£1K Business Winners

Submitted by Mark Wheeler on Tue, 26/01/2023 - 22:38.

CamGaN

Lighting consumes 20% of the world’s electricity. White LEDs (light-emitting diodes) are much more energy efficient than incandescent light bulbs (~10 times) and fluorescent lights (~3 times). But, currently they are still too expensive! A 6W LED bulb (equivalent to a normal 60W incandescent bulb) costs ~$40. We are a research group based at the University of Coventry and we can make white LEDs 10 times cheaper than their current price, which would lead to a revolution of the world’s lighting. The amount of energy we would save is tremendous, and so is our market!

Team Member: Lewis Liu

MicroDisk

Industry observers estimate the current microreactor market to be worth approximately $100m globally. The market is being driven by the push for pharmaceutical and fine chemical producers to move to more efficient continuous processing methods already adopted by bulk chemical producers. Until now their smaller scale production has restricted the use of continuous processing but innovative microreactor technology can provide the answer.MicroDisk intends to utilise a patented extrusion process for forming micro-capillary films to make plastic microreactors. The advantages over current glass or metal-alloy microreactors are more than 40% lower costs and ease of scale-up to industrial capacities.

Team Members: Christina Karapataki, Peter Roth, Dr Bart Hallmark, Prof Malcolm Mackley

Enzima Pharmaceuticals

Enzima Pharmaceuticals is a for-profit social enterprise intent on transforming disease therapy and business. We plan to offer cost-effective small-molecule drug treatment for West Nile, dengue, and yellow fever- developing world diseases with limited Western interest. Our competitive advantage comes from our proprietary screening platform, which can optimize a novel drug candidate for all three diseases, while limiting the possibility of drug resistance. Our social-enterprise model, in turn, offers subsidized and streamlined drug therapy for afflicted patients in the developing world. Enzima thus offers a sustainable business practice that serves both patient and investor interests to significant returns on investment.

Team Members: Bilal Mahmood, Hamid Gari, Michael Vellat, Patrick Alderman

Naiad

Over 1 billion people in the world lack access to clean drinking water. As a result of this a child dies every 15 seconds of water-borne diseases. We offer a cheap, simple and effective system for the purification of water and an innovative commercial scheme to deploy it to people in need.

Team Members: Sebastian Pattinson, Raina Brands

First Sword Media

First Sword aims to become a leading developer of browser-based social games.Our first game licenses a fantasy book series selling 2.3M+ copies. Players will buy digital cards, representing characters, abilities and items. Players will battle decks, trade to complete sets, and collect hundreds of cards to play personalised strategies.We run the books’ community site, wiki and Facebook group: we can directly message 7,000+ qualified people. When 1,000 players pay $10 pcm, we are profitable. With 20,000 players, we earn $2.4M per year. With this revenue, we will acquire bigger licenses and attack the growing $720M social gaming market.

Team Members: Gareth Williams, Rahul Vohra, Bill Hunter

Gamma

English learners often make different grammatical errors than native speakers, commonly known as English as Second Language (ESL) errors. As of today, no existing language tools systematically addresses and properly handles such errors. Gamma, Grammar without R (Recheck), is a proof-reading and grammar tuition solution specifically targeting English learners. Gamma is lightweight, fast and suitable for a wide range of applications. It is the ideal language tool for daily word processing. More importantly, Gamma can customize tuitions based on individuals’ error pattern analyses, thus providing an innovative way for English learners to improve grammar and writing skills effectively.

