May 16, 2012 5:00 PM

David Kedmey and Xiao-Ping (Steven) Zhang take home the top prize. EidoSearch is the grand prize winner of the Alpha Exchange Innovation Campaign, presented by Backbone. The company was chosen from a field of strong candidates at a live-pitch event May 15, held during the OCE Discovery 12 show in Toronto.

The finalists were each given just 10 minutes to convince a panel of nine industry experts that their product or service was smart and innovative, and that it would be commercially successful.

Presenter David Kedmey did just that. EidoSearch is a search and discovery tool for the financial industry, and Kedmey convinced the judges that it filled an important function for financial analysts. Years ago, companies worried about a lack of data and sought ways to gather more of it. That is typically no longer a problem; the hurdle now is that companies are buried under data, with more coming in by the minute.

EidoSearch helps financial professionals deal with that by employing patterns (such as rising housing starts, spiking volatility or cyclical stock prices) as a query to perform sophisticated research. This may reveal trade and investment opportunities in a fraction of the time of traditional data programming.

“The idea is to use data in a smart and efficient manner,” Kedmey said.

The nine judges were unanimous in their selection of EidoSearch as the winner, but the decision was still not an easy one. “This was tough,” said Alpha Exchange CEO and primary sponsor Jos Schmitt. “I was honestly amazed by the quality of the pitches.”

The judges selected Halifax’s TitanFile as runner-up. TitanFile uses military grade encryption to send and receive files over a secure connection.

TitanFile received $5,000 in cash from Wildeboer Dellelce, $6,000 in servers and PCs from HP Canada, and a $4,000 C4G Entrepreneur Accelerator Package from the BCTIA. 

EidoSearch, the grand prize winner, received $20,000 in cash, a $22,000 BCTIA package, a four-month $8,000 package from the DMZ at Ryerson University, $34,000 in HP servers and PCs, and $3,000 worth of new business attire from Harry Rosen.

Our thanks again go out to the nine judges of our live event: Jos Schmitt of Alpha, Darin Graham of ORION, Stephen Callaghan of EDC, Donna Teggart of Ceridian, Perry Dellelce of Wildeboer Dellelce, Chris Dulny of PwC, Valerie Fox of Ryerson, David Rozin of RBC Financial and Geoff Kereluik of HP Canada. 

And congratulations once again to our top 10 finalists: EidoSearch, Gazaro, TitanFile, Vote Compass, Zighra, Tunezy, VennGage, Careerify, triMirror and NoteWagon.

Backbone will follow the successes and challenges of EidoSearch by staying in touch with David and Steven over the next year. We’ll write blog posts and articles, with the content forming a living case study on our Web site.

Blogger Profile: Peter Wolchak

Peter Wolchak has been a professional print journalist for more than a decade. Starting as a news photographer at a community newspaper, Peter then worked as a staff writer at ComputerWorld Canada, a national trade magazine, and later served as the editor of that publication for four years. Peter then moved up to the national business magazine arena as the editor of Backbone. In addition to these journalism activities, Peter has also worked as a public speaker and discussion moderator, served as a judge for the McLuhan Festival’s Vortex awards, and sits on the E-Business Program Advisory Committee at Sheridan College.

Posted by Sue Ansell at May 16, 2012 5:00 PM

Categories: Start Up Innovation Campaign Technology start-ups

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