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Contest: University of Michigan Business School's Business Plan Competition
Winners: Live e-Care, tied for first place with Eberwhite Data Technologies [see "Wiring the Rust Belt"]
Team: Dax Almendrax, Ken Hung, Jeff Russell
Contact: dax@umich.edu
Prize: $2,000 and a spot in E-lab, the business school's on-campus incubator, which provides a computer server, software and other technical services.
Funding: Closing a seed round, which could include an investment from Michigan's student-run Wolverine Venture Fund.
Description: Live e-Care is an outsourcer of live customer service for Internet retailers. Its workforce will be located in the Philippines, with sales and other functions handled from the U.S.
Contest: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Kenan-Flagler Business School, Venture Capital Investment Competition
Winner: A student investment team from Carnegie Mellon University
Team: Alex Churchill, Don Herzog, Matthew Levy, Rob Rice, Joe Woods
Contact: jwoods@andrew.cmu.edu
Prize: $10,000
Funding: Not applicable
Description: In North Carolina's contest, student teams assume the role of a venture investor and evaluate five real startups. The teams read business plans, sit through company presentations, choose which startup to finance and then defend their choice in front of a panel of venture capital judges. The winning team, from Carnegie Mellon, bested finalists from UCLA and from Emory University. Woods plans to join Mellon Ventures after graduation, other team members' post-grad plans were not available.
Contest: University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business
Winner: Channel IP
Team: Mark Galton, Dan Mader, Monique McCarroll, Scott Sorensen
Contact: info@channelip.com or www.channelip.com
Prize: Plaque
Funding: Currently seeking initial round of $2.5 million.
Description: The Los Angeles startup is launching an online auction marketplace where TV networks, cable operators and Webcasters can bid on satellite transponder bandwidth from satellite firms such as GlobeCAST, PanAmSat and Loral Space & Communications. Channel IP, which plans to make money by collecting transaction fees from bandwidth suppliers, is currently in residence at USC's EC2 Incubator and expects to launch its service this summer.
Contest: University of Texas at Austin, MOOT CORP 2000 World's Leading Business-Plan Competition, Internet
Winner: Global Risk Exchange [from Babson College]
Team: Andrew Berry, John Bowman, Matthew Flanagan, John Rubens
Contact: www.grx.com
Prize: $150,000 in hardware, software and services from Hewlett-Packard.
Funding: Received undisclosed seed financing; now raising first round of venture funding.
Description: The startup is launching a property-casualty commercial insurance exchange to help large corporations interact directly with insurers. Initially, the Providence, R.I.-based company will offer umbrella and excess liability coverage and eventually will expand to other coverage areas.
Contest: Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management, National MBA e-Marketing Competition
Winner: Team Outbreak [from Harvard]
Team: Matt Kohler, Dan Lieberman, Laura Nissenbaum, Christa Sutphin, Tiffany Tan
Contact: dlieberman@mba2001.hbs.edu
Prize: $25,000
Funding: Not applicable
Description: Unlike traditional business-plan competitions, Vanderbilt's contest requires student teams to create an online marketing strategy for an existing brick-and-mortar company, which in this case is Wal-Mart. Team Outbreak, from the Harvard Business School, came up with the winning idea to install stations, which they called "E-Comvenience Centers," within existing Wal-Mart stores where customers who ordered merchandise from the company's Web site can pick up and pay for purchases, make changes to orders and make impulse purchases. Initially, online orders would be fulfilled from in-store merchandise and, eventually, through Wal-Mart distribution centers that would group-ship orders to individual stores for pick-up.
