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Compared Care is a free to use web platform that allows patients to price shop for medical procedures. Our goal is to allow consumers to find the highest quality providers at the most affordable price. Compared Care currently has over 4 million medical providers with over 10 million associated procedures across the United States. Our database is continuously expanding and becoming more accurate every day.

In our current healthcare industry, most patients do not receive a bill until after the procedure. This could be analogous to signing a contract for a new home, then receiving the price. We are driven to solve this problem and be the leader in healthcare transparency.

I met Ethan, the Founder and CEO of Compared Care, in an entrepreneurship class that we both had taken at UMBC. With his business sense/healthcare knowledge and my development skills we were able to turn out a working product in a matter of months. Compared Care is now expanding at a rapid rate, we are getting closer to national healthcare transparency.

If anyone is in need of an MRI, Laser Eye Surgery, or any prominent medical procedure simply go to comparedcare.com and a type what you are looking for into our search box. You will instantly be shown a list of providers in your area that offer this procedure or service.

One of the first courses I took at UMBC (cmsc101y) was an introductory course for Computer Science majors. This class was my first introduction into project management. My team had to create a game that allowed students to simulate their academic semester. Designing both the functionality and visual interface of an application has always been of great interest to me. I enjoyed the concept of connecting smaller modules of code into a single working system that has the potential to positively impact user’s lives. This motivated me to pursue larger scale projects such as Compared Care. 

There is a common misconception that Computer Science majors simply sit in a cubicle and write endless lines of code. Many computer science positions, especially in the startup scene, require team skills. With the proper determination you can take the knowledge you gathered from your degree in order to build the next innovative company.

"The Lean Startup" is a book that has influenced our development and evolution as a company. The book's core concepts helped lead to Compared Care's quick release. A successful startup adapts to what its users want and releases new iterations of the product as quickly as possible. These concepts are followed by the world’s most successful startups such as Uber and Airbnb. I strongly recommend reading this book before perusing your idea, it is much more efficient versus other methodologies.

Tech breakfast is an organization that allows upcoming startups to pitch their ideas to other business people. This was one of the first outlets that Compared Care used to help spread the word. I recommend finding events such as these to help market your company and develop your presentation skills.

Deciding whether or not to take a semester off school has been a tough decision. Working on Compared Care full time would allow for accelerated development but would postpone my educational experience. For now I have decided to stay in school while working on Compared Care. If the opportunity to work full time presents itself, I would have minimal hesitation to take a semester off. When I have the ability to positively transform the healthcare industry, one of our nation’s biggest issues, I feel as though I must take advantage of it.

The best advice I could give is to focus on building a great team. In order for your startup to be successful you must have co-founders that share the company’s vision and are equally motivated to transform an idea into a reality. I was lucky enough to team up with Ethan Steininger, Compared Care's founder and CEO, and help bring Compared Care into existence. A successful business cannot be ran alone.

Learn from the mistakes made by other companies and emphasize the aspects that made those companies successful. For example, many of the most successful startups, including Compared Care, have a strong belief in agile development. Compared Care's goal is to quickly release a product to the public, receive feedback from its users, and then reiterate. This process is repeated overtime until the platform is easy to use and effective.

Always work on building connections and getting advice from those who have already been in your shoes. Expanding your network can lead to opportunities that will help transform your idea into a reality. Learn from the mistakes of others and replicate the ideals that made them successful.

We are currently looking for talented developers and innovators who are interested in positively impacting the healthcare community. Please contact us if you have any interest or business inquires.

I decided to do this competition because I it as a chance to practice problem solving and grow a relationship with this company for future employment opportunities. I do not have any entrepreneurial experience and am hoping to gain some through this process. In the future I plan on being an entrepreneur. 

I decided to participate in this competition because it seemed like such an exciting, and fun, opportunity to learn more about intrepreneurship and innovation. Also, I love mascara (which is the specific product that we will be developing); it is literally the single best beauty product in the world!

I have some entrepreneurial experience. In my FYS 102 class, we started a business called LIVE, in which we designed a charm and app to be used to prevent date rape. I am also a consulting intern for a small startup, NK Webb Group. I hope to start my own business. In particular, I would like to open my own yoga studio.

I am honored to be a member of the P&G competition team. I saw it as a great opportunity to represent my University alongside some of the best and brightest minds that our student community has to offer. 

I have a fair amount of entrepreneurial experience, my main projects have been focused on digital application design. I have learned through trial and error that the most efficient way to find success is to exhaust your efforts on only those pursuits that provide an opportunity to leverage a gap in the existing market place. 

I am enamored with the idea of being an entrepreneur mainly due to the degree of freedom that you have when you are your own boss. I am not entirely sure if entrepreneurship is my path, but I do know that I will end up in a profession where I have the capacity to increase my earnings through diligent work and focus.

I decided to do this competition because I love innovation and thinking of new ideas. I get to collaborate with a great group of fellow students.  This is a great opportunity and a chance that I may never have again. 

Last semester I took a FYS course called Creativity, Innovation, and Invention. The purpose of the class was to come up with a product idea and by the end of the semester hopefully take it to market. This experience really sparked my interest in entrepreneurship and invention.

I definitely plan to be an entrepreneur someday. I hope that through engineering I will be able to stay inventive and eventually create something amazing. I hope to change and help the world. With that in mind, I need to be innovative.

As the sidekick of two entrepreneurial parents, I've had the benefit of participating in two start-up businesses for over five years. My mother, a physiologist turned novelist, slowly transformed her writing coaching career into a small, but selective publishing house. Since high school, she's hired me to design book covers, edit back cover copies, and troubleshoot story structure of aspiring manuscripts. Under her mentorship, I adapted her non-fiction book of story structure observations into a concise 16-variable algorithm that could be used as a predictive measure of market success. 

