Spring 2008

An enormous amount has happened since my last post. The most recent news is that on Thursday evening I became an uncle for the second time. Tobias Emeka was born in Melbourne, weighing 8lb 2oz (whatever that means). It’s great to have an extra boy in the family.

A couple of weeks back I handed in my DPhil, which was great. The relief of having it handed in is enormous. It’s great to be able to do things that aren’t work, and not feel guilty when I’m doing something other than working on the thesis. The viva will be at the end of April, after which I am going to Australia for three weeks to see Tobias and the rest of the family out there.

A major thing that happened to me in February was winning a university-wide business idea competition. My idea is to let people do a door-to-door search for travel to continental Europe. Users say they want to travel from Reading to Lyon and the service searches through all combinations of airports, airlines, eurostar, trains, coaches, etc. and returns the optimal result to the user, who has expressed a preference between speed and cost.

I had to pitch my idea to a panel of judges (including BBC TV’s Dragon’s Den’s Deborah Meaden!) and an audience of a few hundred students. After the pitch I was grilled about the idea. There has been a lot of media interest since the competition and I did interviews on BBC TV News, BBC Radio, and in the Oxford Mail.

The judges feedback was very positive, the only thing they questioned was whether it could be done. I’ve therefore decided to have a go at building a prototype service to see if it can be realized and how it all scales. The business model looks good and there doesn’t seem to be anyone else doing this at the moment. It is really exciting to be having a shot at this, and to think I will have my own business. It’s a big change from biomedical engineering although I would like to return to med-tech once this is all over.



Meanwhile, I am keeping up my efforts on ‘Project 365’ for better and worse. Some days it is really easy, on others I have been stuck in the lab all day and it becomes really tricky finding something inspiring to take a picture of... Anyway, check out the damage here. It’s probably best to click on the ‘View as slide show’ link. The picture is from St Peters in Rome on a weekend break just before I handed in.

Cheers,

Ali