Yesterday GroupTable won the annual UCF Joust Business Plan competition and $12,000. About 40 applicants submitted their business plans for the competition, the top 12 plans were selected to participate.

Last week these 12 teams presented in front of several investors & business leaders in the community. The top four were selected as finalists taking place yesterday April 11th, 2008. The top four who were selected as finalists were MPS technologies (A company proposing a customized insert designed for women shoes to ease the pain they feel when trying to squeeze into shoes just to look cute), Miami Cable (proposed a water park in Miami that uses cables to pull you around a track on ski’s…really cool idea), An Agriculture Bio Fuel company was the other finalist (proposing a program to convert algae into energy)and our venture, GroupTable (An online collaborative software venture tailored to meet the needs of high achieving students)

The finals judge were made up of extremely successful business leaders from across the country as well as investors. They were very receptive to GroupTable and enjoyed our presentation. We ended up winning first place, which not only included $12,000 but another free year in the UCF Technology Incubator, I say another because we actually won the competition last year as well with a different venture.

This time around is much more exciting for me because with this GroupTable we are so far along in product development that the $12,000 can help us immensely to grow accelerate our user and product growth to the point where we can get angel funding. It is all very exciting! There should be a lot more articles about GroupTable coming out in the near future I’ll keep everyone posted.