NYC Next Idea Final Round
ReFleX, last year’s winning undergraduate team, pitches their NYC Next Idea at the final round.
The final round of NYC Next Idea 2011-2012 is coming up next week! Now in its third year, the NYC Next Idea global business plan competition for students and recent graduates encourages innovative business ventures to launch and operate in New York City, while raising the visibility of NYC as an international center for innovation and showcasing talent from universities around the world. The competition is sponsored by NYCEDC in partnership with Columbia University’s Engineering School with a goal to attract groundbreaking start-up companies to New York City.
On Wednesday, March 21st at Columbia University, six finalist teams representing Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Sweden and the United States will pitch their business plans to a judging panel of venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and academics, competing for a total of $35,000 in cash prizes. The finalists are:
NYC Connect Track (teams with one NYC-based full-time student):
- AnaLyse is an NYC-based life science lab equipment startup working to develop a disruptive technology for the homogenization of animal tissue for animal studies
- IDEA NYC (Innovation through Design Education and Art) seeks to develop a non-profit fashion label that produces and markets products imagined by NYC children
- TaxiTreats provides and manages vending machines and proprietary convenience solutions for NYC taxi cabs, to be scaled for the transportation industry
International Track (teams with all international members):
- CityShare aims to create stronger ties within one’s neighborhood by creating a mobile marketplace for peer-to‐peer rentals
- Marketing Prevision is developing the Prevision Camera, an intelligent, stand-alone camera embedded with software that can interpret mood, number, gender, age, and facial expressions to provide real-time marketing analytics
- Stylsize has developed a mobile-optimized fitting platform to enhance the shopping experience for the ready-to-wear apparel industry, enabling shoppers to visualize how a garment fits and flatters the body without the frustrating guesswork associated with today’s online shopping
These NYC Next Idea finalist teams were chosen from 270 business plans, submitted by 700 participants from more than 60 countries last summer. Come watch the final round on March 21st, open to the public! Breakfast and lunch will be served. RSVP for the event.
Follow the competition as it unfolds on Twitter at @NYCNextIdea and facebook.com/NYCNextIdea.
Download the Media.NYC.2020 final report, which examines what the NYC media landscape will look like in a decade.
NYC Eds and Meds: A Talk with Scientific Founders
By Lenzie Harcum, Chelsea Rao, Jennifer Yoo, Kristy Sundjaja, & Steven Strauss
Center for Economic Transformation
New York City’s academic medical centers, non-profits, and commercial bioscience firms together make up the “Eds and Meds” sector, which is among the City’s greatest assets. In July, we held the second in our series of roundtables for the Bio (Eds & Meds) NYC 2020 initiative, designed to strengthen and build a more cohesive bioscience cluster in the City. NYCEDC convened 15 scientific founders and scientist-entrepreneurs to discuss the strengths, challenges and opportunities for the bioscience industry in NYC. Among the attendees were:
- Dr. Richard A. Friesner (Professor at Columbia University, Scientific Founder at Schrodinger)
- Dr. Steven M. Paul (Head of the Appel Institute for Alzheimer’s Research at Weill Cornell; Venture Partner at Third Rock Ventures; Scientific Founder at Tal Medical; Former President at Lilly Research Laboratories)
- Dr. Eric Schadt (Director, Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine; Chief Scientific Officer at Pacific Biosciences)
- Dr. Charles L. Sawyers (Chair of Human Oncology & Pathogenesis at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; Scientific Founder at Aragon Pharmaceuticals; Scientific Advisor at Agios Pharmaceuticals and AVEO Biopharmaceuticals)
In this roundtable discussion, we considered the significant opportunities and challenges for the Eds & Meds sector in NYC. Participants agreed with many of the assessments gleaned from our CEO Workshop on May 19th, and also offered these additional key findings.
NYC Employment Update
Check out the latest facts on New York City employment from the New York State Department of Labor (NYSDOL):
- The NYC job market showed mixed signals in July 2011, with public and private sector jobs increasing by 22,900 and the number of employed residents decreasing by 16,300 over the previous month.
- The City gained 61,700 private sector jobs during the twelve months ending in July 2011. This is a 2% increase, above the U.S. growth of 1.7% over the same period of time.
- Educational Services accounted for nearly one half and 68.9% of yearly and monthly private sector job gains, respectively.
- The unemployment rate remained unchanged at 8.7% between June and July 2011. In contrast, unemployment was at 10% at its peak, which occurred in January 2010.
Find out more employment information on the NYSDOL website and in NYCEDC Research, News and Publications.
We’ll be back next month with a new employment update along with a podcast featuring insights from NYCEDC Chief Economist Francesco Brindisi.
