Entrepreneurship Awards - Finalists' Project summary

NEW ENTREPRENEUR CATEGORY

EVM Project Management
EVM is an engineering innovation company whose mission is to combine creativity and reality. It seeks alternative solutions to the problems of both public and private organizations through the use of tools to translate ideas into real projects. EVM refers to Earned Value Management, a project management technique that allows controlling the execution of a project through its budget and its implementation schedule. EVM also offers Business Analysis, Training, Fundraising and Software Development Services for a wide range of Research, Development and Innovation Projects. www.evm‐consulting.com 

ONYX SOLAR ENERGY
Onyx Solar is a technology driven company that has developed smart building solutions for Building Integrated Photovoltaic’s (BIPV) in façades as well as in roofs. These solutions consist in the replacement of conventional materials such as glass or ceramics for a PV glass which is not only aesthetically attractive but also customized for each Project, achieving energy saving from the Sun. www.onyxsolar.com

Sinergia de Estudio 4dtres
4dtres | Animation Studio, it is innovative audiovisual company, which operates through communication projects and creation of new applications within the field of 3D animation. Led by the two brothers Marco and David Martín Muñoz, 4dtres is specialized in the advertising industry and the development of 3D business projects presentations. With the aim of offering a broad visual range of alternatives, we design new ways to open to the market for Image & Rendering in the Canary Islands. We came to this market with a clear philosophy: passion, dedication and creative expression. Our commitment with quality results makes that our work evolves in synergy with our customers’ needs. Everything is managed by a team, highly qualified and with experienced in interpretation of drawings, ephemeral architecture, graphic design and illustration.  www.4dtres.com

Tre Tau Engineering
Tre Tau Engineering started as an engineering company with a strong focus on R&D. We develop together with our customers new processes and products. Thanks to our high-tech orientation, we integrate great part of our work into European sponsored R&D projects, working in these projects as coordinators and subcontractors. We already work as coordinators in ERA-NET projects (4 of them), with partners ranging from Romania to Belgium and from France to Turkey. We are as well possibly starting an Eureka and a Research for SMEs project in the 7th Framework Program. As a complement of our business line, we offer to our clients integrated ERP solutions based on open-source platforms, such as Linux. This complementary product helps our customers better manage and integrate innovation in their business models. www.tretau.it

VIP-86
We are young married couple students. We developed our own business - Copy center. The copy center is situated right in front of the University of Ruse Bulgaria. Our key clients are students. We attract them trough quality and fast services. We want to develop an innovative business model of a half-price copy service for students. On the back of the sheets there will be advertisements of various companies. They will pay for these ads and will bring value for the students. We will need some more people and reliable equipment of copy machines

HIGH TECH CATEGORY

Biotechware
Biotechware is a business venture by Alessandro Sappia, Enrico Manzini and Vertigotech s.r.l., a company specialized in electronics. They conceived a telemedicine integrated platform for remote cardiac monitoring, aimed at pharmacies. Two main kinds of structures are currently operating in Italy on the cardiac monitoring market: private laboratories, offering expensive services with short waiting periods and low bureaucracy, and the national health service, with lower costs but long waiting lists and much more bureaucracy. Both are not always easily reachable, especially by the elderly or people living far from cities, as requiring long travels. These are time and money waste, thus discouraging people and reducing the number of check-ups. Nevertheless people needs these check-ups to be rapid and affordable. On the other side, pharmacies need to offer new services not to succumb to the growing number of OTC-shops. The team’s solution permits to record a professional grade ECG directly at the pharmacy with an easy to use and innovative device. The record is then remotely reviewed and reported by a qualified cardiologist and made available to the patient through a secure website.

CALLMAT: Water for all - top to bottom
CALLMAT (CALixarene iMmobilized MATs) is a range of products for down trodden masses that will use bio-organic compounds to remove toxic metal ions and pollutants from water. Its main applications can be in substituting bottle drinking water and in decontaminating industrial water. Some products that we are currently studying are: • BOTTLES, GLASS and STRAW: instant treated water for consumption • WATERTANK: water transport, treatment and storage • PIPE: for industrial waste effluent treatment Leveraging these applications CALLMAT aims to target a potential $86,421.2 million market in 2011. We also developed CALINTRIP, which gives the users visual representation of quality and quantity of water pollution through changing colour strips. Though the core strength of our venture would be heavy metal treatment, we plan to set-up whole water treatment industry from industries to rural areas. Leveraging this strategy we will distribute the price of the product among different target markets creating a sustainable business. We believe that CALLMAT can be a radical shift from existing complex and expensive technologies, introducing solutions from top to bottom of pyramid.

