On June 26, Innovation Factory hosted our annual Innovation Night Showdown, bringing together Hamilton’s Innovation community. If you were unable to attend the Showdown, here is a quick recap!

The event followed a fun and interactive bracket system where 12 participants competed against each other in hopes of making it to the final competition round.

This year’s participants were:
atom-tonic (Zack Muqtadir)
Community Core (Callan Vola)
The Doghouse (Jonathan Leszko)
Genius Inspirata Evolorum (Curtis Ingleton)
goTOsee (Aristidis Safos)
Draxa Dice (Dominic Menegon)
Greenfield Prospects (Gary MacGregor)
Helping Hands (Janelle Hinds)
Mindbreak (Sharon Babineau)
NanoSpin (Suvojit Ghosh)
O2Networks (Tom Gaasenbeek)
WineVirgin (Samuel Jonas)

In Round 1, our participants faced off head-to-head against another participant. After each pair of pitches, the audience voted for their favourite by a show of hands; the top 6 were chosen to move on to the second round. In Round 2, the top 6 participants faced our guest judges for some questioning on their product or ideas.

Sitting in on this year’s panel of judges were: Jim Rudnick (KTT Interactive Inc.), Kevin Browne (Professor at Mohawk College for Computer Science & IT, Software Hamilton), and Tim Richard (Co-Founder of Weever Apps).

After much deliberation, the judges selected Helping Hands (Janelle Hinds) and The Doghouse (Jonathan Leszko) to compete for the final round.

Helping Hands is an online tool that provides high school students with a network to search for volunteer opportunities and allow them to monitor existing volunteer hours that are required for high school graduation.
The Doghouse is a website forum that provides men with a platform to network on the topic of all things women; men can monitor important dates, tips on what to purchase women, where to take them on dates, etc.

Janelle and Jonathan gave their pitches for a second time and the audience voted again for their favourite pitch. It was an incredibly close call, but this year’s winner was Jonathan of The Doghouse!

Jonathan walked away with a GoPro Camera and Case valued at over $300, and the bragging rights to being named this year’s Innovation Night Showdown Champion!

A big thank you to our event sponsors, McMaster Innovation Park and the City of Hamilton (Hamilton Economic Development) for making this event possible!

For the full photo album of our event, visit our Facebook page.