Tech leaders from Prague and Silicon Valley join UNYP’s e-Commerce class Final Project Presentations

This semester Professor of e-Commerce, Jeff Medeiros brought in a few real-world e-Commerce and Technology leaders to watch and give feedback to this semesters’ student projects for the e-Commerce and Marketing Technologies course.  
 
At the beginning of the semester, the students in the class form teams and come up with business ideas leveraging the Internet and related marketing concepts covered during the semester.  This season’s batch of ideas were very creative and included everything from 24/7  McDonalds food delivery using GPS location-based-services to identify the closest restaurant for ordering and fastest delivery…to “WithMe”, a system built on a proprietary recommendation engine designed to suggest the best entertainment personalized for YOU based not only on what you THINK you like, but what your real life preferences are collected from social networking and Google analytics, and then matching these desires to existing entertainment database content (Movies, Books, Cafe’s, etc) .

The session started with a presentation from Edward Liu, the Founder/CEO of StartitUp.co of Silicon Valley/California (previously CEO – Groupon Taiwan).  Ed was refreshingly direct, positive, and un-orthodox in sharing with the students the secret to success: “DUMB down your idea to the point you can get to an MVP – Minimum Viable Product to make money as quickly as possible.”

Then the students presented, with the BEST project of the day leading it off by Team IZIWIN (pronounced ‘easy-win’)… a betting site aggregation service (bringing all betting services to a single portal…Think Orbitz travel, but for betting)…including added value services like related news streams.

After watching the IZIwin presentation, the Business Department Chair sent me this note…..”Jeff, I would like to formally congratulate those students who presented that (IZIwin)… It was an excellent piece of work. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a well thought-out business idea from undergraduates.” – Kevin Capuder, Chair of the Business Department.

In addition to our special guests, the students’ presentations were also reviewed by the UNYP Rector PhD Andreas Antonopoulos –who also teaches Telecom and Entrepreneurship in the MBA program, UNYP Business Chair Kevin Capuder, and UNYP Graduate Business Program Manager- Aaron Johnson, who is in the process of developing an entrepreneurship MBA program for next year.

We look forward to this being the first of many collaborative efforts with StartitUp, StartupYard and CVUT and encourage students interested in e-Commerce and launching their own business ideas to engage with us and to visit the respective sites of these helpful organizations; www.startitup.co , www.startupyard.cz , and CVUT’s entrepreneurship program eClub of Facebook https://www.facebook.com/eClub.CVUT.

Good luck on the rest of your final’s and have a great summer. I cannot wait to see the next batch of ideas next semester!