[Corrected, 1:40 p.m. May 10, 2010] For teams of student entrepreneurs in Boston, early May means one thing: the culmination of the year-long MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, the country’s oldest and most prestigious business plan contest for young startups, and of its even more lucrative spinoff, the $200,000 MIT Clean Energy Prize. Last week, judges chose finalists in each of the five tracks of the $100K competition and narrowed down the clean energy contenders to just five remaining teams. The big winners will be announced at a public finale event at 7:00 p.m. this Wednesday, May 12, at MIT’s Kresge auditorium.

I got to speak with all but one of the final $100K teams (KarDo) and both of the MIT teams vying for the clean energy prize at a cocktail reception and dinner last Friday at the Beacon Street townhouse of Bob Metcalfe, a general partner at Polaris Venture Partners and one of the $100K judges. My big takeaway was that there are no duds among this year’s finalists. In every case I was impressed by the ingenuity and audacity of the teams’ business ideas and the poise and enthusiasm of their members. While the reception wasn’t technically part of the competition, there were judges, VCs, and journalists such as myself on hand—so the teams, mostly composed of graduate students and business school students, knew they were on stage, and breezed through the speeches and networking with professional aplomb.

Below is a quick rundown of the teams and their concepts. One of the five energy contestants will win the $200,000 clean energy prize after one more round of judging on May 11, and if that team is from MIT, it will be back on May 12 to compete with the five track winners for the final $100,000 prize. (No team has ever won both prizes.) The cash for the prizes comes from a group of sponsors including leading technology companies, investment firms, and service providers.

Aukera Therapeutics—finalist, Life Sciences Track. Team leader Meredith Unger, who will finish her MBA at Harvard Business School this year, said Aukera hopes to treat the devastating neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, using a form of angiogenin, a naturally occurring protein that stimulates nerve growth. Researchers at Harvard Medical School have shown that the protein is effective against an ALS-like condition in mice (although the big caveat there is that mouse models of human ALS aren’t especially accurate—the only existing drug for ALS, Sanofi Aventis’s riluzole, doesn’t work on mice at all). Aukera hopes to raise money to take the molecule into human clinical trials. She says the good news is that there’s lots of non-dilutive capital available for such a venture, since a number of foundations and government agencies are interested in finding ALS treatments. Aukera plans to stay small and virtual, outsourcing nearly all of its lab and clinical activities.

Insulin Chewing Gum—finalist, Product and Services Track. Every year, the complexity of existing methods for getting insulin into the body lead to complications or death for millions of people with Type 2 diabetes, according to Manijeh Goldberg, a Sloan Fellow at MIT and Harvard Medical School. Her company has a simple concept: put insulin molecules into chewing gum, attached to nano-particles that promote absorption through the tissues of the mouth and throat. Goldberg is getting help with the technology from Praveen Vemula, a postdoc in the laboratory of Robert Langer protege Jeffrey Karp in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science and Technology. (I first met Vemula at a Kauffman Foundation reception in Kansas City last fall, where he was being honored as one of the first Entrepreneur Postdoctoral Fellows selected by the foundation.) Goldberg says the company’s platform could also be used to deliver energy supplements or painkillers.

KarDo—finalist, Web/IT Track. Co-founder Hariharan Shankar Rahul says big companies with lots of PCs waste billions of dollars in IT administrators’ time every year on repetitive tasks like configuring laptops to operate within virtual private networks. KarDo aims to solve this problem using compiler analysis and machine learning algorithms developed at MIT. The software … Next Page »

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The organizers of the MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, which is celebrating its 20th year in 2010, announced last week the newest addition to their lineup of contests: a $500 Twitter pitch or “Twitch” competition. Anyone can enter by tweeting their business idea in 140 character or less, reserving 11 characters for the required hash tag “#100kTwitch”. Organizers say they’ll judge entries based both on creative quality of the pitches and their “virality”—ideas that get retweeted by Twitter users with lots of followers will earn more points. A winner will be announced May 12. The full rules for the Twitter pitch contest, which will kick off at 9:00 a.m. on April 20, are here.

