Entrepreneurs Awarded Grants at I3 Challenge

Student entrepreneurs were awarded a total of $80,000 in prize money to help them develop and execute their business projects at yesterday’s I3 Harvard College Innovation Challenge.

The night’s largest catches came in the form of three $15,000 McKinley Family Grants, which went to a Web-heavy slate that included online enterprises geared towards providing free SAT prep to low-income students, making holiday travel cheaper, and navigating New York City more easily.

The I3 event was intended to spur greater student interest in entrepreneurship projects, which tend to go underrepresented on campus, according to Elizabeth L. Altmaier ’09, vice president of the Harvard College Entrepreneurship Forum and lead organizer of the event.

“Everybody loves finance, consulting, non-profits and academia, but we offer another option to students, and that option is entrepreneurship and industry,” said Altmaier.

Yesterday’s winners included Robert W. Corty ’10 and Zachary V. Smith ‘09, who hope to create a one stop destination for college students to plan holiday trips with their project, GetOutOfCambridge. The pair snagged one of the three $15,000 McKinley Family Grants awarded last night, which, Corty said, would be put to use hiring programmers to redesign the group’s sight.

Smith said he hoped that their Web site, originally conceived as a project for the popular undergraduate course Computer Science 50, will help students make savvier travel decisions. Currently, he said, students tend to make their travel plans “too late, at too high a cost, and with too little information.”

The two other big winners last night were INeedAPencil.com, the free SAT prep service, and PortaGuide, an iPhone application with Global Positioning System capacities that functions as a tour guide around the Big Apple.

Each of the teams represented at last night’s I3 awards ceremony had at least one undergraduate member—a stipulation of the Challenge, which was presented by the Harvard College Entrepreneurship Forum, Harvard Student Agencies, and the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard.

For at least one of the students who came away empty-handed last night, hope was not lost.

David J. Tischfield ’09, one of the members of the La Prusia Micro-enterprise Project—an enterprise aiming to set up a ceramics factory in a Nicaragua slum—was one of his first forays into entrepreneurship on campus. Though he was awarded no money through I3, he said he still planned to pursue the project through outside grants during his gap year before beginning an MD-PhD program.

“I think there’s a lot of benefit to be reaped from these types of initiatives,” said Tischfield.