For the fourteenth year in a row, the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange—far better known as MITX (pronounced my-tex)—handed out its Interactive Awards tonight, in a sold-out ceremony at the Marriott Copley Place Hotel in Boston. The awards honor the most creative digital advertising and marketing campaigns devised by companies and agencies in the New England region.

The evening’s spotlight shined with extra sparkles on Dunkin’ Donuts, which won the title Interactive Marketer of the Year. The award was partly in recognition of “Create Dunkin’ Donuts’ Next Donut,”  a website where donut lovers can literally design potential donut shapes, flavors, and decorations for next-generation pastries. (The 2009 winner: “Toffee For Your Coffee,” a classic toroid donut with sour cream dough, a glaze covering, and a chopped Heath Bar topping.)

Dunkin’ Donuts also won in the “Best Cross Media Campaign” category of the MITX awards. “Being named MITX Interactive Marketer of the Year is wonderful honor and a great thrill,” said Cynthia Ashworth, Dunkin’ Donuts’ vice president of consumer engagement, in a prepared statement. “Along with our loyal fan base, we’re excited about the seemingly endless possibilities within interactive and are intent on continuing to make strides in this area.”

Of course, many other companies and interactive marketing agencies also took home awards, in categories ranging from “Best Use of Social Media” to best biotechnology/pharmaceutical campaign. The full list of honorees is below.

We asked MITX Presidentt Kiki Mills to sum up some of the trends she perceived in this year’s awards, especially the technology-related changes. She sent along the following thoughts:

“Social networks are not a discrete category anymore. Social functionality is now showing up in the most mundane applications, reinforcing the notion that marketers of every stripe recognize that the days of the one-way conversation are over. While many are still unsure how to effectively leverage social technologies to effectively support their messaging, there is a clear realization that there is some evolving role for this fast moving area.

“Video and other rich media are also an increasingly large component of many sites (supporting yesterday’s announcement from Brightcove of their lower cost Brightcove Express solution).

“Campaigns have matured in that they are much more user/use-case driven than in the past. Moving forward, we’re more likely to see analytics framing the creative—focusing campaigns on critical behaviors to influence, shaping what the costs and execution have to be to justify themselves in the face of the likely numbers.

“There is an increasing willingness of companies to experiment and include these technologies. Particularly with tech now so much [more] affordable, it’s easy to work a variety of things into a campaign.”

And finally: “The interactive industry in general has matured to the point where even small companies with (presumably) modest budgets are delivering high quality Web experiences.” (Thanks Kiki!)

Continue to page 2 for the full list of MITX Interactive Award Winners (including project, agency/creator, and client). …Next Page »

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It must be Clean Energy Week in Boston, judging from all of the trophies, plaques, and award checks being handed out to the region’s energy and cleantech innovation leaders. We wanted to tell you about the winners in two of this week’s biggest events: the MIT Enterprise Forum’s Ignite Clean Energy Prize business plan competition finals, held at the State House on November 10, and the New England Clean Energy Council’s Green Tie Gala, held at the John F. Kennedy Library last night.

The big winners in the Ignite Clean Energy Prize competition—the fifth annual iteration of the event, sponsored this year by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center—were the following:

Grand Prize: IntAct Labs of Cambridge, MA, which is developing microbial fuel cells and protein-based biosensors and photovoltaic devices. IntAct walked away with $150,000 in cash and in-kind prizes from Mintz Levin, CHT Group, the UMass Dartmouth Applied Technology and Manufacturing Center, and T3 Advisors.

Second Place: InnoSepra Coal, which is developing lower-cost ways to capture the carbon dioxide emitted by coal combustion at power plants, and using the captured CO2 in oil and gas exploration.

Third Place: EGG Energy, which is building rental “solar stations” for recharging batteries in poor, rural regions of Africa.

“Each year, we see a variety of technologies and people participate in ICE – each team beginning the competition with brilliant ideas and completing the process with real market impact,” said Clark Waterfall, chair of the competition and managing director at Boston Based BSG Team Ventures, in a press statement about the awards. “This year is no different and I congratulate the IntAct team on their victory and I congratulate all of the teams for playing a role in strengthening the clean tech industry.”

