I led a team of students who developed a business plan around my thesis topic, StreetSmart Traffic. Out of a field of 174 competitors we made it to 3rd place. With the help of Vivian Armour, Greg Stone, Vicky McAndrews and David Yager our team beat out many good ideas. Our team included undergrad Zach Radtka, PhD students Jeremy Shopf, and Alark Joshi. The Baltimore Business Journal covered the story. You can read about the winning teams at the GBTC site. I would strongly recommend this to any student with a commercial idea. The competition is fun and there is big money, $10k to the winner. With the money that I won I am going to dedicate this summer to developing prototype StreetSmart Traffic devices.

The judge who moved our team from 6th place to 3rd place is Steve Walker. He is a local venture capatalist with a lot of IT background, going back to ARPA Net. He is going to speak tomorrow morning at the Visionaries in IT breakfast. I’ll be there, I think he’ll have an interesting talk. Anybody want to join me?

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