Ben Hall, Benson Garner, and the rest of the crew at Gangplank hosted an Extreme Pitch Contest for their “RoadMap To Launch” and “Semester To Launch” company participants. This biannual event is a culmination of each company’s hard work in developing a ‘lean startup’ with the help of their leader’s mentorship. This time, six new startups faced off against each other, and they were all contending for the top two spots which paid out $300, and $100 in cash (on the spot). Here is a quick description of each company (in order of the presentations):
1) Iced for Life (Chelsea Miller)
Chelsea will be a graduate of the W.P. Carey School of Business this coming Fall, and just launched here speciality cake baking company friday night. Iced for Life is committed to all natural ingredients in their cakes, and prepares absolutely everything from scratch. Miller will also be providing a 100% satisfaction guarantee to her customers, and will be acquiring new ones through word of mouth, and a consistent presence at local expos and trade shows.
2) Doc It Now (Robert Fletcher)
Doc It Now provides an online database to store photographs of construction projects throughout the building process. Once a job is completed, a photo will be taken of the work, and detailed information will be attached to the image. Area of the project site, date / time of completion, construction worker name / contact, and additional notes will all be included. They hope to be seen as a value added service to large construction companies building $40K+ projects by keeping organized records and potentially mitigating mistakes made during the build.
3) Repair Report (Jamison Hill)
Repair Report is aiming to introduce a new process of getting a car fixed. The process will include getting your car initially inspected after an accident at any local shop. Then, once the diagnosis has been made, the auto shop would upload the work order online for other competitive bids. Once all offers have been received from other local repair shops that use Repair Report, the customer would award the job to the company of their choice. Then, Repair Report would get paid a nominal fee from the shop that gets given the service job.
4) Ucate (Alex Bimes)
Ucate is in development of a mobile application that brings, schools, teachers, and students together. It “provides learning paths outside of the classroom” which means if the students have to perform a task such as testing the pH level of Tempe Town Lake, they can take a picture of themselves through this app, and upload it to the gallery. Alex hopes that Ucate will be used as an “attendance check-in tool” as well as an extension of Blackboard.
5) Legacy Cloud (Zach Schaffer, Jason Baker)
Jason recently lost a close family member that shared with him the idea of developing a website where family stories, traditions, photos, and videos could all be stored and shared. Since that day, he has been trying to do just that, and Legacy Cloud has been his biggest passion. The team is currently partnered with Microsoft Azure, and ASU Venture Catalyst. Before their launch (which is expected in the next couple months), Zach and Jason will insure both the security of the platform, and website compatibility across all devices.
6) YurFoto (Chris Stiffler)
YurFoto is a mobile application for sharing photos in real-time while at an event. Simply launch the application, take a photo, and within seconds, the image gets added to a shared feed that scrolls through all other images taken at the event. This works best when the photo feed can be displayed on surrounding display monitors and flat screens. If you were at Techiepalooza, you would have seen the YurFoto app in action!
So, after much deliberation, the judges unanimously awarded YurFoto with 2nd Place, and Doc It Now with 1st Place. Don’t spend your prize money all in one place!
Congratulations to all of the participating ventures, and we will see you next time.