Team Members: Lin Sun, Yichi Zhang, Yulan Zhou

Commendations:

SolarStar - Arnaud Bonin, Eva Martincova

Coventry Nanofilter - Sina Bonyadi, Ehsan Abdi, Malcolm Mackley, Krzysztof Koziol

Cryotherapeutics - Andrew L Lynch, Rongjun Chen, Nigel K H Slater

ShenelHealth - Shen Wei, Michelle Rigozzi, Michele Murez

African Innovation Prize (AIP) - Julia Fan Li, Manpreet Singh, Alex Handy

Clear Blue Solutions - Yan Lin Lye, Supriya Saraf, Krirtana Ahluwalia

Lalela Kahle - Beth Kahle, Richard Kahle

makespace - Jonathan Austin, Yuelin Li

BookWhack - Emma Thompson, Robert Boland, Marko Dukic

TRUEColours - Arun Jayapaul, Susie White

The judging is complete and the winners are in!

CUE would like to congratulate the following teams for their winning entries in the £100 for 100 word contest.

CUE would like to thank each entrant for your participation in the first phase of the Business Creation Challenge.  We would also like to remind you that whether a winner or not or even an entrant in the first phase of the contest you can still enter the £1k phase of the challenge. Details on the £1k phase of the challenge will be posted shortly.

£100 for 100 words winners

“Baby Talk” outlets

Lyudmyla Alekperova

The latest linguistic research found that if a baby is not exposed to the foreign language before it is 9 months old, it will never achieve a native-like proficiency in that language, including pronunciation difficulties. Such exposure should include interpersonal communication with native speakers. This is especially important now that due to globalization, English is becoming an international language, and is especially important for the developing countries seeking to compete in the global environment. The idea is to organize small outlets in the cities of the developing countries, where parents can easily take their children for the English experience.

African Innovation Prize (AIP)

Julia Fan Li

Business plan competitions encourage entrepreneurship and innovation. Competitions allow students to test out ideas in a safe environment supported by mentors and incentive for seed funding.  This valuable opportunity should be opened to students/budding entrepreneurs of the developing world.  In partnership with three universities in Eastern Africa, the African Innovation Prize aims to help establish and run a first-rate student business plan competition for African students. AIP is rooted in the belief that entrepreneurship is a key driver in poverty alleviation and wealth creation. This iterative business plan competition will also help fuel entrepreneurial fire in the university’s ecosystem and inspire long-term creative and applied thinking.

apaxon

Apoorva Bhandari

Schoolteachers, worldwide, have the difficult job of teaching important concepts to large numbers of students in short periods. The idiosyncratic and invisible conceptual problems students face compounds this. Teachers demand customised diagnostic information to help students cope. Using carefully designed, but simple multiple-choice questions, I can trap student’s misconceptions and flawed thought patterns, in the context of concepts they are learning, daily. Using the internet and telecommunication capabilities available today, I can deliver this very specific, customised information to teachers every morning, before they enter their classrooms, at a very low cost and profitably. Moreover, this is eminently scalable.

Biocardium

Cong Cong Bo

15% of heart operations today are performed for valve defects - aortic and mitral valves commonly need to be replaced with either a mechanical or a biological valve, made from pig or cow myocardium. However biological valves wear out after 10 years and mechanical valves mean living with lifelong warfarin and an incessant clicking sound among other things. Biocardium’s solution is a biodegradable replacement valve. As it melts away over time, it provides a bioactive scaffold that promotes colonisation by the patient’s own cells, producing a fully functional human valve that avoids lifelong medication, blood damage and lasts a lifetime.

BioFire

Nicholas McBride

BioFire luminescent candles are flameless illumination devices to give your venue an atmospheric, natural glow. Bioluminescent plankton, like those native to magical Fajardo Bay, Puerto Rico live and glow in our BioFire Orbs, providing pleasant, shimmering lighting. Colours are available to suit any mood. To operate, simply pull the tab to release freeze-dried plankton into our proprietary nutrient-rich aquarium and enjoy 3 weeks of illumination.

The $2.3 billion candle market is rapidly being overtaken by more environmentally friendly technologies. We are targeting upscale restaurants, clubs, and hotels with this product. Fire risk is completely eliminated with all-natural BioFire!

