Students pitch business ideas in Tiger Tank

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Five teams of student entrepreneurs at Rochester Institute of Technology will pitch their business ideas to a panel of Rochester-area investors on April 26 in hopes of launching their products or businesses.

RIT’s Tiger Tank competition will be held at 6 p.m. today in Student Innovation Hall. The five student teams—selected from more than 30 that submitted proposals—will compete for a chance to win $4,750 in cash prizes and up to $160,000 in scholarships for graduate studies at RIT’s Saunders College of Business.

The team finalists for the competition, hosted by the Albert J. Simone Center for Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship, are:

• Club Café Technologies—a coffee machine that offers a method of producing cold brew using less time and fewer coffee beans than what is currently offered on the market.
• DADCo utilizes electromyography (EMG) to create consumer-based products that monitor muscle movements to accomplish different tasks. When a muscle clenches, that muscle emits an electrical signal. Using their technology, it can capture and use that signal to perform a multitude of tasks from driving robotic prosthetics to interfacing with mobile phones.
• Orthop3Dic—a tool that allows doctors to produce custom-made orthotics from their offices in a matter of hours and at a cost significantly less than the current commercial systems. The tool allows doctors to take digital measurements or input those taken by hand and produce a 3D model of an orthopedic insert that is custom built for that client. The tool then translates this 3D model to instructions that can be read by a 3D printer that will print the orthotic with the specific support for the client.
• Rock Stars—helps children with autism or attention disorders with rock climbing using lights, sounds and textures on, inside or around a rock-climbing peg. The Rock Stars project began in the Simone Center’s Idea Lab@RIT.
• Sinka Solar—a new type of photovoltaic material that specializes in capturing indoor lighting and can generate power densities more than twice as high as traditional silicon-based modules. The technology can be used for powering sensors, improving lighting efficiency, as well as other indoor solar applications.

Teams are required to present to the judges the problem the venture or business seeks to solve or gap in the marketplace it seeks to fill; a description of the target market; what value the venture would add to lives; and potential challenges to delivering the product or service. Proposals will be evaluated based upon their uniqueness, feasibility and the ability to impact people.

For information, go to the RIT Albert J. Simone Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship webpage or contact Rupa Thind at rupa.thind@rit.edu or 585-475-7487.