Internet Ideas Win Enterprise Award

Two student-run Internet-based companies—a website that guards against Internet snooping and an online tutoring system for local high schoolers—came away winners at the Center for Enterprise’s fifth annual Entrepreneurial Contest.

The contest, whose winners were announced at an awards ceremony at the Faculty Club last night, gave away $10,000 in prizes. For the first time the awards were divided into two categories: the for-profit business category and the non-profit “social enterprise” group.

The $2,500 first prize in the for-profit category went to Jimmy Surf, an Internet privacy tool. The software screens users from pop-ups and protects them from being monitored on the Internet. For example, lists of recently viewed websites are kept secret. The company’s website, jimmysurf.com, already has 600 subscribing users.

Brandon K. Guttman ’00-’02, who will run Jimmysurf.com next year with his partner Dan Houston ’01, said this competition provided good practice for making business pitches.

The winner on the non-profit side, Mackie Dougherty ’03, who is also a Crimson editor, developed an online Internet tutoring program that links Harvard students with high school students in the Boston area.

“The biggest obstacle for community service at Harvard is the logistics,” he said. “If you cut out the van ride, students are more willing to get involved.”

High school students can go to the public library where they are provided with an Internet account that hooks up to chat rooms in English, math, history or science. There is one Harvard tutor in each chatroom who helps the students with their questions in real time.

The site also includes bulletin boards where students can post their essays and solicit feedback.

The company currently has 25 tutors and 200 students and is looking to expand its model to other cities and other universities. Dougherty said he would use the $2,500 prize as seed money to help with this expansion.

The purpose of the contest “is to spark the entrepreneurial spirit,” said Rosa P. Wu ’03, director of last year’s contest and current Harvard Student Agencies vice president. “It does not give enough money to fund any of the projects, but it gets out the word that being an entrepreneur is an option at Harvard.”

The contest gives Harvard students experience at developing products and plans to sell them. The program’s organizers say the event attempts to make up for the lack of undergraduate business classes offered at the College.

But one of this year’s second-place winners, Acuta Lifesciences, evolved out of a Harvard class. The company’s first product is an injection-based pet sterilization system that avoids the need for surgery. The idea for the system came from a concept that Acuta’s organizers studied in Engineering Sciences 143, a class that teaches how to develop a biotech start-up firm.

The group is also working on other innovative human drug delivery systems.

The third place winner in the for-profit category developed a technology to help radiologists in the early screening and detection of breast cancer.

On the social enterprise side, the second-prize winners developed a program to give loans to people who are being evicted from their homes. And third prize went to a group that proposed to train college students to go to Namibia and jump-start the local tourism industry there.

Entrants submitted 40-page business plans, preceded by four-page executive summaries. Midway through the semester, the Center for Enterprise organized a business boot-camp for all the contestants.