I was all dressed up last night and ready to go to NECEC’s Green Tie Gala, but was stopped in my tracks by car trouble, of all things. Guess it’s time to get a Prius! Here’s a rundown of the awards that I didn’t get to see handed out:

Breakout Company of the Year: EnerNOC, for “achieving an inflection point in revenue growth and establishing itself as both an industry leader and a market-maker.” (2008 winner: A123Systems)

Emerging Company of the Year: QD Vision, for “exiting its development phase with tremendous momentum.” (2008 winner: Aspen Aerogels)

Employer of the Year: American Superconductor, for “growing its workforce by a substantial margin, and providing good, high-paying jobs to its community.” (2008 winner: GT Solar)

Corporate Citizen of the Year: Millipore, for “its adoption of clean energy technology and energy efficiency measures in order to reduce its carbon footprint.” (2008 winner: Staples)

Clean Energy Hall of Fame Inductee: Steve Cowell, CEO of Conservation Services Group, for “his dedication to clean energy, and truly setting an example for others to follow.” (2008 winner: Mark Farber)

Council Leadership Awards: Kevin Doyle from GreenEconomy and Wanda Reindorf from Conservation Services Group—the co-chairs of NECEC’s Workforce Development Group—for “their outstanding leadership in the support of Council activities.”

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The Department of Energy this morning announced that FloDesign Wind Turbine of Wilbraham, MA, and five other Massachusetts startups and laboratories are among the 37 companies and organizations awarded research and development grants under the department’s new Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program. FloDesign has tentatively been awarded $8,325,400 to advance its research on radical new designs for electricity-generating wind turbines.

The other local winners include 1366 Technologies of Lexington, MA, Agrivida of Medford, MA, FastCAP Systems of Cambridge, MA, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Sun Catalytix, also of Cambridge. Massachusetts organizations won $33.3 million in all, or 22 percent of the overall funds awarded, making the Bay State the largest recipient by far of the ARPA-E funds. United Technologies Research Center of East Hartfort, CT, was awarded $2.25 million, bringing the New England total to nearly $36 million.

“I think the fact that Massachusetts organizations received over 22 percent of the money allocated by the DOE is clear testament to how fast the region’s cleantech cluster has grown, and to how much of an economic impact it will provide in the future,” says Nick d’Arbeloff, president of the New England Clean Energy Council, a Cambridge, MA-based non-profit working to boost the region’s cleantech economy. “Companies like FloDesign, 1366, Agrivida and Sun Catalytix represent the future of high technology in the Commonwealth.”

[Update 10/27/09: Massachusetts also has a plausible claim as the home to the top grant winner in the competition, Foro Energy, which will receive just over $9.1 million. As Xconomy reported last night, the Littleton, CO-based startup, which is developing a new drilling technology for tapping geothermal energy deep in the Earth, was originally launched in the Boston area and is funded by Waltham, MA-based North Bridge Venture Partners.]

FloDesign CEO Stanley Kowalski says his company learned about its award this morning in an e-mailed letter from the Energy Department.

“It will accelerate to market what is inherently a risky endeavor,” Kowalski says. “Or at least, it’s been risky in the past because of the many false starts by others. This will allow us to put the proper money into research and development, which is the most capital-intensive phase, and will hopefully help us to get out to market with a reliable turbine.”

FloDesign is building and testing wind turbines with an unusual tube-like design reminiscent of a jet engine. The company says this design allows it to capture more of the energy in wind than a conventional free-bladed wind turbine can. Though the startup has tried to remain stealthy, it has been in the spotlight almost since its beginning—it won a $200,000 grand prize in the MIT Clean Energy Prize competition in May 2008, and later scored an investment from prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

FloDesign shared a copy of its notification letter from the Energy Department, which said the company’s application was “among those of the very highest scientific and technical merit, and is part of an ARPA-E portfolio of high impact projects that have great potential to revolutionize the U.S. energy sector.” A total of $151 million was handed out to the 37 organizations on today’s list, who are all finalists in a competition launched last spring as part of a $400 million boost to Federal energy spending contained in the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, colloquially known as the stimulus bill.

