University Mobile Challenge

The purpose I was at the Mobile World Congress was to compete at Applied Innovation's University Mobile Challenge sponsored by Facebook, GSMA, and LabOne.  12 teams from around the world were competing.  Some of the schools that competed were Harvard Business School, Oxford, University of Waterloo, NUS, and UCSD just to name a few.  They broke the teams up into two groups of six and each group had a different panel of three judges ranging from different mobile fields.  Each group had five minutes to present and five minutes for Q&A and feedback from the judges.  I would say about half of the teams were asked by the judges about proprietary rights.  All of the teams that were asked this question has some sort IP rights to their innovation.  Then the judges would ask if the team has considered licensing their innovation.  None of the teams had really thought about this yet, or wanted to do so, because they were mainly focused on building their own company and product.  It seems as if young start-ups all move fast to get some sort of IP rights to what ever it is that they are building.  A representative for Facebook spoke to all of the teams and was the main judge in the final round.  She is a developer advocate at Facebook and graduated from Stanford in 2010.  I just love the fact that someone so fresh out of college has the ability to work their way up the chain of command at a tech huge tech company so fast.