 | | June 8, 2010
The May Report: 6/8/2010: Avery Cohen on the ten MIT-EF Whiteboard Challenge Finalists
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Scoop section:
-- Avery Cohen on the MIT-EF Whiteboard Challenge Finalists
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The Scoop section:
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Avery Cohen on the MIT-EF Whiteboard Challenge Finalists
Subject: MIT-EF Whiteboard Challenge Finalists
Date: 6/8/2010 1:04:15 A.M. Central Daylight Time
From: avery.cohen@gmail.com
To: ronaldmay@aol.com
MIT Enterprise Forum Chicago: 2010 Whiteboard Challenge Finalists
There were nearly 100 entries in this year's Whiteboard Challenge, the big event concluding a robust season of panel discussions on innovation, technology, and business from the Chicago chapter of the MIT Enterprise Forum. The 100 entries were taken down to the top ten in a series of preliminary judging by members of "The Big Idea Forum" (http://www.bigideaforum.org/). The ten finalists were given five minutes with a whiteboard to convince a panel of five judges that their ideas were the most worthy prize winners. Phone votes of the audience in attendance counted as a sixth judge.
At stake, in addition to bragging rights, was $5,000 in prize money, provided by event sponsor Ungaretti & Harris. The prize money was split among the top three presentations: $ 3,000 to the winner, $ 1,500 to the runner-up and $ 500 to the third-place contestant. And there were a number of representatives from various investment firms, angels and funds in attendance.
1. Eric Robbins: Clink-Viral Couponing
Clink-Viral is a novel approach to mobile marketing: Bump two iPhones together and a coupon crosses between the phones via electronic magic. The "clink" bump of the two phones gives the method visceral appeal (though it limits the viral capabilities) and encourages a missing element of face-to-face to online social networking. And to provide further incentive, there's a "give to get" requirement - your coupon doesn't activate until you've given away two coupons.
The platform licenses "bump" technology and provides secure, paperless couponing to brands. Robbins says that there were 311 billion coupons printed last year, and use of coupons by customers of big brands was up 30%. Groupon has made electronic coupons hot, but isn't paperless. The "clink" provides an opportunity for social touch, experience and fun. But I have to fly to Philadelphia to share a coupon with my friends there?
2. Dr. Armin Hassaznzadeh: Energy Storage for Wind & Solar Power
PyroPhase, Inc. has an innovative approach to maximizing the value of the erratic production capabilities of wind and solar power generation. They want to use wind and solar energy to extract fossil fuels from unconventional oil & gas deposits.
By installing wind and solar on-site, they will efficiently generate the heat needed to release oil and gas from these plentiful but costly deposits. Thus, they will not have to burn oil and gas to get the fossil fuels. They can extract the fuels at a much lower cost. Maybe they can then claim that the resulting oil and gas is carbon neutral?
In the week following the Whiteboard challenge, PyroPhase announced that they closed %7M in a round of Series C funding. So far, they are the biggest winners of the night!
3. Paul Pettigrew: The Giving Tree Project
Pettigrew says that the Emerald Ash Boar Beetle killed over 20,000 ash trees in the United States last year. It killed the trees by attacking the roots; the tree dies, but the wood is left behind. Further, he asserts that there are 4 billion trees in U.S. Cities, and 70 billion in surrounding areas that are wasted when they eventually die. They are used for mulch or pulped. Occasionally they are used for firewood.
Meanwhile, the furniture business has become more remote, requiring lumber to be shipped from forests to manufacturing facilities, then to cities. Paul Pettigrew wants to make furniture locally from locally fallen trees. He has set up a studio, a small factory in Chicago, and is hiring underprivileged students to be the craftspersons. Crate and Barrel is already carrying their first piece, and is merchandising the process as much as the product.
Another example of doing well by doing good? Not sure; Pettigrew spent time talking about the history of furniture making and no time on the company finances.
