The Awards Ceremony of the MIT Arab Business Plan Competition 2007 took place on April 3rd at Hotel Le Bristol in Beirut. The guest speaker was Mr. Ken Morse, Senior Lecturer at MIT and Managing Director of MIT Entrepreneurship Center, and the ceremony was attended by jury members who served on one of the three panels, representatives from Bader and Banque Libano-Française, participants, other local NGOs, as well as family members and friends of the winning teams and other participating teams.
As a token for our encouragement and appreciation for their hard work, we granted the 3 winning teams prize money of USD 50,000, USD 5000, and USD 2500 respectively, as well as certificates of achievement to each member of the winning teams.
Mr. Walid Raphael, Deputy General Manager of Banque Libano- Française and who served on the final jury of oral presentations, disclosed the identity of the first winner and presented the $50K huge check and certificates to EduLab, a Lebanese start-up specialized in developing educational CDs that give students real time laboratory experiments through visual simulations. Mr. Robert Fadel, President of Bader Young Entrepreneurs Program, announced Batroun Biofuel Company as first runner-up. The concept is to convert used cooking oil and other vegetable oils into Biodiesel fuel. Ms. Najat Rochdi, Regional Coordinator of ICTDAR and who served on the final jury, announced Hatifou as second runner-up. The people behind Hatifou are Algerians and they aim at terminating international calls traffic to all Algerian telecommunications carriers through VoIP.
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