Monday, May 12, 2008

MIT $100K tops off a bumper crop of regional business plan contests

By Brendan Lynch

This year's busy business plan competition season is winding down, and the Super Bowl of local entrepreneurship contests, the 2008 MIT $100K Business Plan Competition, will choose its grand prize winner May 14 -- the same day two other local schools are offering the brass ring to student entrepreneurs.

Since March, a steady stream of semifinalist, finalist and winner announcements have been pouring out of local colleges. This year a private company, Art Technology Group Inc. of Cambridge, even got in on the act with its own business plan competition.

ATG chose a California company, MinuteBank, which provides management of prepaid mobile minutes for phone subscribers in developing nations, as its $50,000 winner. In April, Essense Medical Inc. won Boston University's 2008 $50K Business Plan Competition. Essense's technology is intended both to diagnose and treat cancer in real time, cutting down on the need for biopsies. Behavioral marketing company Incentive Targeting won the graduate track of Babson College's competition, and Before The Stores LLC, an e-commerce website and market research firm, took the undergraduate honors.

South of the Bay State border, the Rhode Island Business Plan Competition chose MissingPatient.com, a web-based alert network for missing patients of diseases like Alzheimer's, and Siren Medical, which developed technology intended to save severed digits and limbs, as its entrepreneur and student track winners, respectively. And looking to the north, two competitions -- the North of Boston Business Plan Competition at Salem State College, and the University of New Hampshire's competition -- are announcing their $10,000 winners on the same day MIT does.

Bumper crop

The MIT $100K, with the largest field of companies (232) and the largest cash prize, is the region's biz-plan competition alpha dog. Jeff Fagnan, a partner at Atlas Ventures and a judge in the $100K competition's products and services category, said this year fielded a strong crop of startups.

"There's probably three or four companies that will end up being venture-backed companies," Fagnan said.

Next week, the entrepreneurs will have to pitch to the judges. For his part, Fagnan said he's looking for people who can pitch their company well and withstand tough questioning from the panel of judges.

"They've already gone through a couple of filters, so they've got good teams, good plans," he said. "What we want to see is how they present themselves in a couple of dimensions as they physically present their companies."

EyeViewDigital.com recently won the $20,000 prize at the Harvard Business School Business Plan Competition and is a semifinalist in the MIT $100K. The startup produces instructional videos for companies, coupled with reporting, streaming and support services. The company is already profitable and boasts customers that include eBay Inc., Yahoo Inc., Nokia Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc.

Tal Riesenfeld, EyeViewDigital.com's vice president of marketing and a Harvard Business School graduate, said the competitions were similarly helpful, though the scale is much different. "I probably learned more from this than my whole MBA," he said.

Most of the MIT $100K entrants were "diplomatically optimistic" about their chances of winning, and most said they were grateful for getting access to venture capitalist mentors and a safe, soft launch for their startups. Social Sense team member Anmol Madan, for example, said the MIT $100K provides a "huge, huge value" through mentorship, and presents a gentler learning opportunity than pitching a startup cold. "In a real venture meeting, if you make crazy projections or you're not together 100 percent, it can have drastic implications," said Madan.

Social Sense is a mobile software development platform that uses call logs, SMS logs and other information to build software applications based on a user's behavioral patterns.

Fagnan has been judging the competition for seven years. He pointed to robotic rehabilitation device maker Myomo Inc. (then known as Active Joint Brace), which was the winner of the then-MIT $50K contest in 2004. This past January, Myomo raised $3.1 million in angel investment. "I'm gratified to see them doing as well as they're doing," he said.

One company he was surprised to see stagnate was MolecularWare, a life sciences software startup headed up by Richard Kivel, now CEO of TheraGenetics Ltd. MolecularWare won the MIT $50K in 1999.

"That one never took off, and it was a great idea," Fagnan said. "It made all the sense in the world at the time."