By: Diane Stirling
(315) 443-8975

Two Syracuse University-based teams picked up additional cash prizes in last week’s New York State Business Plan Competition, funds that will help them move their startups to market. The teams for PsyQic and ShowCode each took second-place prizes in the category of “IT/Software,” and took home $5,000 each in prize money from the Albany-based competition.

For the School of Information Studies student-based team PsyQic, the win was the fourth such recognition in the last several weeks.

In addition to its NYS Business Plan Competition win, the startup won a $2,000 RvD IDEA award in March; was selected for the “Dreamer and Doer” award at the Emerging Talk competition; and was chosen as the inaugural Goldberg Prize for Technology & Innovation at the recent 2012 Panasci Business Plan Competition at SU’s Whitman School of Management. That win also carried a $2,500 prize.

PsyQic is a mobile/web service that allows people to exchange questions and predictions about the future on various topics. The app allows anyone to share various predictions and get rewarded when predictions turn out to be correct. PsyQic also measures people’s information expertise based on the accuracy of their predictions. The four-month-old startup was created by Keisuke Inoue, an iSchool Ph.D. candidate, and Bin Zhu, a Master’s program student in Information Management. PsyQic is currently enrolling participants for Alpha testing of its application. Anyone who would like to be part of that effort is welcome to sign up at: www.PsyQic.com.

The New York State Business Plan Competition is one of the largest collegiate business competitions in the country and is open to enrolled graduate and undergraduate students from accredited New York State colleges and universities. The competition featured 15 teams from Syracuse University and SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. They were among the 140 applications and 105 teams to vie in the first round of competition for a total of $150,000 in prize money.  Twenty teams were selected to move to the final competition.

More information on iSchool and Syracuse University student ventures is available at http://idea.syr.edu/ventures.