The Edward L. Kaplan, '71, New Venture Challenge, the annual startup competition of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business has just announced its 10 finalists.
The 10 winning teams were selected first from 72 applicants, and then from the 28 teams that were selected in April to move on to the classroom round, where they worked hard all quarter refining their business models, plans, and presentations. They were judged by panels of faculty, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and business leaders from all around the Chicago area.
Tomorrow, Thursday, May 26, the finalist teams will compete to be named winner of the 2011 New Venture Challenge, joining the ranks of companies like Watermelon Express, GrubHub, and Bump Technologies.
Here's the full list of finalists:
- Agile Diagnosis is a platform of software tools that help healthcare professionals make better decisions by intelligently guiding them step-by-step from symptom to diagnosis. Agile Diagnosis builds on years of research at the Pritzker School of Medicine, and provides instant access to expert opinion boiled down into clear best next step recommendations.
- Line | Jump is a mobile payment solution targeted at the hospitality industry, initially bars and restaurants, which allows consumers to pay their tabs using their smartphones. It provides consumers an opportunity to skip lines and pay quickly, thereby increasing service efficiency for hospitality businesses without increasing labor.
- mHealth Solutions leverages the ubiquity of mobile technology and the science of patient engagement to improve chronic disease management and reduce health care costs. Its communication platform allows health care organizations to capitalize on new legislation that rewards cost efficient, high quality care by engaging patients and providers in self-management.
- NewDog Technologies uses a unique business model to create a mobile user experience that will eventually make ordering fast food as easy as paying for gas at the pump. We offer an app with a rich set of mobile marketing, branding and social media features aimed at increasing same store sales.
- Owl Invest provides quality, low-cost, easy-to-follow, user-specific financial advice for individuals who are saving for retirement and other financial goals. Using proprietary algorithms and a user-friendly interface, we take the complexities out of investing and allow users to confidently invest for the long run.
- playence is a vendor of semantic solutions for corporate multimedia annotation and search. Our goal is to provide corporations with more efficient annotation and access to multimedia assets by exploiting the semantics of information.
- Pretty Quick is a web-based community that directly links professional beauty service consumers with a robust, curated network of salons and spas. Technological analogs include Open Table in the restaurant industry and Zoc Doc in the healthcare industry.
- Real Time Analytics is the On Premise Market Intelligence service, for alcohol companies such as Bacardi, Budweiser, and E&J Gallo, that provides an on-going, comprehensive market assessment and marketing ROI analysis via our ability to crowd-source on premise information from our users through smartphone apps, notifications, and photo uploads.
- Sibylus obtains supplemental educational curriculum materials used in college and graduate courses for a fraction of the price charged by traditional content providers. Sibylus sources content by leveraging publicly available information, utilizing databases students already have licenses to use, and securing copyrights directly from rights-holders.
- Swingbyte is a mobile golf swing analyzer and visualizer. Patent-pending device that capture the trajectory of a golf club, relays it to a smart phone and then the web for instantaneous and subsequent analysis.
About the New Venture Challenge
Launched in 1996, the Edward L. Kaplan, '71, New Venture Challenge is one of the nation's premier business competitions, allowing students to act upon their entrepreneurial ideas within a supportive and highly rewarding environment. Over the past 15 years, the New Venture Challenge has helped launch over 60 companies, which have gone one to raise $150 million in funding and create hundreds of jobs.
