Farley Center for Entrepreneurship Builds Relationships with Entrepreneurs in Home Security

LiveWatch Security, LLC, moved its fast growing home security systems business to Evanston in 2011 because of the city’s proximity to one of the premier thought leadership centers in the country: Northwestern University. Two Northwestern University Alumni formed a perfect team to bridge academia and entrepreneurship at Northwestern University to an Evanston business.

According to LiveWatch Security CEO, Brad Morehead, “While many leading Universities graduate top tier talent, few can match Northwestern’s multi-disciplinary collaboration and innovation that Professor Michael Marasco has created at the Farley Center for Entrepreneurship. Students at Northwestern University with a variety of backgrounds can experience the entire innovation and business life cycle from idea generation, development, launch and fundraising. Courses like NUvention Web train engineers, computer science majors and graduate business students together to gain real world experience rarely seen in a university setting.”

LiveWatch saw the talent that the Farley Center was developing and began an informal internship program working with a group of students active at the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University. Projects began as collaborative ideas between the company and the student interns. In several cases, these projects progressed quickly to longer-term success stories. Today, LiveWatch Security is actively working with six Northwestern University students, most of whom developed their talents through Professor Michael Marasco’s NUvention Web class.

Externship opportunities like this give students a chance to showcase what they have learned in the classroom by working with companies like LiveWatch Security’s SafeMart.com, the country’s fastest growing provider of wireless security systems and alarm monitoring.

LiveWatch Security and The Farley Center for Entrepreneurship at Northwestern University are creating an environment where students, the university, customers and entrepreneurs can all benefit. Students are incubating innovative concepts while LiveWatch Security is leading a $20 billion home security industry revolution using ground-breaking ideas and technologies developed in collaboration with Northwestern University’s outstanding future alumni.

 

Northwestern Students Compete at 2011 Rice Business Plan Competition

The Rice Business Plan Competition (RBPC), one of the largest business plan competitions in the US, held its awards banquet on Saturday, April 16th, 2011. 700+ attended the banquet, where $1.3 Million in prizes was awarded to the winners of the competition. TNG Pharmaceuticals of the University of Louisville took the Grand Prize. The event marked the eleventh year of RBPC and was hosted by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship and Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

Teams were able to compete in six categories: life sciences, information technology, energy, green tech, social ventures and other technologies. The competition process involved 15-minute business plan presentations, with the top six competitors vying for the grand prize valued at $642,000.

Northwestern sent two teams to the competition: Neuvel, which won $700 and got 2nd place in the Shark Tank Round- Flight 2, and San + CO, which won $500 and received 4th place in the Shark Tank Round – Flight 3.

 

Northwestern University Venture Challenge Semi-Finals

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Northwestern University Venture Challenge (NUVC) recently held its semi-finals on April 25^th.  NUVC, a student-run competition, serves as a platform for entrepreneurial students who want to participate in the experience of building a business idea from scratch. Ideas that are allowed to be submitted to the competition must fit into one of five functional tracks: Health Care and Biomedical Science Technologies, Energy and Sustainability, Information Technology, and Media/Journalism Social Enterprise Products and Services.  

Participants in the competition have access to early-stage investors and veteran entrepreneurs as well as faculty. The Semi-final round was the second of three rounds, during which the twenty-three teams that had passed round one were judged in two stages by a panel of VCs and entrepreneurs, by presenting a three minute elevator pitch and answering questions from the judges. The competition is fierce, and only six teams were chosen to move onto the final round, which will be held at the Entrepreneur@NU Conference on May 24^th. Here are the profiles of the six teams who are finalists:

AccuFlow Diagnostics

AccuFlow Diagnostics is a developer of rapid, low-cost and highly sensitive lateral flow assays for screening of high prevalence diseases at the point of patient care. CerviaDx represents AccuFlow’s entry into the $18.7B point-of-care healthcare market segment, utilizing a patented high-sensitivity assay to screen and stage cervical cancer lesions. CerviaDx technology delivers analytical detection comparable to large instrument-based diagnostics within 30 minutes at less than a tenth of the cost per test and without needing any capital equipment. AccuFlow has developed prototype devices for its platform technology and is now seeking funding for feasibility studies and pilot unit delivery.

Higher Realm Photonics

Using recent advances in nanoscience, Higher Realm Photonics has created an energy-efficient and compact version of the conventional ‘mask aligner’—one of the most crucial pieces of equipment used in manufacturing of nanoscale devices, such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs), microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), microprocessors, and many other technologies. Compared to conventional mask-aligners, the product is compact, low-cost, consumes far less electricity, and uses environmentally friendly materials. It has successfully been deployed at the Odom Laboratory at Northwestern University for 15 months and has been used for the production of >500 micro- and nanoscale devices, with feature sizes as low as 100 nm.

S2E Solar

S2E SolarTM makes “transparent conductor” solar cell components that enable solar energy to be lower cost than grid electricity.  The transparent conductor industry is approaching $10B, and the solar industry is currently $38B and rapidly increasing, providing substantial growth potential.  The foundational IP behind the company’s product, S2E Solar FilmTM, was developed at Northwestern University.  Founder Jon Servaites is finishing his PhD at Northwestern in Materials Science and Engineering, researching thin film solar cells in the Tobin Marks Group, where this foundational IP was invented.

