For SmarterShade co-founders (and best friends) Ryan Tatzel and Will McLeod, making the finals at Rice's competition was seeing their boyhood dreams start to take shape. The two Long Island, N.Y., natives met as teens on their high school Science Olympiad team. They spent hours in the machine shop owned by Tatzel's father. And both pursued engineering at Notre Dame, where they were always trading ideas for inventions.
Their current venture started with a physics lecture on polarization, which inspired McLeod to start tinkering. Together, he and Tatzel came up with a way to layer two patterned, polarized films that, when shifted, gradually changed the tint on glass.
The market for this solution, which could be a big energy saver, already exists and is expected to hit $1.9 billion by 2013. But unlike competing products, which require constant power to remain tinted, SmarterShade requires electricity just to trigger the initial change in tint and is far cheaper to manufacture. The duo needs $2 million to get its first product -- a skylight -- on the market within a year. Then they'll expand to other applications. "We're not naive; we don't think it's going to end the energy crisis," says Tatzel. "But we think it will help."
Judge's comment: "This is one of the most simple yet elegant technical solutions I've seen in a long time. The difficult thing about this market is the channel to the end consumer."
NEXT: Sixth place: TiFiber
Startup wins $600k biz plan contest 
