Parmee Prize Winner

[caption id="attachment_23638" align="alignleft" width="300"] Lord Chris Smith, Master of Pembroke, presenting the prize to Jacob Baldwin[/caption]

Congratulations to Jacob Baldwin (2013), winner of this year’s Parmee Prize for Entrepreneurship and Enterprise. Jacob is currently studying Classics at Pembroke as an undergraduate. His entry for the Parmee Prize was a website called Chatterfire, which provides a safe, educational experience of using the internet for primary school children at Key Stage 2 level. The website contains a specially-designed firewall system, Monitor, to prevent any unsafe content or information entering the site. Jacob has been building the website single-handedly for the past five years and hopes to expand the concept across many more schools within the UK.

The Parmee Prize is an entrepreneurial award sponsored by Richard Parmee (1970), a William Pitt Fellow of the College who also runs a local business, Cheyney Group. The judges this year were Robert Marshall (1981), CEO of Marshall Aerospace; Dr Harvey Perkins (1970), an independent engineering consultant; Simon Harris (1969), Investment Director at Envestors Ltd; and Dr Mark Mann, the Technology Transfer Manager at Isis Innovation.

Announcing the winner, Robert Marshall praised the high quality of entries this year, and made a point of commending MedicSMS, an entry from Pembroke PhD student Harley Katz (2013) which aims to provide medical advice via text messages to people in developing countries. Other entries included a flexible electronics business pitched by Tian Carey (2014), a music booking website by Myles Eastwood (2006) and a laptop cooling device pioneered by Joshua de Gromoboy (2014), Siddharth Gupta (2014) and Gwilym Rowbottom (2014). Thankyou and well done to all the contestants!