What do these have in common?

Over the weekend I was reading the Herald, Auckland's daily newspaper - telling my children that I wasn't playing on the ipad, I was actually reading the paper! I came across an article by Dr Michelle Dickinson, an Auckland University nanatechnologist (aka Nanogirl http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=11500936). Michelle was writing about Powerbyproxi, a company developing wireless charging technology that  "could help turn our static furniture into functional charging stations .. [This] mobile-device wireless-charging market predicted to be worth $5 billion globally by 2020".  A few days before that I had been presenting to the finalists of the EY Entrepreneur of the Year competition and a fellow presenter was Greg Cross, the CEO of Powerbyproxi ( http://powerbyproxi.com/). And one of the EY finalists in the room was John Wikstom, from Magic Memories  (http://www.magicmemories.com/ ), a company with the wonderful tag line of "we make people smile"!  

And the thing these all had in common? Spark - the University of Auckland's Entrepreneurship Challenge ( http://www.spark.auckland.ac.nz/).  Both Michelle and John were guest speakers at some of the Spark events held earlier in the year and PowerbyProxi was a previous spark winner, cofounded by Fady Mishriki ( http://www.spark.auckland.ac.nz/alumni/alumni-profiles/hi-tech-products/artmid/10733/articleid/4/fady-mishriki ).

And to round off my Spark week, a student in my undergraduate Entrepreneurship class was part of one of the teams that qualified for the 2015 Spark $100k Challenge. Would be great in a few years time to be writing a blog entry about how well a company that he founded is now doing :)