Yesterday GroupTable won the annual UCF Joust Business Plan competition and $12,000. About 40 applicants submitted their business plans for the competition, the top 12 plans were selected to participate.
Last week these 12 teams presented in front of several investors & business leaders in the community. The top four were selected as finalists taking place yesterday April 11th, 2008. The top four who were selected as finalists were MPS technologies (A company proposing a customized insert designed for women shoes to ease the pain they feel when trying to squeeze into shoes just to look cute), Miami Cable (proposed a water park in Miami that uses cables to pull you around a track on ski’s…really cool idea), An Agriculture Bio Fuel company was the other finalist (proposing a program to convert algae into energy)and our venture, GroupTable (An online collaborative software venture tailored to meet the needs of high achieving students)
The finals judge were made up of extremely successful business leaders from across the country as well as investors. They were very receptive to GroupTable and enjoyed our presentation. We ended up winning first place, which not only included $12,000 but another free year in the UCF Technology Incubator, I say another because we actually won the competition last year as well with a different venture.
This time around is much more exciting for me because with this GroupTable we are so far along in product development that the $12,000 can help us immensely to grow accelerate our user and product growth to the point where we can get angel funding. It is all very exciting! There should be a lot more articles about GroupTable coming out in the near future I’ll keep everyone posted.
The competition was awesome. Going around the Indianapolis 500 race track in a limo pitching GroupTable was quite an amazing experience. We didn’t win the competition, but still won $1500 for being finalists. We also met a lot of smart, ambitious young entrepreneurs many of which loved GroupTable (Our online collaborative tool designed for college project teams and study groups). We got a lot of positive feedback and insight about our product.
We are also participating in the UCF Joust business plan competition as finalists taking place this Friday, April 11th, 2008. The winner will get $12k. Below you will find a link to an article written on us regarding the competition in Indiana. Feel free to check them out at your leisure. The site is also coming along very nicely we are currently working on re-designing the landing page and allowing people to take a short video or screen shot tour of the site. Check it out: https://www.davidbrim.com/grouptable
The Group Table team was selected as finalists in the Nascent 500 Business Challenge. We are representing UCF and will be flown to the competition in Indianapolis taking place March 29th. You can find more information about the competition by following the link here http://www.bsu.edu/entrepreneurship/nascent500/
Over 40 schools entered teams that submitted their business plans to be reviewed. We were notified in mid February that we were selected as finalists to present our venture GroupTable. The really cool thing is that we will present our business idea to a group of investors while sitting in the back of a limo going around the track at the Indianapolis 500.
The winner will get $10,000. I am very excited to hear feedback from the judges/Investors. We are at the point where we are about to seek angel funding to accelerate our products development and grow our userbase. I have found that business plan competitions that I have participated in previously have provided extremely useful information and have been a truly invaluable experience.
I will keep this blog updated to let everyone know how the competition went.
There is a really cool collaborative software application that we created and released called GroupTable. GroupTable empowers college students by allowing them to manage all of their academic interactions, group projects and study groups in one place. GroupTable increases student’s efficiency, saves them time and helps them get better grades by maximizing the power of their group interactions and bringing them conveniently online the way our generation likes to work.
Many students are often involved in organizations, work, have an active social life, are taking a full course load and much more. Finding time to meet with a study group or a group project team can be very challenging. Group Table allows students to meet with their groups just as if they were all together. Students can collaborate in real time or post discussions openly at the class level, or privately within their group. Students can also store files in their personal binder for easy access any where online or store them in their group binder to share with other group members. It’s definitely going to be a hit amongst the college crowd.
