 | CloudTop - MIT $100K winner moves west for Y Combinator |
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The latest winner of MIT's $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, CloudTop, has moved to Palo Alto to take part in the Y Combinator summer program for startups. A number of Boston-area entrepreneurs and investors tried to persuade the CloudTop team to stick around, though it sounds like no one offered to write a check. This year’s MIT $100K Business Plan Contest drew a record 215 teams to compete for the coveted grand prize: $100,000 to start a business venture or market a new product. The company is building "dead simple" uploading tools for digital files that can be used by web sites and mobile app developers; an example of the early product can be seen at Filepicker.io. "The four of us rented a house [in Palo Alto] and are cranking away," CEO Brett van Zuiden, right, writes via e-mail. "We're actually planning a launch of our mobile product soon..." Zuiden, who is originally from the Bay Area, says that "investors" and "culture" played a role in CloudTop's decision to head west. CloudTop’s tech could, for example, let a Google user drag and drop a photo from Picasa into their Facebook Timeline, then over to a WordPress blog post, and a board on Pinterest–all without redundant uploading, downloading and file re-labeling. It works even if someone is accessing their files via the Safari browser on an iPad. http://mit100k.org/ http://www.usecloudtop.com/ http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2012/05/17/cloudtop-wins-mit-competition-to-make-the-upload-button-obsolete/ http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/2012/07/cloudtop_mit_100k_winner_moves.html http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/cloud-top-wins-mit-100k-0517.html SOURCE: Boston.com, WSJ.com |