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On Saturday, I attended the 2nd annual Elevator Pitch Competition (EPC) at MIT—the first leg of the year-long MIT $100K Business Plan Competition. The EPC is all about generating ideas, and over the action-packed day, culminating in an amazing, Rocky-themed finale in the evening, I had the opportunity to hear a lot of them.

The contest was organized in several tracks: Biotech, Development, Energy, Mobile, Products/Services and Web/IT. It works like this: contestants pitch a business idea in less than 60 seconds (the length of a hypothetical elevator ride with a hypothetical potential investor) in front of the audience and a panel of judges. After the pitch, there’s a 3-minute Q&A period in which contestants can clarify the business idea and receive feedback.

Saturday’s winner took home more than $5,000 (not too bad for a 60-second delivery). When I competed last year I took home some great experience, but no cash.

This year there were more 150 entries from a number of different universities (MIT, Harvard, Dartmouth, etc.). The event was a success, with a fully packed and energetic auditorium at MIT Stata Center during the final round. The quality of the pitches was excellent considering how early in the year it is, and most important, most people were able to keep it to 60 seconds! Among the judges there were several venture capitalists and entrepreneurs who were mainly weighing the quality of the pitch, the market opportunity, and the product/solution. Jean Hammond, angel investor and judge mentioned “I thought it was particularly interesting that two presentations were focused on how to bring extra features to folks like the elderly, and also on how to enhance new technologies in the Third World environments.”

Here are some of the great ideas that made it into the final:

—Yinan Du pitched a Chinese marketplace for fans and celebrities, where fans bid to converse with celebrities (using video-chat technology). 80 percent of the final price is donated to a charity selected by the celebrity.

—Philip Shaltis pitched a continuous blood pressure monitor for diagnosis of high blood pressure. Current diagnostic methods are based on a single measurement under doctor supervision. However, single measurements might not be representative of the patient’s normal state. Shaltis proposed a device worn on the wrist that collects this information continuously so the patient’s medication is based on what he really needs.

—Hayden Taylor pitched a software solution to reduce the costs of the design process of semiconductor microfabrication.

—Anoop Rao pitched a 10 cent sensor that reports health conditions of people in African towns, who live far away from medical centers. The sensor can be attached to a prepaid postcard, so medical centers can remotely identify problems.

—Paul Suthapong pitched a nanomaterial technology that recycles plastic into a nano-film that improves energy efficiency of windows (e.g., for homes or cars).

The winner of the competition was Riccardo Signorelli, a fifth year PhD student at MIT, who pitched a new energy-storage technology which improves the energy density up to 5 times compared to existing ultracapacitors. By providing 10 times more power than batteries, the technology also improves charge and discharge ability. Riccardo believes that this can be applied to wind and solar farms to improve quality output by preventing voltage and frequency fluctuation to the grid. This is a $20 billion market and if he can build a great team around the technology he pitched, I am sure he will be successful. The pitch was very well delivered, so it is no wonder why he also got the $500 audience award—using the Poll Everywhere real-time SMS polling product—with 70 percent of the votes of the audience!

For a wannabe entrepreneur like me it was an excellent place to meet and network with over 300 people interested in starting new ventures who attended the event. During the breaks and dinner time it was very easy to chat and meet other potential entrepreneurs willing to find teams and ideas to start companies; or people just seeking feedback for their initial business idea. I met plenty of interesting people and exchanged many business cards.

One of the most interesting things to observe was how people become interested in entrepreneurship simply by attending an event like this and feeling the energy from all of the other entrepreneurs.

Do you want in on the action? The next business idea competition is the MIT $100K Executive Summary Contest (last year I won this one), with a submission deadline on the 4th of December. Check out http://www.mit100k.org for more details!

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Diagnostics-For-All, a non-profit venture aiming to provide low-cost diagnostic tools to global health workers, won the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition last night.

It’s been a week of business plan and entrepreneurship prizes, as we have chronicled in a series of articles. But the 19-year-old 100K competition is the granddaddy of them all. Organizers say the event has spurred the creation of more than 85 companies with a combined market capitalization of $10 billion-plus—and it has trained hundreds of other would-be entrepreneurs. All teams have to include at least one MIT member.

This year, the competition took on a new form, splitting into seven industry tracks: astro/aerospace, biotech, development, energy, mobile, products and services, and Web 2.0/IT. Last night the seven track winners (see list below), each of which took home at least 10K for winning its sector, vied for the grand prize.

