University College Dublin spin-out company HeyStaks Technologies has won the inaugural, Europe-wide, UNICA Entrepreneurship Competition for Students and Young Researchers and a prize of €20,000.
HeyStaks, which is a NovaUCD client company, has developed a social Web search platform which enables searchers to better organise and easily share information they find while browsing the internet.
The winner of the award was announced, following Dragons’ Den-style presentations by three short listed finalists to a five-person judging panel, during UNICA’s 2009 General Assembly, held in the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris.
UNICA, a network of 42 universities from European capital cities, invited members to nominate one entry for the competition, which was sponsored by the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation.
HeyStaks’ technology enables key collaboration and organisational features to be added as a layer on top of existing mainstream search engines so that users may benefit from social search enhancements without having to leave their favourite engine.
The patented, social re-ranking core technology was developed by the company’s co-founders Dr Peter Briggs and Dr Maurice Coyle during their PhD research at UCD’s School of Computer Science and Informatics.
HeyStaks is currently in beta release mode and the company intends to launch Version 1 of its technology before the end of the year.
