Company Name: Banned Together (http://www.dellchallenge.org/projects/banned-together) Team: Zachary Rosenfeld MPP ‘13 Company Description: Banned Together will mobilize a wide audience through participatory media to raise awareness and money for the support of censored or at-risk musicians. By giving these artists a safe space in which they can share their music, we will amplify their voices and help connect them to a global audience. “Remix artists” can harness this platform to remix for a cause, sharing their creations with fans and encouraging more people to become invested in the campaign.
Company Name: One Degree (www.1deg.org) Team: Rey Faustino MPP’12 Company Description: One Degree connects kids and families to poverty-fighting resources. We’re creating a web platform that’s like a Yelp for nonprofit and governmental services that will make it really easy for anyone to find, access, rate and review community resources. One Degree builds stronger communities by uniting people with the resources they need to thrive. We engage neighborhoods by helping families drive social change. With a physical presence in public schools, One Degree builds the connective tissue to transform communities.
Company Name: BetaDater (www.betadater.com) Team: Lauren Lyons MPP ‘12 Company Description: How many times have you gone out on a first date that you thought went well but never got a call back? Have you ever wanted to know why? Unfortunately, the person who has that answer is reluctant share what went wrong, usually because of lack of investment in someone they only just met or fear of hurting our feelings. As a consequence, we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. BetaDater is a web and mobile service that allows daters to provide honest feedback to one another in order to improve our first date behaviors and maximize our second date potential. In some cases it’s incompatibility; in others, it could be something so simple as poor eye contact or nervously talking too much. By going on a series of “first dates” with and receiving anonymous constructive feedback, BetaDater provides the self-knowledge to maximize your dating potential and land that second date.
Company Name: USAdelante (http://www.usadelante.org/) Team: Sergio Marrero MPP/MBA ‘14 Company Description: USAdelante is a national network of current and aspiring leaders in college that support each other’s collective success. The network is open to college students in the United States (US) from all majors across all disciplines. Rising Leaders are paired with peers nationally. They are given leadership assignments to fuel their individual development and the development of the network. By providing the right connection and a series of development exercises through a mobile application each student develops a national network and the skills to be a great student and a leader. Advancing Together.
Company Name: Blackwell Timepieces (http://www.blackwelltime.com/) Team: Dan Futrell MPP ‘12 Company Description: Blackwell Timepieces is a veteran-owned, American watch company that supports wounded combat veterans. Coming Summer 2012. For each watch purchased, Blackwell donates a dog to a service dog training program for wounded veterans, training dogs to provide balance, post-traumatic stress relief, hearing assistance, and other life-improving tasks. One Watch = One Dog. …and we’re making a better timepiece.
Company Name: ShoutAbout (ShoutAbout.org) Team: Matt Morgan MPP ‘13 Company Description: ShoutAbout gives people rich opportunities to learn more and take action immediately after being inspired by news coverage.
Company Name: AppSuccess (www.appsuccess.org) Team: David Shepard MPP ‘12, Miki Heller MPP/MBA ‘13 Company Description: AppSuccess provides low-income students who are qualified to go to college with the means to get there. We eliminate the college application information gap by matching our Applicants with students from top colleges who guide them through the college application and financial aid process via our interactive online platform.
Company Name: The Citizen Book (www.thecitizenbook.com) Team: Prathima Manohar Company Description: The Citizen Book is an digital citizen engagement platform.
Company Name: Bounce Imaging (www.bounceimaging.com) Team: Francisco Aguilar MPA/MBA ‘11, Stacy Tsai MPA/MBA ‘11, David Young MPA/MBA ‘11 Company Description: The technology exists today to put life-saving imaging technologies in the hands of soldiers, firefighters, and search & rescue workers. Yet systems deployed today are too expensive and too impractical, and as a result lives are lost as personnel enter hazardous spaces without knowing what dangers await them. Bounce Imaging is developing the low-cost, easy-to-use tools that personnel need but current systems don’t deliver. Out team brings together former military and government officers and graduate students in business, policy, and engineering from Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania. We are currently looking for engineers with experience in imaging, prototype development, and Android application development.
