ENTERPRISE54 – Intel Egypt Corporation in partnership Nile University today announced the result of a year-long business plan competition that helps identify and support some of the most creative and innovative students and graduates across Middle East and North Africa. Three winning projects from Egypt are competing at Intel Business Challenge MENA 2014 in Bahrain taking place in collaboration with UNIDO from August 31st to September 3rd.

The three winning teams were amongst thousands of submissions from 16 countries initially received for the Challenge. Teams competing in the Finals in Bahrain came from 9 countries: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, KSA, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia and UAE. Intel works to foster entrepreneurship and to advance innovation to address local challenges and to provide individuals the opportunity to obtain the skills, technology and resources they need to build successful businesses that drive innovation, create employment, accelerate economic growth and have a positive impact on society. All participating teams received coaching and support from international experts through the support of Intel partners throughout their preparations to refine their ideas, create viable business plans and hone their presentations to attract interest and investment.

An awards ceremony will be held to identify and reward the top 4 winners who will win financial prizes of the values of $7500, $5000, $2500 and $1000 respectively for first, second, third and fourth place winners. Winners also will get the opportunity to compete at International Competition with UC Berkley in Silicon Valley where the best engineers and scientists present how they plan to make the world a better place through their innovations and entrepreneurial skills in November 2014 for a chance to win up to $50,000.

“I’m proud of the talents we see every year. The standard is increasing and the drive, ambition and creativity showcased by the Egyptian talents. What has really stood out this year is that the projects look to use technology to advance society as a whole which is the main aim of the Challenge fostering innovative solutions and smart technologies of the a better future.” stated Karim el Fateh, Intel Egypt & Levant country manager.

All finalists developed business plans with a strong computing technology focus based on concepts which leverage disruptive computing innovations and impacts on systemic social challenges.

Entrepreneur: Mahmoud Abdel Aziz, Mahmoud Esam Kotb, Ahmed Medhat, Soha Samy

Project:

QEYE is an Egyptian start- up specialized in the production of Smart Quality Inspection Systems based on Machine Vision technology in which smart cameras play the role of human eye in quality inspection. QEYE is a leading company in Egypt and the MENA region that works in Machine Vision applications. QEYE is one of the leading companies in the world that produces vision-based quality inspection systems for the textile industry. QEYE systems can either be installed on manual quality inspection machines as offline solution or be integrated with the production machines directly as online solution. Although QEYE is currently targeting the textile sector, QEYE is working on expanding its systems to serve other industries such as printing, packaging and plastic industries.

Entrepreneur: Mohamed Samir, Mostafa Abdel Fattah, Kareem Hussien

Project: Interact

“Embedded device prototype is developed” IES overcomes the problems of education, even in the most crowded lectures, by converting any ordinary surface into an interactive whiteboard and providing lecture’s data exchange (both Sound and written lectures) between students and lecturer (live streaming) on the screens of the laptops with students and enabling saving lecture as a video.

Entrepreneur: Mohamed Amr

Project:

Accessny is a startup company positioning itself to become the market leader in implementing NFC, near field communication, technology in different applications that makes users’ life easier in Egypt. NFC allows users to get information by smooth swipe; the user will swipe his NFC equipped phone on a specific “NFC tag”, and the data needed will be sent to the user’s phone without a need for internet access. NFC will be leading technology in the next era. It is used widely in America and Europe countries in different application like contactless payment, electronic tickets and many other applications. Our matured products are Accessny android application, InstaWifi tags and Smart business cards.

Accessny android application will be free for users, and it will work with other two products. By using Accessny’s android application, users can access different wireless networks without having to connect to the network manually; by swiping the mobile on wireless NFC tag (instaWi-Fi), our program will do the tedious work for the customer. In addition, customers can use our NFC smart cards to send their business card details (including emails, phone number, organization name…etc) with a smooth swipe to the receiver’s phone instantly, so that they won’t have to manually add the contact details; consuming more wasting time.

The Intel Business Challenge MENA is the gateway to Intel® Global Challenge, a joint project of Intel® Corporation and the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley organized since 2005, brings together the best engineers and scientists from around the world to present how they plan to make the world a better place through their innovations and entrepreneurial skills.