My father is also in the process of transforming a hobby into a side-occupation. A few years ago, he bought me a 3D printer as a Christmas gift while we attended a National Instruments conference, at which my brother and I were giving presentations. Over the next year, I tried to scan objects using Kinect Xbox sensors. For fun, we printed sculptures of our whole family. He began experimenting with ways to post-process the plastic so that it resembles marble, metal, and looks far more expensive than it costs to make. On occasion, he has asked me to apply concepts I’ve learned in fluid mechanics and mechanics of materials to guesstimate his prototype requirements. 

After I complete my chemical engineering background, I hope to contribute to his project ideas by applying concepts from material science to create new, safer materials with which to print. After my brother completes his electrical engineering degree, we plan to all work together to make this technology not only more accessible to medicine, but a common household product.

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Hope you all had a great holiday and took a little time to relax.

For those enrolled in the winter session, welcome back and good luck.

Farewell...for now

So I am excited and a little sad to say that my time at UMBC, as an undergraduate student, has come to an end. It has been a great experience and I can’t begin to thank everyone who has helped to make it so. entreSpace has become second homes on campus for me. Gib Mason and Vivian Armor have been like family to me and I can't begin to say 'Thank You' enough. But, most of all, the relationships I have built with many of you (student entrepreneurs) has been fantastic and I am so excited to see the businesses, products, services, you create and the social issues you solve. I live in Baltimore, will still be on campus occasionally (working on Banana Bones), and am more than happy to go grab coffee with any of you to chat business.

Moving Forward

It is now my honor to introduce you all to Amanda Mancuso, the newest Alex. Brown Center for Entrepreneurship marketing intern. Amanda is working on her degree in human centered computing and will be transitioning into her Master’s Program in the summer. She is a very active member of Delta Phi Epsilon and has been working as a social media marketing guru for a local energy company for over a year.

I have no doubt that she is going to do amazing things with this role and take it to levels I wasn’t able to.

Good luck with the upcoming semester and thanks for all the great memories. Many more to come!

Feel free to throw some comments in our my.UMBC group to welcome Amanda!

~josh massey

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The Sports Zone was packed Wednesday night, November 12, for the 5th  annual UMBC Idea Competition. Nine ideas were pitched to a standing room only crowd and a panel of three judges.  Stakes were high – awards ranged from $250 to $750 and the ideas were original and very broad.

For the first time in competition history there was a tie for 1st place.  Patrick Wheltle’s idea for ‘Electronic Triage Tags’ and Andres Camacho’s idea, ‘True Greens,’ both took home first place and $750 in cash prizes. Wheltle also won the competition’s Best Pitch, earning him an additional $250 in cash.

Wheltle’s idea attempts to revolutionize the current paper tagging method of triage identification, which hasn’t changed in 40 years. His idea, Electronic Triage Tags, would help to identify injured people during a mass casualty such as a terrorist attack or natural disaster when there is a high need to find people, identify them, and to get them to the hospital as quickly and efficiently as possible. The electronic tags are reusable, and transmit a minimal amount of information about the patient (gender, approximate age, treatment level, etc.) about 30 feet. Each tag would operate on a mesh network, strengthening each tag's power and distance based on the number used. 

Upon winning, Wheltle stated, “It feels really good to have won. But it isn’t the winning that felt the best. It is the vote of confidence from the judges and the facilitator saying that this idea might actually have a chance of success.”  Wheltle plans to utilize his $1,000 in winnings to “assemble a team, buy the necessary parts and try to build a basic prototype” so he can feel as confident going into the Cangialosi Business Innovation Competition in the spring as he did for this competition.

Camacho, who jumped on stage armed with a head of lettuce and two flats of micro salad greens, explained his idea was to install hoop houses, a type of greenhouse, on campus or nearby. True Greens idea is a group effort that included members of The Garden project including Sarah Miller, Tom Eliason, Samual Buettner, and Jack Neumeir. The idea is a student focused group that looks to bring in different groups and majors in a very interdisciplinary approach, e.g. engineering students could help to build the houses, environmental scientists could help with soil testing, etc. He wants True Greens to be able to supply True Grits with nutritious vegetables that “we can slather in ranch dressing.” The micro greens could also be sold in a farmer’s market fashion, or a CSA model, to students and faculty/staff. 

True Greens plans to use the team’s winnings as “seed funding…literally, we’re buying seeds.” They also plan to buy soil and an automatic watering system for their space in the greenhouse. This coming spring the True Greens project will be part of the INDS 430 course curriculum and students in the class will help them grow micro greens and interface with Chartwells.

The third place spot went to Nitin Sampathi for his mobile application idea called Indi– Exploration and Exercise. The app looks to combine a person’s interests with exercise. ”You tell the system some things you love doing. It searches your area for that pizza shop and bookstore you want to find and spits out a map for you to do a 1, 3, 5…mile walk or bike ride with two stops along the way” says Sampathi. The app would also locate bike sharing sites close by and tell you where to drop it off if it’s a one way trip. He won $250 to put toward his idea which he says he will continue to develop.

Winners were chosen by a combination of scores from the voting audience and the judging panel consisting of three entrepreneurial alums: Mike Adelstein, President and CEO,Potomac Photonics, Lily Bengfort, serial entrepreneur and President, UAS Safeflight, and Peter Parker, Director of Business Development, Early Charm Ventures, LLC.