the business plan. And you know what? It has been remarkable as a way of doing this. The prize money was perceived as a bonus...If we had just tried to write a plan and a model ourselves, I can imagine how crap it would be. 

"By going through the PF Cup and the JH Challenge we have received so much in-put, energy, critique and motivation. The TaxiApp plan is now really well refined and we believe that it now has a much greater chance of success as a business. In addition, we now also have some great contacts, we learned lots, we pitched and pitched and pitched this thing & we know it backwards." 

TaxiApps has developed a mobile phone-based taxi booking and payments platform. One of the application's main features is to connect passengers and taxi drivers directly by broadcasting their location using mobile phone technology: passengers save time and effort finding cabs, while drivers get more fares and revenues. 

In Australia, large taxi network operators and the highly monopolistic payments firm, Cabcharge, wield enormous influence and control over other players in the industry. The Taxi Apps business is founded on the principal of applying emerging technology to disrupt a highly monopolised market, redefining in the process how this market operates.

For more information on the John Heine Entrepreneurial Challenge, click through on the following link: http://www.johnheinechallenge.org/competitor/prizes.jsp

2009 Peter Farrell Cup Winners (repost)

(reposted here as part of a de-cluttering of the CIE website. Stay tuned for announcements of the winners of the PitchFe$t earlier this week. Registration for the 2010 Peter Farrell Cup is now open)

2009 Press Release

'Ad-a-Bottle', a business concept that provides advertising directly on bottled water distributed exclusively to office building food courts, has won first place in an Australian School of Business competition to encourage student entrepreneurism.

The Peter Farrell Challenge Cup entrepreneurship competition offers students the opportunity to bring innovative business ideas to life.
“The Peter Farrell Cup was a catalyst for me to write a business plan and now I'm poised to implement it, and hopefully people will be drinking Ad-a-Bottle by next April,” said winning team member Iris Qi.

Some of the enterprising ideas in this year's Finals included a Wi-Fi based paperless receipt system, an online rental service where parents can order equipment and toys for their children when on holidays, and an electronic display system to eliminate changing price tags.

More than 45 teams from the University of New South Wales and other participating universities entered the competition, hosted by the Innovation, Commercialisation and Entrepreneurship (ICE) Club at the Australian School of Business, with eight teams participating in the Finals held on November 19, 2009.

The finalists presented their business plans to a panel of four judges including high profile business founders and venture capitalists.
Teams were judged on criteria including sound risk analysis, financial attractiveness to potential investors and a clear identification of current market need. The written business plan, oral presentation and responses to judge’s questions helped determine the overall winners.

Christopher Witt, Director of the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) at the Australian School of Business, said the aim of the Peter Farrell Cup is to foster entrepreneurship and instill a passion for research and innovation. More than $40,000 in prizes and scholarships was on offer to the finalists to pursue their business ideas.

“The Peter Farrell Cup strives to link research projects and businesses with student teams to produce credible business plans that help all parties. It frames the time period and requirements, and rewards excellence through prizes and scholarships," said Mr Witt.

“Amongst the partners of the CIE is the NSW Enterprise Workshop. This outstanding organisation offers finalists a scholarship to continue into the Enterprise Workshop three month long business planning program, enabling students to take their business ideas to the next level,” he said.

Ramanan Krishnamoorthy, President of the ICE Club, said the Peter Farrell Cup promoted the reality of business innovation as a real option for graduating MBA students.

“The life of an entrepreneur can be extremely rewarding; you are working for yourself on something that you are passionate about, and there is the opportunity to excel to your fullest potential,” said Mr Krishnamoorthy.

2009 Finalist Team Synopsis

Humanity Life Sciences: provides predictive medicine services via DNA analysis of genetic predisposition to inherited conditions in Greater China. The Tag Team: use of electronic display systems to eliminate the manual process of changing price tags via a wireless, centrally controlled system. Tiny Travel: a retail and rental service whereby parents can order equipment, toys and necessities for their children online to be picked up at the holiday destination, lowering baggage necessities. Mercurius Ltd.: a device to estimate the fouling propensity of a given feed water prior to reverse osmosis membrane filtration to predict how frequently a filter must be cleaned or replaced. Ad-a-Bottle: provides advertising on bottled water distributed to food-outlets in office building food courts via exclusive distribution channels. Viva Blu: a chemical-free, cost and energy effective water-purification technology using a photocatalysis reaction. Wildcard: a Wi-Fi based paperless receipt system whereby the receipts are stored in an online personal account. Equigreen: a rechargeable lithium-ion battery designed to power electric vehicles.