Innovation Day winner graduates after four years of success
onvincing people to wake up in the morning and play a game on a sandy beach with palm trees seems like a marketable idea, especially if the game helps people sleep more effectively and stay alert throughout the day.
That’s exactly what inventor Justin Beck (BS ’09) hopes is true, and the judges at the 2009 Innovation Day competition thought he was on to something. In February, Beck, along with his partner Daniel Gartenberg, a psychology and neuroscience student, won $10,000 at the 15th anniversary of the Schoofs Prize for Creativity, an annual UW-Madison undergraduate invention competition that rewards innovative and marketable ideas.
Their winning idea, called Proactive Sleep, is a software application for the iPhone and the iPod touch that serves as a sophisticated alarm clock, waking users during the light sleep phase of their cycle. In the morning, users play an easy game—which currently is depicted on a beach scene—that tests alertness. The software then automatically reconfigures as it learns the user’s unique sleep cycle, ultimately eliminating morning grogginess and helping users stay more alert all day. Beck and Gartenberg plan to put Proactive Sleep on the market in the next few months via the Apple application store.
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Justin Beck (left) and Daniel Gartenberg
with their first-place winning invention, Proactive Sleep. (Larger image)
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Proactive Sleep is only one of many inventions Beck created while he was a student at UW-Madison. He participated in Innovation Day three times as an undergraduate, which made his senior year victory all the more special. During his sophomore year, Beck and four other students founded UW Innovators, an organization that pools talents to help inventors develop their ideas. He was also an exhibitor at Engineering EXPO 2007 and 2009.
Beck worked as an intern for Google, Microsoft, Mechantronics and Cuna Mutual Group, which gave him the confidence to found his own software company, PerBlue. PerBlue is working on a variety of projects, including a video game called Parallel Kingdom, and more than 42,000 user accounts for the game have already been opened.
Beck’s commitment to innovation and entrepreneurship is exactly the kind of spirit Richard Schoofs (BSChE’ 53), the founder and sponsor of the Schoofs Prize, hopes Innovation Day attracts. “If you’re creative and enjoy what you’re doing, you don’t have to worry about finances because they seem to roll in,” says Schoofs. “We’ll have couple of millionaires assuming Proactive Sleep is approved by Apple for sale in the application store.”
