IEOR Blog Post #13

This was our last week of class and time flew by so fast. Luckily our pitch is coming together very well and we integrated the feedback from last week's class into our pitch deck to make it more cohesive and ensured that the information does not contradict itself. Our P&L is now accurate and we are well within the time limit for the entire presentation. All that is left to do is keep practicing!

I personally worked on the the results, the target market and the market dynamics for the presentation. I added interesting graphics and removed the bulky text in order to have a very clean slide deck. This is also what we will be presenting in class today.

The in-class presentation were great because we got helpful feedback from Tal and Rick in regards to our timeline and our business model. We have decided to extend our timeline so that production of the the product will begin in 24 months rather than 12 months so account for any setbacks that we may have. The business model needs a slight amount of work in order for it to match with the P&L statement, Stijn and Aneesha will be working on this. We were also encouraged to make the presentation a bit more relaxed and casual rather than so serious so we will be adding some interesting elements to the presentation, such as a demonstration of how the flywheel works to our final pitch. The presentations from our peers were also very interesting and we certainly have some stiff competition for us on Tuesday! Nonetheless, we are confident that we will be successful and we are excited to present to everyone.

Best of luck to the other teams and thank you for an amazing semester!!

IEOR Blog Post #13

Taking all of the feedback received last week my team and I re-vamped our final pitch. This time we included more in-depth analysis of the finances and took another look at the business plan to ensure that licensing the technology was the most efficient business model vs actually manufacturing the flywheel and selling them ourselves. We decided that licensing the technology was the most efficient route to go. The last thing that we need to finalize this week is our ask because we are still unsure of what that should be.

In addition to this, I had a very interesting phone call with Leslie Eudy of National Renewable Energy Laboratory. She pointed me to an interesting website that detailed the market growth for renewable energy in various bus transit companies all over the country (including data about AC Transit used here in the bay). The data showed us that there is definitely a trend towards flywheels/hydrogen fuel cells in the future and showed us that AC Transit aims to implement a zero emissions policy in their bus system by mid-2017 and I think the flywheel would be useful in implementing that. There were also multiple publications on the website that detailed the financial trend towards flywheels/hydrogen fuel cells because although the price for implementing flywheels is currently slightly increasing this cost is expected to go down by mid 2017 and actually end up saving money for AC Transit within the nest few years. According the Eudy, the only reason why there is a slight trend in increase of funds currently is because there is required training for bus drivers to operate these new cars, required training for mechanics to understand how to fix any problems that could be caused by the implementation of this new system and also because AC Transit has invested in new buses.

The website can be found at this link: http://www.nrel.gov/hydrogen/proj_fc_bus_eval.html

IEOR Blog Post #12

This week was very exciting because we drafted our final pitch! It was great to see all of our market research coming together to help us consolidate our final product. I personally worked on formulating the target market and the business model.

One of our earlier presentations for this class listed the TAM as all vehicles, the SAM as hybrid vehicles and the SOM as hybrid vehicles in the US. However the team quickly realized that these weren't realistic and we also switched gears to target buses and mail carrier vans instead of vehicles. Due to this I changed the TAM to be buses and mail carrier vans in the US, the SAM to be buses and mail carrier vans in California and the SOM to be buses and mail carrier vans in the Bay Area. We have reached out and spoken with representatives from AC Transit, FedEx and USPS. We have chosen these businesses to be out target market because the fly wheel system will work best when implemented in vehicles that stop and go often.  In addition to this, buses and mail carrier vans are large and therefore will use more energy.

Looking at the business model we decided to license our patent to public transportation and mail carrier van manufacturers such as North American BUs Industries and Grumman LV.

This upcoming week we will be finalizing our pitch!

