On: Business
Waste Not, Want Not Food Sharing App Wins CMU-Q’s ‘Quick Startup’ Competition Admaney, a business administration graduate, said that, in addition to the technical development of the app, the team will also look for revenue models. “When we surveyed people about the app, they said they wouldn’t expect to be compensated for giving away food, so one idea we have is for people who receive the food to make a donation,” she said. “Those revenues could be used to support the app with the remainder going to charities that address hunger.” Safe.T, a program that encourages employers to use workers’ commute times to provide safety training, came in second place, while PetApp, a mobile application that provides information about services for pet owners, came in third. Participants in Quick Startup 2015 came from Carnegie Mellon Qatar, College of the North Atlantic-Qatar (CNAQ-), Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, Qatar University, Stenden University Qatar, Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, ALSTOM and the pre-university Academic Bridge Program.
You’re baking a cake, but don’t have enough eggs. Your neighbor has eggs, but he’s going on vacation and won’t use them up. A mobile application app being developed by a team of CMU-Q students would solve both problems, enabling friends, families and neighbors to share food and reduce waste.
Members of the judging panel were Peter Moore, College of the North Atlantic-Qatar; Rawan Al Fares, Qatar Business Incubation Center; Yasmeen Hasan, Bedaya Center; Michael Portz, the Shisha Company Ltd.; Khalifa Al-Misnad, Al Misnad & Rifaat; Juha Peralampi, Qatar University; and John O’Brien, Carnegie Mellon Qatar. Tom Emerson and George White, who are both distinguished career professors of entrepreneurship at CMU-Q, organized the event.
The app, called Basket, won first place in CMU-Q’s Quick Startup, which was held on campus this spring. Launched last year, Quick Startup challenges university students to conceive and develop a business idea within 72 hours for presentation to a judging panel. This year’s event was sponsored by the Small and Medium Enterprises Department of Qatar National Bank (QNB). “It’s an impossible task to start a business in three days; however, we provided students with a framework for the important steps needed to get started, focusing on business plan development, customer discovery and investor pitching,” said Dave Mawhinney, co-director of the Carnegie Mellon University Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship and executive director of the Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship. This year’s event saw participation by 38 budding entrepreneurs, working in teams of four to propose solutions that would fill gaps in the market. Winning team members Sabih Bin Wasi, Rukhsar Neyaz and Noor-ul-Huda Admaney from CMU-Q were joined by Abdul Jabbar Mir Ali Khan, a student at the College of North Atlantic-Qatar. “We came up with the idea for Basket awhile ago and have always wanted to take it to the next level,” said Bin Wasi, a senior in computer science. “At Quick Startup, we only had three days to come up with our business plan, which gave us the push we needed to jumpstart our project and take advantage of an opportunity to gain feedback from industry experts.”
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First Place: Basket Rukhsar Neyaz (Carnegie Mellon University–Qatar) Sabih Bin Wasi (Carnegie Mellon University–Qatar) Noor ul Huda Admaney (Carnegie Mellon University–Qatar) Abdul Jabbar Mir Ali Khan (College of the North Atlantic–Qatar) Second Place: Safe.T Qazi Umair (Carnegie Mellon University–Qatar) Shivi Mishra (Stenden University Qatar) Vignesh Venkatraman (Stenden University Qatar) NK Yagnessh (Weill Cornell Medical College–Qatar) Third Place: PetApp Mohammad Alrifai (College of the North Atlantic–Qatar) Omar Laham (College of the North Atlantic–Qatar) Samer Abdelhamid (ALSTOM)