Diagnostics-For-All, built around patent-pending technology developed in the lab of Harvard professor (and Xconomist) George Whitesides—himself a highly successful serial entrepreneur—is out to create a “new generation of diagnostic devices microfabricated and patterned in paper,” according to a press release. The technology is meant to enable tools for diagnosing ailments including liver, kidney, and metabolic diseases that are easy to use, cheap, portable, and disposable—and therefore well suited for use in the developing world. Judges picking the venture as the competition’s best included Desh Deshpande, co-founder and chairman of Sycamore Networks, and Bob Metcalfe of Polaris Venture partners.

Another winner last night was Covalent Solar, which had already won the energy track of the competition. Based on its live elevator pitch, the team took home the $10,000 prize for audience favorite—as measured by cell phone voting.

Here’s our list of track winners and their prizes:

Mobile — Ubitrack ($35,000)

Energy — Covalent Solar ($20,000)

Astro/Aero — InAct Labs ($10,000)

Biotech — Diagnostics-for-All ($10,000)

Development — ClickDiagnostics ($20,000)

Web 2.0/IT — CyberAnalytix ($10,000)

Products and Services — MyFaktory ($10,000)

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What will be the next great Internet company? Will it be a firm developing technology for online video guides, or one with a new way to assess and manage Web security risks? Maybe it will be a company mining customer data for small and medium-sized businesses, one building an online ad management system for Chinese video publishers, or one with a way to make clothes shopping more appealing for men.

The team behind that last idea, Project Einstein, claimed their venture really was the “next great” one when they pitched it in the Web track finals of the MIT 100K Entrepreneurship Competition, which will announce its overall winner tonight. But, of course, picking out one winning team isn’t the point. The real aim, and this sometimes seems to get lost in the competition hoopla, isn’t to spur the one next great company (or even a few), but to produce scores of great future entrepreneurs by introducing them to the entrepreneurial process—including focusing on market opportunities, forming teams, developing business plans, and pitching before real VCs and other experts. As Ken Morse, managing director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, poetically puts it: “It is an educational process which infects hundreds of students and faculty with the entrepreneurial virus. The virus takes hold at different times for different people…[and] for every successful company there are a hundred teams born with deep-fired burnings, waiting to be launched at the right time in the future.”

This year, for the first time, contest organizers opened some of that process—the finals of a few tracks—to journalists. Om Malik from GigaOm sat in on the Mobile track, and a reporter from Technology Review observed biotech while I was watching the Web 2.0 pitches (Erik, meanwhile, visited the semi-finals of the 200K Energy Prize competition, a close affiliate of the 100K event).

The Web 2.0 finalists made their pitches in a conference room at Polaris Venture Partners in Waltham, MA, where the group of judges was chaired by Polaris general partner Sim Simeonov (who has his own blog here and will no doubt soon be writing about the 100K as well). The other judges present were: Stan Fung, managing director of FarSight Ventures; Jon Gworek of Morse, Barnes-Brown & Pendleton; John Pyrovolakis, of the Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurship’s Innovation Network Initiative; and entrepreneur Marcus Ruark, founder of Optiant.

To protect confidential team information, I am keeping my comments high-level, but here are the main things I took home:

My first impression was a reinforcement of what I had already thought—the contest is a great training ground, as opposed to a proving ground. People seem to want to view the winners as real businesses, and the losers as falling short of this goal. In truth, the teams are mostly all pretty raw, and not as close to real businesses as they might think. But just because only one wins doesn’t mean the runners-up aren’t in the end more viable enterprises.

Simeonov explains that judges can’t even attempt to judge 100K teams by the same standards they would use to evaluate a real business. By the time of our session, judges had only seen the teams on paper, and had provided some written feedback in advance of the finals. Now was their first time to see a live pitch. Teams had far less time to make their pitches—20 minutes each (including answering questions), in contrast to maybe an hour in a real VC meeting. All told, Simeonov says, he normally spends 10 hours or more with entrepreneurs and another 40 to 50 hours in due diligence before picking a “winner” to fund. For the 100K, judges had more like 40 to 50 minutes.

