Students Pitch Business Ideas at Peoria Startup Weekend
Students from °®¶¹´«Ã½ÊÓƵ and other area colleges brainstormed and pitched business ideas over the three-day Startup Weekend in late November.
12/09/2014 10:41 AM
By Brandon Wallace ‘17
Students from °®¶¹´«Ã½ÊÓƵ and other area colleges brainstormed and pitched creative business ideas over the three-day Startup Weekend in late November. The event, organized by °®¶¹´«Ã½ÊÓƵ’s , , and Startup Peoria, provided tools for central Illinois innovators to pursue technology-oriented businesses.
The participants, 32 °®¶¹´«Ã½ÊÓƵ students and students from other schools, began the event by pitching individual business ideas. Teams formed to tackle the seven top concepts.
Teams spent the rest of the weekend creating business models that would succeed, validating their idea by surveying and/or interviewing potential customers, and creating a pitch of their business concept. Many teams also produced working prototypes of websites and smartphone apps. On Sunday evening a panel of judges evaluated their ideas and pitches.
The first place idea was Chef Genie, a website and smartphone app that links chefs to people interested in having a chef come to their home to cook a meal for them. Chefs post profiles and market themselves through the website, and the business takes a 10 percent cut. The team was led by four °®¶¹´«Ã½ÊÓƵ students: major Daniel Hart ‘16, and major Haroon Zahid ‘16, major Harsh Shah ’15 and major Kyle Williams ’15.
The second place idea was Citizens’ City Helper, a smartphone app that provides a platform for citizens to alert municipal officials/departments of neighborhood problems such as potholes, broken streetlights and vandalism. The app will help cities prioritize repairs based on the severity of the problems or interest of the citizens. The included major Earl Schirer ‘15, and graduate students Sreekanth Karakula and Balakishan Belde.
The third place idea was Informed Response, a mapping technology and mobile app that captures and stores floor plans of commercial and residential buildings, to be used by first responders in the event of a crisis.
“Besides learning the concepts of a business, I think the most valuable item I learned was how to work with a team under high stresses,” Shah said. “If anyone is thinking about starting a business in the future, I highly recommend going to Startup Weekend or something similar to get a taste of what a startup involves.”