Announcements
Winners and finalists of the 2010 I³ Competition
McKinley Family Grant for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Leadership in Commercial Enterprise
McKinley Family Grant for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Leadership in Social Enterprise
Harvard Student Agencies Investment Fund Awards:
Harvard Student Agencies New Agency Award:
Technology & Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard Award for Outstanding Senior Team:
Technology & Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard Finalists:
The 2010 Harvard College Innovation Challenge Semi-Finalists
Act On Your Dream Act on Your Dream is a social enterprise that creates a bridge between students at Harvard and high school students from the same hometown. The mission has a dual focus of guidance and college funding; the guidance will not only focus on academic achievement, but also on personal development as the program targets high performing students from at-risk backgrounds. A Harvard student in his/her sophomore year will mentor a high school student in his/her sophomore year, communicating weekly and seeing the student when both are in the hometown; by their senior years, the mentor will aide his/her mentee in applying to college and AOYD will ensure some college funding.
College Confidant College Confidant strives to make quality college counseling available to all college bound students. By connecting high school students with college students like them at their dream schools, College Confidant gives high school students the ability to receive candid, personalized advice from someone like them who was recently in their shoes. Our online peer-to-peer model makes college counseling personal, affordable, and accessible.
Coursevis A complete, consolidated, and visual solution for academic planning and scheduling that allows students to share and collaborate with peers and advisors, receive suggestions for classes in a similar manner to Netflix, taking the pain out of selecting courses so students can focus on learning.
DigiLit – The Digital Literacy Project The Digital Literacy Project (DigiLit) aims to tackle the digital divide by promoting digital literacy for teachers and students around the globe by developing curricula and teacher training programs and materials. DigiLit makes these lesson plans and curricula available online for free, in order to assist teachers in integrating the XO Laptop into the classroom. DigiLit currently hosts two pilot programs in the Boston area and conducted our first international deployment trip this past January in Managua, Nicaragua.
IntervYou In an effort to teach high school students how to present themselves effectively during the college application process, IntervYou will seek to provide affordable admission interview training via web-cameras. Current Harvard undergraduates will be recruited as interviewers and trained to conduct mock college admission interviews, identify the customers’ weaknesses, and write personalized and comprehensive feedback letters. IntervYou will supply services that are not provided by the existing college advising market, helping high school students to more accurately translate their knowledge into enrollment opportunities.
Kakeya Kakeya is an online travel planner that finds the best (cheapest, fastest or even greenest) routes for inter-city travel. While existing travel websites (Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity) search limited flight options, Kakeya’s system combines buses, trains and flights to give a truly comprehensive set of results. Users will find that bus and flight or train and flight connections can save a lot of money, but are impossible to find with current resources; Kakeya is here to change that.
KeenLean.com KeenLean is a web service and mobile application that will allow millions of users to make healthier choices about what they eat at home and in restaurants. Our service will accomplish this by suggesting meals at the user’s current dining location using our unprecedented meal generation and prediction algorithm and then visualize the nutritional data of that meal and past meals, making it easier for users to quickly comprehend and digest. The quick, simple, nonintrusive nature of KeenLean will revolutionize personal nutritional health.
Legata Legata seeks to offer intuitive suites of web applications tailored to individual colleges and universities. By serving an array of needs ranging from textbook marketplaces designed around the curriculum of each school to personals restricted to the populace of a given campus, Legata aims to create unique localized communities for each school. We will provide advertisers with the ability to specifically advertise to the college student demographic and offer premium services to students on a pay-to-use basis in addition to our free services.
Mamelodi Township Initiative The Mamelodi Township Initiative is a racially-integrated tutoring program in South Africa that empowers students from the University of Pretoria to help underprivileged black township youth attain higher education. Modeled after existing tutoring programs run by Harvard’s Phillips Brooks House Association, this initiative will bring together the intellectual resources of Boston’s renowned academic institutions, the desire among U. Pretoria students to redress apartheid, and the hope among impoverished black South Africans to overcome educational and economic inequality. By partnering with local schools, churches, and nonprofits as we launch the initiative, we aim to create sustainable social change and ultimately transfer full ownership of the program to U. Pretoria, meanwhile providing an opportunity for Harvard students to take their education to one of the neediest parts of South Africa.
Medicine Cabinet Medicine Cabinet is an application designed for smartphones that will serve as a reminder to take your medicine on time. The program will also keep an online database tracking how well one followed the prescription.
