Go Financial Aid - Advisors and Consultants

Tepper Venture Challenge Winners Announced
Dynamic Business Magazine
Mary Heindl
6/1/2006

Seven Carnegie Mellon students and one student from the University of Pittsburgh are sharing $10,000 in prize money awarded by SMC Business Councils, Meyer Unkovic & Scott LLP and Carnegie Mellon University as part of the Tepper Venture Challenge. The Undergraduate Business Plan Competition was held on April 2, 2006 at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business.

Envivial LLC was named first prize winner receiving the $5,000 “Meyer Unkovic and Scott Award for Outstanding Business Plan.” In addition to the cash award, the winning team also received an additional $5,000 in legal services to establish their company from the Pittsburgh-based law firm. Envivial will provide turnkey technology solutions to consumer research firms. This technology features three-dimensional communities that are created as exact replications of real world places of sale (shopping malls and stores). Envivial’s software is built through the merger of interactive ‘video game’ technologies and highly realistic three-dimensional models to produce an array of virtual environments. This technology will allow research firms to get inexpensive, instant feedback on consumer behavior without the typical $10 million budget. The founders are: Kyle J. Langworthy, CEO; Matthew Z. Humphrey, COO; and, Joseph J. Damato, CTO.

SMC President Cliff Shannon praised Meyer Unkovic and Scott, saying, “It’s so important to this region to encourage innovation and job creation through programs such as the Undergraduate Business Plan Competition. We’re proud that this SMC-Member company came forward to support this endeavor with both prize money and legal assistance. This type of business support for our best and brightest students is key to ensuring a bright future for this region.”

University of Pittsburgh Student Andrew S. Reichert won the second prize of $3,000 for Go Financial Aid. This company will provide a wide range of financial aid services to ensure that current and prospective college students are receiving all the financial aid to which they are entitled. The company’s core services will be the preparation of all necessary financial aid applications using the government’s methodology to ensure that applications are filled out correctly and submitted in a timely fashion.

Medimaging won the third prize award of $2,000. This ground breaking new technology will enable customers to do image-based searching across different databases rather than using current text-based index searching. The product will create $3 million of revenue (over a five-year period) and improve the drug-research process significantly without disrupting it. Carnegie Mellon University students Xiao (Eric) Tang, Anuj Kumar, Ran Xie, and Malvika S. Tamhane developed the concept.

Judges for the competition were: Marilyn Landis, president, Basic Business Concepts; David Oberdick, Esq., Meyer Unkovic and Scott LLP; and Patrick Stewart, managing director and president, Idea Foundry.

Undergraduate students from Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh, Duquesne University, Chatham College, and St. Vincent College participated in the competition. Thirty-four entries were received and participation increased significantly over previous years.

Meyer Unkovic and Scott LLP and SMC Business Councils provided funding for the Undergraduate Business Plan Competition.

For the seventh consecutive year, the Undergraduate Entrepreneur Association (UEA) at Carnegie Mellon organized the Tepper Undergraduate Business Plan Competition, under the guidance of Dr. Arthur Boni, deputy director, Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship. UEA Officers are: James Tong and Alex Sussman, copresidents; Serena Ho, vice president; Neha Sarda, secretary; and, Lu Zhang and Shawn Alwani, co- treasurers. Saravana Sivasankaran chaired the Tepper Venture Challenge Committee. For additional information, visit the Internet at www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/uea and www.smc.org.