Vision/DCU New Business Ideas Competition 2003
9 April 2003

Dr Sarah Ingle, Mr Brian Keyes, Kevin O'Connor, Paul O'Halloran , Jenny Gogarty and Fergus O'Cuanachain, Professor Dermot Diamond

The Vision/DCU New Business Ideas Competition 2003, which is now in its fifth year, took place in the Invent Centre on Monday 7 April 2003. Vision Consulting, DCU Teaching and Learning Committee and DCU Business School sponsor the awards. Speakers included organiser Dr Sarah Ingle from DCU Business School and Mr Brian Keyes from Vision. Professor Dermot Diamond also spoke and presented the prizes to the winners.

The Vision/DCU New Business Ideas Competition, open to both postgraduate and undergraduate students, was set up to encourage entrepreneurial spirit within DCU. The essence of the competition is to show that a real business opportunity has been identified and verified, and an innovative product or service has been developed from this opportunity. The team, or individual, must clearly define the theoretical steps that would be taken and identify the main risks for their business model.

The competition was short-listed to three teams; first, second and third places were announced at the ceremony. First prize of €1000 was awarded to Ebreed.com, comprising of Jenny Gogarty, Kevin O'Connor, Fergus O'Cuanachain and Paul O'Halloran who are all postgraduates of the Masters in Ecommerce Programme. The objective of this venture is to consolidate the vast knowledge and tradition of breeding thoroughbred horses into one easily accessible and usable web based tool.

Second prize of €300 was awarded to DAGIT. Jonas Marggraf, Julia Palausi, Maud Condomine and Max Wolf, all European Business undergraduates, developed the idea of an audio guide for tourists. DAGIT would be transmitted through the car radio of a rental car company so that the tourist travelling around a particular country could hear the relative audio cultural and historical information in their chosen language.

Third prize of €200 was awarded to Cameron Dunne and Thibault Candebat, who part of the PhD research programme in Computer Applications. Their business venture was called Orient Platform which is an infrastructure designed to enable third parties to provide such services, guaranteeing privacy and security of the user's location details.