VeloCity Demo Day was a huge success! Yesterday (Thursday, November 22nd, 2012), VeloCity hosted 12 uWaterloo student startup companies as they pitched and showcased their ideas in the Davis Centre Foyer between 12-3pm. The pitches continue to raise the bar with each term and the ideas are extremely dynamic and varied. Companies were pitching ideas about organic food, corporation training, course selection, fashion, and even politics!
Our panel of judges which included Wayne Chang, President of Pivotry Consulting Group; Amanie Ismail, Co-Founder of Kue Software and ProductWiki; Ben Hagon, Creative Director at Hagon Design; Nabil, Senior Analyst, VSG at Communitech; and the audience who voted announced the winning teams! It was a tough decision; innovative ideas and the speed at which they are realized and tested are moving at a pace unlike anything VeloCity has ever seen. This term’s Elevator Award, for best pitch went to Mantaphrase, a digital phrasebook app for communicating in a foreign language. The two co-founders came up with the idea when looking to solve their own frustrations while communicating in a language other than their native tongue during travels abroad. Mantaphrase has earned its place in TechCrunch and many other notable online sites, and we are excited to see what comes out of the pipeline for them!
Projexity took home the prize for the Innovation Award for their pitch of an online crowd funding platform for urban improvement projects. The team is diverse and has a collective background in urban infrastructure, design, and community engagement. We’re pumped about their ability to translate crowd funding in a very tangible and impactful way to community neighbourhoods.
Lastly, inVuze earned the People’s Choice Award for their application, which lets users control display screens from mobile devices. The idea behind this is to enable participation in public spaces. Say you’re at a restaurant and you want to contribute your music to the playlist. Simply submit your request via your phone and the process will take place in real time. We were more than happy to award each of these teams with three prizes of $1000 to push their business ideas!
If these teams and their ideas sound like you, VeloCity is always looking for new and innovative ideas to support. Check out our website for more details about the three VeloCity programs, and more importantly, come out to our events to learn more about what we have to offer! If entrepreneurship is something you are passionate about, we’re excited to help.
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