KENNESAW MBAs WIN THE 2009 WHARTON ALUMNI BUSINESS PLAN COMPETITION
The HydroCoal Technologies (HydroCoal) team of MBA students from Kennesaw’s Coles College of Business, won the 2009 Wharton Alumni Business Plan competition held recently at the Penn Club in New York under the sponsorship of the Wharton Cub of New York. Earlier this year, the HydroCoal team took Second Place in the 2009 Tulane Business Plan Competition in new Orleans, LA, and Third Place in the IC2-WBT (World’s Best Technologies) Competition in Arlington, TX The HydroCoal team will commercialize through the sale of front-end processors and converters and downstream licensing the HydroCoal™ fuels, synfuels, and hydrocarbon feedstocks produced by its innovative patent-pending products and processes. HydroCoal™ is micron-sized coal with unique surface chemistries that enable it to burn like natural gas, but with almost no NOx emissions. HydroCoal™ can be further processed into synfuels and hydrocarbon feedstocks that breakeven with natural gas and oil at prices of $3.50/MM BTUs and $20.00/barrel and are as clean or cleaner than both of these energy sources. HydroCoal is an especially attractive venture opportunity because it has low risks and exceptionally high rewards. HydroCoal’s risks are low because: (1) HydroCoal’s use as a boiler fuel has already been proven at commercial scales; (2) HydroCoal’s proof of concept costs for gasification and liquefaction are low; (3) HydroCoal’s pending patents are strong; and (4) The time required to bring HydroCoal™ to market is very short. HydroCoal’s rewards are exceptionally high because: (1) The total U.S. market for new and retrofit processors that can produce HydroCoal™ and synfuels for use by the chemical, fertilizer, paper, and plastics industries, oil refiners, and electric utilities is about $3.5 billion over the next 10 years, i.e., about $350 million per year; (2) HydroCoal expects average annual licensing revenues in excess of $250 million per year from the production of fuels by its equipment; and (3) The international markets for these products and licenses are at least five times larger than the U.S. total – and will grow even larger and faster in the future. The Wharton Alumni Annual Business Plan Competition involves new venture teams that have one or more Wharton alumni on their founding management teams from throughout the U.S. The 2009 Competition involved three rounds. In Round 1, over 57 new venture teams involving Wharton alumni submitted 5 page Executive Summaries of their venture ideas. These Executive Summaries were then reviewed by a panel of Wharton alumni who were either successful entrepreneurs or venture capitalists to select 14 SemiFinalists. Each of the 14 Semi-Finalists then submitted copies of their complete Business Plans, which were reviewed by a second panel of Wharton entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to select the 6 Finalists who were invited to New York to make presentations of their concepts to a third panel of successful Wharton entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, who chose the winner. In all three rounds, the teams are evaluated on three major criteria. They were: (1) The Uniqueness and Innovativeness of the team’s Products and the Degree to which these Products address a Clear Market Need; (2) The Teams’ Skills and Capabilities for successfully launching their proposed venture; and (3) The teams’ Plans and Progress toward the successful commercialization of their venture ideas. Placing Second in the 2009 Wharton Alumni Competition was the TrialX team. (http://trialx.org). TrialX is developing an web-based system to enable pharmaceutical companies and CROs recruit qualified subjects for clinical trials within significantly reduced time frames TrialX’s technology matches potential participant’s to relevant clinical trials based on their electronic health records and provides the first web platform to effortlessly connect these potential subjects with investigators. Currently, Pharmaceutical companies spend about $2 billion on ineffective advertising for clinical trials and lose about $10 billion annually due to insufficient or ineffective patient recruitment for clinical trials. TrialX will not only lower these clinical testing costs, it will enable pharmaceutical companies to bring new products to market faster. TrialX is the only such company that is integrated with Microsoft
