Make Your Mark Challenge 09: The winners are…
December 11th, 2009 by Alex_GoldupYoung entrepreneurs from Waldegrave School in Twickenham, London, and Plymouth College were announced yesterday as winners of the keenly-contested and toughly fought 2009 Make Your Mark Challenge.
The team of five students from Waldegrave topped the 14-16 category with their ‘keepakup’ idea. The team took nearby Twickenham Rugby Stadium as their inspiration for their idea: selling recyclable souvenir cups. Their idea is that, once purchased, the souvenir cups could either be kept or returned for a 25 per cent refund of the original price. The cups could be fully customised, and would be equally suitable for sports matches and music concerts alike.
Four students from Plymouth College triumphed in the 16-19 category on the strength of their ‘Pro Planner’ idea – an online student planner that does not use paper and, as teachers can upload assignments directly to all their students’ planners, also ensures that pupils know what homework is being set – even if they are away.
The day itself was great fun. The students gave their entrepreneurial brainpower a workout through workshops and mini-competitions before the pitching to a panel of illustrious judges in the afternoon that included Channel 4 News’ Business Correspondent Benjamin Cohen and the British Council’s Philip Goodwin. These kids were spremely confident: no twitching hands or hesistant delivery here. If they were nervous, they weren’t showing it!
I was struck by how much business nous the competitors had. These young people – who have had next to no formal training - were not pitching high-concept ideas scribbled down on the back of a postage stamp, they were pitching fully developed, textured business plans complete with estimates of profit and loss, after-tax gains, potential partnerships and a great deal more that went way, way over my head. It was easy to forget that these young people were really young, some born as recently as 1995 (the year eBay was founded and the DVD was born).
All in all: a great experience for everyone who took part. Yesterday’s event showed beyond all doubt that, as long as we continue to promote the experience of entrepreneurship to as many young people as possible, the future of UK enterprise is in very safe hands indeed.
December 11th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Congratulations to all the teams, and to the teams from Waldegrave & Plymouth College for their fantastic ideas. Well done, Will King (forgetful judge
December 18th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
There was an interesting result out of the national finals.
In the 16-19 categories ProPlanner won first place. ProPlanner an online homework planner? A.K.A Moodle (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment). Moodle is free and Open Source. (Lookup Open Source if you don’t know what it means) Moodle features all your ideas and due to its open source nature is easy to develop add-ons for. Your start-up cost projections are £50k. Nobody wants to invest in that when a majority of schools/colleges around the world have Moodle installed and running. It has over 30million users just on its own website, and being open source your free to modify and distribute so that number could be 20x that.
The mantra of make your mark is ‘Don’t be a carbon copy’. Ironic on multiple levels. The idea is pretty much copied. (I cannot state if the school have seen this software before or not. They should its called market research!) Also do you know that servers use electricity? Mostly servers are stored in Data Centres that use electricity to power servers, lighting and cooling. (A room of just 100 servers is enough to make you sweat. Trust me) There are some data centres that are ‘green’. Using green powered energy sources. But these have a HUGE mark-up compared to usual hosting prices. I know this because I did research into green data centres for my Make Your Mark idea. Carbon offsetting actually looks cheaper…. There is also the power that each computer connecting to your service uses and any bugs in your software will make it use even more.
You may think that my view of your idea is overly negative. It mostly is. But I’m being realistic. If you have an amazing idea that somebody couldn’t replicate to go with your service/product or greatly improve it from the existing service it could work. Look at FaceBook is another social networking website like MySpace but you can’t spoil the look of your profile with stupid layouts which gives it more of a cleaner community feeling. Same as Google with its search rank technology. It uses algorithms to rank to relevance and was started by a couple of IT geeks so they could build the computing infrastructure around it. Making it better than the rest and it can’t be matched.
The cost predictions for £16k for software development, does this include bug testing? Security auditing? If you do not do correct bug testing and security auditing someone WLL break your software. I can guarantee that. I am a software developer and security auditor. I know where people go wrong. The more data a user can input. The more chance you have of leaving a bug and a security hole. ProPlanner is nearly majority user input. There is not much back processing.
Second place went to an idea of marking packages with a branding with their CO2 usage. Wait…what? The carbon trust! As I believe they wanted this to be an online database of companies and their environmental impact. As outlined above. Servers, electricity, etc. But this would be a Private Company deciding who goes on the database and what numbers go on there. Who would you rather believe? A governmental body or a private company looking for ‘investment’? Decide for yourself!
