The College of Charleston’s ICAT program (International Cross-curricular Accelerator for Technology) finished with a flourish on Tuesday, April 28, 2015, as eight student teams each gave four-minute business pitches to a full audience and panel of judges at the Footlight Players Theatre. Two winning teams walked away with $10,000 each to help grow their new companies.
At stake was a grand prize of $10,000. As it turned out, two teams tied for the top prize in the eyes of the judges, who included Tommy Baker, president and owner of Baker Motor Company, Jonathan Zucker, president of The Intertech Group; Brad Elmenhust, IT Director of Engineering Systems at Boeing South Carolina; and Glenn Starkman, entrepreneur-in-residence at the College of Charleston’s Honor College.
The two top teams: Team Yawper and Team SpotIt, both spent the past semester developing apps and business plans to support the app. Yawper is a social networking app that allows users to get real-time, geo-located information for bars and restaurants in a given area. The students developing Yawper are Ben Hintz, Andrew Gordon and Adam Sugarman. SpotIt allows users to find the most convenient parking space in a given town or city simply by activating the app. The students developing SpotIt are Liza Hendriks, Anna Baginski and Joye Nettles.
When the winners were announced, the organizers declared that the top prize would be split between the two teams. But then Baker stepped in to say he would offer an additional $10,000 so that both teams could be recognized and benefit from the full prize money.
