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” (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 (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
www.metristpartners.com
phone: 312.772.5945 | skype: averycohen
linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/averycohen | twitter: @averycohen
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