City students looking to ‘Nudge’ you for support

A group of PhD students from City University London are launching a crowd funding campaign on Kickstarter. The students, Robert Schumacher, Miodrag Vidakovic, Shuo Yang and Marius Braun, are hoping to raise £35,000 to take their product Nudge to market.

Nudge is a wristband that syncs to your mobile phone that can be programmed easily to let you know when important messages or notifications come through.

Co-Founder Robert Schumacher says, “We get hundreds of notifications on our phones every day. Some are important, but most really aren’t. Evidence shows that nine out of ten people are irritated at least once a week by friends or family continuously checking their phones. We wanted to find a way to say no to the nuisance and filter out only the important things – we came up with Nudge.”

The students met at City’s Graduate School Enterprise Bootcamp at Easter this year. Initially Robert and Miodrag teamed up having met each other at the City Sports Fair. Marius joined the team over a pint in the Student Union and Shuo via the FFWD pre-accelerator programme (see below).

They went on to compete in and win the CitySpark business plan competition, landing £3000 in prize money which helped them develop the prototype for Nudge. Part of the CitySpark prize was a place on the FFWD pre-accelerator programme hosted at City’s co-working space The Hangout. The six week summer programme equips attendees with the necessary skills to take a product to investment stage.

“City has been amazing in supporting us on our journey all the way from when we met at the boot camp to the Kickstarter launch today,” continues Schumacher, “We would never have got this far if it wasn’t for the amazing support on offer for student entrepreneurs, and I’d highly recommend going to one of their events.”

Ben Mumby-Croft, Enterprise Education Manager at City said, “It’s fantastic to see another Kickstarter campaign coming out of CityStarters. Team Nudge are a great example of the entrepreneurial talent within the Graduate School. One of the key aims of enterprise education at City is to encourage students to ‘get out of the building’ and learn by doing. This is exactly what Team Nudge are doing now and I’m really excited to see what happens next.”

Team Nudge comprises:

– Robert Schumacher – PhD student at Cass Business School who likes tracking things in spreadsheets

– Miodrag Vidakovic – PhD student in Engineering, City University London Sportsman of the year 2012 – loves entrepreneuring

– Marius Braun – PhD student in Computer Science, currently building dream interaction software

– Shuo Yang – PhD student in electrical engineering, also working on using motion to create electricity.

Check out Nudge’s campaign on Kickstarter