Team CANOPY convinces the judges

The final round began with Team CANOPY (Abhinav Gattani, Amrenda Bisht, Benji Shomair and Sanjeev Kayath) putting forth their media and entertainment proposition for the end consumer. The team seemed a little nervous when they began but soon got into the flow of things. They seemed passionate about their initiative - a little too much so; they were rushed at the end and it seemed that some bits went on longer than they should have.

They introduced their concept in the first few minutes - a combination of set-top boxes, high-end handheld devices and content partnerships. While I cannot give away too many details of their presentation I can share some of the judges' questions and comments to show a little bit of their thought process -

This is an interesting initiative but the company is divisional-ized. You expect Motorola to do a cross-divisional application - who would own it, drive it and advocate it to make it successful?

Should the network sync the various devices or as you suggest, should the control be in the hands of the consumer?

What would be the cost per solution in the house vs. a central server doing the ingestion and the home server feeding off it?

Your initiative will get Motorola closer to the consumer. However, when you run this you run a channel conflict with the current customers - won't we be competing with our traditional customer base?

Where do we launch - North America or internationally?

The judges seemed satisfied with the answers - there was lots of head-nodding as Abhinav Gattani confidently answered their questions regarding the technology, the solution, the business model and the financial projections. He walked them through their thought process in a very logical (and rather impressively rapid) fashion. His manner and confidence indicated that this is clearly a man who knows what he's talking about.