Energy-efficient Smart Home Monitoring and Control
Enabling residents to analyze and monitor their electricity footprint in real-time using intuitive visualization tools, allows intelligent and efficient energy management. However, residents are still not actively involved in the process of saving energy. “Green” systems are designed to help people save energy, which of course means they can contribute in saving money too. The basic idea of smart home automation is to employ sensor-based control systems to monitor a house and accordingly adjust the various mechanisms that provide heat, ventilation etc. In this way, energy conservation and security can be realized by stopping the flow of electricity to plugged-in devices that were left unattended (switched-on or standby) or consume high amounts of energy when operate for large time periods. But, is this kind of home automation really a necessity for consumers? The majority of applications intended to be used in contemporary smart houses offer more likely a luxury service than a necessity. We believe that simple-to-use and affordable, but high quality solutions focusing on most people’s basic needs are needed in order to stimulate people’s interest on smart home automation green products.

Mass production of nanoparticle-based devices
The business consists in transferring the strong potential of nanotechnologies from Research to Industry by developing processes to control the elementary bricks (nanoparticles assembly) of future application of nanotechnologies. The technology involved is simple: assembling nanoparticles according to predefined patterns in order to bring specific functionality to the created device. Indeed, our company will be in charge of assembling nanoparticles on solid or flexible substrates and fostering the new opportunities brought by these processes such as miniaturization (from micro to nano) or sensors improvements, due to new properties accessible solely in nano scale. The target market is very large as the industry position will be in “front-end”; the market is directly linked to the domains potentially interested in nanoparticles applications. We can highlight some of them which are currently orientating their development in this way: biology/medical (analysis or treatment), sensors (better detection, miniaturization), aeronautics (news communication devices, miniaturization), technology, multimedia (i.e. flexible tactile displays based on nano strain gauges)…

MediWiSe: Medical Wireless Sensing
MediWiSe (Medical Wireless Sensing) is an innovative venture in the emerging Microwave Medical Imaging market. Our core technology is based on a novel and original use of low-power microwaves for non-invasive, early stage screening of cancer. Our patent pending technology offers an improvement on the existing medical imaging procedures as it is safer and more cost-effective for the screening of certain cancer types. The MediWiSe team is extremely committed to this real project and fully intends to bring it to market. MediWiSe’s initial focus is early stage screening of breast cancer as, with more than a million women diagnosed every year, this is one of the most common cancer types in the World. In the UK alone, in 2006 more than 45,500 women were diagnosed with breast cancer, that’s around 125 women a day. Breast cancer incidence rates have increased by more than 50% over the last 25 years. Women who are diagnosed with breast cancer in the earliest possible stage have a nine in ten chance of surviving for at least five years after diagnosis. But if the cancer is very advanced at the point of diagnosis, these odds fall to under two in ten. These challenges highlight the need for a safer and at the same time cheaper medical imaging technology that can allow the worldwide distribution of early screening of breast cancer equipment.

Mesostructured Intergrated Systems for Original solutions

Mesostructured Integrated Systems for Original Solutions (MISO) is a business project based on the use of silica particles with ordered porosity in conjunction with the patented recipe for combining them with pharmaceutical agents and dispersing them in creams or ointments, increasing the efficacy in numerous topical applications, both therapeutic and cosmetic. On the basis of the tests carried out in laboratory, the results show the prolonged and constant effect of the pharmaceutical agents combined to the silica particles. Therefore, the so-obtained creams or ointments get the advantage of an increased efficacy, a lower number of applications during the time of care and a reduced time to cure. The business objective is to interact with companies involved in dermatology and having the dimensions to implement clinical trials and to manufacture and commercialize the new creams quickly. Operationally, the team will request to become a spin-off of the Politecnico di Torino and to avail the exclusive right of the commercial exploitation of the patented recipe.

