Mandarin lessons, anyone? Or help with online shopping?
Judges of the Paul and Tom Kinnear Business Plan Competition were wowed by Jane Wu, BCom’12, and her Waterloo, Simon Fraser and U of T teammates’ pitch of a virtual community that teaches Mandarin Chinese to children in an engaging and experiential way. Their new venture, Penyo Pal, took home the $5,000 top prize in this annual competition funded by Dr. Tom Kinnear, BCom’66, LLD’02, and his brother Paul, BCom’63.
Stylsize, a mobile and web app that enables online shoppers to visualize how garments would fit and flatter their bodies, was the winning entry in the international category of the NYC Next Idea Global Business Plan Competition. Dan McCann, BCom’11, and Amy Bergenwall, BCom’08, MSc’10 and current PhD candidate, took the top prize of $17,500 in a field of 270 applicants from around the world. In addition to the cash, the pair received six months of free office space in New York to help them launch their business there.
Online ventures proved to be winners for five MBA’12 students who scored three-month Dare to Dream internships at QSB and up to $15,000 per project, funded by Cogeco, CIBC, alumni Dany Battat and Gia Steffensen, both BCom’78, and Queen’s Centre for Business Venturing. Clement Tse is starting an online market connecting people through social media for small tasks such as grocery pickup or baby-sitting. Fahad Siddiqui intends to launch an online service to change how people look for and give presents to their friends and family. Pranab Pandey is building a site to facilitate the prototyping and production of objects to be designed by a user community and built using 3D printing technologies. Robin Daultani and Bipul Das are intending to partner with airlines to help them improve profitability by managing over- booked seat inventory and underutilized cargo capacity.
Watch out for these new ventures, coming soon to a laptop or mobile device.