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Tuesday, April 21, 2009
StealthRowing takes PennVention grand prize

If it’s spring, it must be time for business-plan competitions on area college campuses.

And that means get ready for some gee-whiz ideas.

The University of Pennsylvania’s Weiss Tech House just finished its fifth annual PennVention competition. This student-run organization teaches student inventors how to turn their ideas into commercial products. It also gives prize money for the best ideas.

This year, the PennVention judges considered 10 finalists from among more than 60 submissions. The grand-prize winner was StealthRowing, which is developing equipment that enables rowers to feel like they’re training on the water while staying indoors.

The win gives StealthRowing, started in July 2007 by Wharton School undergraduate Daniel Harbuck, $5,000 to pursue development of its product. That’s on top of the $10,000 Wharton Venture Award it received in 2008.

And StealthRowing isn’t done. It is among the eight finalists for the Wharton Business Plan Competition that will be held April 29. (The event is free and open to the public at Jon M. Huntsman Hall on the Penn campus.) The winner of the grand prize of that competition gets $20,000.

But to win, Harbuck’s enterprise would need to best teams behind ideas such as:

* CuddleBots, a robotic toy and online community for kids;

* RealisticEye, which is trying to produce a more natural-looking artificial eye for patients;

* And DocASAP, an online service that would notify patients of last-minute openings for appointments at their physicians.

Don’t think for a minute that these are merely academic exercises: In February, one PennVention winner from 2005 - Humanistic Robots Inc. - received $2 million in grants from the Department of Defense to turn its machine to find and destroy land mines into a commercially viable product.

Annual meetings

Tuesday: Ametek, National Penn Bancshares, Public Service Enterprise Group, Univest Corp. of Pennsylvania, Vist Financial;

Wednesday: Alliance Bancorp Inc. of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr Bank, Cigna, Harleysville Group, Wilmington Trust;

Thursday: Crown Holdings, Johnson & Johnson, Lockheed Martin, WSFS Financial.

Posted by Mike Armstrong @ 2:30 AM  Permalink | File Under: Small Business | | Technology | Post a comment
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About Mike Armstrong
Mike Armstrong, a business editor and writer for nearly two decades, is the Inquirer's business columnist and PhillyInc blog editor.
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