This past Friday, 25 July 2008 the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards hosted a virtual competition for the United Kingdom’s top undergraduate student entrepreneurs. The students presented their brilliant success and skills as entrepreneurs to a panel of CEOs and Presidents. The judges panel comprised of Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) members from the EO London Chapter. The judges were thoroughly impressed with each of the student entrepreneurs and recognized upon evaluation Kieran O’Niell from the University of Bath as the competition winner.
The United Kingdom competition results:
1st Place: Kieran O’Neill - University of Bath - Founder of www.PlayFire.com, www.HolyLemon.com, and www.PSU.com
2nd Place: David Hawkins - University of Portsmouth - Owner and Founder of Boat Care UK (www.BoatcareUK.com)
3rd Place: Matthew Mills - Durham University - Owner and Founder of Sailing Sorted.
4th Place: Stuart Johnston - University of Worcester - Owner and Founder of www.BlueskyWebStudios.co.uk)
About the 1st Place Winner:
Kieran O’Neill started as a young entrepreneur with his first company www.HolyLemon.comwhen he was only 15 years old. The company is an innovative video sharing website, similar to YouTube.com, except Kieran founded it two years before YouTube was launched. Before Kieran eventually sold this website he was receiving over 100,000 daily viewers.
Kieran writes,”Whilst growing HolyLemon in 2004, I also co-founded another business with long-time friend Seb Hayes. It is an online magazine for PlayStation fans: PlayStation Universe (www.psu.com). We’ve grown the publication to 1.5 million monthly readers, with editorial spanning North America, Europe and Asia. As well as the PSU.com property, we’ve also built a very strong games discussion community, www.PS3Forums.com. It currently has 85,000 members, 3 million conversations, with over 150,000 new ones each month.”
Currently, Mr. O’Neill is highly focused on PlayFire.com which in 2007 he co-founded with both Seb Hayes (from PSU/PS3Forums) and Ben Phillips. Playfire.com is a social networking website designed entirely for video gamers. Playfire.com has a team of 7 people who work full-time to provide the highest quality experience to this online community of gamers. At PlayFire.com you can:
- Get a killer profile, with in-game stats, custom themes, favorite genre graphs and more.
- Track all your favorite games, and be notified of new discussion, videos, news stories etc for the games you care about.
- Follow your friends and online buddies, and stay up to date with what all your buddies are playing, saying and doing.
Beyond his entrepreneurial achievements, Kieran also gives back to the community and has been using his experience gained over the past 5 years to advise the charity The Reading Agency, who aim to promote and encourage reading amongst young people. They are building a social networking website to connect reading groups all over the UK, and Kieran has spent a lot of time working with them to ensure it is a huge success.
