£1k Award Ceremony!0

Well done to all entrants for the £1k competition! If you’re interested in getting involved but for £5k this time, come along to our £5k Training Event this Saturday, register at ‎www.5ktraining2011.eventbrite.com!

Gallery at the bottom of the page!

See press release at http://www.cabume.co.uk/the-cluster/cue-p1k-awards-uncover-stella-potential.html?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4d481a72a1492b00%2C0

Social Enterprise Winners

RISE
Baillie Aaron and Daniel Marshal (Department of Criminology)
“RISE’s mission is to provide court‐involved young people with opportunities for role modeling, inspiration, success, and enrichment through its coaching program. Studies have consistently shown that at‐risk young people benefit tremendously from ongoing mentorship relationships. The RISE program is based on empirically‐tested best practices and provides adult coaches for youth in custody, commencing during their sentence and extending through to their community re‐entry. Given that the annual cost of keeping one youth in custody is £34,000 and the recidivism rates are approximately 75%, RISE is expected to save taxpayers £25,500 for every young person that does not return to custody.”

Khadija’s Business Park
Shah Rukh Abbas (Department of Chem Eng and Biotech.) and Faisal Farooq Khan
Khadija’s Business Park, aims to grow into a network of locally-planned business parks or entrepreneurial bazaars for women in Pakistan. It provides a unique platform to women folk to empower themselves, help in sustaining their households and share the burden of rehabilitation after the catastrophic floods which has crippled the economy of every affected home in Pakistan.

Commendation Prize winners:

ifundresearch
Lindsay Kellar-Parsons (Department of Chem Eng and Biotech.), Michael Freedman, Zachary Katz, Phillip Benedetti and Markus Moravek
“ifundresearch is a virtual non-profit organisation that facilitates direct public funding of biomedical research laboratories with a disease focus. This online platform enables streamlined donations to a selection of credible researchers from around the world, whose projects have been certified by the non-profit’s impartial and unbiased board of scientific advisers. Furthermore, ifundresearch is more than just a cost-efficient donation portal; it also engages people with innovative research scientists. Through this new relationship, individuals will be more aware of where their research funding is going, and the public will support scientists in a centralized, simplified way.
”

Workingcycle
Sergio Koc-Menard (JBS), Paola Passuni
Over the next 5 years, 3.2 million people will retire in the UK alone. Two-thirds of them, however, will consider working in retirement. WorkingCycle is a social partnership for employers that value the talent of retirees. Using an online exchange, employers can build a shared pool of retirees, and help their retiring employees find flexible assignments. Companies profit because they can reduce recruitment costs, while branding themselves as age-friendly employers. Retirees gain because they can increase their savings, while keeping time for retirement activities. Society benefits because extending working lives is essential to sustain economic growth and finance public pensions.

Technology Enterprise Winners

Anharmonika
Sourav Ghosh (Department of Engineering), Ashley Butcher
“Global sociological and economic trends dictate that there is an increasing need for local, quick, reliable and cost-effective detection of biological analytes for a wide variety of high value market opportunities in healthcare, defence, agriculture, environmental and consumer sectors. Anharmonika have developed and patented a novel analytical detection technique that favourably lends itself to the development of high performance, low cost point-of-use diagnostic solutions. The technology has a unique capability to sensitively, quantitatively and reliably detect bacterial and viral pathogens that pose a serious threat to national security and have a significant cost to the UK economy: healthcare associated infectious diseases caused by MRSA, C.difficile and Noravirus costs the NHS about £1B annually; food poising from Campylobacter to date has cost more than £590M; a key need identified by the National Security Strategy is the development of fieldable solutions to detect biological warfare agents. We are a team of researchers, engineers and scientists seeking finance to develop a portable version of our laboratory detection system which collaborators and potential customers will use to perform field trials. ”

eComm
Tongyun Li (Department of Engineering), Michael Crips, Richard V. Penty, Ian H. White
Due to severe signal penetration loss, large buildings blocks have increasing demand for in-building infrastructures to provide wireless services (3G, Wifi and etc). Most recent market research forecasts worldwide deployment revenues from in-building wireless systems to grow from $3.8 billion in 2007 to over $15 billion in 2013. Distributed antenna systems (DAS) is an attractive approach for improving radio coverage in buildings. However, traditional DAS suffers from a requirement for high linearity, dynamic range and energy consumption. Using digital signal processing techniques, we have demonstrated a high efficient digital DAS system with dynamic range over 60dB and reduced data rate of 208 times. Reconfigurable digital system and high energy efficiency lead to significant reduction in both construction and maintenance costs.