4. Swapnil Chatuvedi: GreenPad - Virtual Social Games
Chatuvedi opened with a commentary on "the power of social gaming." Farmville, he says, has 150 million users and absorbs 3 billion hours of otherwise productive time per week. From fifth grade on, kids spend upwards of 10,000 hours - the same amount of time they spend in school; enough time to become experts at almost any subject.
Chatuvedi wants to use games to solve real-world problems like "poverty, low graduation rates, obesity, and energy." His company has been developing competitive online environments. In-game behavior models positive real-life behavior. They are working on ways to "mash-up" virtual life and real life behavior. You take action in real life, you get paid in virtual life. Version 1 will focus on energy conservation. Version 2 will be about "healthy living," you get a gym membership in real-life and get one in the game. My son told me yesterday that if he buys candy and soda at 7-11 he can earn Farmville cash. Better get cracking, Mr. Chatuvedi!
5. Muhammed Fazeel: I.C.E. - In Case of Emergency
Fazeel is a third year medical engineering student at UIC. He says that every 29 seconds, an American has a heart attack. Every 60 seconds an American dies from a one, most often not their first. The I.C.E. is a heart monitor device that calls 9-1-1 when a heart attack is detected.
The device consists of two components: a heart monitor on a "comfortable" cloth chest strap and a watch. If the device detects irregular heartbeat or accelerated heart rate, an alarm goes off. If the user doesn't turn off the alarm in 30 seconds, the watch sends GPS coordinates to Emergency Services.
Fazeel described the target market thusly: Diabetics are two-to-four times more likely to have a heart attack. There are 17.9 million American diabetics and they spend, well, a lot of money on heart conditions, something like $53.7B, according to Fazeel, which he would cut down immensely. And it's comfortable, affordable, mobile, and easy to use properly. Just check your cell signal before you have your next heart attack.
Damn, I forgot to put in the Dick Tracy gag.
6. Stephen Cascio: Lock-a-Motion
Everybody's doing a brand-new dance, now: texting and talking while driving. And it's a dance with death! 500,000 people injured. 6,000 deaths. Talking on the cell phone is as dangerous as drunk driving. Texting is eight times more deadly. Laws are being drafted, but people don't always follow these laws. (My pet peeve: people talking on the phone in parking lots, phone to face, despite talking laws.)
Cascio wants to provide an extra warning. Start by using the smart-phone's built-in GPS to require a password to authorize texting while the device is in a moving car. (Evidently so you could still use it if you were the passenger). But eventually, he would like to pair the phone with the car's Bluetooth key, disabling texting when the car was running, or at least providing a powerful warning that only passengers should text while the car is moving. Two suggestions for Mr. Cascio: 1) send to email to parents when the password is entered and 2) have the app automatically dial 9-1-1, following the model of Mr. Fazeel's invention.
7. Matt Christensen: Non-Invasive Blood Glucose Monitoring
Christensen is a 4th year grad student at University of Wisconsin at Madison and a previous winner at the MIT-EF Chicago Whiteboard Challenge. Christensen says that 10% of the U.S. population suffers from diabetes, and that they have to prick their fingers two-to-three times per day to test their blood sugar levels. Americans spend $4 billion on blood testing equipment at $.50 per strip. And your tax dollars go to pay for a good deal of those strips via Medicare!
Christensen says that electrical impedance in the skin is affected by blood glucose levels. He said something about how impedance is a function of voltage and it's actually measuring interstitial fluid, but I'm not a MIT graduate, I just attend the MIT-EF events. All this was to say that a prior device using electrical impedance to measure blood glucose levels failed because it only had two electrodes, but Christensen's design would use many electrodes, going around the finger and providing, he says, an accurate measure. The device would cost $ 500 and last 3 years versus up to $ 1,200 per year for glucose test strips. And no pain of finger-pricks.
I have no idea how viable this idea is, or what existing patents there are. But if I owned a test strip business (or made band-aids), this would be the first project I'd buy out and shut down. It's clearly an anti-capitalist plot to eliminating billions of dollars in government-subsidized profits annually.
