Cincinnati Innovates Names Winners →
VenueAgent soon may be a web tool for wedding and event planners nationwide, thanks to a $25,000 first place commercialization award from this year’s Cincinnati Innovates competition.
VenueAgent founder Jocelyn Cates learned of her award Wednesday night at an event to recognize 10 local award winners of the annual innovation competition. About 300 people attended.
Cates and her husband, Joe, soon will launch a web site that aggregates venue information and provides deals for planners. They’ll now have funds and a year of assistance from CincyTech’s staff of former entrepreneurs, business executives and venture capitalists to help market and manage her business.
Cates was among a pool of 301 applicants to the online competition. More than 16,000 online votes were cast for the winners.
Said Innovates founder Elizabeth Edwards: “We had more winners than awards to give out. This is about a whole year’s worth of deal flow for our region’s seed stage investors.”
Other winners include:
• Suprasanna Mishra for ConcertEverytime
Second Prize Commercialization award sponsored by CincyTech: $10,000
The 18-year-old Mason High School grad created a web application, called ConcertEverytime, to match a person’s music library with concert dates and locations of his or her favorite artists
• Alex Frommeyer, Alex Curry, Daniel Dykes and Joseph Schab for their dental device
Northern Kentucky Commercialization Award sponsored by Northern Kentucky eZone, Vision 2015, Northern Kentucky Tri-Ed and biologic: $10,000
They’ve created an intellidontic endodontic file to protect patients from nerve damage during root canals.
• Amit Bhattacharya and David Ralph for OsteoDynamics
First Prize Legal & Patent Award, sponsored by Taft Stettinius and Hollister: $10,000
OsteoDynamics is a device that enables painless and non-invasive diagnosis of osteoporosis.
• Georg Weber of MetaMol Marker for Breast Cancer Aggressiveness
Second Prize Legal & Patent Award, sponsored by Taft Stettinius and Hollister: $5,000
Weber’s MetaMol Marker provides diagnostic tools to predict the likelihood of a breast tumor to grow and spread.
• Sally Pipkin of Patients at Play
LPK Design and Branding Award: $10,000 applied toward services by LPK
Patients at Play is a company that designs kid-friendly clothing and IV covers to protect needle sites during treatment.
• Darcy Crociata for FunBooks
CoStrategix Web Development Award: $5,000 applied toward web application development by CoStrategix
FunBooks is a web application that grabs status updates, comments and photos from Facebook and assembles them in a hardcover album.
• Keara Schwartz of ShareSomeSugar
Cooney, Faulkner & Stevens Get Started Award: $2,500 applied toward business accounting and advisory
ShareSomeSugar is a web community that lets users lend items they own or borrow from others within a neighborhood or social network
• Dan Calhoun for RooRoo
HYPE! Community Choice Award: $2,000
RooRoo is an in-flight game for airline passengers.
• Carly Hagins of the University of Cincinnati for her compostable porta-potty
Student Innovator Award: $1,000
The complete portable restroom is designed with a waste tank primed for composting and minimizing odor within the restroom.
