UCD spin-out wins inaugural UNICA Entrepreneurship Competition for Students and Young Researchers
News | 10 Nov 2009 :
HeyStaks Technologies, a University College Dublin spin-out, has won the inaugural, Europe-wide, UNICA Entrepreneurship Competition for Students and Young Researchers and a prize of €20,000.
A NovaUCD client company, Heystaks developed a revolutionary social Web search platform which enables searchers to better organise and easily share the resources they find while searching and browsing the Internet.
UNICA, a network of 42 universities from European capital cities, invited each university, including UCD, to nominate one entry for this competition, sponsored by the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation. The winner was announced, following Dragons' Den-style presentations by three short listed finalists to a five-person judging panel, during UNICA's 2009 General Assembly, held on November 6, in the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris.
HeyStaks' technology enables key collaboration and organisational features to be added as a layer on top of existing mainstream search engines such as Google and Bing, so that users may benefit from social search enhancements without having to leave their favourite engine.
On winning the competition, Dr Maurice Coyle, co-founder, HeyStaks said, "We are delighted to have won the first UNICA entrepreneurship competition. It is a great honour and it will be of enormous benefit to us in raising the international profile of HeyStaks. The prize money will be used to drive the company to the next level in its development."
HeyStaks' patented, social re-ranking core technology was developed by company co-founders Dr Peter Briggs and Dr Maurice Coyle during their PhD research at UCD's School of Computer Science and Informatics.
HeyStaks is currently in beta release mode and the company intends to launch Version 1 of its technology before the end of the year.
The spin-out was also selected as UCD's nominee for the UNICA competition following its success in winning SUSSED!, UCD's €10,000 Entrepreneurship Competition organised and run earlier this year by NovaUCD.