I’m not even going into the third place team. Their idea was interesting to say the least. But the concept is hard to understand. As I understood it they were selling something back to the place they got it free from.
‘Thinking on your feet’ Enterprise UK decide to delete their presentation. Fair enough that was an unfortunate incident. But why do you need a prize for having a backup with you. If you didn’t have a backup I would be worried. A basic is to have at least 1-2 different backups in different formats on different mediums. E.G How I would do it. 2 USB’s with my presentation and accounting documents in Microsoft Office 97-2003 .doc format and in Microsoft Office .docx format and also Open Office .odf format. Then I would also have my files uploaded to a server that I controlled. That is not always applicable for most people so you bring a CD. In a jewel case to keep it safe!
My rant is now over. I accept any comments that people may want to put to me
I can be contact at uksecco@googlemail.com
December 18th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Thanks for your comments.
Whether you agree with the decisions or not, they were reached by a panel whose credentials and business nous cannot be doubted. Each of the judges brought a high-level of expertise and credibility to the table, with several of them having developed, nurtured, and grown businesses of their own, and their judgements were suitably rigorous, robust, and rooted in an advanced understanding of enterprise and entrepreneurship.
You should also bear in mind that these ideas were not put together by professional, career businesspeople. They were put together by young people who have had little to no formal business training, and who in several instances were developing their idea alongside studying for their exams. Given their relative inexperience as well as the competing pressures on their time, it seems unfair – unrealistic even – to claim that their level of preparation or research was insufficient.
Given that the competition was so closely fought and that all of the entries were of a uniformly high character, it wouldn’t be realistic to expect support for the judges decisions to be unanimous. However, I would suggest that rather than picking holes and finding flaws, we should be encouraged by and celebrating their achievements.
December 22nd, 2009 at 10:21 pm
I am responding to the rant against the 3rd placed team – “Pure Manure”. The team based their idea on the KISS principle – “Keep It Simple Stupid!”. Unfortunately we appear not to have been able to dumb it down sufficiently for our detractor to understand! The waste manure comes from farmers, riding scools etc and following the organic manure is sold to gardeners, garden centres etc. Not that difficult to understand if you’re not a slow learner! Next time get your facts right before you write such “manure”!
January 6th, 2010 at 11:20 pm
Jealousy is a truely wicked thing! Maybe you should swallow your pride and admit defeat? I’m sure if you do enough ‘market research’ I’m sure you will come across numourous other blogs, where they will appreciate your juvenile and jealous comments on meaningless subjects.
January 6th, 2010 at 11:53 pm
After wasting a worryingly large proportion of my ever dwindling life scrolling through line after line of mind numbingly boring, useless information, I have reached the conclusion that not only do you appear childish and embarrassingly covetous of the successful teams, you also seem to have too much time on your hands to conduct that much research! I wish you luck in pursuing what ever it is you want to achieve and try not to belittle other people’s achievements before you have truely achieved yourself.
January 26th, 2010 at 10:46 am
Speaking as members of “Pure Manure” we feel truely insulted by your cricticisms of our efforts. Firstly, i believe we should have won, because our idea was not a “carbon copy” whereas so called “ProPlanner” is infact a cabon copy! Google it? 1000s of results suspiciously identical appear. Coincidence, I think not! Third place, we will settle for because we know our idea potientially viable and sucessful!
=)
January 26th, 2010 at 5:35 pm
Wow, this discussion is the stuff the internet was made for!
fr33d0m what’s your twitter?
Big up to Pure maure who’s idea was excellent, as was Plymouths – who also delivered a fantastically confident presentation (a feact fr33d0m doesn’t seem to take into account)
February 3rd, 2010 at 1:27 am
I have just googled Pro-Planner and none of the links have anything to do with a homework diary at all. As far as I’m aware, there is no such thing as an online homework diary which emails parents when homework is not handed in. There are VLEs which allow student to get homework sheets whilst they are at home, but they do not have this email feature.
I was at the national finals and I thought Plymouth’s presentation and answering of questions was excellent and I was not surprised when they won. Lets face it there were only really 3-4 teams in with a shout of winning anyway.
March 31st, 2010 at 3:02 pm
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