which won $150,000 for placing first in PLANedu, the inaugural contest held by online angel-investor network Garage.com. Led by a team of four Ph.D. candidates in medical information sciences, pharmaceutical chemistry and biophysics, Quicksilver Genomics aspires to build an application-service-provider platform to help researchers discover drugs based on human genome research. The startup says that by using its computing platform, pharmaceutical and other companies will be able to uncover lead compounds from unclassified gene sequences and turn them into patentable products more quickly.
Contest: Georgia Institute of Technology's DuPree College of Management, Business Plan Competition
Winner: B2Bfast.com
Team: Brian Fortner, Angela McCorkle, Adrienne Rollerson, Adam Schwartzberg, Jay Tramonte, Sarah Trout, Simon Yin
Contact: simonyin@excite.com
Prize: $500 and a spot in the school's Advanced Technology Development Center, an on-campus incubator.
Funding: Looking for $150,000 in seed financing.
Description: The startup is launching a Web marketplace for technology startups, other small businesses and their suppliers. Registered buyers set up a private page to view information on strategic partners and suppliers and to bid on merchandise and services. Likewise, vendor companies set up their own private pages to aggregate information about customers and make bids on contracts. The team expects to have a working prototype by July. Although competitors such as Onvia.com and BizBuyer.com have a substantial foothold in the market, B2Bfast.com believes that it can compete by charging suppliers only when they complete a sale, not when they submit a bid, which is the current practice.
Contest: Harvard Business School, Harvard Business Plan Contest
Winner: Bang Networks
Team: Sarah Boatman, Robert Dreyer, Robert Rosin, Tim Tuttle
Contact: info@bangnetworks.com
Prize: $10,000 in cash and $10,000 in professional services.
Funding: Near to closing first-round funding.
Description: Although Bang is keeping what it's doing under wraps, company officials will say they're building a distributed infrastructure network linked to a broadcast platform to give Internet media companies a "scalable, real-time content-delivery solution." The technology is ready to go, but the team won't say when the launch is expected to happen. Founders include Dreyer, an architect of the Pentium processor; Rosin, a member of the Harvard Business School class of 2000 and a former WebTV program manager at Sony; and Tuttle, an MIT Ph.D. who worked in the university's AI lab. "We've been literally inundated since winning the contest with VCs, people looking for jobs, old friends who saw us on CNN and even real estate agents." Rosin says.
Contest: London Business School, E-Posium business plan competition
Winner: Sibilance
Team: Rana Ganguli, Gregory Garson, Michael Smith
Contact: msmith@london.edu or www.sibilance.com
Prize: $18,200, incubation from E-start.com and technical support from Sun Microsystems.
Funding: Seeking first round of financing.
Description: Sibilance is a personal concierge service for European users of Internet-enabled cell phones and other wireless devices. According to the startup, the online concierge uses preferences from users and their friends, and editorial reviews, in order to recommend restaurants, clubs, bars and pubs. It also will dish up news, train schedules and customized advertising. The startup team includes veterans of Oracle and IBM.
Contest: Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition
Winner: EyeGen
Team: Kiril Alexandrov, Susan Bevers, Zoran Zdraveski
Contact: kiril@bostonbookreview.org or zzz@mit.edu
Prize: Winner receives $30,000.
Funding: Seeking $2.5 million in first-round funding.
Description: In its 11-year history, the MIT contest has spun off 50 companies, including Akamai and FireFly. EyeGen, a 3-month-old Cambridge, Mass.-based firm, was a finalist in two other national competitions.
