April 21, 2009
MEDIA CONTACTS: Ellen Yui
301-270-8571; ellenyui@yuico.com
Michelle Sherrard
202-994-1423; mcs1@gwu.edu
GW STUDENT-LED TEAM WINS $20,000 FIRST PRIZE IN FIRST ANNUAL GW BUSINESS PLAN COMPETITION WITH INNOVATIVE TOUR GUIDE DEVELOPED FOR PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES
Three Runners-Up Share $10,000 Award
WASHINGTON--An innovative, downloadable tour guide for people with disabilities developed by a GW student-led team took home the $20,000 first prize at the first-ever GW Business Plan Competition held April 17 - 18, 2009. This seed money, along with a total of $10,000 awarded to the three teams of runners-up, will launch four new start-up businesses. The competition was sponsored by The George Washington University School of Business and its Center for Entrepreneurial Excellence and is funded by donors Richard and Annette Scott.
The winning team--Keen Guides--will revolutionize traditional live or audio tours by offering, for the first time, customized video tours in multiple spoken languages and modalities for those with disabilities. Keen Guides' tour packages, to be played on iPhones and BlackBerries, will be sold to museums, universities and cultural institutions. Visitors will be able to download tours to their personal media players, or pick up a pre-loaded player at the venue.
Team member Catharine McNally, an art historian who is deaf, recognized a deficiency in some museums' compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and Keen Guides was developed as a result. Catharine is the sister of Frank McNally, Keen's chief administrative and sales officer. Other team members are Georgetown MBA students Karen Borchert and Martin Franklin.
"We want to thank Richard and Annette Scott, as well as John Rollins, the director of the competition, for making it possible to share Keen Guides with the panel of entrepreneurial judges," said Frank McNally, who is pursuing an MBA at the GW School of Business. "We will use the Scott family's investment to develop the mobile application that will make it possible to bring our product to market. We hope to make some inroads with colleges and universities in the area and hope to make GW a hub for our service."
"The GW Business Plan Competition encourages and cultivates business innovation and entrepreneurial drive in our student community, putting real seed money behind creative and viable business opportunities," said local entrepreneur John Rollins, who founded AZTECH Software Corporation and served for 30 years as its CEO and chairman and subsequently founded StreamCenter. "At this time of economic distress, it is especially important that we support entrepreneurs and small businesses which provide the bulk of our nation's new jobs and innovations."
GW Business Plan Competition finalists survived three rounds of cuts from an original pool of more than 200 entries over the course of two months. During the final round held April 18, each team presented creative and innovative business plans to a distinguished panel of successful entrepreneurs and business leaders in a real-world presentation format modeled after venture capital presentations.
Nurse Traudi Rose, who will finish her MBA at GW this spring, won $6,000 for her team's second place finish with Health Day by Day, a concept for a pill caddy that will allow individuals to keep track of when medication is taken. Equipped with a sensor, the pill caddy will upload information to a Web site when medication is taken. In the event that an individual does not take his or her medication in the prescribed manner, an alert e-mail can be sent to the individual and family members.
GW graduate students Deepak Haridas, Rounak Muthiyan and Akash Shah won $3,000 for third place with their plan for Kalpa Energy, which will derive biodiesel from algae. With its unique modular, high-density, hybrid fermentor/photobioreactor design, Kalpa Energy will be able to provide large quantities of biodiesel to the burgeoning fuel market of India. Microalgae are single-celled photosynthetic organisms that use CO2, water and the sun's energy, and produce biofuel as a byproduct of their metabolic activities.
Nineteen-year-old GW undergraduate student Konrad Kopczynski won $1,000 for his fourth place finish with The Saturday Delivery, a service that will provide delivery of bulk, wholesale grocery products to college students. Kopczynski plans to launch the service on the GW Foggy Bottom Campus.
Healthcare entrepreneur Richard Scott and Annette Scott are funding this innovative program for ten years with their donation of $300,000, ensuring a decade of innovation from some of the brightest and most creative minds in Washington, D.C. The Scotts' daughter, Allison Scott Guimard, graduated from GW's Business School in 2005.
The George Washington University Center for Entrepreneurial Excellence plays a central role in promoting entrepreneurship education to both undergraduate and graduate students. Through its faculty, graduate teaching fellows and partners, the center provides a knowledge sharing platform for many, both inside and outside the University, to study entrepreneurship from a local to a global perspective. The center offers excellent opportunities for research, in which knowledge and methods of different fields can be merged, where due diligence coupled with creativity and innovation scholarship may reach fruition not otherwise possible.
GW's School of Business prepares students for professional management careers. The depth and variety of its academic and professional programs, including five specialized master's programs, provide rich opportunities for students in the school's core Bachelor of Business Administration, Master of Business Administration, and doctoral programs. GW's undergraduate- and graduate-level international business programs rank among the world's best.
For more information go to http://www.gwubizplan.com
For more information about the Center for Entrepreneurial Excellence, visit www.cfee.gwu.edu.
For more information about GW's School of Business, visit www.business.gwu.edu.
For more news about The George Washington University, visit www.gwu.edu.
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