A group of York students has won the opportunity to have their very own I-phone application developed after winning The App Challenge final, held at the Ron Cooke Hub on Wednesday, January 18.
YUSU Welfare officer Bob Hughes has warned students to be vigilant after a student loans phishing scam has been revealed.
Her Majesty the Queen will be visiting York on Maundy Thursday, 5th April, as part of the 800th anniversary of York’s Charter for the traditional “Royal Maundy” ceremony.
A flood caused by a heating system “failure” forced the university IT services to shut down many essential systems on Sunday night, causing problems for many students on the eve of their exams and assignment due-dates.
York Entrepreneurs’ annual competition, The Market, concluded this week with the winning team, Team Cognate, taking home £1000.
13 teams took part in the four day competition with each task aimed at rebranding York, aiming to test teams’ “advertising, marketing, design and teamwork skills”.
India Perry, Vice President of the York Entrepreneurs Society, said: “The event went incredibly well given that this is the first time our events organisers have done a York Entrepreneurs even. The final particularly was fairly impressive in terms of the calibre of the judges and what the teams came up with regards to originality.”
Perry added: “Given that this was our first competition with a predominately new committee it was a lot more challenging than last year but it offered us a chance to come up with more original challenges and assess our running of competitions.”
The three tasks, which were designed by the events directors Jess Crow, Callum Laithwaite and Opemipo Akisanya, were based on the concept of 'Rebranding York' and saw the lowest ranked teams eliminated at each stage.
Task one saw teams challenged to go into York and collect free items that had a link to the city which were then sold to students later on in the evening 'Student Market'. The event was won by Team Zeal whilst five teams were knocked out throughout the day.
Task two was to design an advert based on marketing York to the team’s chosen audience. For this event, York Entrepreneurs joined up with YSTV to film the 30 seconds adverts which the eight remaining teams had one hour to capture. The top three teams progressed to the final with Team Cognate winning this task followed by Team Prima and then Team Zeal.
Task three, which challenged the finalists over two days, was to generate a new tourist attraction for York. BDP, the company that designed and built Hes East campus, consulted with teams in order to help them develop their ideas. On the second day teams delivered 10 minute presentations in front of four judges that included Ron Cooke, the Deputy Mayor of York and the Vice Chancellor of York.
Team Cognate, made up of Pschologists Jack Blake, Ros Baker, Joy Bothamley and Daniel Bennett, was crowned winners with Team Zeal and Team Prima coming joint second. Perry said that the winning team “showed immense creativity and organisation”.
Winners Team Cognate told The Yorker that: “We had some great competition all throughout the contest; we had each put our all into every task so it was the best feeling to be recognised by such successful people. It meant a lot to us that we all do psychology as well, with most of the teams being from economics; so we had to learn a lot about costing and getting funding for projects!”
However, they added that the hardest part of the competition was the “intensity of the competition”, working until 10pm and starting again the next morning at 8am. They admitted they haven’t decided what to spend the money on, saying “we're still talking about whether to re-invest, go travelling or splurge!”
Perry said she was pleased with how the competition went, and is looking forward to the York Entrepreneurs’ future challenges as the society has big plans for next term: “Our next big event will be coming up throughout next term,” she said.
“It is new, exciting and very different, we are planning it at the moment and it is a secret thus far. We really hope to push the society to break our current limits in terms of campus recognition and involvement and are very excited to see how our committee choose to do this.”
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