The $8.3 million awarded to FloDesign is the third-largest amount awarded today, after Foro Energy’s $9.1 million and an award to Dupont of Wilmington, DE, of $9 million.

The ARPA-E grant will make a big difference to FloDesign, Kowalski says. “It’s a sizeable investment, and I think it’s indicative of where we are and the capabilities of the team we’ve got on board,” he says. “We continue to recruit world class talent and we certainly have a radically different turbine that nobody has ever attempted to commercialize in the past. The support from ARPA-E will allow us to fund that appropriately for the R&D effort that’s approaching.”

1366 Technologies was awarded $4 million in the competition. Agrivida will get $4.6 million, FastCAP Systems will get $5.3 million, MIT will get $6.9 million, and Sun Catalytix will get $4.1 million. The full list of awardees is here; the Department of Energy said it selected the 37 winners from an initial pool of more than 3,600 concepts, from which the department requested 300 full applications. The exact amount of each award will be determined in final negotiations between the department and the winning organizations.

The 37 ARPA-E winners hail from 17 states. The department said that 43 precent are small businesses, 35 percent are educational institutions, and 19 percent are large corporations.

In a statement on the awards, Energy Secretary Stephen Chu said, “After World War II, America was the unrivaled leader in basic and applied sciences. It was this leadership that led to enormous technological advances. ARPA-E is a crucial part of the new effort by the U.S. to spur the next Industrial Revolution in clean energy technologies, creating thousands of new jobs and helping cut carbon pollution.”

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Seattle-based Delve Networks won the “best presenting company” award from the attendees of the first annual Angel Capital Expo, hosted by Keiretsu Forum Northwest on Tuesday. More than a dozen companies across different fields presented to investors, including Humanity Interactive, Iverson Genetic Diagnostics, and Exro Technologies. Delve Networks started in 2006 (formerly called Pluggd) and makes video hosting and searching software.

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Seattle-area startup Findood, an online marketplace for specialty foods, took first prize at the Northwest Entrepreneur Network’s First Look Forum on Wednesday. The other four finalists were Dibspace, DigitalScirocco, Geedra, and HeatFlow Technologies. Also presenting to investors were Aurumis, CoCollage, Glue, Greenbridge International, PodCurry, Re:Source Fitness, and Serra Media. Findood won a package from Swift HR, office furniture, and a year of free office space from WRF Capital.

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The Oregon Entrepreneurs Network (OEN) announced the winners of its 2009 Tom Holce Entrepreneurship Awards on Thursday night. Ray King, founder and CEO of Portland, OR-based AboutUs, won the award for individual achievement. The award for development-stage company of the year went to Portland-based Jama Software. Portland-based Monsoon and Medford, OR-based Motorcycle Superstore won in the “working capital” and “growth” company categories, respectively.

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The results of last Thursday’s investment forum organized by the Zino Society are still wafting through the Seattle business community. Six finalists were chosen for two $50,000 investment prizes—Photon Machines, Enroute, and Giftango in the “tech” category, and MicroGreen Polymers, Harbor Wing, and Zero Crossing in the “non-tech” category. Zino founder and CEO Cathi Hatch tells me her team will have to select the two winners more quickly than expected, probably by the end of this month, because some of the finalists are getting ready to close outside investment rounds.

The Zino Society has invested close to $13 million of angel financing in startups over its four-year lifetime as a business-social network that connects investors with entrepreneurs. Investor members vote on the companies, and the fund makes investments from a common pool. Hatch says one of her key takeaways from last week’s investment forum is that the passion of entrepreneurs is crucial to a broader economic recovery. “Innovation is really what’s going to help drag us out of the doldrums,” she says. And the 28 presenters from the Zino forum are the “poster children” for innovation, she adds.

