Peelable Paint wins business contest

    A design for paint that can peel from surfaces took top honors yesterday in one of two competitions run by the Entrepreneurial Leadership program, and the three Tufts students who designed the product won a $50,000 grant from the School of Engineering's Gordon Institute.
    The award came as part of the fifth annual Classic Business Plan Competition, held at the Gordon Institute. A group that wants to create business workshops for Uganda youth won an equivalent grant in the other contest, the Social Entrepreneurship Competition.
    The competitions, sponsored by a number of firms, were open to students from across the university, as well as those outside Tufts, provided their teams had at least one Tufts student on them. The two winning groups each received grants, legal services, storage space and capital network mentoring.
    The paint design group beat out four other finalists who presented their business plans yesterday to a panel of judges. In the other contest, four finalists vied for the top prize.
    Michael Mintz, Kunal Gupta, and Matthew Hnatio, three students at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, presented their plans for Peelable Paint.
    Peelable Paint — and its companion product, Peelable Primer — both "look and act like regular paint except that they can be peeled off of a wall by hand in one giant sheet," according to competition literature.
    In the Social Entrepren-eurship Competition, a team of students from several universities, including Tufts graduate biomedical engineering student Jeremy Fryer-Biggs, won with their plan to teach young Ugandans business.
    Through their group, The Strivers Foundation, they plan to develop business workshops for students in Uganda who have completed their high school education but who do not have the opportunity to attend college.
    "Uganda is a country that is locked in poverty," Fryer-Biggs said. "People can't afford to get higher education. But without getting higher education, you can't get a job that pays enough for you to afford higher education."
    Strivers hopes to change this by offering high school graduates a business education that costs one tenth of college tuition, but which provides them with the same job prospects as a college graduate.
    Other finalists' plans ranged from a Web site entitled "eClinic," on which physicians answer users' questions on health and wellness, to Alera LLC, which plans to cultivate seaweed that would be used to make biofuel.
    While many finalist teams were made up of graduate students, or even alumni, undergraduates were represented as well.
    Junior Adam Wueger and sophomores Ben Walkley, Ian Goldberg and Alex Ross presented "EcoTexts," an online-textbook supplier targeting college students. Walkley is also an editorialist for the Daily.
    "We want EcoTexts to be, in a sense, the iTunes of textbooks," a group member said.
    Senior Julia Torgovitskaya won second place in the Social Entrepreneurship Competition. Along with a student from the University of California, Los Angeles, she created Cadenza, which aims to help performing arts organizations reach out to the college-age demographic, one which they have been struggling to attract in recent years.
    "Young people don't feel like they fit in when they go to see the performing arts," Torgovitskaya said. "But Cadenza will revolutionize their experience. We'll use a Facebook application to increase awareness, we'll organize group seating for young audience members and we'll plan after-party events so young people have places to go."
    The company also plans to create a "Cadenza User Interface," similar to Facebook.com, where students make their own accounts, create a calendar of performing arts events and even see what events their friends are attending.
    Cummings Properties, Deloitte, Skadden Arps, Lowenstein Sandler, Web.com and The Capital Network (TCN) sponsored yesterday's competitions.
    The Gordon Institute, which coordinates both competitions, is a center housed within the School of Engineering that guides students in management and business-related activities. It also runs the entrepreneurial leadership program. More than 150 students have taken part in the program since it began in 2002.
    The institute's programs include a Master of Science in engineering management for graduate students and a minor in engineering management for undergraduate engineers.