Story and pics: Heidi Mäenpää
On Thursday afternoon the first ever Demola Graduation Event began. In the event the Demola project teams pitched the ideas they had been developing since last autumn. The teams consisted of students from all of the three universities of Tampere: TAMK, TUT and UTA.

Teams eagerly waiting for the pitching to begin

Bernard Garvey officially launching the event

Over 30 graduating teams were divided into several pitching groups according to their development areas, for example Games and Machinery. Every team had 5 minutes to convince their audience that their pitch was the best, and after that people could ask questions that had arisen during the pitch. Finally, after all teams had had their presentations one winner was voted by all of the teams within a single pitching group, and the Demola staff picked three more Wild Cards to join the most voted teams. Some of the choices were quite surprising, but made rest of the evening more interesting.

Live-Manual ready to demonstrate their product

After the Demola staff had given some last-minute instructions to the finalists they were left to polish their pitches for a few hours before the evening Gala. You could feel the excitement fill the halls of Demola. The evening finally continued at six o'clock one floor above the normal working spaces.

Team Mini Mega Fun discussing how to improve their pitch for the last round

At the Gala we, in addition to the great pitches, heard one keynote about Crowd Sourcing. All of the finalists were great, my personal favorite was Mini Mega Fun's presentation. Other members of the audience seemed to think so too according to the amount of cheering! After all the teams had pitched their projects a special panel of judges had a meeting over who should win. Surprisingly a wild card team Live-Manual was announced as the winner of the event and given the Grand Prize of 2000€. Congratulations to the winning team and all Demola Academy Graduates!

Winner of the day: Live-Manual

Thanks to the people at Demola for arranging this great event, let's hope the next one will be even grander!

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