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Awarding Good Ideas

Four start-up concepts win first prize in the "Startinsland Competition"

Freiburg, May 29, 2017

The business plan competition "Startinsland" is honoring the winners of its first round. A jury of experts from research and business has reviewed a total of 45 entries and awarded four of them first prize. For each winner, that means a prize of 500 euros. The judging categories were: "Innovations from Research and Higher Education" and "Innovations from Companies and Society." There were also special awards in the categories "Green Economy" and "Digital Future." Second place prizes were also presented in each category. In the second round of the competition, contestants must develop a business plan based on their business concept. The winners of the next round will be announced on 5 December 2017.

The round one winners in the "Innovations from Research and Higher Education" category are Benjamin Baumann, Mathias Klenner, Bernhard Schöne and Christian Zech. Their aim of their project, "OndoSense," is to develop a new type of intelligent, millimeter-wave radar sensors. These sensors will allow precise distances to be calculated in measuring speed and presence in environments where optical or acoustical sensors are too imprecise or fail entirely. One possible application area would be in steel works, where water vapor has made some measurements impossible.

First prize in the "Innovations from Companies and Society" category went to Jerome Meinke, Lilian Rettegi and Dr. Lukas Spohn for their business idea, "ClinEx," an app for digital documentation of physical examinations. The app offers an easy-to-use format structure. It can filter for regions of the body, for which all findings can be quickly and intuitively entered. Noticeable changes can also be recorded with a smartphone camera and filed.

The special "Green Economy" prize was awarded to Marco Armbruster and Benedikt Hauer. As "Working Group Biomass," they would like to provide operators of biogas facilities consulting services, laboratory analysis and automated fermentation test stands, including the accompanying software. The information supplied is expected to lead to an improvement in biogas facilities. The ultimate goal is to make the biogas facilities profitable enterprises that can operated without government subsidies.

Esther Arroyo Garcia, Frederik Böhm and Christian Hirth have won the "Digital Future" special award with their business concept "DeepVA" (deep video analysis). Founded on the principles of "deep learning," the system can automatically extract a range of properties from videos, generate metadata and classify and describe the video based on its content. Operators of large video archives could use the system to save a great deal of labor.

The Founders Office of the University of Freiburg supports the candidates with an accompanying seminar series that addresses the issues surrounding establishing a company. The University of Freiburg, the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, the Offenburg University of Applied Sciences, and the Chambers of Industry and Commerce of the Southern Upper Rhine cooperate in running the competition.

Startinsland Competition

Founders Office of the University of Freiburg

 

Contact:
Dr. Philipp Julian Köster
Founders Office
University of Freiburg
Tel.: 0761/203-5214
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