8. Seyi Fabode: Power2Switch
Fabode says he saved 30% on his business' electricity rates by bidding out his business to eight brokers. Power2Switch is a free-to-consumers online market for electric power suppliers. Typical customers are worth $60/month (was that profit or revenue?) and customer acquisition cost is in the hundreds of dollars.
Power2Switch provides an online marketplace. They have expertise in SEO and Media Relations, and project a customer acquisition cost in the three to five dollar range. There are over 250,000 meters in the small business segment, which leaves a potential $92 million in commissions and potential revenues of $ 3.2 billion that could go through their system.
9. Joe Sprovieri: Ready Ping
Waiting is lost time. It makes people unhappy. People have to wait in a lot of places: waiting for tables at restaurants, waiting for hotel rooms to be ready, waiting for prescriptions to be filled at the pharmacy are just a few examples. Restaurants in particular have to manage a lot of waiting. Many have invested in vibrating pagers. They buy systems with 40 pagers for around $3,000 and replacement pager units cost between $50 and $90 each. And they lose a lot of pagers.
Not only do they lose pagers, they still have to track the reservations and walk-ins on a waitlist.
Ready Ping offers a simple solution: get rid of the pagers and ping people with an SMS message on their cell phones when their table is ready. Cell phones are ubiquitous (my father-in-law, being the last person on the planet who doesn't carry a cell phone, will have to stay close to hear the call of "hey, mister, your table is ready.") The Ready Ping system manages the waitlist and makes the calls for $49/month plus $.05 per call. They are working on interfaces to popular reservation systems. The system for restaurants is in Beta, with the final production version, developed by Evanston-based Breakthrough Technologies, available soon. Versions tailored to other industries are on the drawing boards.
10. Bill Zangwill: Risky Decision Technologies (http://www.decision-command.com)
"Let's suppose you are involved in making a risky decision," postulates Zangwill, a professor at Chicago Booth School. For example, a major investment decision about buying a company. How do you know if you have assessed all the risks? Do you have biases or blind spots? Should you have anticipated surprises? What is the likelihood that you have missed alternative opportunities?
By feeding your decision-making factors and the options examined for each factor into Zangwill's software, the system will calculate the likelihood of risks, biases, surprises, and missed opportunities in the resulting decision. Zangwill's innovative decision-support system has been years in the making and has an approved patent with fifty claims. Initial tests of the system on major corporate decisions show a rating of 196% better decisions reached 22% faster than the corporate processes alone.
The Winners
First, let me note that I have no idea what the judging criteria were. From the perspective of global potential economic impact, I think that Risky Decision Technologies is the likely leader. From the perspective of having a direct impact helping the most number of people, saving money, discomfort, health and potentially lives, I think Christensen's Non-Invasive Blood Glucose Monitoring was most notable. I'm sure many people with diabetes don't monitor their glucose levels as closely as they should because of the discomfort, and perhaps some people with borderline diabetic conditions could be kept in line with this device as well. Also, as mentioned above, PyroPhase just closed $7M Series-C, so they are winners in any event.
Second, the biggest winners were the people who attended the event. They got to see ten excellent innovative and inspiring speakers provide clear visions for innovative business ideas. This year, most of these are existing businesses, but several were in nascent stages. I hope to work with next year's committee to use social media and micro-blogging to build more excitement around the initial round of entries and, if possible, the evaluation process.
Finally, the judges' decisions:
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Third place, $500: Power2Switch
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Second place, $1,500: I.C.E. (In Case of Emergency)
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First place, $3,000: Ready Ping
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Thanks again to all 96 entrants, the ten finalists, the preliminary judging committee, the celebrity judging panel, the organizing committee, the MIT Enterprise Forum Chicago Chapter leadership and all who participated in events over the year, as speakers and audience. Most especially, thanks to Northwestern University who co-sponsored the event and Ungaretti & Harris who also sponsored this year's MIT-EF events in Chicago.
As always, feel free to contact me with any questions or corrections.
Avery.
Avery J. Cohen
Principal
Metrist Partners
http://www.metristpartners.com
phone: 312.772.5945 | skype: averycohen
linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/averycohen | twitter: @averycohen
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