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Health Vault, Google Health, and Indivo. Recently, it was launched in Canada (http://trialx.ca) and is currently being implemented at one of the largest hospitals in the U.S. Finishing Third in the Competition was the Wanderfly team, whose mission is to become the de facto online source for travel inspiration. Currently, over 70% of all travelers have not decided where to go or what to do 3 to 4 months before their scheduled travel date. But traditional web-sites assume the contrary and their first request id for a destination. This means that the prospective travelers must visit numerous web-sites to gather the information that they will need to plan their vacation. Wanderfly is an online travel recommendation engine that “flips” the travel search process. The traveler is asked to provide a “rough” time frame for the travel, a tentative budget, and a list of interests and/or experiences that the traveler has enjoyed in the past. Wanderfly then begins “recommending” a series of trip ideas, and can refine these ideas based on the user’s reactions to them. In short, Wanderfly does for travel what Netflix does for movies and Pandora does for music. Taking Fourth Place was the Meme Networks team. Meme Networks is an innovative credit card marketer that reduces Card issuer acquisition and retention costs while eliminating all acquisition risks through a 100% pay-forperformance model. Finishing in Fifth Place was the Newco Corporation team. Newco will be the first national provider of integrated wellness services specifically designed for women cancer survivors. Newco, which is New York based, will create a healing environment by offering premium wellness services and client-tailored therapies provided by well trained, experienced cancer specialists. These services include acupuncture, massage, meditation, psychotherapy, and yoga, as well as body treatments, facials, and nail treatments. The sixth Finalist was the MUST Chocolates team. MUST Chocolates produces, distributes and markets a line of up-scale, super-premium chocolates that are designed to complement ultra-premium (≥ $15.00) U.S. wines. Ultrapremium (≥ $15.00) wines currently account for $8.1 billion (27%) of the $30 billion U.S. wine market. MUST Chocolates will gain sales by using sales teams to sample upscale retail establishments where wine is sold or served including country clubs, hotels, restaurants and wine bars, gourmet food stores and liquor stores. MUST Chocolates expects to do well despite the economy because both wine and chocolates are among life’s affordable luxuries. Dr. Charles Hofer, Kennesaw’s first Regents Professor and faculty advisor of the HydroCoal Technologies team, commented on the team’s win as follows: “HydroCoal is the first Kennesaw team to compete in and win the Wharton Alumni Championship. We are extremely proud of their performance and of the progress that they have made. I also expect that they will be able to successfully launch their venture before the end of 2009. When they do so, it will be a major achievement for the team, for its investors, and for Kennesaw. More importantly, it will mark a potential turning point in American history. Simply put, HydroCoal’s technologies have the potential to provide America with energy independence for the first time since the early years of the 20th Century. Not only are HydroCoal’s™ technologies compatible with most forms of U.S. coal, these technologies will make it possible to set up direct coal liquefaction plants in the Gulf Lignite coals fields of Mississippi, East Texas, and Northern Louisiana, convert this coal to high value synthetic crude oil at the equivalent of $25.00/BBL, and transport it by pipeline to the oil refineries in and around Galveston, Houston, and New Orleans to replace imported Near Eastern crude oil. Similar liquefaction opportunities exist for “coal refineries” in Appalachia, the Midwest, and could even enable the creation of new refineries in more remote coal bearing areas far from crude oil and/or natural gas supplies. Also, the massive U.S. petrochemical industry is located in the Gulf Coast primarily because of cheap, plentiful natural gas. However, now that natural gas is no longer cheap, plants using HydroCoal’s™ syngas technologies could produce coal-derived feedstocks to replace their current natural gas supplies with a more reliable, secure substitute at the equivalent of $3.50/MM BTUs. Moreover, in many areas the infrastructures (such as pipelines and CO2 gathering and recycling systems for enhanced oil recovery) needed to effectively utilize HydroCoal™ products are already in place. In short, HydroCoal’s™ technologies could transform the current economic structure of the energy and petrochemical industries, and that of the industries that are dependent on them, throughout the U.S. and the world. In fact, this potential is one of the reasons that it has been so difficult for the HydroCoal team to do well in business plan competitions. Quite simply, many judges have found it hard to believe that a team of students from a school they have never heard of has solved one of the greatest technology challenges of the 20th and early 21st Centuries.“
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