Three Brown Teams Named Finalists in 2014 Rhode Island Business Plan Competition

Seven finalists have been named in the 2014 Rhode Island Business Plan Competition, and will share more than $200,000 in prizes when winners are announced next week. All three of the student track finalists, Dual Server Cooling, MedSynergies, and Pronto Solutions are teams from Brown University, including two teams from the School of Engineering's master's Program in Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship (PRIME).

All finalists will briefly present their business idea at an Awards Ceremony, 4:30 – 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, May 1, at The Garage, a half-day business development conference at the Rhode Island Convention Center, to which the public is invited, after which the winners will be announced.

Dual Server Cooling is using licensed technology to help data centers use energy more efficiently to cool electrical equipment with lower implementation cost. Team members include PRIME master's students Ze Chen, Yiran Guo, and Kangbei Jiang.

MedSynergies proposes to use a low-cost, high-sensitivity, optically activated micro-device to detect lung cancer at its early and treatable stages. Team members include PRIME master's students Aditya Singh and Pratik Thakkar.

Pronto Solutions is a smartphone application for ordering and paying catered to full-service restaurants, allowing customers to order on impulse and pay when they are ready. The principal applicant is Jesse Hartheimer '14. In December, Hartheimer was one of the winners of the Elevator Pitch Contest, sponsored by the Rhode Island Business Plan Competition. The Pronto Solutions team developed their plan in Danny Warshay's highly regarded course, Engineering 1010: The Entrepreneurial Process: Innovation in Practice. Other team members included Peter Hix '14, Raghavendra Kamalesh '14, Juliette Weiss (RISD '15), and Michael Zamost '14.

A team from Brown University has won the competition for the past five years. Previous winners have included Azavy (2013), Overhead.fm (2012), PriWater, now Premama, (2011), Speramus (2010), and Runa (2009).

Established in 2000, the Rhode Island Business Plan Competition has been recognized as one of the top 40 business plan competitions in the country. To date, it has awarded more than $1.4 million in prizes to competitors developing companies across many industries.