SomePitching – The Online Pitching Competition

SomePitching is intended for individuals, early phase startups or teams with/without a formal company. The winners are selected based on the ratings from public (anyone who registers) and invited serial entrepreneurs, inventors and experts around the world.

The competition rewards winners with professional advice and massive promotion for the idea. The competition boosts entrepreneurship and the start-up mentality, general pitching and idea-marketing skills, and raise awareness of innovative business ideas and the teams behind those ideas.

In addition to participants, also the voters (general public) can win prizes based on their activity. Register from here.

Rules and instructions for the teams

The competition is open for any startup, company or team (or individual), which has a business idea. The idea can be either a product or a service. No formal company is required.

Material

The team produces a description of the business idea (less than 200 words), a video (maximum length 60 seconds) and an optional short business slide deck (10 slides).

The video can be any type with editing and special effects, animations, etc (check our youtube channel for examples). The video will be visible to everyone. Upload your video to your youtube account and use the link when sending the material.

An optional slide deck should be based on this guidance. The deck will be visible only to invited jury and experts, not to public. Your chances are better if you provide a slide deck, but it’s not mandatory.

Submitting material

To submit the material to the competition, one team member should register to the competition. After registration Innozed will send an email with a link and guidance to send the material.

Note: you only submit the links to your material to the competition. Use youtube for the video and e.g. dropbox to share the slideset.

How the idea is rated

SomePitching uses the Innozed platform to manage the idea rating process and selecting the winners, based on ratings from the crowd.

The material is rated, by the public and invited jury, based on these categories:

• Applying to SomePitching rules (e.g. video lenght)
• Traction to buy or use the solution (video)
• The level of problem the solution solves (video)
• The uniqueness of the solution (video)
• The quality of the pitch (video)
• The business potential (video + slide deck)
• The execution plan (video + slide deck)
• The quality of the team (slide deck)
• Overall rating (video)

The competition format

How we select the winners

The winner is selected from the finalists based on the overall rating from the crowd and the jury.

For an idea to reach to finals, it must pass all rating levels (see categories above) and get a minimum rating.

The team will get an automatic notice of reaching to the finals.

If the idea doesn’t reach to the finals, a report is sent to the team and the idea can be revised and send again (if time) to the competition.

Schedule and deadlines

The competition starts 15.10.2012 and lasts three weeks until 4.11.2012. During that time registered voters and invited jury will rate the ideas based on the selected categories.

important dates

15.10.2012 – teams and raters can register
15.10.2012 – rating starts
24.10.2012 – last day to send idea (revised or new)
4.11.2012 – competition ends
9.11.2012 – winners will be announced

Registration, costs and benefits

The participants

The registration is free. All material is screened by the crowd in the first level. Any unfit material can be deleted and participant banned from the competition.

The general public

Registering and voting is free. The more idea a voter rates, more likely the voter is to win a prize. See more information about the voting from “info to voters” page.

The Jury

The jury is formed by the competition organization and will judge all ideas that pass public voting levels.

The Jury consists of well known business professionals from different fields of life. The names and other information of the jury is available at the competition website. The jury may change between competitions.

The criteria and the Prizes

The winners are chosen from those ideas which pass all rating levels (see the categories above). The ranking will be determined based on the combined ratings from all categories.

Top 5 ideas will receive prizes that are announced later.

Responsibilities and rights

All Pitching videos are public and may be distributed online without restrictions.

All other material is only available for the competition organizers, except the slideset that is available for the investors, the jury and the sponsors as well.

The organizers may shut out any team from the competition due to invalid or irrelevant material, or any other reason that the organizers consider being against competition rules or good business manners and ethics. Any breaking of competition rules ends up in being shut out of the competition immediately.

Other items

As the pitching videos will be made public and will be promoted heavily at social media, the organizers urge all contestants to protect their ideas with relevant immaterial rights, and to keep in mind not to give out any information that may harm one’s business in any way. The competition organizers expect all participants to understand the rights that they have related to the idea they are pitching for. Additionally, the organizers expect the contestant to only pitch an idea that is of their own thinking or that they have full rights to publish. Remember not to give out too many technical details if not absolutely necessary – most ideas can well be presented without giving out too detailed information.

The pitching itself does not require explaining the technical details or processes.

Should an investor and a contestant wish to negotiate funding between themselves, the event organizers are in no way involved in the process of doing so. We are glad to promote the ideas and see positive investment decisions taking place as a result of the competition, but we don’t take any part in such negotiations or promote particular companies or investors towards each other as such.