An eco-friendly window that’s cheaper than a normal window? A “seeing-eye belt”? A robot tailor that transforms your online shopping experience?
Penn’s most innovative entrepreneurs gathered yesterday to compete for the top prize at PennVention’s final Innovation Fair.
College and Wharton freshman Andrew Hong and Wharton sophomore Daniel Judd hosted the competition, which took place yesterday at the Wu and Chen Auditorium in Levine Hall.
The final Innovations Fair is part of a year-long PennVention program, where student teams walk through the start-up process.
Following initial brainstorming, students participated in the Mini-Mentoring Marathon and Penn Startup Challenge, hearing expert opinions and pitching their innovative idea or product to a panel of experienced judges in 90 seconds or less.
Teams who made it through the challenge advanced to the final Innovations Fair yesterday.
The 10-person judges panel included representatives from Design Circle Inc., a product development firm and PennVention sponsor, Engineering professor Barry Silverman and other entrepreneurs and startup industry leaders.
Engineering juniors Jeffrey Kiske and Eric Berdinis, creators of Kinecthesia — a belt-mounted navigation device that assists the visually impaired — won first place and $5,000.
The belt uses sensors that vibrate to alert the user of nearby objects, allowing them to avoid collisions. The belt is more cost-efficient than a guide dog and more convenient and effective than a cane, the presenters said.
This is not the first award for Kiske and Berdinis. They were the winners of the Google’s Young Mind Competition, and earned a chance to appear at Zeitgest Americas 2011, an invitation-only event hosted by Google. But the two remained humble about their victory. “It’s kind of crazy,” Berdinis said.
The duo explained that their inspiration came from a class project.
1978 Wharton graduate Michael Aronson and PennVention judge said he was blown away by this year’s competition. “This was a very strong group. We saw a more diverse group of finalists this year.”
He added that the judges were impressed overall by the diversity of innovative ideas and have faith that a number of the startups at PennVention will eventually get funded.
For Aronson though, Kinecthesia was the clear winner. “I had never heard of them before and the endorsement from the Perkins School for the Blind was also a big help,” he said.
Berdinis and Kiske don’t plan on slowing down their efforts to promote and improve Kinecthesia.
“The networking built into PennVention is humongous,” Berdinis said. He explained that while the money would take their project far, the benefits of receiving business cards and making contacts was even greater.
“We want to get our name out there,” Kiske said. The pair is currently working on a second version of the product, which will include longer battery life, a better means of detecting objects in the user’s path and a more user-friendly design.
Some other prize-winning projects included Size Seeker, Firefly, The Campus Rep, and Invisergy.
SizeSeeker, presented by second-year Wharton MBA students Mona Safabakhsh and Ian Campbell, won the RJ Metrics Business Software Award.
By using a Kinect camera to take a person’s measurements prior to online shopping, their program solves the frustration of ordering the wrong size and fit.
Firefly, a screen-sharing app for customer service representatives, received the Dr. Chris Mader Award for Most Innovative Use of Information Technology. It allows support representatives to connect to customer’s screens remotely and walk them through complicated or poorly designed websites.
Wharton junior Patrick Leahy, a Firefly team member, explained his startup was unique because of its unprecedented privacy settings, which protect sensitive customer information.
Third place and a $1,000 prize was given to The Campus Rep, a website that connects college students with brand companies.
Students interested in becoming campus representatives create profiles and can either actively search for companies seeking ambassadors or wait to be contacted by the companies themselves.
The startup was created by College senior Elizabeth Wessel, Engineering junior Jason Mow, College and Wharton senior JJ Fliegelman, Wharton senior Andrew Harrington and College senior Kendall Haupt, a former 34th Street editor.
And finally, Wharton and Engineering sophomore Ryan Marschang and Engineering junior John Foye presented Invisergy, which came in second place and won $2,500.
Together with two Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate students, including 2009 Wharton and Engineering graduate Rishabh Jain, the team created a unique solar power-generating window that does not sacrifice aesthetic appeal and is also less expensive than traditional windows.
This article has been updated to include descriptions of other prize-winning teams that were not included in the original print edition published on Thursday, April 19.
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