Silicon Beach Awards has diverse group of winners

The winners of the 2014 Silicon Beach Awards, which were held at USC last week, come from a wide array of academic backgrounds, ranging from business to engineering.

The Silicon Beach Awards is part of the larger Silicon Beach @USC conference, a collaboration by the Marshall School of Business and School of Cinematic Arts. The competition was held by the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies and the Institute Communication Technology Management, both housed within Marshall.

The competition this year included  96 entry teams comprised of students and faculty across campus and consisted of two rounds. The first round was a five-minute presentation to a panel of three judges and five minutes of questions, with five teams advancing to the second round. The same process occurred in the second round, with teams presenting in front of all of the Silicon Beach Conference attendees. The first place team received $25,000 and second and third place winners received $15,000 and $10,000, respectively.

Winners of the competition were announced at the end of last week’s conference. The first place team this year is start-up LeadBoost. LeadBoost provides a tool to business managers to ensure complete visibility in their team’s activities. By tracking calls, demos and emails across web-based tools, LeadBoost allows managers to maximize productivity and revenue.

Karen Rudy, who is in her second year in the Marshall M.B.A. program, is the Chief Executive Officer of LeadBoost. She and Mark Otuteye, the chief technology officer, presented their growing business — one that is already being used by several companies.

“We were hoping through the contest to get more validation on the idea and get more feedback so that we can actually go forward and build our customer base,” Rudy said.

A start-up called Stasis Labs won second place in the competition. This project focuses on helping reinvent medicine within developing nations by developing a better system of monitoring patient vitals. Stasis Lab has created a lightweight, compact vitals monitor that measures pulse rate, blood oxygen, body temperature, blood pressure, respiratory rate and heart rhythm. The monitors come equipped with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities to facilitate the storage and organization of information.

Dinesh Seemakurty, a senior majoring in biomedical engineering, is the founder of Stasis Labs.

Seemakurty said in an email to the Daily Trojan that they will use the prize money “to build infrastructure for [the project] that will increase [their] rate of prototyping the product.”

The third place team, Moving Analytics, has created a smartphone-based cardiac rehabilitation program. Cardiac rehabilitation is a secondary intervention measure for 10 million adults living with coronary artery disease that consists of supervised exercise, motivation coaching and lessons in self-management. This new product will allow patients to participate in cost-effective, home-based cardiac rehabilitation.

Adelanwa Adesanya and Harsh Vathsangam, a postdoctoral fellow at USC, are the founders of Moving Analytics. Adesanya, an alumnus who graduated last December, has been in charge of marketing and business development since last June, when the project was started.

“I think it was a really great exercise for us, just going through the competition. All the teams were great, also, so it was a really good experience,” Adesanya said.