Hatch also told me some intriguing tales from Zino’s history. Having a nose for this sort of thing, I thought a few of the piquant tidbits could be turned into somewhat unconventional lessons for any startup venture. In fairness to Hatch, she did not lay them out as lessons in entrepreneurship, so these takeaways are strictly mine:

1. Don’t be afraid to change course.

Hatch says she originally started Zino with the idea that it would be about wine investments. People could invest in wineries, software involved in tracking wines, and so forth. Hatch asked one of her angel investors to help develop a logo, which to this day has a grapevine running through it (see image above). “Before we got to our first investment meeting, I decided this makes no sense,” Hatch says. “If someone invests in a winery, they’re not going to invest in a second winery. They’re going to want to diversify.” At Zino’s first investment forum, only one pitch had to do with wine. Since then, the group has been open to all kinds of startups—though wine remains a peripheral theme to Zino’s events (more on that below).

2. Don’t label yourself prematurely.

At last year’s Zino Zillionaire investment forum, presenting companies were asked to sort themselves by “tech” versus “non-tech.” One company gave itself a non-tech appellation, and didn’t win an award—but Hatch says the investors would have voted for it had it been in the tech category. So at this year’s forum, Zino uncorked the categories and let the investors decide for themselves. There was no hard-and-fast rule, but “non-tech” ended up including companies focused on materials technology and physical products.

3. Do choose your name wisely.

I asked Hatch where the name Zino came from. She says she used to be in the restaurant business, where names are particularly crucial. Names that start with “Z” are good because people remember them, she says. Hard vowels are preferable as well. Lastly, Zino rhymes with “vino,” which takes us back to the original idea behind the group. At its forums, receptions, and dinners, Zino often invites wine makers to attend and serve their featured vintages. At last week’s forum, the attending wineries (all from Washington state) were JLC Winery, 428 Wines, and San Juan Vineyards. As David Brent would say, el vino did flow.

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The Seattle-based investor and entrepreneur network Zino Society hosted its fourth annual Zino Zillionaire Investment Forum today at the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Seattle. The event drew 28 companies, some in technology and some non-tech, each making a pitch for a chance to win one of two $50,000 investment prizes.

Here are the six finalists in the two categories, announced by the Zino Society at a reception this afternoon:

Technology—Photon Machines, Enroute, and Giftango.
(I wrote about Portland, OR-based Giftango raising $500,000 from the Oregon Angel Fund earlier this week.)

Non-technology—MicroGreen Polymers, Harbor Wing, and Zero Crossing.
(Luke profiled Arlington, WA-based MicroGreen earlier this summer, when the company raised $1.6 million from WRF Capital and local angel investors.)

The winner of each category, who will receive $50,000, will be announced in late October, after Zino Society members perform due digilence on the finalists. Stay tuned…

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Four companies from Washington state have been selected to a list of the world’s 100 most promising private cleantech firms. That’s according to a report released yesterday, in a joint effort by The Guardian (the UK-based newspaper) and the Cleantech Group, a global company that provides research, data, and advisory services for the clean technology industry.

The Washington results are not too shabby—especially for a state that has been perceived as trailing other parts of the country in terms of cleantech venture investment, alternative energy policy, and expertise. We’ve been hearing a lot about those issues from experts like Jesse Berst of Redmond, WA-based Global Smart Energy and Michael Butler of Seattle’s Cascadia Capital. While the latest news won’t do much to stem any criticism (nor should it necessarily), it does provide some recognition for the local cleantech scene.

The Global Cleantech 100 list “recognizes companies at the forefront of cleantech innovation offering solutions to some of the planet’s most pressing environmental challenges,” according to the Cleantech Group’s website. The companies were selected by a process involving hundreds of international experts on cleantech innovation, venture capital, and entrepreneurship (check out the methodology here). Cleantech, by their broad definition, spans the fields of energy generation, storage, infrastructure, and efficiency, as well as transportation, water and wastewater, air and environment, materials, manufacturing, agriculture, and recycling and waste.