A couple other thoughts I jotted down during the presentations:

—While I probably wouldn’t invest in any of the company ideas if I even had the money and wasn’t a journalist who doesn’t make any investments in what he covers, I would invest in every person I saw. (Anyone need a job?).

—The judges were far kinder than they would be in a real venture setting. For starters, not a one noticeably looked … Next Page »

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The pot of prize money available to students and entrepreneurs with innovative ideas about commercializing clean-energy technologies just got a lot bigger.

MIT, the U.S. Department of Energy, and local electric utility NSTAR announced today that they’re collaborating to offer a new $200,000 cash prize for the best idea for a business supporting a technology, product, or service in the clean-energy sector. The “MIT Clean Energy Entrepreneurship Prize” competition, or CEEP—which has a February 15 entry deadline—is open to all student teams, not just MIT students, as well as teams from early-stage startups, as long as they haven’t yet received any venture funding. (Each team must include at least one U.S. citizen.) The sponsors define clean energy technologies as those that increase the diversity of energy supply, increase energy efficiency, or reduce environmental impacts such as greenhouse gas emissions.

“It’s such a much bigger prize than anything else out there,” says Bill Aulet, a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Entrepreneur in Residence at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center (and an Xconomist) who is advising the competition organizers. “But it’s not just a big carrot that we’re offering. It’s also bright lights and a large stage. That’s why MIT is involved—people perceive us as being honest brokers.”

The new energy prize is an offshoot of two existing business competitions, the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition and the Ignite Clean Energy Business Presentation Competition. Xconomy reported in October that the two organizations planned to combine resources and announce a new prize; CEEP is it.

At the same time, the MIT $100K competition (which is open only to teams that include at least one MIT student) is being divided into eight separate tracks, including energy, mobile technology, Web 2.0, consumer products, biotechnology, aerospace, technologies for the developing world, and “other.” The judging process for CEEP, ICE, and the energy track of the MIT $100K competition (which is expected to amount to between $20,000 and $50,000 in cash and in-kind prizes) will be integrated, according to Aulet, and all teams will receive coaching, team-building help, and other forms of mentorship as the competition proceeds.

According to background materials released today by CEEP organizers, entrants will be judged based on their chances of creating a successful new venture—which will depend, in turn, on the strength of the team they’ve assembled, whether they’ve focused on an attractive market opportunity, whether they have a strong execution plan, and whether they have a competitive advantage (technological or otherwise). Teams will not be judged simply on whether they have a “cool technology” at the core of their business or whether their proposal is likely to attract venture funding. Prize winners will be announced in May.

Organizers expect that at least 100 to 150 teams will throw their hats into the ring for the unified competition, whose overall mission is to accelerate the pace of energy innovation and entrepreneurship. “Our customers are looking to meet their energy needs in the cleanest, most efficient way possible and that requires innovation,” said NSTAR chairman, president and CEO Tom May in a statement about the new prize. “We want to help these entrepreneurs get their great ideas and possible solutions to the nation’s energy needs off the drawing boards and into the homes and businesses of our customers.”

In two widely-read essays for the Xconomist Forum (What’s Wrong with Energy Investing? Part 1 and What’s Wrong with Energy Investing? Part 2), Aulet has argued that energy entrepreneurs face a wider variety of challenges than those in most other technology fields, including a shortage of support for early-stage technologies. He says the CEEP award will help to reverse that. “It’s hard be an energy entrepreneur,” Aulet says. “But people know that there is a huge shortage of funding and support here, and now DOE and NSTAR are willing to put up some money and say ‘This is what we need to do.’”

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On Monday the organizers of MIT’s famous $100K business plan competition unveiled the M Prize, a new award specifically for teams submitting plans in the area of content or services for mobile devices. The amount of the prize hasn’t been announced, but teams (which must include at least one MIT student) can get a head start in the competition by submitting a summary of their business plans to the Executive Summary Competition by November 29; the best summary for a mobile startup will receive $1,000 at a December awards ceremony, according to Ajay Kulkarni, an MBA student at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and organizer of the M Prize. “The idea of the prize is to make Boston the number-one city in the country for mobile entrepreneurship,” Kulkarni says. “The competition is not just about evaluating ideas, but about giving teams access to the capital and the people and experience they need” to build a successful business.

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