NovaUCD spin-out is winner of Unica competition

HeyStaks Technologies, a spin-out from University College Dublin, has won €20,000 in the inaugural, pan-European, UNICA Entrepreneurship Competition for Students and Young Researchers.

The company has developed a Web 2.0 search platform which that enables users to better organise and easily share the resources they find while searching and browsing the Web.

UNICA, a network of 42 universities from European capital cities, invited each university, including UCD, to nominate one entry for this competition, which was sponsored by the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation. The winner was announced during UNICA’s 2009 General Assembly, held on 6 November, in the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris.

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing offer a one-size-fits-all approach to search result selection and ranking, without regard for the differing needs of individual users. They fail to take account of the context of a user’s search and so, for example, do not allow users who are searching on a common goal or shared interest to search in a collaborative fashion.

HeyStaks’ technology enables collaboration and organisational features to be added as a layer on top of existing mainstream search engines. Users can benefit from the social search enhancements without having to leave their favourite engine.

Maurice Coyle, co-founder of HeyStaks, said, “We are delighted to have won the first UNICA entrepreneurship competition. It is a great honour and it will be of enormous benefit to us in raising the international profile of HeyStaks. The prize money will be used to drive the company to the next level in its development.”

The core social re-ranking technology was developed by Coyleand his co founder Peter Briggs during their PhD research at UCD’s School of Computer Science and Informatics.  

Barry Smyth, their PhD supervisor and the company’s third co-founder, was Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of the UCD spin-out ChangingWorlds Ltd, which was acquired last year by Amdocs for $60 million.  

HeyStaks is currently in beta release and the company intends to launch Version 1 before the end of the year.

UNIKI, an intelligent media development company, representing the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, was the runner-up in the competition and received a €10,000 prize. Parelectrics, which has developed a non-invasive device for the diagnosis of skin cancer, representing Freie Universität Berlin, took third place.