Representatives from AT&T, Alcatel-Lucent, the press, and select university students gathered on May 27th at the AT&T Foundry in Plano as part of the Alcatel-Lucent / AT&T University Entrepreneurial Workshop. Two weeks of business venture sessions, networking, and idea collaboration for university students culminated in a pitch day. On pitch day, students from local DFW universities, such as SMU, UNT, TCU, UTA, and UTD, along with students from Texas A&M, the Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT) and Carnegie-Mellon Palo Alto (CMPA) presented their products and services to a group of 6 judges.
John Reas, from the Emerging Technology and Innovation at Alcatel-Lucent kicked off the event with introductions of the judges. The judges were comprised of many key players in
the DFW startup community; Eric Engineer, Senior Associate at Sevin Rosen Funds; Gabriella Draney, Cofounder and Managing Partner of Tech Wildcatters; Jason Collins, VP of
Emerging Technology and Innovation at Alcatel-Lucent; Maria Smith, Director of Stakeholder Relations as NTX Regional Center Innovation and Commercialization; Dean Terry, Arts
and Engineering professor at University of Texas at Dallas; and Mike Berry, AT&T Foundry Director. The presentations followed in which 12 teams had 10 minutes to present followed by 5 minutes of Q&A. The teams were:
Healthbuzz – GIT – This functions somewhat similarly to Medic Alert bracelet from yesteryear. But for Healthbuzz, there are no wearable devices. Instead, Microsoft Kinect is used to monitor health of elderly people by tracking the orientation of their skeleton system. For example, if someone falls down on the floor, Healthbuzz will recognize that by noting the body’s change of position.
Train With Friends – TCU – This is a social workout Win 7 mobile app. It encourages you to work out if you’ve been notified that your friend has done so today. It also fosters friendly competition by tracking things like the number of bench presses each of you has completed.
CallMigo – CMPA – Think of yourself in a meeting when you get a call on your cell phone. The caller is your friend, just checking in to say hello. Do you really need to take that call? Probably not. Now consider the same meeting. But this time, a family member calls with a medical emergency. I’d say that’s an important call to answer. CallMigo offers customized cell phone call prioritization / notification. It puts you in control of who can get through to you in case of an emergency or other important event.
Smart Cardio – GIT – Smart Cardio wants to track the energy usage of cardio machines. This can help fitness center staff do things like monitor energy usage, reduce usage by out-of-order machines, identify rarely used machines, etc.
Automated Generation of Sports Highlights – UNT – This team aims to tag sports highlights for easy, quick retrieval at a later time. For the demo, the team focused on MLB, but they plan to expand it to football and other sports later.
Fast Trackers – Texas A&M – Fast Trackers is designed as a mileage tracker, to allow for fleet optimization and planning. Geo-location, along with backup, onboard devices would be used heavily in the application.
Experience Media With Friends – UTA – The intent here is to enable friends who may live across the country to watch movies or TV shows together, or listen to music together.
Near And Dear – UTD – Near and Dear is another entrant to the crowded location-based, social gaming app space. Participants would be able to play games with their friends regardless of where there are.
SeekDroid – SMU – SeekDroid is an already-launched mobile app that secures your mobile phone, in the event it gets lost or stolen. The target market is both end consumers and businesses that manage multiple devices. This presentation seemed the most refined. It was obvious this wasn’t the team’s first pitch. After all, the app was released earlier this year. I expected them to win 1st place (more on that later). But after hearing the judges comments, it became more clear. This app didn’t fit cleanly into the “wheelhouse” of what they were looking for, specifically in target markets using the preferred technologies.
CMS for Android – CMPA – This was very succinctly dubbed “wordpress for mobile” by one of the judges in the Q&A. The aim was to provide a customizable platform/mobile site where users could store content.
Shafe – GIT – Pronounced “Shahf”, this was a product/app discovery service to improve your life. Say you wanted to become more fit, it would help you locate health-related mobile apps. Or perhaps you wanted to find a soulmate. It could guide you to the best dating site, based on your profile and expecations.
Geo Tag – UNT – The final team presented Geo Tag, a location tagging tool. This lets you tag a specific place (like the Eiffel Tower, for example) where people read your tagged comments when they visit the same location. Or if you wanted to revisit locations you’ve tagged from where you have fond memories.
The top four teams, as evaluated by the judges, were chosen to become what are called guided projects in the AT&T Foundry. These teams were: HealthBuzz, CallMigo, Smart Cardio, and CMS for Android. And the award for “Top App” went to the Healthbuzz team, which received an opportunity to present their idea at the AT&T Innovation Summit in Palo Alto, CA coming up in September 2011. Congratulations to all the teams. There were some really great ideas. It’s great to see AT&T and Alcatel-Lucent providing a venue to encourage young student to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams.
28. Oct, 2011 
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