The 2014 Intel Global Challenge has been running for close on ten years and pits the best young entrepreneurs against one another in a competition intended to promote entrepreneurship and innovation world wide. More than 20 000 entrants from 60 countries were narrowed down to 26 semi finalists who have spent the last week in Silicon Valley being mentored by some of the best entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in the world. From these 26 teams, 8 finalists were announced and asked to pitch their ideas to an audience and panel of judges. The final winner was Lab4U from Chile who took home $50 000 to put towards their business.
Intel Global Challenge participants need to be university students and most are under the age of 27. The challenge is also doing its bit towards ensuring we have more women in tech.
Get this Lab4U is headed up by Komal Dadlani who brags a Masters in Biochemistry. Her company developed a mobile and web app that allows your smartphone or tablet to become your own personal Science Lab. Utilising key smartphone features like GPS navigation, sound and physical properties, the app creates experiments you do on your phone that then supply results for you in real time. The obvious benefit of this is bringing the fun of maths and Science to more kids in schools.
Out of the 8 other finalists 6 bragged prominent female team members
MOMKIN invented Stamina – a device that requires no external power sources or batteries and assists in the physio therapy recovery of various ailments. Amina-al-Hawaj invented Stamina when she was only 19 years old. Now at 24, she heads up the company.
Neuron Guard from Italy is a collar that can be placed onto patients who suffer from Acute Brain Damage. By placing the collar on someone immediately after they’ve suffered from a stroke, sudden cardiac arrest or traumatic brain injury. The collar induces a form of hypothermia to the brain blood supply which is required to minimise brain damage. CMO of Neuron Guard is Mary Franzese who has a background in economics and now handles the business side of this interesting device.
Earlier this week we told you that one of our picks for the Intel Global Challenge was Karisma Kids.Erika Brodnock is “chief superhero” at this new company. Ilektra Zografou was also part of the Karisma team and works as a software developer in the business. You can read our article here and find out more information.
Servtech brags two female team members including Ann Kao, their CMO and project manager Delia Syu. This incredible start up from Taiwan plans to revolutionise the manufacturing sector in Asia and worldwide. They’ve developed Servolution that consists of three interesting technologies that collects data from machines and then transforms it into readable statistics before allowing workers to communicate with their machines and analyse data via a piece of technology a bit like a smartphone with a host of applications available depending on needs of the industry. Finally Servtech offers a cloud type service that then stores data, information and allows managers or workers to make various queries and retrieve the relevate data accordingly.
Buzzoole is a web platform designed for the management of digital PR campaigns. Buzzoole allows agencies to plan campaigns, access 14 000 users. There is a pay as you go campaign model (pay per post), contests where selected users can create a report on brand reputation and the best ambassador then wins a cash prize as well as find influencers in select topics. Think Webfluential but for Italy. Buzzoole, being a platform promoting digital and content marketing needed a rockstar to handle their own social channels so they Valeria Iannozzi as part of their start up team.
