Students pitch ideas in King of the Court competition

Imagine yourself walking into an elevator only to meet the CEO of your favorite company. You want to pitch your business idea to the CEO, but you only have an elevator ride's worth of time to present your idea and create an impression.

UCF's King of the Court competition is based on this idea.

The 5th annual quick pitch business competition was hosted by The Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at UCF's College of Business Administration on Friday. The competition featured 16 students that presented their business ideas to a panel of five judges, all of whom were UCF alumni and prominent business leaders in the community.

"The purpose of the King of the Court competition is to spread a culture of entrepreneurship around the UCF campus," said Cameron Ford, associate professor for the College of Business.

"This event is set up to give students a common experience in creativity, platform skills, starting new ventures and interacting effectively with people in the business community."

Each student had 90 seconds to pitch their idea to a panel of judges and 90 seconds to answer questions from the panel about their idea.

Of the 16 students that pitched their ideas, eight were chosen to move on to a second round where they got to pitch their ideas again to the panel. The panel then selected four winners from this round.

"I tried to take it nice and calm when I was up there but I was still pretty nervous," said competition winner Daniel Parish, who received a trophy and $1500 prize.

Second place and $750 went to Ace Glenn, third place and $500 went to Khalil Majied, and fourth place with a $250 prize went to Amanda Crum.

The King of the Court competition was open to all UCF students.

"Any UCF student is eligible for this competition, including graduate students and Ph.D. students from any discipline," said Ford.

"Our mission at The Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation is to serve the entire campus community and we are focused on trying to get the whole campus engaged in entrepreneurial thinking."

Parish, a senior interpersonal/organizational communication major from the Nicholson School of Communication took the top prize for his presentation on his portable water purification system.

Parish presented his idea for a portable water bottle that uses a hand crank mechanism, which allows charges to pass through that can create UV light and kill bacteria and other diseases found in drinking water. UV light would have to be charged to 15,000 microwatts to effectively kill the bacteria, Parish explained in his presentation.

He talked about the importance of having clean water. "Currently 1.1 billion people do not have access to clean, drinkable water," said Parish.

The first market that he plans to pursue is the international travel market after explaining an experience of getting very sick while traveling overseas.

He also talked about the other market uses that his product would be ideal for: natural disaster relief, military uses and even camping.

"All of the ideas were innovative and I was blown away by the level of talent from the students that competed," said one of the panel judges Charlotte Williams.

"We selected Daniel's idea because the application of his product is so timely and has so much potential for so many uses on both a large scale and also the smaller consumer scale markets."