Update April 15, 2021: Kailey Shara, ATLAS PhD student and a researcher in the Emergent Nanomaterials Lab, won the NVC 14 Audience Choice Award detailed below, adding $1,000 to the $11,000 she has raised for her startup, Chembotix, over the last month.

Kailey Shara,  ATLAS PhD student and a member of the Emergent Nanomaterials Lab, and Darren Sholes, ATLAS PhD student and a member of the ACME Lab, will compete along with others for the Audience Choice Award. Both Shara and Sholes won highly competitive NVC14 awards recently, with Shara taking home $5,000 during the New Venture Challenge 14 Female Founder Prize after presenting her research, Chembotix, a robotic automation platform to dramatically speed up chemistry research and development.  Sholes won first place in NVC's newcomer competition, walking away with $5,000 for LoopSketch, a program that makes it possible for musicians to remotely collaborate.

During the online event, six other finalists will also pitch their business ideas online to a panel of judges and an audience for the opportunity to win more than $100,000 in prizes.  To make it to the NVC 14 Championships (NVC skipped 13 for superstition's sake), the six startup finalists competed in two previous competition rounds against more than 110 ventures that took part in this year's program.

ATLAS students who have successfully competed in past NVCs include the EdBoard Technologies team co-led by Cody Candler, MS-CTD '20, and Ruhan Yang, MS-CTD student, winning fourth place and taking home $12,500 in NVC 12. Ted Thayer, MS-CTD student, and two team members won fourth place and $7,500 at the NVC 11. 

For 13 years, the NVC has been CU Boulder’s premier, cross-campus entrepreneurial program and competition, giving aspiring entrepreneurs the chance to build a startup through outstanding support and mentorship. Participants represent majors and departments from across the university. From undergraduates to graduates, PhD candidates to postdocs, and faculty to staff, everyone is invited to pitch their idea or watch and support.

Register Now to watch the NVC 14 Championships!

When: Tuesday, April 13 at 5:30 p.m.
Where: via Zoom

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[video:https://vimeo.com/525809774]

Darren Sholes, ATLAS PhD student and a member of the ACME Lab, pitched LoopSketch to judges during CU Boulder’s New Venture Challenge 14 Prize Night on March 17, winning first place in the newcomer competition (event video ), which comes with $5,000 in funding. In addition, the team advances to the next round where they will compete for additional awards. 

Restrictions during the pandemic have made it difficult for musicians to make music with others because the creative process is often intensely collaborative, and latency, the short unavoidable delays that are part of remote information transmission, make digital communication technologies a poor substitute for working together in person, Sholes says. 

“LoopSketch’s software program is designed for collaborative music-making,” he says. “It focuses on group flow and brainstorming, allowing for a remote experience that feels more like an in-person jam session.”

The program makes it possible for musicians in different locations to collaborate and quickly build rich, multilayered recordings. For example, a drummer in New York City could use LoopSketch to share a short recording with two friends in California and Oregon. The friend in California then composes an accompanying guitar track and their buddy in Oregon, who plays the bass, can listen to the combined tracks and add his own layer.

Sholes explains that the power of LoopSketch lies in the simplicity of the design. Users record short loops of music that are shared among friends who progressively build a song layer by layer, section by section. The software modulates playback so loops stay in sync with each other, empowering users to focus on playing the music, not managing the session.

The short video above explains the technology in more depth.
 

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