Pace Paw Print

Facebook may be in for some significant competition, thanks to Joe DiPasquale's creation of CollegeWikis, which won the "New Business Concept" category at the Pace Pitch Contest held Friday night.

The contest, sponsored by the Lubin School of Business, was held at the Schimmel Center in the New York City campus. The event was organized by Bruce Bachenheimer, Clinical Professor and Director of Entrepreneurship at Lubin. After winning the contest, DiPasquale added Pace to the CollegeWikis network, which is described as a combination of the networking of Facebook and the information provided by Google.

The event was based on the "elevator pitch concept," according to the event's webpage.

"The premise is that it could be made in a few minutes, should the entrepreneur spot a potential investor on an elevator and have the opportunity to pitch their idea during the brief ride," the webpage states.

The contest had two categories: the "New Business Concept" and the "Social Venture Category," which was won by Sarah Lipkin, from the University of Buffalo's School of Management. To enter the "New Business Concept" category, participants had to submit a 300-400 word summary of their idea as well as a 150-200 word bio. At the event, finalists delivered a 3 minute pitch to a panel of judges as well as to the audience members. Winners for both categories each received $1,000.

DiPasquale graduated from Harvard University as well as Stanford University's School of Business, where he got the idea for CollegeWikis.

At Stanford, DiPasquale told Samuella Becker, Manager of Public Information, that the students used email lists of people in their dorm, courses and class year to exchange info from details about courses to the best place to get a haircut. The problem, he said, was that the answers were never captured and the information would get lost, causing the same questions to be repeated. CollegeWikis is the result of DiPasquale addressing these problems.

DiPasquale's product, built off of the MediaWiki framework, allows students to post questions on the website and email students from different groups, such as people in certain classes, dorms, etc. When people respond to the question through email, the results get posted and are saved on the website. Answers can be corrected or updated at any time.

To register on CollegeWikis, members don't need to be in college, but they are required to have a valid email address ending in .edu.

Once registered, users can get involved by inviting others to join, becoming a campus executive, and volunteering to work on the technical side of the website.

The more active networks are from Harvard, where five percent of Harvard undergrads have registered, as well as ten percent of Stanford undergrads and 14 percent of Tufts undergrads. Now that it has been added, Pace now has the opportunity to become a major network as well.

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