IEOR Blog #11

After our discussions with Rick and Tal last week we decided that to be more on track with our project it was necessary that we reach out to more industry specialists in hopes of finally getting in contact with someone. We went back to the the drawing board and re-drafted our emails and tried reaching out to multiple people. We also called new contacts that we had found through further research of public transportation systems. Over break we had some successful interviews. The most important one was with Bart's sustainability director, Holly Gordon. She believes that although the flywheel technology is still quite new it could have potential use in the train system. It will have both significant impacts on cost and the environment. Bart currently uses the RCR technology, and she did mention that the Flywheel technology might not be very useful for Bart in specific but she did refer us to the public transit companies in the greater Chicago and Boston areas (as they use the regenerative breaking technology). Stijn and I also went back to the Professor who invented the flywheel because we had a few more questions to ask him. In our correspondence with the co-founder of Tesla. he said that he did not believe the flywheel system would be effective in electric so we went to the Professor who invented the flywheel to better understand his vision for the flywheel. He clarified and said the the flywheel is best used for hybrid cars because electric cars already efficiently use the battery system and make use of braking energy. With this clarification we better understood the patent. For the upcoming week the team will get together and make a draft of the pitch. 

IEOR Blog Post #9

Aims for this Week:

1) Get more responses from surveys we sent out

2) Compile data from the surveys and follow up with companies that we have not heard back from 

This week we also had an interesting correspondence with Marc Tarpenning from Tesla. He used to work at Tesla and provided us with valuable feedback about the flywheel system. He said that he did not know how feasible the flywheel would be to implement in vehicles because the efficiency of most motors in electric cars is already optimized at 80%-90%. This is a bit worrying so we will be going back to talk to the Professor who invented the flywheel once we get back from break. 

Plan for the Future:
Talk to the inventor to ensure that the flywheel is a useful and innovative product and meet with more companies to see if they would be open to implementing the flywheel in their public transportation systems.

IEOR Blog Post #8

This week we changed our market to be public transport. Aiming specifically at buses because they are a common from of public transport in big cities. By implementing the flywheel system in buses we aim to capitalize on a unique market. In addition to this, by implementing the flywheel system in buses we will be making them more cost-efficient and energy efficient.

Last week in class we listed a couple of customers to contact. So far we have successfully gained an interview with AC Transit and Tesla. We will be contacting them next week. We are still waiting to hear back from customers such as Muni, Nissan, VTA, Toyota, etc.

IEOR Blog Post #7

This week Team Patent decided to finalize our patent for this class and we ultimately chose to work with the flywheel system. To better understand the product, we decided to meet with the Professor who designed the product a second time to better understand his vision for the flywheel. However this did not work out because he was not his office hours. Instead we will be following up with this next week.

The team believes that in order to find a niche for the flywheel product is it imperative that relook for unique markets to introduce the flywheel into. For example, certain companies in San Francisco offer Go-Kart tours of the city and we were consider the Go-Karts as a potential market we could capitalize on. Upon further research of Go-Kart tours, the team discovered that they are not unique to SF but rather offered all of over the world in places such as Barcelona and Vancouver. This means that there are thousands of tourists renting out these Go-Karts everyday and if the flywheel system was implemented in them we could make the Go-Karts more sustainable and energy-efficient.

IEOR Blog Post #6

Feedback on Group

Overall I think my group works well together. We are open to each other’s ideas and can have a constructive conversation about patents and products that we would like to build using these patents. Everyone is very helpful and very encouraging. As a team we decided to choose a patent that fit the health and fitness sector because it is a booming industry. However is it has been difficult trying to reach professors associated with this patent and we have started to look into patents in other industries. For example, last week in class we presented a flywheel patent which was very interesting. It's main purpose is to be implemented in cars to make them for efficient. I do not have a background in this though so it was not the most ideal patent. This past Monday, me and another teammate met with Askash to discuss potential options for where to go from here. He mentioned that if the patent had a publication along with it then we didn't necessarily need to go talk to the professors about their patent, rather the discussion with the professor was to get some more background information about the patent. The sweat patent we were interested in had a publication with it so it might not be necessary to go talk to the presser about it. However later that day, the main point of contact fro the sweat patent got back to my group and said because the sweat patent was already in the works for a startup it may not be the best option. He said he would talk to the people in charge of the start up and get back to us. If that does not work out we may decide to go with the MEMS Ultrasonic Imaging Patent. I am a little concerned that we may be a little behind in this class but I am hoping that as soon we hear back from our contact with the sweat patent we will have a more clear direction of what we would like to do going forward.  

