GET DAILY REPORT FREE
The application deadline for Nexus Louisiana’s inaugural Technology Cup has been extended one week until May 7.
Nexus CEO Tony Zanders tells Daily Report that the event has roughly 40 applicants so far, but he expects that number to reach close to 100 as the deadline nears.
He points out that one university has three teams that will compete in the event. However, none has submitted an application yet. He says the application deadline was extended to account for teachers and students being out of school due to the recent holiday breaks.
The multiday event, scheduled for June 17-19 in Baton Rouge, allows participants to compete in one of three tracks: high school, college and an open track. Each track will have both a hardware and a software category, equating to a total of six categories. Thirty finalists, five from each category, will be invited to the in-person event and allowed five minutes to demonstrate their projects to the judges.
Applicants must submit original projects primarily developed by team members and be prepared to compete in person on June 18 (hardware) and June 19 (software). To be eligible, teams must submit their application and presentation by the respective deadlines, agree to the event’s code of conduct and intellectual property policies, and designate a team lead.
Zanders says the audience will also play a role in the competition, deciding who will win a separate award—the Most Innovative Award.
A yet-to-be named keynote speaker is planned for June 18.
“We’re bringing home Baton Rouge’s most successful software entrepreneur, bar none,” Zanders hinted. “We’re very excited for that.”
Nexus announced in March that the event would replace Baton Rouge Entrepreneurship Week. Zanders says part of the inspiration for the new event stems from his memories of competing in the science fair growing up in New Orleans.
“I remember making it to our citywide competition, which was at UNO Lakefront Arena,” he recalls. “That feeling was irreplaceable. If you won at that level, you got to go to state, which was always at LSU, and it was just this celebration of academics and intellectual pursuit in a competitive way.”
Another inspiration came from taking his daughter, a student at Baton Rouge High, to participate in a hackathon at the Goodwood Library. There, he learned the students had built an app that connects to an Entergy consumer’s utilities dashboard and sends text alerts when they exceed a certain level of electricity use.
“That’s when it just hit me. That’s just one high school in one city, in one parish across the state,” Zanders says. ”What if we were to see who’s doing that across all the parishes? Not just at the high school level, but keep following that train of thought.”
For more information about the event, click here.
