The Parmee Prize

The 2016 Parmee Prize competition was held on Wednesday evening this week. Five entrants, who had been selected during the first round of the competition last week, had the opportunity to pitch their business idea to a panel of expert judges, and potentially win a prize of £1000 to invest in their business.

First up was Jacob Baldwin (2013), a Classics undergraduate who has been designing and building his website for the past five years. Chatterfire is aimed at solving the problem of safe internet access for primary school children. Jacob began by listing some stats which reveal that almost half of UK children have messaged strangers on the internet before the age of sixteen. The current options providing secure internet access for children, such as Moodle, often fail to appeal to their intended audience because they don’t compare to social media websites such as Facebook, which is not age restricted. Jacob wanted Chatterfire to incorporate social media elements such as instant messaging, but also provide educational tools and opportunities to be creative, for example through teaching children how to design their own websites. To ensure that the site was safe for children, Jacob built a system called ‘Monitor’ which works alongside human moderation to detect risks and uses artificial intelligence to learn from the data it assimilates. Jacob talked us through the feedback from current users from two UK schools, outlined the costs and the potential of the site to become profitable by 2018, and described the future sale potential (the website itself could be of interest to education software specialists, and Monitor could be sold to firewall companies).

The second presentation was by Tian Carey (2014), a PhD student in Engineering at the Cambridge Graphene Centre. Tian spoke about the potential of two-dimensional materials to make flexible electronics. The market for flexible electronics is set to increase hugely, with products such as the LG Flex Smartphone already available. Nanomaterials are more stable than organic polymers or doped metals and are therefore a better option for making flexible electronics. There are over 5000 two-dimension nanomaterials known and nobody is currently marketing two-dimensional inks tailored for customer use. Tian’s PhD focuses on the properties of 2D inks and he hopes to go into business as a provider. There has been a recent surge in investment for flexible, stretchable and wearable electronics, especially in the sports and fitness sector. The inks can be produced for around £100 per litre and sold for around £4000, so the business would be profitable.

Myles Eastwood has studied music at Pembroke since 2006. His business idea is a website, FixTheMusic, which provides a musician booking service for events. Current methods of hiring a musician to play at an event include word of mouth, directories and entertainment agencies, all of which have their downsides. Myles’s solution is a monetised online marketplace where customers can search for their preferred musical act and then use the website’s booking system to contact the musician directly. FixTheMusic currently has around 200 musicians. The costs involved in running the website are relatively low and the business should be profitable as the website applies a 15% commission on the musicians’ earnings.

Pembroke Innovations is a collective of three second-year ‘Pemgineers’, Joshua de Gromoboy (2014), Siddharth Gupta (2014) and Gwilym Rowbottom (2014). Their entry was a laptop cooling device which they designed for a recent competition and are now keen to take further. HipsterIce uses Glauber’s salt crystals to conduct the thermal heat from the laptop; the salt can then be recharged by simply leaving the device outside when the temperature drops overnight. The flexible casing allow the device to fit around laptops with feet, fans or bumps and scrapes, providing an insulating outer shell. The device would be beneficial for aid workers, since laptops often fail in hot countries due to overheating or dust intake through fans; prolonging the life of laptops would enable aid organisations to save money. It could also appeal to the defence market. The team has built their first prototype, which is currently being tested to match industry standard temperatures for both sectors. The device would cost £10 per unit to build and could sell for an estimated £30, with the potential for bespoke applications to fit individual contracts in the defence sector.

Astronomy PhD student Harley Katz (2013) and Mike Curtis gave the final presentation. Their proposed business, MedicSMS, would provide medical care via text message to people in the developing world, over half of whom do not have regular internet access. The goal of MedicSMS is to build a healthcare platform which would use parsing to extract the symptoms described in the text message and then use an algorithm to automatically generate basic medical advice for a reply. The system is integrated for use in multiple languages and has a potentially huge user base: around 4% of the US population uses webmd.com, which corresponds to 94m users in the developing world. The revenue strategy of MedicSMS would be to acquire real-time data on symptom location and sell it on to NGOs, charities and local governments who could use the information to refine their healthcare provision strategies. The end goal is to improve healthcare in the developing world, using state-of-the-art technology which could be sold to other areas in the future.

[caption id="attachment_23741" align="alignleft" width="300"] Lord Chris Smith presenting the prize to Jacob Baldwin[/caption]

The judges 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. After consideration, they announced Jacob Baldwin as the winner of the 2016 Parmee Prize, explaining that the decision had been difficult on account of the excellent entries but Chatterfire was a deserving winner. MedicSMS was also commended for the impressive scale of its ambition.