A crowd of about 700 attended the second annual Entrepalooza Thursday evening, watching as students pitched business ideas for cash prizes.

Jointly hosted by NC State and IBM, the event featured 15 student teams, both graduates and undergraduates, who had 60 seconds to present their ideas in hopes of winning one of the two $1,000 prizes. Forty teams initially signed up for the event, but only 15 were randomly selected to compete.

The “audience choice award” allowed the crowd to vote on its favorite idea, while the “IBM Built-in-Cloud” prize was awarded to the pitch with the best use of IBM cloud technology.

Rakesh Sukumar and Jigar Sharda, two graduate students studying computer science, won the audience choice award with their idea WalkPool, an app intended to remove boredom while walking to class and jogging or running alone.

Through the app, which is not yet on the market, users can log in with Facebook and identify the starting and ending point of their routes. The app will then match users to their Facebook friends walking the same route, at the same time.

The app attempts not only to eliminate lonesome and boring walks to class, but to help with the safety concern of walking alone late at night. Once launched, WalkPool will also have a feature that will allow users to set their interests and personality traits, in hopes of getting matched with someone similar.

“Everybody is complaining that technology is pulling people apart, everybody is with their heads in their phones,” Sukumar said. “Our idea was to use technology to get people together. One of the things that students especially spend a lot of time doing is walking. So, we thought we would use that time to help people connect.”

Sukumar and Sharda hope to have WalkPool available as a mobile app by the end of the year.

Alex Leonov and Shaunak Turaga, two seniors studying electrical and computer engineering, won the “Built-in-Cloud” prize with their idea, Medtrack

Medtrack is an app that uses Bluetooth beacons to interact with smartphones in a hospital environment to detect whether doctors and nurses are washing their hands for an adequate amount of time. By knowing the cleanliness of their staff, hospitals are able to improve their operations and provide cleaner conditions for patients.

“Hospitals, they are able to get a better understanding of what’s going on in their facilities and better their operations,” Turaga said. “This is mutually beneficial for hospitals, for insurance providers, as well as all of us.”

Macy Thomas, lead coordinator for Entrepalooza and a communications specialist for the entrepreneurship initiative, is the main one to credit for the event’s turnout.

“Our goal for the event is to expose students to what entrepreneurship is,” Thomas said. “You could come to the event and not necessarily be an entrepreneur yourself or know what entrepreneurship is, but when you walk away from the event you’ve learned a little bit about entrepreneurship. You have learned about what resources NC State has to offer to entrepreneurs.”