Joust announces winner

The joust held at UCF's Fairwinds Alumni Center on April 15 featured no Knights on horseback charging at one another with lances at the ready.

In reality, the joust was between the four finalists of the Joust Business Plan Competition, hosted by the Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation in the College of Business.

Finance major Ace Glenn won the competition with his Better Ways to Study plan. He was awarded $10,000 and a one-year membership to the UCF Technology Incubator.

"We really needed this win. This is big for us to move forward in the future," said Glenn. "I think we have a lot of growth potential, we're already developing our product that we're launching. We can use that product to generate revenue in multiple ways and there's nobody what we're doing right now."

Thirty teams were narrowed down to 16 semifinalists, then narrowed down to the final four: Oh My Groceries, headed by Nick Frazier; Dave's Market, headed by Matt Schaefer; Free in a Box, headed by Daniel Seeff; and Glenn's Better Ways to Study.

Out of the four, three of the proposals were for online businesses, with Dave's Market — a restaurant — being the only one not online.

Tom Bland, CEO of AquaFiber Technologies, said that this is a trend that we can expect more of, because technology has become such a huge part of our world.

Glenn's business proposal audience focuses on the students, who are visual learners. However, many of the learning materials students use lack visual representation. His company's goal is to provide the students with visual study materials with the hopes of increasing retention rates and providing an overall more effective study experience.

Glenn and the other competitors were each given a 15-minute time limit to present their company, followed by a 10-minute question-and-answer session with the judges.

During his presentation, Glenn said that while standing in line at Panera Bread you probably won't see someone pull out a textbook to read a paragraph quickly, but almost every person in line will be using his or her cell phone.

One facet of Better Ways to Study was a text messaging system that would send SMS messages to subscribers with facts from their class' topic. The idea is that receiving five to ten texts a day a few weeks leading up to the exam would shorten the number of hours spent cramming for a test to 45-minute review sessions since you've been getting information periodically throughout the weeks prior.

In the reception following the presentations, Cameron Ford, UCF's Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation's founding director, pointed out just how close this year's competition was indicating the amount of time it took the judges to reach a decision.

Ford said that all of the proposals would make great companies and the students behind them had bright futures ahead of them, but when it was all said and done, someone had to be picked as the winner.

"We look at the investment, risk and return for all these proposals and when it was all said and done we felt that Ace's proposal was the best one," Bland said.

Joey Verderber, one of Glenn's programmers and a UCF computer engineering major, said what made Glenn's proposal stand out was that it introduced a new idea.

"People have been learning forever, since before technology, but since all of this new technology has been created nothing has been done to update how we learn," Verderber said. "Better Ways to Study does just that, combining the classroom and technology into one effective mix."

Verderber was amazed by how things turned out.

"I was really surprised Oh My Groceries ended up in third," Verderber said. "When we were waiting for the results, I was certain it would come down between Ace's and them."

This year's competition was the eighth year and its most successful in the number of entries.

"Just do it, whether you have doubts about it or not just do it, the reason I've been able to have this success is because I've been doing it for three years now," Glenn said.