The University Fund Limburg encourages UM students to become more and more entrepreneurial and realise their own business aspirations, preferably in the Euregion. As an incentive the fund has initiated the Local Hero Award. Participation in the competition involves critical reviews of your business plan, useful feedback and the chance to win €10,000 seed capital. Previous winners are:
Finido (2012)
A to-do application for smartphones which helps you to manage your tasks effectively. “There are already many to-do apps but none of them really helps you to organise your work in the time available, they were more a replacement of your sticky notes with your scribbling on them. We developed and algorithm that combines urgency, importance with the time available”, according to the gentlemen of Finido.
Nerdalize (2013)
Datacenters are expensive: more than half of the costs are in the building, cooling and infrastructure. Servers generate a lot of heat, which is regarded as a waste product. Nerdalize uses the heat usefully for heating homes and saves costs by using homes as our datacenters. A very efficient, very sustainable, very cheap and cost saving idea by Nerdalize.
Project Pales (2014)
A safe optical technology, which notifies horse owners or care-takers of the mare going into labour.
Peekaboo VR (2015)
Peekaboo offers mothers and fathers-to-be a more intense and shared experience of the pregnancy by harnessing virtual reality to let them ‘get acquainted’ with their baby. This experience goes beyond the ‘keepsake’ ultrasounds already offered by many clinics.
Sparcio (2016)
A water saving nozzle that saves 93% drinking water without changing your hand washing habits. The nozzle can easily be installed as an add-on to nearly all faucets in the world. Sparcio hereby contributes to global and sustainable development goals, in a world facing increasing water stress. It offers organisations, schools and venues the opportunity to significantly reduce their water bills, take sustainable actions and benefit from an interesting return on investment.