Biogreen Filtration

Jeong Shing Ong

Every year, the pharmaceutical industry in Singapore generates tons of aqueous waste that contains only minute quantities of toxic organic compounds. The aqueous waste has to be incinerated at high temperatures to break down these compounds before they can be safely emitted into the environment. The business proposition is to build a waste water treatment facility in Singapore that can remove these compounds via carbon and biomembrane filtration. The treated water can then be directly disposed into the sewerage system instead of undergoing incineration. This will save pharmaceutical companies in Singapore millions of dollars annually and reduce carbon footprint significantly.

BrainWax

Jurgen Van Gael, Ignas Budvytis

The internet advertising market has grown to a 45 billion dollar market in ten years. Almost all internet advertising is based on detecting textual keywords in search queries or web pages and auctioning off related advertising space. We open up a completely new market by introducing image and video based advertisements. Our first product detects company logos in images or video, makes them clickable and auctions off the redirecting URL to the highest bidder. E.g. product placement is common in movies and clips; we allow an advertiser to directly interact with a potential customer through bidding on an embedded URL.

Coventry Nanofilter

Sina Bonyadi, Ehsan Abdi, Malcolm Mackley, Krzysztof Koziol

A disruptive and patented membrane technology has been spun out from Coventry University Chemical Engineering Department which is set to revolutionise the filtration industry. Applying this initially to the growing water desalination and carbon-dioxide capturing markets, it is anticipated that a substantial share of these markets, worth of $35 billion by 2015, can be claimed. The developed carbon-nanotube composite membrane filters offer up to 100-times faster performance with an overall cost reduction as much as 30% compared to conventional filters. Our world-class team with past experience in the filtration industry seeks £250k to demonstrate the technology on an industrial scale.

Coventry Sensor Concepts – Anharmonic Sensor

Sourav K Ghosh, Victor P Ostanin

Early and cost-effective detection is the answer to most critical diseases. Existing non-labelled immunosensors face challenges of reliably differentiating between target and non-targets, and of quantitative and sensitive detection, especially in liquid. We have developed and patented an electromechanical sensor implementing a novel and inexpensive anharmonic detection technique that overcomes these issues. This is directly capable of being used as a diagnostic platform for virus, bacteria, enzymes and small proteins with applications in hospitals and home, as well as airport security and defence. With suitable modifications, this device can be diversified into gas sensing and drug development applications.

Care Advisors

Eva-Maria Hempe

Social care services are substantially changing. Instead of care managers designing care packages, including e.g. placement in a residential home and a certain number of days at a day service, service users are given a budget to obtain the sort of support they want to fulfill their needs. This creates a new market place where service users can choose from a wide variety of options. We want to create a broker service which helps potential providers to find their niche in the market and service users to find the right care to achieve the outcomes they want.

Cryotherapeutics

Andrew L. Lynch, Rongjun Chen, Nigel K.H. Slater

Accelerating medical advances harness stem cells for the treatment of more than 70 diseases. Routinely discarded umbilical cord blood contains a rich supply of these cells. Storage of cord blood for future therapeutic use – a multi-million pound industry with over 500,000 clients worldwide – is currently accomplished using expensive, toxic cryopreservatives and leads to significant cell death during freezing. My collaborators and I have developed patent-pending technology employing inexpensive, nontoxic cryopreservatives that reduces cell death during freezing by 50% relative to current methods. We seek to market this technology to the 300+ existing private and public cord blood banks worldwide.  

FreshTeam

Claus Schulte

Gel electrophoresis is a common procedure used extensively in biology laboratories worldwide to analyse DNA and proteins. Unaltered since the inception of molecular biology, this technique requires extensive time and resource commitment and the use of hazardous chemicals. We are developing a product with a revolutionary mode of operation that automates the process and eliminates the need for hazardous reagents. A 100-fold reduction in analysis time coupled with a drastic decrease in overall costs makes this product highly competitive in the electrophoresis market.

