Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

One might say it’s competitions galore. Starting Thursday night and continuing through Sunday night, we attended three and received a report on a fourth one held at the University of Louisville.

Three of the four were won by University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) students. Articles about all of those, except one, follow this brief post. We will have a more complete article on last night’s “What’s the Big Idea 48-Hour Launch” (WTBI) in Tuesday’s edition of teknovation.biz.

• The winner of the annual WTBI competition organized by the Knoxville Entrepreneur Center for The Development Corporation of Knox County was Quantum Lock, Erica Grant’s security start-up based on the principles of quantum physics that we spotlighted in this recent article. She’s a UTK graduate student.
• Just before the WTBI pitch competition, six teams competed in the finale for KnoxDevs first-ever “Knoxville City Hackathon.” WyWaste won that competition.
• Lia Winter, a UTK student working on two Master’s Degrees, captured first place and $15,000 in the  “Brown-Forman Cardinal Challenge” hosted by the University of Louisville. She pitched her EasyWhip^TM device used for orthopedic reconstruction procedures like ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) surgery.
• Finally, another UTK student – Sofia Tomov, an undergraduate – captured the top prize and $1,500 in the inaugural “Scots Innovation Challenge” sponsored by Maryville College. Her start-up is Quardian Labs that is built around an algorithm she developed to be a predictor of heart disease risk.

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