Every Spring, the Columbia Venture Competition gives out $350,000 dollars in cash prizes to the next generation of Columbia entrepreneurs.
Alumni judges from Brooklyn to Bordeaux to Beijing evaluate and advise competitors until three winners are chosen for each challenge track, which this year includes: the BlocPower Columbia Climate Challenge; Columbia-CareOne Healthcare All-Stars Challenge; Brown Institute Innovation Challenge in Journalism, Media, and Technology; the StartupColumbia Challenge; the SIPA Dean’s Public Policy Challenge Grant; the Technology Challenge; and the Undergraduate Challenge.
Congratulations to the winners of the Columbia Venture Competition – Columbia Journalism Challenge, sponsored by the Brown Institute for Media Innovation!
First Place, $15,000 prize and an internship in the Brown Institute Summer Program
Sourceable
Sourceable, is an online platform and mobile application that empowers, supports, and connects citizen journalists in conflict and crises zones.
Founder: Lena Arkawi ’22SIPA
Second Place, $10,000 prize and an internship in the Brown Institute Summer Program
CollabWORK
CollabWORK is a transparent gig marketplace to help creators and media brands find short-term work and workers to collaborate and tell great stories.
Founder: Summer Delaney ’22CBS
Third Place, $5,000 prize and an internship in the Brown Institute Summer Program
Indian Data Explorer
Indian Data Explorer is an organization that liberates Indian public datasets by taking the responsibility of ensuring that any data released by the government is cleaned up, readied and made available freely for the general public.
Founder: Sriharsha Devulapalli ’22JRN
Honorable Mention, internship in the Brown Institute Summer Program
Radical
Radical is a web platform where users can have live-audio conversations and share high-definition connection-quality-resistant recordings after talking.
Founder: Eugene Joseph ’20JRN
The Brown Institute Innovation Challenge in Journalism, Media, and Technology aims to support ventures creating new kinds of content, designing new forms of participation, contributing to our understanding of media and society, or experimenting with entirely new ways to communicate. Successful projects can be either for-profit or non-profit ventures — The Brown Institute is as concerned with business successes as with sustainable social impacts.
Brown encourages proposals for new tech-based or tech-enabled forms of media — these might make novel uses of computer vision, AI, NLP, machine learning, data visualization or even VR/AR to create, communicate, and interpret content. Eligible ventures can also be topically aligned, building custom platforms to explore complex issues in new ways.
The Brown Institute is housed at Columbia Journalism School and its Innovation Challenge extends a special welcome to ventures that focus on the practice of journalism — developing tools to aid investigations, say, or designing new visualization platforms to experience stories. Projects might also address the business of journalism, perhaps proposing new models for local media or sustainable approaches to delivering content to underserved communities.