Technion team wins first place in the European entrepreneurship competition “Intel Challenge”

30Receive $20,000 & go on to the finals to be held in November in the U.S.

A team from the Technion won first place in the European entrepreneurship competition “Intel Challenge” and will participate in the finals of the world championship to be held in November in the U.S. The group reached the final round in the “BizTECH” competition held a few months ago in Israel with their venture that allows, as they put it, anyone taking a picture “to get a perfect photograph by pressing one button, without having to be an expert in photography and without needing to take the picture more than once.”

Yaron Ratcher, Polina Federman, Avner Bar and Aviv Gadot are the members of the Technion team. Yaron is a computer science major, Aviv is an electrical engineering major, Avner graduated with a degree in computer science and Polina graduated from the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management. The idea for their venture emerged from the entrepreneurship course given by Prof. Uzi De-Haan of the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion.

 “In the BizTECH competition, we weren’t quite so ready,” they say. “We were disappointed when we didn’t win but we kept going. We learned a lot from the competition, we corrected the mistakes we saw we’d made and kept going.”

180 teams from Western and Eastern Europe participated in the competition, which was held in Poland. Nine of these teams made it into the final round. The Technion team was included among the four finalists from Eastern Europe. The first place among the Western European teams was won by two young women from Denmark who applied for a patent for their development of an ozone-based sunscreen.

The Technion team immediately invested the $20,000 they won in their venture and hope that this is only the beginning.

In the picture (from right to left): Polina Federman, Avner Bar, Yaron Ratcher, Aviv Gado. Photo by: Technion Spokesman