More information can be found on my YouTube page!
https://www.youtube.com/upload

IEOR 185 Blog Post #5

Rejection Challenge

In class this week we played a game called the rejection challenge. In the beginning of class we were given a small plastic box and the purpose of the game was to add value to the box by making 5 trades. Each trade was supposed to be done by one team member. Our first trade was with the flower shop on Bancroft where we traded the box for two flowers. Out next trade was with the card shop next to the flower shop where we traded one flower for some tissue paper. Subsequently, by wrapping the remaining flower in the tissue paper, we increased the value of both the flower and the tissue paper by creating a bouquet. The third trade we made was with a co-op and we exchanged the bouquet for a shot glass. After this we made two more trades with fraternity houses in the area and ended with a small fan.  

I was impressed not only by our acquisition of the fan from a small plastic box, but also by other teams in the class and the methods they used to trade for items of value. For example I was highly impressed with the teams that added value to their box even before they started trading by putting flowers or candy in their box. My teams strategy of going to frat houses and stores was devised because we did not think that many students walking around campus would really have anything of value to trade whereas as stores and houses always have miscellaneous items lying around. 

IEOR 185 Blog Post #4

Market Needs

One of our teammates dropped the class so we ran into a problem as we no longer have a CS major on the team. In order to accommodate this situation, we decided to look into patents that would be more simple to create a product around. We narrowed down out top two choices to the sweat patent and the helmet patent. We will be contacting both professors in the upcoming week to better understand how we can develop these patents into a product.

IEOR 185 Blog Post #3

Not only did we participate in the Lego Gam this week (more on this can be found on my YouTube channel) but we also had to narrow down 5 patents that we thought would be interesting to build a product on. My two favorite patents are the are the cardiovascular patent and the patent for wearable technology.


The cardiovascular patent is provided accurate monitoring for a patient’s prosthetic heart valve function in real-time. The innovation is based on the system being entirely passive, wireless, precise, and intuitive in design. In addition to this, the valve is very low-risk and will will reduce the risk to patients and decrease physician liability. As I have been interested in creating something more medical related for this class, this patent highly appeals to me. However I am not sure what type of product we could build using a heart valve. I would need to do more research into this to propose some product concepts.

The patent wearable technology is also very interesting. It is composed of sweat arrays that analyze the users sweat and create detailed sweat profiles. Human sweat contains physiological information that will give us insight to user's health and also allows for non-invasive monitoring. The sweat will tell us about dehydration in a user and will tell us if users lack certain proteins or molecules. I think it would also be interesting if we would analyze the molecule of the sweat and relate it different disorders such as ADHD or depression but comparing the sweat of individuals with these disorders to the sweat of healthy individuals. I think this also ties into the world of medicine so I am excited by this patent as well.

I look forward to more team building activities for this week and seeing how my team will make the decision of what patent to use.

IEOR 185 Blog Post #2

This week I have decided to create something that entwines both health and technology rather than focusing specifically on health. I have not yet found a specific patent I would like to use but I hope to that by the end of the week with the rest of my team members. I am excited to get the chance to develop something that will help our lives become more efficient and keep us healthy.  

As a biology major I hope to work with people who are also interested in something to with health and desire to create something that will help positively impact our community. To create a sustainable team, I look forward to working with people that have a diverse skill-set and have a good understanding of tech so that we can create a cohesive working environment. I aspire to work with people I can learn from and are driven so I can trust them to be people I can depend on throughout this course. 

IEOR 185 Blog Post #1

Hi Everyone!

My name is Sheela and I am from Sacramento, CA. I am currently a senior studying Integrative Biology with an emphasis on human biology at UC Berkeley. In the future I hope to become a pediatrician! Some of my hobbies include hiking and reading.

This semester I have enrolled in a class titled IEOR 185-Challenge Lab. The aim of the class is to create a working prototype for an innovative startup. As as biology major I enjoy learning anything related to science so it would interesting to create a startup in this field. Maybe something to do with helping children have better access to scientific tools or potentially something to do with streamlining medical records and making them easier to access. I am also very instead in community service and outreach so a startup in this field would be interesting as well.