Curious who won the University of Washington Business Plan Competition?
Congratulations to the 2009 Business Plan Competition Winners!
It’s been a terrific BPC this year: They had a record 90 student teams apply to the competition by sending 5 to 7 page executive summaries. Eighty-one judges screened that group down to 33 teams at the beginning of April. At the Investment Round in late-April, those 33 teams pitched their hearts out to 205 judges. Sixteen teams advanced to the Sweet 16 and Thursday the Sweet 16 teams gave it their all and presented to the judges. Five incredible teams made it to the Final Round, where they presented to seven judges. See below for the results!!
As you can see, lean and green is no longer a trend but part of the entrepreneurial fabric of the Pacific Northwest. The future of start-ups is in sustainable products, whether that’s wood flooring or water dispensers or electronics that conserve energy. We would like to thank the judges, sponsors, volunteers, faculty, and our colleagues at Seattle University, Washington State University, Seattle Pacific, Evergreen, Pacific Lutheran, Seattle Central, UW Bothell, Western Washington, and Whitworth. It takes a community raise an entrepreneur!
$25,000 Herbert B. Jones Foundation Grand Prize
Nanocel, UW, Seattle U
Provides high performance liquid cooling solutions to the electronics market.
Dustin Miller, PhD Mechanical Engineering; Daniel Rossi, Evening MBA; Todd Fishman, Seattle U MBA; Mehar Pratap Singh, Evening MBA; and Noah Stockton, Evening MBA
$10,000 Bristlecone-Selamat Challenge Second Prize
Energizing Solutions, UW
Washington corporation with patent pending technology to help industrial facilities switch from predictive to preventative maintenance on their electric motors, cutting maintenance costs by more than 70%.
Brian Pepin, BS Electrical Engineering; Marc Ramme, MBA; and Anthony Simon, BS Electrical Engineering
$5,000 Fenwick & West Finalist Prize
Shockmetrics, UW
Technology that is able to detect shock in patients before it becomes terminal.
Ryan Bergsman, Evening MBA; Anthony Rodriguez, PhD Bioengineering; Erik Roby, BS 2008
$5,000 WRF Capital Finalist Prize
HydroSense, UW
A revolutionary water sensor that detects fixture-level usage from a single point in a home or business.
Jon Froehlich, PhD Computer Science; Conor Haggerty, BS Community, Environment and Planning; Tim Campbell, BS Mechanical Engineering; Jenna Lee, PhD Psychology; Zach Okun, MBA; Vandan Parikh, MBA; and Debbie Tran, MBA
BEST IDEA PRIZES
The BEST IDEA prizes were created to reward teams in the Business Plan Competition for their exceptional work in several different categories. The teams receiving these prizes were selected by a special group of judges during the Investment Round. This year we gave away SIX $2,500 Best Idea Prizes.
OVP Best Technology Idea
Nanocel, UW, Seattle U
Provides high performance liquid cooling solutions to the electronics market.
Dustin Miller, PhD Mechanical Engineering; Daniel Rossi, Evening MBA; Todd Fishman, Seattle U MBA; Mehar Pratap Singh, Evening MBA; and Noah Stockton, Evening MBA
SEBA Best Innovation Idea
Shockmetrics, UW
Technology that is able to detect shock in patients before it becomes terminal.
Ryan Bergsman, Evening MBA; Anthony Rodriguez, PhD Bioengineering; Erik Roby, BS 2008
Summit Law Group Best Consumer Product Idea
Big Canvas, UW
We take mobile/always-connected communication to the next level, beyond texting and Twitter, by offering richer media expressed through photos and creative arts to our users.
Adam Goldblatt, EMBA, and Satoshi Nakajima, EMBA
DLA Piper Best Service/Retail Idea
ecowell, WSU
Will design, deploy and manage a network of litter-free, beverage dispensing kiosks that allow users to customize their drink, and pay 50% less than bottled beverages while doing so. Kiosks will offer automatic customer identification, environmental messaging, and targeted advertisements.
Brian Boler, BS Electrical Engineering; Reid Schilperoort, BA Finance and Entrepreneurship; Andy Whitaker, BS Electrical Engineering and Chinese, and Don Tilton
Keeler Investments Best Clean-Tech Idea
HydroSense, UW
A revolutionary water sensor that detects fixture-level usage from a single point in a home or business.
