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PARIS, July 6, 2004 — No fewer than 183 technology entrepreneurs gathered in the grand amphitheater of Sorbonne University in Paris’ Latin quarter last week. They weren’t there to attend or even teach a class, but rather to receive a prize as part of France’s sixth annual National Contest for Business Creation in Innovative Technologies.
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As one might expect, small tech projects featured prominently, two laureates even taking some of the top prizes. “This is the sixth year we have been running this contest and every year we have had a consistent number of projects in the areas of new materials, microtech and nanotechnology,” said Jacques Astoin, of the Ministry of Research and New Technologies.
Luckily for the winning entrepreneurs, the fame comes with a little bit of fortune attached. Laureates in the business creation and development category go home with up to $550,000 in government and European Union funds to help them make their business concept a reality.
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Laureates in the “business emergence” category obtain an average of $50,000 to write an improved business plan and undertake a project viability study.
Christian Marc, of Grenoble walked off with the first prize. His recently created company, Crocus Technology has found a way to integrate the benefits of magnetic memory, which works well, but is a little bulky, with the advantages of silicon chips, on one silicon substrate.
“Each of our memory bits measures about 180 nanometers in diameter,” said Marc. Fitting both types of memory on the same chip “reduces processing time, and more importantly, reduces the chip’s power consumption by 10 to 50 times.”
This is expected to be increasingly useful for, among many other things, smart cards that require less energy to store more information and faster features on portable phones.
Doctoral student Julien Reboud went home with the “thesis prize” for his “Cell’nChip” project, a system for studying cells for functional genomics work. The 24-year-old started the project while working on his doctoral thesis in biotech at Grenoble’s Joseph Fournier University. The project involves the commercialization of cell chips, just over a tenth of a square inch in size, on which researchers can place drops of about 500 microns in diameter.
“What you do, is place cell cultures, which are small unicellular organisms, in these drops in order to study them and their reaction to different molecules” Reboud explained. “The technology allows researchers to miniaturize their testing and lets them verify the effectiveness of potential drugs and their toxicity.”
The company Reboud proposes to create would sell the cell chips, the robot for making the microdrops, the computer imaging system and a kit for making standardized tests. The Cell’nChip project is in the “business emergence” category, which means he has to do a market viability study before launching. But if everything goes well, the launch is expected in January 2006.
Brahim Dahmani, one of the other laureates, teamed up with former colleagues at Corning Inc. to commercialize a near-field optical microscope, or rather the nanoscopic tip at the end of the microscope.
“We have a tip about 100 nanometers in diameter which goes at the end of a fiber optic cable, itself about 100 microns wide,” Dahmani explained during a phone interview from his lab in Troyes, in France’s Champagne region. “The tip lets us observe a surface, whether it’s a nanomaterial with semiconductor qualities, nanopowders, nanotubes or DNA, to get information on the nature of the material and analyze it.”
Potential clients for the product include anyone who wants to research the infinitely small, including nanotechnology companies, industry, startups and research institutes. Troyes’ Technical University developed the nanotip and granted Dahmani’s Lovalite company an exclusive license to sell the technology.
The $283,000 in prize money has brought the company about a third of the funds it needs to develop. Having secured another third from personal funds, Dahmani and his colleagues are in the process of raising the remaining funds with banks and other investors.
The annual contest has a good track record for identifying the business projects with the most promise. About 600 companies have been founded since the first one was held in 1999. According to the French Ministry of Research, 94 percent of them still exist today. This year, the organization committee selected the 182 winners, among 1,402 applicants.