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Basheer Tome and the Inventure Prize

Basheer Tome and the Inventure Prize


Author Zaid Anwar by

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Basheer Tome did not expect people to be that passionate about the color of their toast.

The Inventure Prize Competition at Georgia Institute of Technology was created and organized by it's faculty to encourage an interest in invention, innovation, and entrepreneurial lifestyle. Basheer is one of the finalists selected among hundreds of students who are not only vying for the $20,000 first prize, but for the opportunity to join Flashpoint, a Georgia Tech startup accelerator program.

Basheer, a senior industrial design student here at Georgia Tech likes to build products that integrate the digital world into the physical in more graspable and seamless ways. His project for this competition called Hue started as a quest to make toasters easier to use. Here is what he had to say:

What I came to find out is that the "transparent glass toaster" was really popular on the internet but was never really created due to a lot of practical issues. So I dug deeper. Why do people want that? It's because people don't trust their toaster and have no predictable way to communicate with it. The majority of toasters measure toast based on time yet with zero standards or consistency between brands, models, and toasters, how do you know whether "2", "4", or "5" is the right setting on the first attempt? So after a bit of brainstorming and ideation, I ran into the idea of using color since that's normally how people gage how "done" toast is. So why can't your toaster do the same?

Hue has an array of color sensors inside that see both sides of the pieces of bread so that when the user selects the shade of brown he/she wants, the toaster then keeps the heating element on until the toast reaches that color. The amount of time that translates to works on a sliding, exponential scale depending on the initial starting color of the bread and the contrast the user has set.

When I told the internet about my little project a few months ago, the reaction was unimaginable. What started as a shared link between my closest friends soon grew into a Daily Mail article, an exposé in BusinessWeek, a radio interview with the BBC, a piece in the in-flight magazine of KLM and dozens of emails asking where people could buy this: including from one of the creators of the internet himself Robert Cailliau!

That's what pushed me to enter my project into the Inventure Prize competition early in the semester. It's been a really interesting experience so far. From there, I made it into the semi final round where I pitched to the judges who then decided to put me into the finals.

The Final Round, taking place on March 13th at 7 PM, will be televised live by Georgia Public Broadcasting. You can vote for a favorite invention during this televised round. The People's Choice Award will be given to the fans' favorite invention. Voting will be by text messaging or via the InVenture Prize website.

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