StartupCafe

Congrats to Michael Berger and Gregor Hofer of Speech Graphics, who were awarded £5000 and third place in the national Santander Entrepreneurship Awards earlier this month.

Michael and Gregor are the brains behind a new lip-synch technology for video games, which automatically generates high-quality facial animations directly from recorded speech. You can see a cool video demo of their technology on their website.

Fourty-seven universities from across the UK were invited to nominate student-led companies for the Santander awards; from these, ten finalists were chosen to pitch to a panel of judges in London. Speech Graphics were the only Scottish company to make the finals.

Since incorporating late last year, Speech Graphics has also won a John Logie Baird award for innovation, and were one of eight companies selected to deliver live investor pitches at Engage Invest Exploit (see their 60 second version of that pitch).

Here’s a roundup of the other startups that caught Santander’s attention:

Jottify is an “online community which allows people to share, discuss and sell anything they have written.” Fame and fortune appear to have caught founder Jack Lennox off-guard (the Jottify website simply says “Jottify: coming soon”), but if that’s all you need to commit, it is possible become a Facebook fan.

Guitar Lesson Lounge, founded by Guillaume Devinat, aims “to create the best video guitar lessons online.” You have to sign up to access the videos, but you can try out the following for free:

• three video guitar lessons including notes and chord charts
• a beginner’s guide to guitar fret hand technique
• your personal song lesson collection
• future free guitar lessons.

One2One Medicine, founded by Grant Milne, provides “support and guidance for future doctors from school to graduation.” Amongst other things, One2One have released their own app on iPhone and Android, which claims to help prospective doctors study for their exams. They’ve gone with an expansion pack model, where the initial content is free, but the really useful stuff costs £1.79. Fortunately, extensive market research on my part reveals that this is a price point most prospective doctors can afford.

Radfan Heatwave, founded by Simon Barker and Roland Glancy, produces “a more efficient central heating product to reduce bills and energy waste.” What more can you say?

The Fold is a new clothing brand for the “professionally chic” woman. I wish I could be professionally chic, but unfortunately, my chic-ness just don’t pay the bills. Co-founders Cheryl Mainland and Polly Fowler have developed an attractive first collection of womenswear, which ranges from black to dark navy in colour, and is accentuated by £95 belts. Is this why London is so expensive?