The four Washington companies span energy generation (solar and geothermal), energy efficiency, and software. We’ve covered all of these companies this year at Xconomy, and here’s a bit about each one:

—AltaRock Energy, based in Sausalito, CA, and Seattle. This geothermal company was founded in Seattle in 2007, and plans to artificially engineer reservoirs of hot water deep underground and extract steam energy as it rises to the surface, as we reported last summer. AltaRock hit a snag in recent weeks when it had to suspend drilling of a well in Northern California due to geological problems, but says it is continuing to develop its technology and look for alternate drilling sites. The company is backed by Vulcan Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Khosla Ventures, Google.org, and others.

—Infinia, based in Kennewick, WA. This solar power company makes devices that capture and focus sunlight, and then harness the concentrated heat (using a Stirling engine) to generate electricity, as Luke reported in a recent company profile. The strategy is complementary to traditional solar cells and photovoltaics. Infinia has been around since the 1960s, but has focused on solar since 2005. It is backed by Vulcan Capital, Khosla Ventures, Idealab, and other prominent investors.

—Powerit Solutions, based in Seattle. This energy-efficiency company, originally from Sweden, has been in Seattle since 2002. It makes hardware and software to reduce energy consumption and costs in industrial facilities like steel mills and manufacturing plants, as Rachel reported this summer. In May, Powerit raised $6 million led by Siemens Venture Capital and ArcelorMittal’s Clean Technology Fund, with @Ventures and Expansion Capital Partners also participating. Some of its customers include Ikea, Benton Foundry, Stockholm Airport, and the San Jose Mercury News.

—Verdiem, based in Seattle. This cleantech software firm, founded in 2001 and backed by Kleiner Perkins and other investors, focuses on energy efficiency and management in the corporate IT world. Its personal computer power-management software has been installed on more than one million desktops, and its customer base has doubled in the past year to include more than 300 corporations, government agencies, and universities. We’ve reported on Verdiem’s progress in demonstrating energy and cost savings to companies, as well as its broader strategy in cleantech-meets-IT from CEO Jeremy Jaech.

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Five researchers from the University of Washington and Washington State University, Vancouver, working together with Washington companies, received a total of $376,454 in state funding through Washington Technology Center, according to an announcement today.  The university researchers are working with property data solutions company Data Data in Vancouver; biomaterials firm Healionics in Redmond; pressure instrumentation manufacturer Paine Electronics in East Wenatchee; nanostructure material builder Modumetal in Seattle; and medical simulator developer Simulab, also in Seattle.

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The Pacific Northwest chapter of the Clean Tech Open, a nonprofit organization, announced 12 semifinalists in its business plan competition at an event at Puget Sound Energy in Bellevue, WA, last week. The companies will compete for regional prizes of up to $50,000, and a national prize of up to $250,000. The semifinalists are Clarian Technologies, Extreme Caps, GoNano, Green Lite Motors, Hydrovolts, InnovaTek, LivinGreen Materials, NHThree, Pangreen, Shorepower Technologies, Soluxra, and Veranda Solar.

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The Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange, an organization of 7,500 New England professionals in the Internet and digital marketing and advertising fields, handed out its yearly Technology Awards for the sixth time last night.

Meant to celebrate the local companies who are bringing the most innovative technologies to bear on real business problems, the awards covered 10 technical categories such as gaming, mobile technology, rich media, and devices, plus four general “Best Of” categories including customer impact, sector impact, usability, and “overall solution.” (See the full list of winners at the end of this article.)

Kiki Mills, the executive director of MITX, kicked off the 90-minute awards ceremony with a few results from the organization’s second annual survey of the Internet business and marketing industry. “The key finding is that we are big and we matter,” Mills said. The industry will contribute $28 billion to New England’s gross domestic product this year, she said, representing a 20 percent increase over 2008. The sector covers 2,100 companies employing a collective 69,000 people, Mills said. Given numbers like those, she said, there’s a need to bring more visibility to the region’s technology achievements—which is what the MITX Technology Awards are designed to do.