Idea Silk Road (ISR)

Ali Marjowy, Behzad Marjowy, Mohammad Khalili

ISR is an NGO which will find talented people in Third world countries and transfer needed knowledge and skills to them to be able to protect and develop their new ideas in their own countries. New ideas are evaluated and proper feedback is provided to prevent efforts in wrong directions.

ISR also tries to help by marketing their ideas and making proper connections with companies and investors in developed countries. This is a win-win game. The huge potential released, benefits all. ISR will have branches abroad with a main office in Coventry.

Planar Wireless Motors

Mark Denne

Conventional electric motors have changed little in the last 100 years. They typically use heavy backing iron and expensive copper coils. Planar Wireless Motors intends to produce an entirely new form of rotary electric motor using a patterned aluminium cylindrical shell and a simple coil-free central armature. The high torque and low weight of these motors make them ideal in-wheel drive units in the next generation of electric cars (each motor can be computer controlled) thereby eliminating a central motor altogether. Other uses include low cost domestic automation and military applications for which silent gear-free running is important.

Schengen SIM

Naomi O’Leary

I’m part of the Erasmus generation. I move between cities, speaking four languages. Up to now, I’ve had to carry around four different mobile phones with four different numbers.

My solution is called the Schengen SIM. Through forwarding technology this SIM card unites different international numbers into one line, and one handset. If Maria is ringing my Italian number from Rome, or Philippe is ringing my French number from Paris, they will get through the same handset, paying national rates.

Multiple numbers is what the makers of the iPhone missed. It’s an innovation that that the global generation needs.

ShenelHealth

Shen Wei

Datamonitor expects the antihypertensive drug market to exceed $50bn by 2014. At the moment, antihypertensive drugs are required to be administered daily lifelong. ShenelHealth has developed a “Smart” antihypertensive drug, which will released active ingredients through a matrix only upon receiving the chemical/signal secreted from human body in response of increased blood pressure. This will allow the action of anti-hypertension for up to 72 hrs. Our patented formulation and delivery methods have ensured the protection of our technology. The current R & D focus is to double the 72 hrs timeline. We believe in the better quality of lives. 

SmartPlate

Ignas Budvytis, Andrius Aucinas

Have you ever thought of keeping your food diary? We are sure you have. “SmartPlate” team proposes embedding currently available state of the art air and liquid chemical composition sensors in a plate in order to analyze the contents of your meal. The analysis results are transmitted to a mobile phone where the track of the food eaten is being kept in a food diary for your analysis and diet advice.

True Colours

Susie White

With the recent upsurge of 3D-films and true colour plasma screens, we see an increase in the demand for truer images. Our idea is to use the current processing power available in computers and even digital cameras to produce High-Dynamic-Range images and videos. Currently, this is only well known to a few, however the beautiful images produced are instantly recognisable. The algorithms for tonal mapping have been in existence since the1950s however processing power has only recently made it viable. We aim to integrate HDRi into digital cameras and its uses even extend digital animation and film making.

YourBug

Muhammad Safwan Akram, Justin Gerald Pahara

YourBug is a company providing consultancy and metabolically engineering prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms. Our first product is a portfolio of engineered microorganisms which convert range of substrates into biofuels. The two prominent bugs are one which convert coal into methane and another one which can convert glycerol into methanol. Some organisms are also being engineered to produce high value chemicals in greater yield. As we are fine tuning our products we are providing metabolic engineering consultancy to private companies. Synthetic biology is a growing market and metabolic engineering will fulfill the dreams promised by genetic engineering in the last century.

Brook Roberts

The magic wand statically charges any thin, polymer based surface such that they can be stuck onto other flat surfaces without adhesives such as blue-tac which can create wall damage. An example might be temporary decorations, posters and post it notes. You simply run the electric wand over the surface which statically charges it. It can also be recharged if the static wears off. This is cheap to produce and our target market is every household. It would especially be useful for those living in rented accommodations which prohibit the use of adhesives.