MediCompass MediCompass is an SMS service that couples direct-to patient health care decision support with disease tracking for governments and NGOs. It will help individuals in developing countries decide whether their symptoms merit medical attention via a short series of y/n questions developed from existing diagnostic decision trees such as the WHO’s IMCI. In addition, MediCompass will aggregate and present the symptom data it receives on a digital map—approximating the spread of disease in real time and enabling faster responses to public health outbreaks than ever before.
MotorCity Urban Summer Enrichment (MUSE) MotorCity Urban Summer Enrichment introduces sixth through twelfth graders to multiple aspects of education through the use of creative curriculums and seminars taught by undergraduate college students. Through English, mathematics, the arts, and media, the students will gain knowledge in fun, yet challenging ways, which will encourage logical thinking, and illustrative writing. MUSE promotes youth leadership and aspirations of attending institutions of higher education; furthermore, it builds a powerful network with year round support from students and mentors alike. By the end of this enrichment program, students will have an increased sense of community awareness, college readiness, self confidence, and academic exuberance.
NaviTOUR NaviTOUR is a fun, culturally immersive speech recognition game for foreign language learners and language instructors. Users are transported to a world where they can practice learning Mandarin or English by virtually navigating the streets of Singapore with the user’s personalized NaviTar. By earning NaviCash and spending it on NaviGoods, the user gains important language learning skills through an incentivized and cultural context.
Outtonight Outtonight.com is a discrete and easy way for your friends to broadcast their nightly destinations directly to your computer or phone. By providing a streamlined view of the whereabouts of various groups of friends on a particular evening, outtonight.com provides a unique social networking experience that not only allows the users to keep up with a wide range of connections but also to go out and interact with them in the real world. Removing natural barriers to keeping up with distant connections, outtonight.com provides a fun way to blend social groups and expand social horizons.
Styleta Styleta is an online high-fashion charity thrift store that collects donations of high-end clothing and accessories, sells them online to a fashion-conscious membership base, and gives the proceeds to charities that focus on women’s initiatives. We aim to utilize fashion and online buying groups as a new and innovative method of obtaining financial capital for charitable organizations. Styleta’s mission is to do social good first by reducing discarded clothing waste and second by fully capturing the market value of designer clothing donations, while simultaneously allowing individuals to purchase high-end fashion at deeply discounted prices.
Talent Management Talent Management (TM) seeks to help artistic students realize their potential and to build a community of aspiring professionals. The business offers services to students of various talents to expose them to the possibilities of their industry, as well as valuable employment experience in a professional context. TM has tapped into an unfulfilled demand for talent management at Harvard and creates a new dimension of artistic capabilities on campus.
The Cultivate The Cultivate is a dual online platform connecting emerging fashion design talent to boutique and department store buyers across the nation. Containing both a retail portion for consumers and a wholesale portion for larger buyers, The Cultivate creates a seamless flow of merchandising information that allows all parties to make informed buying decisions. The Cultivate aims to allow designers to prove their sell-ability on a site trafficked solely by people who are searching for emerging design talent.
Tutor Bazaar Tutor Bazaar (www.tutorbazaar.com) is an online marketplace that connects tutors with students in need of standardized test preparation. It serves as a hub for high school and college students who are taking exams, and provides tutors with an online forum where they can set their own hours and wages. By featuring student reviews of tutors, it will revolutionize the way in which student-tutor matches are formed, incentivize tutors to provide quality service, and enhance the standard of tutoring across the board.
Uniplay Worldwide UniPlay is a developer of mobile gaming applications and an innovative advertiser in the emerging location-based advertising market. Our first game, Uniplay Tag, allows users to play a grown-up version of tag and provides the opportunity to transform virtual friends into real-life connections, find local store promotions offered only through us, and most of all, have fun!
VertiGrow VertiGrow aims to improve the health and agency of people in slums and crowded urban areas around the world, while cultivating community empowerment and entrepreneurship. It addresses two global problems: rapid urbanization and malnutrition. The vertical gardening device allows families to grow their own nutritious food against the sides of their homes, walls, or roofs, and is designed to conserve water, reinforce unstable house structures, and maximize growing space.
Harvard undergraduates of all interests and concentrations (as well as entrepreneurs from across Boston and beyond who have at least one Harvard College student on their team) compete annually to win summer funding and space by submitting plans for projects in the following two tracks:
The I³ Innovation Challenge is organized by the Harvard Student Agencies, Inc., the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard, and the Harvard College Entrepreneurship Forum.