Jon Froehlich, PhD Computer Science; Conor Haggerty, BS Community, Environment and Planning; Tim Campbell, BS Mechanical Engineering; Jenna Lee, PhD Psychology; Zach Okun, MBA; Vandan Parikh, MBA; and Debbie Tran, MBA
Sensors in Motion Best Sustainable Advantage Idea
Sisalwood, UW
A sustainable alternative to hardwood for interior design and furniture.
Jason Hahn, MBA; Lindsey Sheets, MBA; and Payan ole-MoiYoi
Our own Inkd.com profiled on Smashing Magazine today
One of the web’s larger graphic design portals did a nice expose one usability and design. Inkd was included as an example of good design. Smashing Magazine wrote the following:
When it comes to building customer’s trust in your company, a professional, trustworthy design becomes crucial. In the Web, people are very likely to mistrust online-business, so you better make sure that you appear credible and serious. Inkd.com does just that with a professional look, a solid grid-based layout and following classic usability conventions.
The 15+ Best Magazines for Print Designers
Over at our print design marketplace, Inkd, we’ve compiled a blog post containing the top 15 graphic design magazines. Most also have free trials and discounts for designers belonging to organizations or for students, and all of these magazines have resource rich companion websites.Some magazines are highly focused on graphic design, some are great for general inspiration. Many have at least annual calls for design and competition. This is a really great list. Particularly for those of you who design brochures, newsletters and other print material.
Interview: Martin Tobias of Kashless.org
You sure know how to make some noise and get some press. So it seems everyone knows who you are. But maybe that’s not the case. Where are you from and how did you wind up working in tech?
I am actually a Seattle native. Born at Virginia Mason as my father did a medical internship and my mother was a hippie watercolor artist in the Pike Place Market. In college I took Computer Science (on a Burroughs card reader) but wasn’t smart enough to write device drivers so I decided to focus on business applications and languages. I used to like to reprogram the TRS-80s in Radio Shack to loop profanity on the screen. My first computer was a Timex Sinclair, then TRS-80 with a cassette player as “mass storage”, then Compaq luggable running CPM, then a Zenith lunchbox running DOS, then I started selling Leading Edge PCs running the Microsoft stack. I came back to Seattle after college in ’87 to work for Andersen Consulting (Accenture) as an RPG (for the IBM S/38 and AS/400) programmer for $19,500/year and I thought I was the bomb. Deep in by bones I am a computer nerd and gadget freak. But I have this need to use technology to actually solve real life problems rather than just be technology for technology sake. I guess I am in Technology because I really believe things like the PC, the Internet, wireless, et al have changed the world and can continue to improve my life.
You’ve raised more money than anyone I’m likely to interview. You took one company public. Now you’re latest company is called Kashless. What’s the elevator pitch?
Yea I have raised over $500M for different companies, invested a couple million of my own in over 40 companies and helped VC’s invest about $30M more. I like being both an investor and inventor. I am in inventor mode with Kashless.org now.
Kashless.org is the first online marketplace where everything is free. The company calls it ReCommerce. Kashless.org helps consumers find reusable and recyclable items in their local communities that they need in their daily lives. Currently available only in the Puget Sound, the site lists thousands of items free for the taking today. The Company hopes to provide the service nationally in the coming months.
Why is it the best place to search for and publish free items?
We provide a single place that aggregates all free items locally across other listing services. Kashless.org has scheduling tools, offer tools, user reputation, feedback, saved searches and lots of other advanced e-commerce features that are missing in existing free listing services. As a giver of stuff, you can get a tax receipt for giving through Kashless.org and have tools to manage your response cue (other than your email inbox) and track your positive impact on the planet, all new features to the free transaction marketplace.
Mind if I ask how the idea came to you?
Like every idea I have had (and acted on) and every idea I have ever invested in, personal need. Last summer, I was cleaning out my garage, had a bunch of failed Craigslist sales and failed pick-ups when offered for free (blog post). I was frustrated by the lack of good ecommerce tools and the poor experience trying to give something away. It was easier to throw it in the trash. That is why so much good stuff goes in the trash, it is too hard to give away. I thought I could do better.
What other start-up(s) in Seattle do you think are cool?
