The Office of Innovation & Entrepreneurship collaborated with the Student Government Association to bring the student body two events that highlighted the entrepreneurial spirit of Stevens. The Student Business Expo held on February 28 in the Babbio Atrium featured 11 businesses run by current students and alumni. Sandra Furnbach, Programs Manager for the Office of IE and Adviser for the Stevens Innovators & Entrepreneurs club said the event was to give students a chance to present their businesses and to see the successes of their fellow colleagues.
Graduate student Evan Feil (’14) showcased his product Mountables, which is a wall dock for iPhones and iPads. It is currently being sold in the campus book store, as well as Etsy. They are currently made with his 3-D printer and he’s looking to put them into mass-production.
Data Minded Solutions presented their flagship product: Embrace, which is a cognitive decision management tool for tracking user health and synchronizing data real-time with the user’s physician. The system is specialized towards diabetics and focuses on “creating an ecosystem that increases care efficiency and limits overspending while ensuring that the patient’s care [remains the] number one priority.”
Stevens alumnus Roman Malantchouk and current student Henry Thomas showcased WalkTHISHouse and its 3-D visualization product which makes virtual tours of houses, construction sites, and residence halls. The models take 30-60 minutes to render for an average sized property and are dimensionally-accurate within 1-inch. They are currently teaming up with Stevens Residence Life to provide more accurate interactive models of dorms and off-campus housing.
Student Jeff Devince showed his product called Text Me Laundry, which is a water-proof device that users can insert in their washing machine to track when their laundry is done. The device uses motion sensing to determine when the washing machine has turned off and sends a text message over WiFi to the users phone once 10 seconds of non-motion has occurred. A Kickstarter campaign is launching sometime in March and can be accessed at his website, www.textmelaundry.com.
Alumnus Chris Coppola and Ralph Mattiaccio showed their personal security product SHIELD tech. It has a panic button that when activated, sends an alert to the user’s phone, grabs their GPS coordinates, and sends it to an online police dashboard used by campus security. It is intended to be a quicker and more convenient alternative to Blue-Light phones and on average cuts 170 seconds of talk time. They are looking to do a test-run at Stevens sometime in the Fall.
Current students Nayad Manukian and Jasmine Mina showed Cornys, which is based on a snack originally invented in Egypt. They used the Lean Startup Method to form their business and interviewed over 400 people in order to design their packaging and decide on flavors to produce. The product is only 70 calories per bag and boasts a combination of health, fulfillment, and taste while remaining gluten free, preservative free and free of any artificial flavors.
Graduate student Bryan Nesci showed his company, Feel Good Media Group’s product which connects businesses to college students through use of its ride service. The vehicle, which provides free transportation from campus to off-campus housing gets funding from sponsors who advertise their product on the vehicle’s built in monitor. Additional graphics can be displayed on the doors and back panel of the vehicle. Bryan says that he is looking to turn his company into a B-Corp (benefit corporation) and wants to make sure that sponsored advertisements are fun for the passengers.
Later on in the night at 8 p.m., Daymond John held a speech and Q&A in DeBuan Auditorium. The seats quickly filled up, gaining a large attendance of students. Before the shark made his entrance, JR Jackson made a brief presentation about his company, JR Sport Brief. He stated that his idea for his YouTube channel originally came from his love of sports news and from the success of Daymond John’s FUBU brand. Working with companies like the NCA and interviewing big-name athletes eventually brought Jackson to 100,000 subscribers.
Before Jackson gave the floor to Daymond John, he said “Don’t let your ‘passions’ be sparks in the pan.”
After an introduction video highlighting all of the shark’s accomplishments, Daymond John made his entrance. Throughout the speech, he gave the audience fatherly advice while frequently throwing jabs at fellow shark, Kevin O’Leary, whom he called “evil” and “an A-hole”. John started his entrepreneurial journey when he was 6 years old, carving the names of pretty girls into pencils. He would then sell the pencils to boys so that they could give their crushes a gift to show their affection. John realized however, that the girls were more interested in having a pencil with their name on it, and so he sold to them directly.
His father was an entrepreneur and always reminded John that “Your day job will not make you rich, your homework will.” John carried that sentiment into his adult life, starting his own clothing line called BUFU while he was in his 20s working at Red Lobster. There were unfortunate consequences to the name, so Daymond quickly changed it to FUBU, For Us, By Us.
The starting inventory of his company was just 9 shirts, all of which John would lend out to rappers so that they could wear them in pictures. This gave the perception that FUBU was a large clothing brand, which in reality John had no way of mass producing his clothing line. This proved to be troublesome when he sold $300,000 of pre-orders at a Las Vegas convention. On the plane ride home, he worried how he was going to complete the insurmountable task of sewing all the shirts. With clever thinking and help from his mother and his close friends, John was able to turn his Brooklyn apartment into a sewing factory.
But John knew that he needed financial intelligence, so he put an ad in the paper and soon got in contact with Samsung Textile Division, who was looking to give his team a distribution deal. Not short after, FUBU was being sold in The Gap and John was approached by Mark Burnett to star in a new American Television series called Shark Tank.
At the end of the talk, Daymond John went over his five Shark points, S (Set goals), H (do your Homework), A (absolutely Adore), R (be Ready with two to five words about yourself), and K (Keep swimming).
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