Commendation Prize winners:

PCB-integrated optical Sensor
Tanya Hutter (Department of Engineering), Dr. Nikos Bamiedakis
“There is a strong interest in the development of low-cost sensors for safety, healthcare, environmental and homeland-security applications. Optical sensors offer high sensitivity, low power consumption and immunity to electromagnetic interference. US demand for chemical sensors will grow 7.6 % annually through 2012, and the demand for chemical sensors based on emerging technologies, such as optical sensors, will see the fastest gains (Freedonia Market Search). Proper safety monitoring procedures and equipment must be in place at all times to detect accidents (e.g. leakage) and prevent
serious injuries or death. We have developed a low-cost fully-integrated optical multi-gas sensor. The device composed of polymeric waveguide array on standard printed circuit board (PCB) with all the required electronic components. Chemical functionalization of a waveguide array with different sensitive coatings is used to generate ‘fingerprints’ for specific gases. The device can be fabricated with conventional methods, and therefore compatible with existing manufacturing processes. In addition, as the optical sensor is deposited directly on the PCB, the device can be fitted on any circuit, thus incorporate a transmitter for wireless sensing and miniaturized to fit in mobile phones.”

Sphericos Biotechnology
Shah Rukh Abbas, Faisal Faroop Khan, Habib Abdur-Rahman
“Promoting the cause of safer insecticides of biological origin, Sphericos Biotechnologies introduces a novel approach for the production of ‘green’ bio-insecticides that will compete in the current market by escaping stringent regulatory restrictions through its eco-friendly nature, higher efficiency and decreased production costs through the use of recycled agricultural wastes. The launch of Sphericos Vault, an online information database of all Sphericos Custom products, will attract universities, governmental and non-governmental organisations to collaborate with Sphericos in the fight against mosquitoes and malaria.”

Trainsense
Rachel He Yu and Ruiqi Chen (Department of Engineering)
TrainSense is a Coventry based spin off which aims to emerge as a global leader in real time railway track monitoring technology. The railway engine driver is dependent on a number of sources for information about incoming trains, condition of the railway track and prospective obstacles along the path. However, unlike a car driver, who can visually monitor the road in real time, as he drives, the railway engine driver is virtually blind. Accidents happen whenever the sources of information available to the engine driver are not correct.

Software Winners

Kaleedo
“Wenqi Chen and Paul Catherall (Material Science and Metallurgy)”
Kaleedo is a smartphone software startup addressing the exploding apps market. The platform technology Kaleedo develops fulfils the demand from major handset manufacturers to have rapid access to quality apps, while creating an extra revenue opportunity for app developers without the need of their major effort. Confirmed interest from handset manufactures has reduced the market risks, and the company has proved the concept on prototype on technical side. Seed capital is needed to diminish the technical risks by refining the prototype into beta demonstrable to potential partners and clients.

Labbridge.com
Ankur Mutreja, Min Hu and Peng Li (Welcome Trust Sanger Institute)
“We propose a website called ‘Labbridge.com’ as a platform that allows scientists to update and share real-time information about experimental kits and reagents within or outside their institutions. This website will prevent repetitive orders, promote resource exchange, and provide feedbacks on kits and reagents from different brands. Furthermore, this website is free for researchers. Our profits will be generated by advert subscription charges from biotech and chemical reagents companies and selling the statistical reagent usage data to interested buyers. In future, we have plans to enter Europe, USA and Asia and establish respective micro-communities for effective information and product exchange.”

Commendation Prize winners:

Qiqqa
“James Jardine (Computer Laboratory), Elbert Marais and James Phillips”
“Qiqqa.com, pronounced “quicker”, is a software application that enables people to learn faster and more effectively by providing tools to find, annotate and quickly recall the knowledge they need. People go to Google to search, Amazon to read. Our vision is that people go to Qiqqa to learn. Qiqqa does this by offering our users tools to annotate information to make sense of it, i.e. the versatility of paper and pen but on a computer, combined with the power of computers to search and organise information, in conjunction with proprietary recommendation algorithms to suggest relevant new information to read.”

Best Pitch

HireGrid.com Robert Ellis

hiregrid is your Personal Recruitment Network. Connect with people who are exposed to jobs you might want in the future. It’s your network where where you can share information about upcoming jobs or other work.