Technology

Two NovaUCD firms shortlisted for David Manley Awards

23.11.2009
Two companies from University College Dublin’s innovation and technology transfer centre NovaUCD at are among nine firms that have been shortlisted for the 2009 David Manley Emerging Entrepreneur Awards.

HeyStaks Technologies and RendezVu have made the shortlist in the awards’ Business category. The two other categories are Arts and Social and three companies have been shortlisted in each category.

HeyStaks has developed a revolutionary social web-search platform that enables searchers to better organise and easily share the resources they find while searching and browsing online.

HeyStaks’ technology enables key collaboration and organisational features to be added as a layer on top of existing mainstream search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing, so that users can benefit from social search enhancements without having to leave their preferred engine.

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 and an experienced entrepreneur is the company’s third co-founder.

RendezVu was co-founded in 2008 by Paul Groarke and Garrett Hussey, both ex-Baltimore Technologies employees. The company was the overall winner of the NovaUCD 2008 Campus Company Development Programme.

The David Manley Emerging Entrepreneur Awards was established in 2003 and nurtures the enterprising spirit in business, the arts and in the social community. The awards offer €10,000 in cash to the overall winner and €1,000 to each of the other two category winners.

The winner of each category will be decided on within the next few weeks and the overall winner will be announced at a ceremony in January 2010. The chairman of the judging panel is Alfie Kane.

Each of the nine shortlisted entrants will also receive, courtesy of Enterprise Ireland, ‘Gift of Time’ mentoring and business advice valued at €100,000 from leading experts in finance, law, accountancy, management consultancy, payroll and accounts software, corporate and brand identity, and public relations.

Pictured: Dr Maurice Coyle and Dr Peter Briggs, UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics and co-founders of HeyStaks