Winners Of The MIT Arab Business Plan Competition 09-10

The MIT Arab Business Plan Competition is a competition designed to encourage all entrepreneurs in the Arab world to start their own company and, ultimately, create a nest of leading firms in the Arab world.

The current version of the competition was officially launched on October 12th 2009 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The competition went through a number of rounds, including different teams covering the following sectors: Energy, Engineering, Healthcare, Internet, Software and Telecom.

The final round just took place at a ceremony in Cairo, Egypt, and the awards for this year were handed out. The winners of this edition of the MIT Arab Business Plan Competition are as follows:

First place: The Little Engineer (Lebanon) – Prize: $US 50,000
An after-school edutainment center which introduces kids and teens [age 4-16+] to pre-engineering courses such as robotics, physics, electricity, electronics, renewable energy and more.
Team: Rana El Chemaitelly, Albert Shamieh, Nadia Alamah, Marwa Harb.

Second place: BioBusiness (Egypt) – Prize: $US 15,000
BioBusiness is developing a solution for the continuous monitoring of blood glucose in the form of s a small product that will fit into a hand- held battery-operated ergonomic shape. The product is comprised of two pieces, the gBracelet is worn anywhere on the arm and is the main measurement sensor which transmits the glucose measurements wirelessly to the gMon hand-held device. The gMon is the main display device. It displays the continuous curve of blood glucose levels, keeps track of the glucose level trends, and produces alarms of current/ predicted glycemic highs or lows.
Team: Islam Badreldin, Amr Elwakeel, Mostafa Elwakeel.

Third place: The following two startups got this position, with a prize of $US 5,000 each:

Arabic Coach (Yemen)
A system that will enable students to browse teachers’ video based portfolios and schedule virtual teaching sessions with the desired teachers. The online teaching sessions are fully interactive and each teacher can determine his own hourly rate, and Arabic Coach gets 15% of the teachers’ profits.
Team: Amad Almsaodi, Mohamed Almussaabi, Saeed Alfagieh.

EG-Bioinformatics (Egypt)
Provides software products and services for genomics data management and analysis. Its products include novel software programs for comparative genomics with applications in healthcare, agriculture, and pharmaceuticals. Its services include cloud-based data management and analysis, development of customized solutions on behalf of global customers, and conducting data analysis on behalf of regional customers. The business model is based on ‘pay-per-use’ basis, subscription, or licensing.
Team: Moustafa Ghanem, Mohamed Abouelhoda, Sameh El-Ansary, Mohamed El-Kaliouby.

For profiles of all the semi-finalist teams, you can download and check out the Semi-Finalists Catalogue 2010 (PDF)