Tuesday, February 24th, 2015 | ’

 

Phoenix Pitch brings together students for

innovative pitching competition

Shriram Anbalagan
CO PY E D ITO R

Several teams consisting of students
from Chicago assembled at the Chicago Inno-
vation Exchange (CIE) in Hyde Park on Friday,
February 13. This is a newly opened building,
owned by the University of Chicago. The event
was the first annual one, which mainly focused
on providing a platform for young entrepre—
neurs and like minded students to network
and build connections.

They presented their startup or busi—
ness idea with a clear cut goal and map, collect-
ed feedback and did some valuable network-
ing. The TIT Mobile App Development (MAD)
association played

a key role in making this event pos-
sible. Also, several IIT teams and students were
seen actively pitching their ideas and discuss-
ing with entrepreneurs. 'Ihe CIE played host
to over 80 participants consisting of 25 teams

 

from local schools and universities. Students
were seen from the University of Chicago, De-
Paul University, University of

Illinois at Chicago and our very own
IIT. All twenty five participants were asked to
submit a thirty second video pitch for the first
two rounds of selection. The videos of all the
pitches were played in front of all the contes-
tants at the event and each contestant had to
vote online for their top three picks. Then the
top ten teams would go through to the next
round. The quality of the videos in terms of
presentation and innovation was pretty re—
markable. All kinds of ideas were flying around
and some had made their videos so impressive
using their editing skills, making it very hard
to choose for the contestants.

Ideas ranged from swapping jobs
with someone, making blogging easy through
a mobile app, to turning trash into tomatoes.

Ten finalists were selected and they
had to provide a final pitch in front of six well

 

accomplished judges, namely Rick Zullo, Vice
President at Lightbank, Alida Miranda—Wolff,
Associate Manager at Hyde Park Angels,
Imran Ahmad, Principal at OCA Ventures,
Shradha Agarwal, President and Co-Founder
of Context Media, Shreena Amin, Co-Founder
and COO at Pretty Quick, and Bob Rosenberg,
Adjunct Associate Professor of Entrepreneur-
ship at the Booth School of Business. The fi-
nal pitches were three minutes long and could
have a Question and Answer round of up to
four minutes. The contestants were given two
hours to prepare for this. There were a set of
mentors commonly available to all students to
help them through and discuss real world is-
sues. The judges rated each pitch on how inno-
vative the idea was, the business viability and
market value of the product.

The results were then announced
by the judges, with Amazon gift cards being
awarded to the winners. Coming in at third
was none other than our very own fellow IIT

businesséfitechnewsiitcom

team, Trash-to-Tomato, consisting of Prasan-
na Deshpande, Juana Villalpando and Ivaness
Chiong. Their pitch was based on creating a
system which helped restaurants turn their
trash to tomatoes by collecting the waste, as-
sembling and composting it and finally grow-
ing the tomatoes. They bagged a $125 Amazon
Gift Card. Coming in at second was Prepify, a
startup which offers adaptive SAT study mate-
rials for free. The first place was bagged by GE
Yang for his amazing creation, The Escherpad.
It is a collaborative note-taking web applica-
tion which saves a lot of time for students and
members of the academia by short handing
scripts and different styles with nifty shortcuts.
The first place and second place winners were
awarded with $500 and $250 Amazon Gift

'Cards respectively.

 

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Photos courtesy of Phoenix Pitch