Business for students wins pitch prize
College kids showcase their inventions in Shark Tank-ish competition
Have you ever wondered if light can transport information? Or, if you’re into beauty products, how you might find false eyelashes that last longer than a few uses? If you’re a student, you might want a marketplace to buy and sell furniture, textbooks or other items you want to get rid of at the end of the semester.
Those are just some of the ideas students presented at the University at Albany’s fourth annual Blackstone Launchpad Innovation Competition, a “Shark Tank” style business pitch competition that saw undergraduate and graduate students lay out their business plan in front of around a dozen judges.
The winner of the event, April Meerson, walked away with $3,000 toward her online marketplace business that is geared toward student-to-student oncampus sales. The business is called Studentsells**t— the last word in that name is profane.
Meerson said her business’ eyecatching name will set the service apart and attract young people as users.
“We wanted to be different... We’re marketing our product to college students. They don’t care if there’s profanity in the name,” Meerson, a senior at Ualbany, said. “It’s memorable. It sticks with you. If we’re trying to expand to different colleges, we want to make sure that they know our name and that people are talking about it.”
Meerson said she expects that the business would become profitable within four years, and will expand to an apartment sublease marketplace, as well.
Finishing second was Elaine Essien, a senior who owns “E’mmaculate Minks”, which offers high-end eyelashes made from cruelty-free mink hairs. The lashes, Essien said, sell for $38 each, but last for up to five months of use.
Other presenters included Ualbany graduate student Ahmed
Hussain, who finished third with his business Lumina Reality, which uses “li-fi” technology to transmit data through light.
Hussain said his business could be used in museums in conjunction with augmented reality programs to transmit text or video onto a device’s screen while in front of a work of art or museum display. The li-fi technology would allow for more focused, hyper-local data transferred directly from the light illuminating the display.
In total, 22 teams presented in this year’s competition. The two other finalists were John Onanuga, who hosts a Youtube talk show “Behindtheflash” to profile young professionals in different industries and give students an idea of what everyday life in different workplaces is like.
Two other students, Nueci Rojas and Luc Sandler, presented an app “Papertalk” that would allow students to easily dictate essays or papers in place of writing them. The service would improve on current dictation programs with AI and allow students to use voice commands.
“The idea was to inspire students to do something different. The basic concept is that entrepreneurship is the engine for economic growth of the country,” said Sanjay Goel, the program’s director and a Ualbany professor of business. “We need to have this engine go.”