McCormick Team Takes Second Place at Entrepreneurship Idol

November 17, 2008

A team made up of McCormick School of Engineering undergraduate students took second place at Entrepreneurship Idol, a business-pitch competition hosted by Northwestern University’s InNUvation Club.

McCormick junior Jonathan Drake and McCormick seniors Justin Wear, Nicholas Evans and Rick Oleszczuk and Weinberg senior Micah Friedland competed against 34 other teams from six different schools in the competition Saturday and took home a $1,500 cash prize for their idea SidewalkEffect.com.

According to the competition, SidewalkEffect.com will be “a highly visual online flyering website for student groups to advertise events and individuals to advertise pretty much anything they choose.” The website will be almost entirely image-based, allowing users to switch between a collage view and timeline view, with easy access to filtering and searching metrics. Each ad, once clicked, opens up a large version of the flyer, giving users a message board and various notification options. Positive incentives will encourage site traffic.

The competition format consisted of a preliminary round, a networking lunch, and a final round. During the preliminary round, teams delivered a three-minute pitch to a panel of venture capitalists, industry entrepreneurs, non-profit founders, and legal professionals. During the intermission, students had the opportunity to walk around kiosks of Chicagoland-based start-up companies that are looking for motivated student workers. The best eight teams advanced to the finals, where they were grilled by a panel of experienced professionals.

Illinois Institute of Technology seniors Avelo Roy and Ed Suda took home the grand prize — a $25,000 10-week internship through the iVentures10 program. The team’s idea, eMotion, creates and offers devices for girls ages 8 to 14 to communicate with each other. The first product, called the BFF<3Necklace, is a wireless communication fashion accessory that uses patterns of lighting and vibration to enable friends to send secret, encoded messages.

To read the Daily Northwestern story on the competition, click here.
For more information on the competition, click here.