 Functional Jewelry

In the United States, jewelry is a ~$50 billion per year, highly fragmented market. Recently, traditional jewelry business has been losing market share to unique, innovative jewelry products sold from smaller retail shops and online-only vendors. Separately, the scientific race to address climate change has led to the creation of a novel material type: crystals that can absorb greenhouse gases. Both beautiful and functional, these crystals are ideally suited as jewelry for the environmentally conscious.

TicketSnagger.com

TicketSnagger.com is a secondary market for event tickets that reverses the dynamic of other markets by allowing buyers to set prices at which they would be willing to buy tickets and allowing sellers to close deals by accepting offers and initiating the ticket transfer. The buyers would be committed to their offer prices so that when/if a seller accepts, that offered price will automatically be charged. This system will allow buyers to purchase tickets below face value and allows sellers to always be able to recoup the value of their tickets, creating a demand driven secondary market.

Present Bee

Present Bee alleviates gift-giving pains with a smart solution that helps users give better gifts with less stress and more social proof. Its platform provides users with access to the most personally relevant and popular gift ideas for anyone in their social network. Present Bee combines: (1) Algorithm-generated gift ideas to connect people to products they will love, (2) the ability to get gifting advice from friends and family, and (3) the option to purchase expensive gifts seamlessly as a group.

 

NUvention:March Web Presentations

The NUvention: Web presentations took place recently in March. There were many interesting projects presented, all of which are detailed below:

Suggenda is an online event planning tool which builds off the idea that current event planning tools are inefficient and do not work well when planning a dinner together with friends. It also addresses the issue that many restaurants face in terms of bringing in new diners and filling in seats during non-peak hours. Suggenda’s solution is to offer a way to play matchmaker between restaurants and potential diners, providing a platform for restaurants to directly see the discussion on convenient dining times provide deal offers based on what they see, providing consumers with what they say is easy and fun social event planning.

AlumSocial is a website which deals with the problematic aspects of multiple alumni networks, outdated directories, and job searches by providing a single platform for alumni to find information, connect with networking contacts, and find friends with common interests through affinity groups. AlumSocial also engages with the university side, aiming to allow universities to manage and measure the alumni engagement experience

DiSCO5:01 is a photo-driven social application for smart-phones designed for people and their friends to communicate and collectively capture memories while they’re on the go. It is designed to make communication more interactive and engaging, redefining the way people communicate.

Sweetperk.com is a web-based service that allows small businesses to manage promotions by allowing business owners to create and manage promotions online, replacing paper coupons, cutting down waste, and partnering with business improvement districts. Consumers will be able to redeem these promotions using their mobile devices. Ultimately, Sweetperk.com’s goal is to encourage people to live life local.

Storytree works off the notion that there is currently platform for player collaboration in social gaming, despite the fact that there are over 100 million users on games like Farmville. What Storytree does is to allow gamers to competitively create and share stories, turning them from content consumers to content producers. According to the makers of Storytree, “everyone likes a good story”, and their product provides an opportunity for real collaboration.

MassiveStart targets the inefficiencies of the job search: according to them, as it stands currently, recruiters are receiving hundreds of resumes from unqualified candidates, qualified programmers are getting lost in this deluge, and project managers aren’t getting the employees they need. MassiveStart aims to create a social community designed to allow users on both sides of the job search to interact with each other, providing a place for programmers to showcase their talents and giving recruiters a chance to see what developers can actually produce, combining the best aspects of sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook on one professional platform.

Mood.dj is aimed at streamlining the digital music consumption process. According to the creators, the way people consume music is determined by their mood/desired mood, and the current system of manually created playlists is inefficient, as playlists constantly need to be updated and they do not always match up to the activity at hand. Mood.dj is a music application that delivers custom music from users’ personal libraries to go along with their current mood by reading their personal iTunes library, tagging their music automatically using databases and an intelligence machine, and generating a mood-based list of songs, saving the consumer time and energy.

Peer Points

Peer Points is a loyalty program designed to enable repeated engagement between businesses, customers, and customer groups. It is designed to tackle the problem that many stores face in trying to reach a wider consumer base, as many “deal” type models focus on one-time bargain hunters, social check-in apps cannot verify actual purchases, and consumers want to be rewarded for their loyalty without necessarily carrying multiple loyalty cards.

 

Entrepreneurship at Northwestern

Entrepreneurship is everywhere. A recent Business Week article titled ‘Startup Fever: College Students Have It Bad’ talks about the boom in entrepreneurship in college campuses around the country.

Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill., added six more undergraduate classes in entrepreneurship in the past three years (for a total of eight) in response to student demand, says Michael Marasco, director of Northwestern’s Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

The Farley Center has pioneered a series of innovative interdisciplinary courses called NUvention in different verticals — Medical focuses on medical innovations, Web on web-based businesses and Energy on energy and sustainability projects. These classes help students go from idea to conception to the actual launch of the businesses.

For the complete Business Week article, click here.