2011 Mix’n'Match night off to a great start

(cross-posted from www.pfcup.com.au)

Yesterday evening’s mix’n'match event kicked off the season for the Peter Farrell Cup challenge (run by the CIE) and the Social Entrepreneurship Competition (in partnership with the CSI). Peter Kazacos, CIE Board member and generous sponsor of the Social Entrepreneurship Competition, attended the event and was delighted to hear about all the exciting ideas students were preparing to submit to both competitions.

The event began with a welcoming introduction by Dr. Martin Bliemel, who outlined the series of workshops leading up to the finals (26 Oct for the PFCup, and 27 Oct for the SEComp) and what factors judges would focus on for the PFCup competition. This was followed by an explanation from Cheryl Kernot of the CSI about the evaluation criteria for SEComp entries, and some wise words of inspiration by Peter Kazacos. After these addresses, the audience of over 40 students and even some faculty broke into networking mode to discuss ideas and crystallize team composition.

Last year, this very event catalyzed the TaxiApps team to work on their idea and submit it to the competition. They ended up winning the 2010 Peter Farrell Cup, and went on to win 2nd place at the John Heine Challenge in Adelaide. Since then, they have used the prizes from the competitions to fund the development of goCatch, which is now available for free via the iTunes store, and are actively pitching their business to the angel community. They attended last night’s event and helped inspire the next generation of participants to pursue their dream.

Based on some of the ideas we overheard floating through noise of the networking event, this is going to be a great season of entrepreneurship competitions!

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