The top three winners in the 2008 Georgia Tech Business Plan Competition are all student teams participating in the Technological Innovation: Generating Economic Results (TI:GER®) program.

A collaboration between Georgia Tech and Emory Law School, TI:GER ® is nationally recognized for its success at developing the next generation of entrepreneurs. TI:GER teams include MBA and law students who help commercialize PhD students’ research.

The AccelerEyes team won first place in the competition for its plan to market technology enabling supercomputing on a standard PC. This software technology is designed for engineers, scientists, financial analysts, and others requiring extreme computational power.

In addition to the $10,000 first prize, AccelerEyes also won the Most Fundable award (a service package worth $40,000 in legal, financial, and other services), which goes to the team deemed by judges to be most ready to enter the marketplace.

All together, the 2008 competition awarded a total of $63,500 to participants. Of 19 teams that made it to the semi-finals, five advanced to the final found held February 22.

Participation in the annual Business Plan Competition is open to all Georgia Tech students and alumni who've graduated within the last five years. Intended both to educate and facilitate startups, the competition often leads to the creation of real technology-based businesses.

Winning Concept

AccelerEyes is serious about bringing its software to market. Already patented, the team’s software makes supercomputing on a PC possible by enabling the popular MATLAB programming language to easily utilize the great power of the graphics processing unit, which has much more muscle than a computer's central processing unit.

Designed to be user friendly, AccelerEyes software is patented and in testing by users at such major companies at General Electric and Microsoft Research..

“There’s no other comparable software out there that’s as intuitive to use as ours,” says AccelerEyes team member and MBA student David Silver.

In addition to Silver, the AccelerEyes team includes electrical and computer engineering PhD students John Melonakos, Tauseef ur Rehman, and James Malcolm; computer science PhD student Gallagher Pryor; and Emory law students Matt Nesbitt and Chris Meeks.

The AccelerEyes team, which also won the $500 Showstopper award for its presentation in the competition's trade show, says it’s already attracting potential investors and expects its software to officially hit the market by summer.

Second Place

Syzygy won second place ($3,000) in the competition for its plan to market shape memory technology involving smart material capable of adapting itself to perfectly fit into a customer’s ear in a truly one-size-fits-all approach.

This design creates a personalized fit for earphones, wireless Bluetooth devices, and hearing aids, alleviating the common comfort problems associated with these devices and empowering each user to fully realize the sophistication of today’s audio technology, explains the Syzygy team.

This TI:GER team’s members include MBA student Brent Duncan, mechanical and systems engineering PhD student Walter Voit, and law students Justin Helsby and Rob MacKenna. They also won the $500 Alumni Innovation Award judged by past participants in the competition.

Third Place

DiagNano, an early-stage technology company focusing on in vitro cancer diagnostics, won third-place ($2,000).

The company offers nanotechnology-based products for tissue biopsy analysis to provide clinicians with a patient-specific cancer fingerprint.

This TI:GER team’s members include MBA student MBA student Kristina Crockett, biomedical engineering PhD student Brad Kairdolf, Emory law students Richard Gaddis, M. Eric Galvez, and Laura Huffman, and Emory JD Jarrett Silver.