Roger Pincombe's come up with a computer program to reduce the costs of advertising and boost sales for e-commerce companies.
Elizabeth Ann Flanagan, Alex Cooper and two colleagues have devised an easier and gentler way to place a breathing tube into the trachea of medical patients.
Jenny Taylor, Megan Richards and Michael Zhao have invented a medical device that can detect hard plastics in the human body and could prove invaluable to people being treated for breast cancer.
And Aaron Fan, Xo Wang and Jamison Go have concocted a skateboard unlike any other in the marketplace.
Someday, these Georgia Tech undergraduates' inventions could make them all rich and famous. For now, they'll settle for winning a college innovation competition.
They are among the seven finalist teams vying for Georgia Tech's InVenture Prize, a three-year-old award that will be given out Wednesday night when the winners are chosen. The event is being televised live by Georgia Public Broadcasting at 7 p.m.
The winners, to be chosen by a panel of experts, will get $15,000 for first place and $10,000 for second place as well as a free U.S. patent filing by Georgia Tech's Office of Technology Licensing, valued at about $20,000.
The money and the patent help would definitely come in handy, the finalists agree, but just taking their ideas this far has meant a lot.
"It's validation that this is not a fluke idea," said Pincombe, founder of AdsCreated, an automated way to create online advertisements.
The finalists are in different stages of raising funds, obtaining patents and marketing their products and services which they created either independently, or as members of teams pursuing class projects. They are mainly biomedical, mechanical and electrical engineers.
While the future of their inventions and their business prospects are unknown, they can look for inspiration to last year's winner. Patrick Whaley said he is close to launching a line of sports apparel called Titin Tech.
Whaley said the competition gave him, "the contacts and the network that I needed to make my invention a reality."
The idea behind the InVenture Prize is to give student competitors an experience like the kind lived by entrepreneurs in the marketplace.
Raymond Vito, vice-provost for graduate and undergraduate studies at Georgia Tech, said that for many students, the technical aspects of engineering new products come readily, but that the business savvy needed to bring them to market can be lacking.
The competition, he said, "shows that if you put something out there like this and they get it, they jump on it and do amazing things."
While Pincombe opted for a pure business-to-business play, three of the finalists focused on medical products, including a group that has developed an instrument to aid in cataract surgery.
James Molini and Parick Caputo designed an environmentally-friendly system to provide power for developing countries.
Others focused on fun. Daniel Chaney developed a guitar capo that can create unique sounds. The skateboard, called the Velociryder, is a motorized, self-balancing , two-wheeled twist on the standard design.
Go, one of the Velociryder's co-creators, said competing for the InVenture Prize goes beyond being a learning experience and a potential business. It sends a message, he said, to other students.
"It tells them," he said, "that you also can make a difference in the world."
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