Bizstartup.ie - NewsHeyStaks Technologies wins European Entrepreneurship Competition

HeyStaks, which is a NovaUCD client company, 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 the web.  

UNICA, a network of 42 universities from European capital cities, invited each university, including UCD, to nominate one entry for this competition, which was sponsored by the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation.

The winners were announced following Dragons’ Den-style presentations by three shortlisted finalists to a five-person judging panel, during UNICA’s 2009 General Assembly, held on 6 November in the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris.

Following the win, Dr Maurice Coyle, co-founder, HeyStaks, said: “We are delighted to have won the first UNICA entrepreneurship competition. It is a great honour and it will be of enormous benefit to us in raising the international profile of HeyStaks.”

He said the prize money would be used to drive the company to the next level in its development.

“Being the co-founder of an Irish start-up company, I hope that our success will further raise the profile of UCD in particular and Ireland in general as being at the forefront in the commercialisation of world-class university research,” added Coyle.

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.  

Leading UCD researcher Professor Barry Smyth was the team’s 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, which was acquired last year by Amdocs for US$60m.  

Dr Briggs and Dr Coyle are currently carrying out UCD postdoctorates in CLARITY, the Science Foundation Ireland-funded Centre for Sensor Web Technologies, a joint initiative between DCU, Tyndall National Institute and UCD.

The company intends to launch Version 1 of its technology before the end of the year.

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.

Caption: Dr Peter Briggs and Dr Maurice Coyle, co-founders, HeyStaks Technologies