A Few Good Links...

Hope everyone had a merry Christmas and is hard at work on their business plans.  Selcuk surfed around and found a few links that should be helpful in writing a plan.

www.mentorsphere.com : Mentorsphere is a great resource for all contestants to communicate with their mentors as well as outside resources. It is a network that gives you the opportunity to share your documents with the rest of your group. We encourage everyone to register and create their own mentorsphere.

http://www.bizplanit.com/free.html : BizPlanIt provides high-quality free business plan resources for the do-it-yourself business plan writer. There are a range of resources on this website that you can use to write your business plan.

http://www.sba.gov/smallbusinessplanner/index.html : Small Business Administration has many resources on how to start and run your own business. The section on writing a business plan offers many tips and resources that should help you throughout the process of writing your business plans.

Also check out the new documents we uploaded: Business Plan Structure and How to Write a Business Plan

Finalists and First Workshop

Congratulations to our 10 finalists!

Amit Mukherjee
Christian Theriault
Josh Shulman
Pietro Rea Maravi
Andrew Knight
Seth Priebatsch
David Levit
Adrian Soviani
Jennifer Howard
Nickolas Jiang

We will kick-off our workshop series tonight at 6:30 in the Mathey Private Dining Room with Darren Hammell '01, CEO and President of Princeton Power Systems. Mr. Hammell won the competition when he was an undergraduate and will be giving advice on how to take the leap from executive summary to business plan. All are welcome to attend.

The Year in Ideas...

In what has quickly become one of my most favorite Sundays of the year, the New York Times Magazine just released its seventh annual edition of "The Year in Ideas."

Far from being an exhaustive library, the list is a fun survey of the year's new products, trends, and ideas that may fundamentally change how we live our lives. And of course, there are copious amounts of entrepreneurial concepts and enterprises...

Here are some of my favorite entrepreneurial ideas:
~Wireless Energy
~Smog-eating Cement
~Telltale Food Wrapping

Finalists will be announced shortly...

The preliminary judges have been sorting through the 21 submissions for the past week and we are hoping to announce the 10 finalists by Tuesday, 5 PM. When finalists are announced, they will also find out which mentor they have been assigned.

Thank you again to everyone who submitted an executive summary, keep checking back for more contest updates, and best of luck to all of the competitors!