Mnemosine
It is estimated that by 2050 over 100 million people will be affected by the Alzheimer’s disease. It not only affects the patient but also the whole family and specially the caregiver. We propose a software environment, called Mnemosine, designed to improve the quality of life of Alzheimer’s patients and their support groups Some capabilities of Mnemosine are: *Personal Memory: This tool allows the edition of text and/or several multimedia resources, depicting past lived experiences, or the social circle of the patient. *Cognitive Exercises: It allows the neuropsychologist to manage cognitive exercises. *Planning and monitoring the daily activity of the patient: If we assume that daily routine is a key factor in Alzheimer’s patients, this tool make possible to schedule a limited set of activities for a certain period of time, *Patient’s positioning system: Mnemosine allows the definition of a geographic route, including the definition of a set of alerts in case the patient walks outside a secure area, or doesn’t come back inside the scheduled time. *Analysis of the disease progression: Logs with the everyday activity of the patient are recorded on the mobile device.

RevHeal
RevHeal project aims to provide hospitals and medical facilities with an integrated framework of services, oriented to cooperation, communication and consultation. RevHeal intends to exploit the latest social networking technology, supported by a powerful semantic engine, allowing medical centers to organize and share data with efficiency and ease, quickly answering the needs of patients.

TRANSNATIONAL CATEGORY

 
Adapted Materials (Italy / Spain)

The business is based on Materials for special conditions, for extreme environments or with very demanding properties. Business activities are in two different approaches: “Materials Selection” for private companies with special needs and “Materials Development” for public agencies in partnership with other R&D actors. The company added value is based on their staff skills. Adapded Materials will be formed by four students from Spain and Italy with knowledge and experience in engineering, R&D, technology transfer, international business and materials development.

Demographic estimates and social experiences tailor automatically travel and hotel (France / Spain)
 In the new era of social networks the power of combining this with crowd-sourced intelligence will mark the edge for any business. This project is about having hotel information coming to you rather than you searching for it. When travelling, we know your hotel is dear to you -it is where you rest and get ready for the coming day packed with experiences!It is a fact that dozens of websites help you along the search, giving you reviews and price comparisons, but, honestly, you don’t really have the time to read them all. What about a system that does it for *you* -selects a list of hotels matching your choices at the right time and the perfect price. And how? -By learning a little bit about you. Connect with Facebook or other social networks. -Getting to know you better as we go along. Any children?or partying? -What you expect from a hotel. Budget, must-have Wifi, allergic? And privacy is our main concern. Our system will build your profile, anonymously match it against the rest of the community anywhere in the world, and give you the best option. This means smartly inferring profiles, rankings and reviews from other parts of the world, to give you choices for your local pick!

eReader (Italy / Spain)
This project aims to complete the technological transformation that has already happened in several content markets, covering the last remaining sector: the text documents. Defined as a comprehensive solution for managing digital contents, eReader enables the organization, visualization, acquisition, and sharing all types of text documents. In addition, we aim at implementing an automatic synchronization of contents among all user devices. We plan to realize the eReader software for multiple platforms, including smartphones, and to exploit multitouch devices to provide an outstanding user experience. In the modern society, despite of the effect of globalization, we still have a lot of production of text document in mother tongue. Each user of eReader will benefit from the possibility to add friends using social networking primitives in order to share the documents, and request/perform translations. In order to manage the resulting community of translators, eReader will implement a strong reputation system. Several current trends confirm the viability of the project, our goal is to create and energize the market trend to achieve the highest possible penetration.

NOA (Portugal / Spain)
The business is based on the application of real case solutions of highly hydrophobic foams able to absorb oil products off the water, acting like an oil sponge, to clean up the sea surface and beaches along Canary coasts by using floating structures (similar to marine jails). The strong hydrophobic character, surface area and 98% of porosity allows this material to absorb circa 540g oil per 100g of material. The main products will be: 1. In the case of remediation (marine disasters) the standard product is a circular 10x10 square meters structure with the absorption of app. 650 Kilograms of oil and with a price around 1.350€. 2. In the case of prevention the product will be 1 square meter with a price of 135€. The target region will be the Canary Islands, in which the marine traffic is very high, tourism is the main economical factor (30.4% PIB), and marine resources, sun and beaches are the most attractive components for European tourists and no competitors have been identified. The high impact of oil pollution or environmental disaster such as Mexican Gulf on Canary coasts will comprise a critical risk for the tourism on Canary coasts over long years. The main scope to develop the technology in the Islands for then, launching to Europe within distribution channels.

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