One of my favorite things about Seattle is the vibrant start-up community. Especially in the last couple of years with the addition of mixers and lots of local networking sites, there has really been an explosion. Unfortunately I can’t use them all and I haven’t considered the business models of many of them, so I wouldn’t presume to judge the “coolest” startups. I also do a lot with alternative energy start-ups as founder of NW Energy Angels, so they are different. As far as ones I use and personally hope succeed, I would include 43Things, Divvy, Dibspace, Greenwood Technologies, Brammo (Ashland Oregon), RYNO Motors, Blue Marble Energy, and EnerG2.
You could give tons of advice to a new entrepreneur. We’ll save that for a book. If you could share just one sentence of guidance or warning for the first time CEO what would you say?
Find a problem that personally pisses you off and fix it.
Interesting things going on CityU of Seattle
Today we interview Dan Morrill, Program Director in the Computer Science department at City University of Seattle. He’s a committed technology activist and blogger and has some interesting things to say about Cloud Computing and why it makes sense in the educational realm. Dan shares his personal views on Technology, Education, Web 2.0 over at TechWag
1. You aren’t out there trying to get your start-up idea funded like so many others in Seattle. Tell us about Dan and what you do.
I am the Program Director for the Computer Science, Information Systems, and Information Security programs at City University of Seattle. We see many of the technology issues that companies have, from startups trying to find the right programming experience to people being ready to go to work from day one. My job is to make sure that all of the computer science education that we provide is what companies need for their work force. We work with over 35 major and minor companies in the Seattle area to help write and deliver great educational programs and help people get real skills that they can go right to work with. We even work with startups to understand what they are looking for, along with some of the bigger companies in the Seattle area. Education has a unique perspective when it comes to companies, people love to talk to us because we do not try to sell them anything, we see many different skills that companies want, we then try to design programs around those skills, measure the success of imparting those skills, and work with groups that provide key insights into what is happening next, so we can train to future skills. The hardest part is working with future based skills, and often we find ourselves working with Alpha version systems, that by the time students have graduated from school, are in full use late stage beta or just hitting production. It is one of the most fun things I do, work with advanced technological ideas and then design training programs for them.
One of my biggest favorite phrases is that the “students we teach today will be solving problems tomorrow that we do not even know are problems yet.” CityU of Seattle has taken that idea to heart, and works very hard to make sure that we are preparing students for the future. We are fortunate in that we can respond very quickly to new technology, it takes us a year to put together a complete training program, while other colleges might take as long as five years to do the same thing. Like many companies, we find that we have to be very agile in what we teach, to make sure we are providing skills that employers need.
2. What made you decide to move to the educational side versus staying in the “private” sector?
I spent 22 years in the private sector and had a blast, but something was missing, and that was paying it forward. This was a personal issue for me, where could I do the most good? I worked in Information Security and would help small select groups of people within companies, but after my experience with blogging, and seeing how fast the information security business and landscapes change, I thought that being in education would be the next big logical step. We need more people researching computer systems, making great hard to break software, thinking about how to break and fix computer systems, and generally making the computing environments we work with from the Critical Infrastructure grid (power, water, sewer) to the software on our mobile phones. The chance to raise the bar on what we teach, how we teach it, and get people thinking about the problems we have in computing was too much of an opportunity to pass up. If you had the chance to effect good change on a global population, that is a hard thing to turn down, I don’t know many who would turn that down.
3. Tell us a bit about how you’re using new technologies (cloud computing etc) at CityU?
One of the problems with learning is that everyone learns just a little bit differently from the way that everyone else learns. By working with Cloud Computing on the backend infrastructure, video teleconferencing, video lectures, podcasts, along with traditional text/document/PowerPoint, we can provide a richer experience for students. We can easily appeal and work with the various ways that people learn by providing a rich mix of traditional materials and support for new learning methods and tools. I have had students stream lectures on their cell phone, or watch lectures on video on their lunch breaks prepping for the class. The more we move away from traditional PowerPoint huge lecture hall style teaching and more towards what students expect with digital technologies today, the more successful the students are in retaining knowledge. The more successful students are, the higher likelihood of them being hired, and the higher likelihood that they will get great jobs, and eventually pay back the communities that supported them.
The great thing about the technology we are using, and the technology that we are reviewing is that we can use cloud computing to spin up a test bed in an afternoon, test it, and then tear it down if it does not work, or move it to production if it does work for a significant cost savings. I am a huge fan of Amazon Web Services, and cannot wait until Azure comes on line, and they start providing LAMP (Linux, apache, MySQL, php) support. I would also like to get time on Rackspace/Mosso and any Google offering that is out there when it comes on line. The more environments we have access to, the richer the teaching experience that we can offer students.