The winners in each category were chosen from a list of at least three finalists; the finalists had themselves been selected from a much larger pool of applicants by a group of about 60 volunteer judges from the local infotech sector. (Full disclosure: I was a judge for the mobile category.) The complete list of 2009 finalists is here.

Three companies—LogMeIn, Swaptree, and Vitality—achieved double honors, winning both in their technical categories and in the “Best Of” categories.

And four young companies were named as PricewaterhouseCoopers Promise Award winners, a new category created this year to honor companies under two years old whose technologies may not be fully deployed but nonetheless show significant potential. I’m proud to say that Xconomy spotted all of these companies before the MITX judges did, as our pieces on Crimson Hexagon, SCVNGR, Virtual Computer, and Wordstream attest. (See this March article for background on the creation of the promise awards.)

A highlight of the evening was the induction of Helen Greiner, the co-founder of iRobot and the founder of DroidWorks (as well as an Xconomist), into MITX’s Innovation Hall of Fame. In a lighthearted acceptance speech, Greiner joked that the only way she thought she’d ever be on the same list with previous Hall of Fame inductees, such as Amar Bose, Bob Metcalfe, and Ray Ozzie, was “in the phonebook.” Greiner said that Boston “has been on the bleeding edge of innovation since Bunker Hill,” from the American Revolution to the Industrial Revolution to the computer revolution and, of course, the robot revolution. After briefly recounting the history of iRobot, which is famous for both military and consumer robots, Greiner said she looks forward to continuing to innovate at DroidWorks, which will focus on unmanned aerial vehicles.

Without further ado, the list of MITX Technology Award winners:

Analytics and Business Intelligence: Oco

Cloud Computing: Pixily

Devices: Vitality

Enterprise Technologies: VidSys

Gaming: Turbine

Marketing and Customer Relationship Technologies: Affinnova

Mobile: LogMeIn

Online Advertising: ScanScout

Rich Media: EveryZing

Social Media: Swaptree

“Best Of” Award, Customer Impact: LogMeIn

“Best Of” Award, Usability: Vitality

“Best Of” Award, Sector Impact: Netezza, Ember Systems

“Best Of” Award, Overall Solution: Swaptree

PricewaterhouseCoopers Promise Awards:

Social Media: Crimson Hexagon

Gaming: SCVNGR

Cloud Computing: Virtual Computer

Online Advertising: Wordstream

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Seattle-based Rogue Sheep, a software development and consulting firm, has won an Apple Design Award for its iPhone App, Postage. The news was announced this week at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, and reported by the Seattle Times. Postage lets you create customized electronic postcards.

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Ernst & Young has named Quake Global CEO Polina Braunstein as its San Diego regional High Technology Entrepreneur of the year. Quake Global makes palm-sized satellite transponders for tracking purposes. Ernst &Young issued awards to San Diego entrepreneurs in seven other categories for 2009: Master Entrepreneur, CEO Les Cross of DJO Inc.; Emerging Entrepreneur, CEO Jeff Goldberg and COO Tanner Haigwood of Cali Bamboo; Turnaround Entreprener, President Jose Luis Paparte of PriceSmart; Health Sciences Entrepreneur, Chairman and CEO Alexis Lukianov of NuVasive; Consumer Business Products and Services, CEO Jeffrey McCain of McCain. In addition, Ernest Rady of American Assets has been honored for Lifetime Achievement.

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A biotechnology company aiming to revolutionize early-stage cancer screening last night won the UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge. Biological Dynamics, led by bioengineering PhD student and CEO Raj Krishnan and his fellow graduate students David Charlot and Roy Lefkowitz, took home the $40,000 first prize.

Biological Dynamics has developed a screening tool that identifies secondary cancer biomarkers such as free circulating DNA from unnatural cell death. Krishnan’s technology helps to detect signs of early stage tumors with a cost-effective blood test that takes less than 30 minutes and shows signs of almost every cancer type, according to the already much-awarded team.

Medical device company Tritonics, which has a solution to treat clogging in implanted catheters, came in second. Third prize was given to Radiofast, which is creating new integrated circuits technology for medical and security imaging.

