Young inventors on top with taxi adverts

City taxis may soon sprout animated advertisements on their roofs, thanks to a team of undergraduates from the University of Hong Kong.

The team's taxi-top advertising concept won the grand prize last Saturday in the Young Entrepreneurs Development Council's 2007 business plan competition, beating more than 180 other Hong Kong teams to take home HK$30,000.

Judges were impressed with the level of competition, noting that the members of the top two teams were all first-year undergraduates, all mainland Chinese and, except for one lone male on the HKU team, all female.

'It was surprising,' head judge Roger Marshall said. 'Some of the presentations were as good as anything we've seen in the real-life business sector.'

The HKU team's idea for taxi-top advertisements came from their experience with in-car television screens in mainland taxis, said Yuan Rong, 20, a first-year engineering student at HKU, originally from Beijing.

Putting screens on top of taxis and using wireless technology to let advertisements be displayed according to location, the team came up with an alternative to the signs already adorning Hong Kong taxi-tops.