Company Name: CareerVibes  Team: Yaniv Rivlin MPP ‘12 Company Description: CareerVibes is the community for the Career curious generation.CareerVibes is the first career sharing community where people can share career experiences and learn from one another. It is a one stop solution for career explorers to gather career knowledge from not one but a pool of people from all walks of life. CareerVibes is a Facebook application, and it is deeply integrated with the core experience of social networking. The app is completely personalized based on users “niche community” and uses the Facebook network as a base to reach out to users.
Company Name: Instiglio (www.instiglio.org) Team: Michael Belinsky MPP ‘12, Avnish Gungadurdoss MPA/ID ‘12 Company Description: Instiglio empowers societies to discover, adopt and scale innovative solutions to social problems. By contextualizing an innovative contracting scheme called a social impact bond (SIB) to developing country settings, Instiglio brings new sources of capital to solve the world’s most pressing problems. We focus on a subset of interventions which create down-stream cost-savings for government budgets and monetize that savings (e.g. HIV prevention reduces the need for expensive anti-retrovirals, better criminal reintegration means less money spent on housing inmates). Private and philanthropic investors provide the up-front growth capital to scale a complementary set of cost-effective interventions. The government then pays investors back only for success actually achieved. SIBs face distinct challenges in developing countries—and offer astronomically higher financial and social returns.
Company Name: Nuestra Communidad  Team: Mark Truman MPP ‘13, Ray Rivera, MC/MPA ‘12 Company Description: Nuestra Comunidad (NC) is a social capital development institution that builds vibrant communities through the expansion of civic capacity. Focusing on the underserved Westside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, NC will provide low cost child care to our members through cooperative models in order to create networks that foster community development. Each family, providing volunteer hours and paying membership fees, will contribute to an overall community that will lead the organization. As Nuestra Comunidad grows, we will take on additional socio-economic problems based on the direction of the membership, expanding to new neighborhoods and offering additional cooperatives such as credit unions, grocery stores, and housing projects to improve our members’ lives.
Company Name: Organ Jet (www.organjet.com) Team: Katharine Wolf MPA/ID ‘12 Company Description: OrganJet provides end-to-end services, including timely and affordable air transport, for patients who are multi-listed or distant listed for organ transplants in the U.S. This increases the overall supply of organs, offers better and earlier matching, provides a significant cost savings to Medicare and insurance since kidney transplants are cheaper than its alternative, dialysis, and improves the success of transplants for patients, which ultimately allows them to lead a longer and fuller life. Check us out on AOL and PBS new platform: www.makers.com/katharine-wolf
Company Name: Veterans Business Owners Initiative National Scale-Up Team: Tim Youmans MC/MPA ‘12 Company Description: I am doing the national scale-up of the Veterans Business Owners Initiative (VBOI), an existing Boston-local non-profit with zero funding and only voluntary and in-kind support. Over the past few years, the VBOI has taught over 400 “how-to-start-a-business” classes to disabled veterans at the Bedford VA Campus. This “Business Gym” has launched over 65 successful small businesses, including some by veterans with severe mental disabilities who have moved out of the shelter and become totally self-supporting. There are also clinical and micro-finance pieces of this venture.
Company Name: DevIntel Team: Rubayat Khan MPA/ID ‘13,  Amin Toufani MPA/ID ‘12 Company Description: DevIntel strives to harness the power of predictive modeling and data mining to make development interventions more proactive, efficient and impactful. We help development organizations (donors, NGOs, governments) appreciate the power latent in their untapped data sources, and create predictive models based on this data, allowing them to identify their most high-risk beneficiaries and predict where and when the next emergencies/crises might occur, so that they may allocate resources more efficiently and have more impact per dollar.