In addition, the best entries in five categories got $2,000 each. They were Biological Dynamics (Biotech/Life Sciences), Radiofast (Hi-Tech/IT), Profile UST (CleanTech), The Nicholas Conor Institute (Social Entrepreneurship), and Cyrotrace Solutions (Undergraduate).

The UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge is a student-run competition now in its third year. Each of the 70 competing teams had to have at least one active company team member who is a UCSD or affiliate student or recent graduate.

Last fall, teams had to present their business concept, and during the winter quarter they went head-to-head in an executive summary competition. The spring quarter culminated Monday night with business plan presentations.

Judges for the final round included Mary Ann Beyster, president of the Foundation for Enterprise Development; biotech entrepreneur, venture investor, and Xconomist Larry Bock; SDSU College of Business dean Gail Naughton; Connect CEO Duane Roth; Mission Ventures managing partner Leo Spiegel; and UCSD’s Rady School of Management’s founding dean Robert Sullivan.

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Seattle-area software startups AdReady, Swype, and TeachStreet won “best in show” at the Washington Technology Industry Association’s Fast Pitch Forum and Tech Showcase yesterday. The winners, selected from 23 presenting companies, were voted on by the audience. The prizes include tickets to Safeco Field.

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I had the pleasure of attending the 2009 WTIA Tech Showcase Fast Pitch Forum yesterday. I was one of four panelists tasked with listening, reacting, and asking questions of the 23 Seattle-area companies that each had eight minutes to present. The day was divided up into six one-hour-long sessions, and I’m ashamed to admit I missed the last two sessions because I had some other meetings in Bellevue that I had to attend. However, after listening to 16 companies spread over four sessions, my brain was overflowing with new info and thoughts, so I’m not sure how much value I would have added during the final two sessions.

In a nutshell, I was very impressed by both the content and the form of the presentations. The presenters did a great job of condensing their pitch into exactly eight minutes. What also struck me was that despite the slow economic times, most of the companies were doing well in the marketplace. All of them had growing customer bases and rising revenue, and many of them were hiring.

It is a hackneyed phrase, but it is true—economic downturns are often the best times to build a startup company. In the chaos and confusion of turbulent times, there always lies opportunity. As industries change and contract, the marketplace is ripe for new solutions. Because despite the negative headlines in the media, people are still going about their daily activities and living their lives, and there will always be opportunities for new products and services, and for new technologies that reduce the cost and increase the efficiency of existing products and services.

Two examples in Seattle are Redfin and TeachStreet. Redfin is an online real estate brokerage. As we all know, the real estate industry nationwide is in a major slowdown. However, Redfin continues to experience strong growth, partly because I suspect that during tough times, people enjoy using technology to make their real estate deals a higher quality experience, not to mention a more efficient and cost-effective transaction.

TeachStreet was also interesting. They have built an online marketplace where people who want to learn can connect with the best teachers and classrooms; and where teachers and tutors can find students and clients. They also are growing nicely. During slow economic times, many folks want to learn new skills (either for professional or personal reasons), and many experts have more time on their hands to provide teaching services.

That being said, I’m sure everyone in the room today would rather the economy was growing at a 3 percent rate as it did from 2002-2007, as opposed to shrinking dramatically as it is this year. However, many of the 23 startups that presented yesterday will emerge from this recession in strong shape and will be well-positioned when the economy starts growing again. I was an active VC investor before, during, and after the dot-com crash of 2000 and the telecom meltdown of 2001. Many of today’s most successful startups were founded during those dark days, and as Tim Draper noted during his lunch speech, many of today’s biggest companies were founded in prior recessions.

So hope springs eternal, and I won’t apologize for finding silver linings in the current clouds.

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The 2009 University of Washington Business Plan Competition has come and gone. It started with something like 90 business plan submissions that were paired down to 33 set to compete in an investment round. That round can best be described as a Las Vegas-style trade show with 33 booths, over two hundred judges, team shirts, ties, hair styles, and five hours of pitching that left me and many of my friends sounding like frogs at the end of the day. “Ribbit, Nanocel cools electronics better and cheaper, Ribbit.” The 16 teams that had the most “CIE bucks” invested in them made it to the next round.