The good part about cloud computing is that cloud computing allows us serious flexibility in bringing in new technology to the classroom, and enhancing the learning environment. We can go play with the latest and greatest stuff, test it, teach it, providing an opportunity for people to get hands on with some of the most exciting bleeding edge technology out there today. We could not do this if we were not using cloud computing as our data center is small, with limited space. If I wanted to spin up 10 servers, it could take months to provision space in the data center, buy the systems or revamp the test bed with current gear, scale and test locally. With cloud computing I can do the same thing in an afternoon.
We are in many ways trying to create a 1 to 1 relationship between the student and the content using our backend teaching systems to appeal to the way that the individual student learns. Cloud computing, open source software like Wordpress, Loudblog, Open Source VTC, and Moodle as a learning management system, free seminars, and other technology all adds to the classroom experience, and supports the many different ways that people learn. When you can have a one to one relationship between the content and the student, everyone wins. Technology provides a way to remove barriers to learning, the technology we use is all about breaking down barriers and providing a rich experience for the classroom online or in person.
4. You do a bit of blogging too. Favorite topics to write about?
People, technology, society, and education are my favorite things to write about. If you look at the ability of communication to break down access and remove barriers to access to world-class information. Today we live behind pay walls for information, but individual or corporate blogging, sites like Toolbox, FriendFeed, Social Median and even RSS readers can all be inputs to the information that you need now. People are complex, we are often messy in how we relate to each other, Web 2.0 and other technological systems help us all understand where things are coming from. We learn not to take things to personally, we develop better social skills, and we allow ourselves to find people inside and outside our comfort zones. Do I agree with everything I read, no, but when I read something brilliant by Louis Gray, Steve Hodson, Mike Fruchter, Andy Sack, Marcello Calbucci, and other brilliant thinkers and leaders for this generation, we all expand ourselves. Usually I end up commenting and putting my own spin on what they say, but through them, I have met some of the most fantastic people that I would never have met otherwise. Those are the fun things to write about, and mostly what I focus on when I do write. There are also the cool things that are happening in the Seattle 2.0 community, startups fascinate me because we are working with a strong charismatic leader at times, other times we are dealing with people who are focused on a dream. What makes them tick, what makes them successful, how do they handle failure? These are the heroes we should be looking at and talking about, Seattle has one of the most vibrant startup communities I have been involved with; we need to talk about them more.
5. If you could snap your fingers and solve any technology problem right now, what would it be?
The one problem I would love to solve in terms of technology would be to have a true one to one learning system, where people could go and learn what they need to learn or want to learn without knowing the difference; it would all be interesting and applicable to what the student wants to do with their lives. The first person that can put something like this together, I will see how well it does in our environment.
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Curious Office Companies
Inkd
Inkd is our latest internally developed concept. We raised our $1.7 million seed round on September 22 and are backed by Second Avenue Partners and a variety of tremendous angel investors. We are developing the World's First Market for Original Print Design.
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CafePress
Cafepress acquired Imagekind in July 2008. CafePress.com is an online marketplace that offers sellers complete e-commerce services to independently create and sell a wide variety of products, and offers buyers unique merchandise across virtually every topic. -
Imagekind
Curious Office started Imagekind in 2006 and it is the world's fastest-growing art site offering over 750,000 high-quality fine art images for sale. Imagekind gives consumers limitless options to purchase museum-quality framed and poster art from over 50,000 domestic and international emerging and established artists. -
SEOmoz.org
Curious Office invested in SEOmoz along with Ignition Partners in 2007. SEOmoz serves as one of the largest online hubs for search marketers worldwide by providing education, tools, resources and paid services to help make every SEO the best they can be. -
Shelfari
Amazon.com acquired Shelfari in September 2008. Based in Seattle, Shelfari introduces readers to our global community of book lovers and encourages them to share their literary inclinations and passions with peers, friends, and total strangers -
Fanzter
Fanzter is headquartered in Collinsville, Connecticut and are the creators of the wildly popular celebrity style and entertainment platform Coolspotters.com, which launched in May 2008. Fanzter secured $2 Million In Series B Funding Led By Steamboat Ventures in March 2009. -
Wishpot
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netConcepts
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Rouxbe
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RocketVox
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FeedDigest
