HeyStaks Technologies, a UCD spin-out company has been selected as one of three short listed finalists for the first, Europe-wide, UNICA Entrepreneurship Competition for Students and Young Researchers.

UNICA, headquartered in Brussels, is a network of 42 universities, including University College Dublin, from the capital cities of Europe with a combined strength of over 120,000 staff and 1.5 million students.

HeyStaks, a NovaUCD client company, has developed a revolutionary social Web search platform that makes it easier for people to find and share relevant content on the Web. HeyStaks, designed to work with all mainstream search engines, enables searchers to better organise and easily share the resources they find while searching and browsing the Web, providing more relevant search results.

Dr Maurice Coyle and Dr Peter Briggs, HeyStaks Technologies

HeyStaks’ patented, social re-ranking core technology was developed by company co-founders Dr Peter Briggs and Dr Maurice Coyle during their PhD research at UCD’s School of Computer Science and Informatics.  

Professor Barry Smyth, a leading UCD researcher in recommender systems, was their PhD supervisor and is the company’s third co-founder. Professor Smyth is an experienced entrepreneur who was Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of the UCD spin-out ChangingWorlds Ltd, acquired last year by Amdocs for $60 million.  Dr Briggs and Dr Coyle are currently UCD postdocs in CLARITY, the Science Foundation Ireland funded Centre for Sensor Web Technologies, a joint initiative between DCU, Tyndall National Institute and UCD.

HeyStaks was selected as UCD’s nominee for the UNICA competition following its success in winning SUSSED!, UCD’s €10K Entrepreneurship Competition organised and run earlier this year by NovaUCD.

The overall winner of the UNICA competition, which is sponsored by the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation, will be announced on Friday 6 November during UNICA’s 2009 General Assembly which will be held in the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris.

The overall winner will receive an award and a prize of €20,000. The other two finalists in the competition are, Paraelectrics, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany and UNIKI Intelligent Media Development, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

ENDS

2 November 2009

For further information contact Micéal Whelan, NovaUCD, e: miceal.whelan@ucd.ie, t: +353 (0)1 716 3712 .

Editors Notes

HeyStaks Technologies, a UCD spin-out company, has developed a revolutionary social Web search platform that makes it easier for people to find and share relevant content on the Web. The company was established in 2008 by Dr Peter Briggs, Dr Maurice Coyle and Professor Barry Smyth.

UNICA is a network of 42 universities from the capital cities of Europe with a combined strength of over 120,000 staff and 1.5 million students. Its role is to promote academic excellence, integration and co-operation between member universities throughout Europe.

The UNICA Entrepreneurship Competition for Students and Young Researchers is sponsored by the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation. Aims of this competition include the promotion of a culture of entrepreneurship among the students and young researchers of UNICA member universities and improving the confidence of participants in their own entrepreneurial skills and capabilities. Each UNICA member university could nominate one team for this competition following its own university-wide entrepreneurship competition.

SUSSED!, UCD’s €10K Entrepreneurship Competition held earlier this year was UCD’s internal competition to select its nominee for the UNICA competition. The objective of the competition, organised by NovaUCD, was to transform business ideas emerging from students and early-stage researchers at UCD into business plans and commercial enterprises. It was open to all undergraduate and postgraduate students and early-stage researchers at UCD.

NovaUCD is University College Dublin’s Innovation and Technology Transfer Centre.  NovaUCD is responsible for the commercialisation of intellectual property arising from UCD research. NovaUCD has been funded through a unique public-private partnership that includes AIB Bank, Arthur Cox, Deloitte, Enterprise Ireland, Ericsson, Goodbody Stockbrokers, UCD and Xilinx.