Teams had a few weeks to prepare a slide deck and practice presenting their cases to a panel of judges. We all had coaches that listened to our pitches and critiqued them. For team Nanocel, this round was critical as our coaches grilled us on our pitch and punched enough holes in our presentation to make it look like Swiss cheese. That session was uncomfortable. But our coaches weren’t there to stroke us. They were there to school us and schooled we were. We recorded the session and listened to our coaches comments over and over. We did our best to implement every single recommendation and answer every single question raised so that they wouldn’t be asked again. It paid off. The questions raised by our coaches were never again asked by judges in subsequent rounds. Our coaches obviously knew their stuff.

Several weeks later, after multiple presentation deck rewrites and scores of practice pitches, we were ready for the Sweet 16. The day started in a room filled with all of the competitors looking tired, nervous, excited, and tough. My evening MBA class was well represented. I knew these student teams and have seen them present on case studies for last two years. We were confident in our product, our team, our pitch. My partner Dustin sat back looking confident and collected. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little worried and intimidated by the competition.

We found out when and where we’d be pitching, who our judges were and which teams we needed to beat to get to the final round. We had two hours before we had to pitch and used our time to research our judges just in case one of them would personally benefit from our technology. And we paced around. The pitch seemed to go fast and the questions after were tough. But it was what we expected and we were ready.

The toughest part of the day was coming up. We had to pause and eat lunch, waiting to …Next Page »

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From an initial field of 90 teams last month, down to 33 presenters, and the sweet 16 and finals yesterday, the business plan competition at the University of Washington has captivated us with the spirit and determination of these student innovators and their veteran advisors. Some 30 judges from the Seattle-area innovation community participated in the final rounds as well, including Rebecca Lovell of the Northwest Entrepreneur Network, Bill McAleer and Geoff Entress of Voyager Capital, and Adrian Smith of Ignition Partners.

The sweet 16 were whittled down to five finalists in the morning (and nary a software or Internet play among them):

—Energizing Solutions, a UW team working on making motors more efficient to reduce unplanned downtime in industrial facilities

—Hydrosense, a UW team developing a low-cost, sensing system for tracking water use in the home

—Nanocel, a UW and Seattle University team making a liquid cooling system for electronics

—Shockmetrics, a UW team with novel medical technology to detect shock in patients before it’s too late

—Soluxra, a UW team commercializing cheap organic solar cell technology for residential solar panels, electricity-producing windows, and other applications

At the evening awards ceremony at the Bell Harbor conference center, all of the teams in the competition were honored. The $25,000 grand prize went to Nanocel (see co-founder Daniel Rossi’s post going into the finals here), with Energizing Solutions as the runner-up. It’s interesting that both companies are fundamentally about making physical equipment more efficient.

But there were many other prize winners as well. Here’s a quick rundown (including some teams that didn’t make the final five in the grand prize competition):

$25,000 Grand Prize: Nanocel

$10,000 Second Place: Energizing Solutions

$5,000 Finalist Prize: Shockmetrics

$5,000 Finalist Prize: HydroSense

Best Tech Idea: Nanocel

Best Consumer Product: Big Canvas (UW team developing rich media and art for mobile communications)

Best Innovation Idea: Shockmetrics

Best Service/Retail Idea: Ecowell (Washington State University team developing litter-free vending machines that let you customize your drink)

Best Sustainable Advantage: Sisalwood (UW team with a sustainable alternative to hardwood for interior design)

Best Clean Tech Idea: HydroSense

(Congratulations to all the teams, and see you again next year.)

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The Zino Society announced yesterday it has awarded its $50,000 Zino Green Fund to Seattle-based Hydrovolts, the maker of a novel underwater turbine for producing electricity in canals and waterways. Hydrovolts is led by Burt Hamner, who pitched the company at last month’s Zino Society Green Investment Forum.

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