LAST SUMMER, software design student James McNamara stood on a stage in New York’s Lincoln Centre amid shouts, cheers and booming music to accept, along with his three team-mates from the Sligo Institute of Technology, one of the top computing prizes in the world for third-level students: Microsoft’s Imagine Cup.
The team had designed a clever device that plugs into a car’s electronics and monitors for safe driving, with the ability to also flag road conditions ahead on a journey. A tough panel of judges, which included chief information officers and chief technology officers from some leading American organisations, selected their project from those of 67 other international teams for the top prize of $25,000.
Ten months later, McNamara – along with original team member Calum Crawley – has a new company, CleverMiles, centred on their device and, with the help of the three-month Startupbootcamp Dublin programme, they are hammering out a formal strategy and business plan.
And once again, McNamara has found himself up in front of an audience. The 10 start-ups selected for the programme are now in intensive preparation for a day of pitches to investors which takes place next month.
He says he was always determined to look for commercial opportunities for the device. “After the Imagine Cup, we were trying to find our feet and take stock. We decided that Calum and I would carry on,” he says.
With some initial support from Microsoft as well as Sligo IT, the two began to think about possibilities for the device, which they initially had thought would most appeal to the car insurance market as a device for monitoring young-driver performance.
But getting on to the Startupbootcamp programme has helped the young company – which now has added in four others – to do some proper market research. “We have really tried to focus on what exactly is our target market, and what are the pain points. And now we feel it’s parents.”
He says the device could be sold to parents who want to have the comfort of knowing how a child is driving and where they are. He says it is a “light approach” and not a kind of mobile CCTV surveillance system, with the emphasis on improving road safety and giving reassurance to parents.
But the device, which has an inbuilt gaming element where drivers earn points for safe driving and can compete with their scores online, should also appeal to young drivers themselves, he says. The device has remained fairly true to the version that won the Imagine Cup. It fits into the car’s system by snapping into a slot under the steering column. It gives gentle audio warnings to drivers if they are doing something which is unsafe, an unobtrusive noise similar to a seatbelt signal, McNamara says. If the driver removes or tampers with the device, a message is sent back to a parent to notify them.
After a journey is completed, drivers or parents can go online and view an analysis of the journey, which will identify safe and unsafe parts of the journey and flag what was done badly.
The site will also give tips on how to improve driving skills and, consequently, the driver’s score on the site. There are also videos to show good driving techniques: for example, the right way to approach a corner and reduce speed, McNamara says.
Rather than go after the insurance market, which he says has a very long lead-time for sales which could leave a new company foundering, or fleet management, where there are already a number of companies with devices that monitor driving, he explains they felt the consumer arena was perfect. “Going after the consumer market will enable us to get our device out right away.”
They also will be approaching driving schools, as they can imagine a situation where an instructor might give a student the device, and could afterwards analyse driving performance.
The “gamification” approach is a natural fit for driving, “a very powerful technology if used in the right way. It’s trying to imagine the world as a game and the car as a controller, but focused on good driving skills.” He imagines that the device will go to market at somewhere between €100 and €300 – about the cost of a good satnav device. The company would then provide a subscription service for the website.
But he knows a lot of work lies ahead in shaping the company. “We need to focus on distribution, on sourcing components, on building out the device, on putting together a board of advisers. It’s a lot of learning. It’s all about trying to increase the value of your company and reduce risk.” He’s enjoying putting together a new company and getting ready to lure in investors whom he hopes might believe as strongly as he does in the value of the company.
James McNamara says the device could be sold to parents who want to have the comfort of knowing how a child is driving
Microsoft’s Imagine Cup: A Pathway To Innovation And Commercialisation
AFTER TEAM Hermes of the Sligo Institute of Technology took the top prize in Microsoft’s Imagine Cup competition last July in New York, they were already thinking of how their driving monitor device could be commercialised.
That’s no surprise – thinking like a start-up is a central part of the Imagine Cup competition, with teams needing to work out a business plan and hone their presentation skills as part of their pitch to competition judges. Teams are also actively encouraged by Microsoft to take their projects, regardless of whether they are amongst the winners, and further develop them for commercial use.
“Last year was a phenomenal achievement, a real testimony to what the students had done,” says Kevin Marshall, head of education at Microsoft Ireland, of last year’s winning team, who placed first in the national competition before winning the international final.
He is delighted that two of the team have continued, with the help of Sligo IT’s business incubation unit, Microsoft and the Startupbootcamp programme, to create a company around their Imagine Cup project, a device that monitors driving skills.
Marshall also wants more encouragement of computing talent at a younger age and believes reforming the junior cycle in school to embed programming skills would boost the IT talent pool and entrepreneurship. The success of Irish teams in the Imagine Cup in recent years shows “we have got the talent here, but we don’t nurture it enough.”
He says the Imagine Cup shows “a pathway” to students to succeed in the IT industry. “It is the core of what we want the Imagine Cup to be – a pathway to innovation and commercialisation.”
Karlin Lillington will be a judge at the Irish final of the Imagine Cup next week
