Happy 20th Birthday to the Dingman Center

Venture Capitalists, you will be interested in our Alternative Energy Tech Visionary April 26th. Mark your calendars for June 1st and 2nd for the 23rd Annual Human Computer Interaction Lab Symposium.  Also, be sure to not to miss the many Dingman partner events like the Early Stage East, Digital Media or National Women's Business Conferences, or the Grow Fast Grow Right Business Strategies Seminar! 

Entrepreneurs, check out our Pitch Dingman and Cupid's Cup competitions for chances to win seed money for your start-up business!  In addition, be sure to read former Dingman Scholar Dana Lande's feature article on Dayna Designs and DaynaU. We are also proud to announce that former Dingman Scholar and Geocentric CEO, Jim Blakeslee is featured in not one but two feature articles recognizing Geocentric as a premiere interactive internet application.

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Upcoming Events
 

Dingman Day Lunch

The Marketing and Research and Development Team from Honest Tea, a Bethesda based company, will present on their recent growth explosion and entrance into the organic food market. Help out the team at Honest Tea and take part in a taste testing of Honest Tea's latest products.  Give feedback on products and learn the struggles and rewards of being a part of a newly developed company that has a total of 7 employees. 

Friday, April 21st, 12:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m., 1505 Van Munching Hall  

Register Today!

Pitch Dingman Competition

This event is held monthly and is a follow-up to our weekly walk-in Pitch Dingman held on Fridays at 11:00 a.m.  Come to the monthly competition, present your business idea in 5 minutes to a panel of judges from the Dingman Center, and you could win $500!  For information about the weekly Pitch Dingman sessions on Fridays or the monthly Pitch Dingman competitions, e-mail Derek Vlcko at dvlcko@rhsmith.umd.edu.

Friday, March 31st, 11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m., 3570 Van Munching Hall

Tech Visionary Series - Alternative Energy (invitation only)

The panel discussion will look at emerging trends of rising energy prices, increasing world wide demand and national security concerns that will drive innovation and investment in the energy sector. Experts in solar energy, alternative fuel, fuel cells and control systems will discuss the current landscape and future horizons. Learn how these trends are affecting views on energy use management and are hastening the exploration for new uses of current sources and development of new sources of energy. This panel will help you develop an effective strategy to evaluate alternative energy ventures.

Please contact Andrea Galati for more information.

Smith China Business Plan Competition

The University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business is sponsoring its second annual China Business Plan Competition. The competition, themed "Building Leaders for the Digital Economy" is organized by the Smith School's Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship and will bring together entrepreneurs and business executives from around the world to compete for a total of $50,000 in prize money, including a $25,000 grand prize, $15,000 second prize and $10,000 third prize.

For entry details and more information please see the Smith website.

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Feature Events

The first annual Cupid's Cup will be awarded by Kevin Plank, CEO of Under Armour on Friday, May 19th, 2006 at a luncheon reception. Please note the date change from May 12th.

Cupid's Cup is a ten thousand dollar monetary award given to the best University of Maryland student operated business.  The student must currently be enrolled in one of the school's at the University of Maryland in College Park, or have graduated within the past three years from either a graduate or undergraduate program.

The recipient will receive a $10,000 cash prize and possession of Cupid's Cup's trophy for a one year period.

Dayna Designs and DaynaU Feature Article

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Event Summaries

Prospective Scholars Lunch - March 9^th

Smith Team wins the Entrepreneur's Choice Award at the Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC)!

Capital Access Ventures wins 1^st Place at the Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC- Smith round)!

Capital Access Ventures, comprised of Mark Slusser, Anne Engebretsen, Avi Lerner, Karl Olson and Steven Schifferle, a last minute substitution for Susannah Campbell, won the Smith (internal) round of VCIC held on February 24^th, 2006. AAA, comprised of Yasuo Mutsuura, Andy Cheung, Akinola Dusunmu, Yue Tian and Karnjaporn Kittiampanont, won 2^nd place, while International Ventures, comprised of Omarr Tobias, Arindam Basu, Joshua Kroo, Abinash Tiwari and Seyed Mohammad Mohaghegh Ahmadabadi, took 3^rd place.  The internal round was sponsored by the Dingman Center of Entrepreneurship, Office of Career Management and venture capital firm Opus 8.

Each team was handed a fund profile and two unique business plans on Thursday evening.  The teams were supposed to eliminate a few of the companies based on this information, and to form questions for the 30-minute Q&A sessions with the entrepreneurs on Friday morning.  All teams had until the afternoon to make their investment decisions and present to the judges.  The judges based their decision on the teams' Executive Summary, Term Sheet, and a four-minute presentation followed by an eight minute Q&A session.

Seven teams competed in this one day competition. First year MBA student Arindam Basu said that the VCIC internal round at Smith was a great learning experience. Students felt that this competition offered them a great opportunity to learn about the Venture Capital industry and apply concepts picked up from the first year core curriculum. Michael Barr: President, Netrino; Rusty Griffith: Principal, Walker Ventures, and Joseph R. Kessler: Managing Partner and Co-Founder, Next-Stage Development Group judged the competition. The judges really enjoyed the experience and mentioned that such events enhance the MBA experience while engaging the alumni community. 

The southeast regional round was held at Georgia Tech, Atlanta from March 2-4, 2006. Please use this link to view more details on the competition: http://www.vcic.unc.edu/

Games Aren't Just Child's Play
Building a small company to publish and market original board games is a painstaking business. Here's how one MBA-entrepreneur spends his day

I am the founder and co-manager of North Star Games, a company in Maryland that designs, publishes, and markets original board games. Our mission is to bring people together through memorable experiences that inspire laughter and cheering while engaging the mind. I have been designing games since the sixth grade but got the idea to start this company when several friends started arguing over who could take Cluzzle (our first award-winning game) home for the holidays.

I attended the MBA program at the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland to find a business partner and learn how to start the board game company of my dreams. My passion about the benefits of face-to-face social interaction led to my choice of industry, but I was delighted to find out that the board game segment is growing quickly. In fact, most parts of the industry have been outpacing those of computer games for the past several years.

CAPITAL CONNECTION. As a Dingman Scholar at the Smith School, I was required to work 10 to 20 hours a week at the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship, where I consulted for local entrepreneurs. My job was to help people find capital by working on their business model and plan.

This experience gave me the tools and relationships needed to raise $200,000 in seed money for North Star Games. An MBA is nearly essential when your goal is to take a product to mass channels because it goes a long way toward convincing investors to trust you with their money.

Since we are in the early stage, I am involved in every aspect of making the company grow. This means there is no typical day for me. Instead, the layout of my day depends on whether we are developing a new product, creating a marketing plan, making sales calls, structuring legal relationships, filing for intellectual property, raising capital, or determining our strategy.

Here's a look at a recent day in my life:

9 a.m. -- I never set my alarm. Whenever I wake up is when I turn on my computer in the living room and make coffee.

9:15 a.m. -- I look over my e-mail and respond to anything important. My partner, Satish Pillalamarri, whom I met at business school, and I returned from the International Toy Fair in New York a few weeks ago, so we have already followed up with the big-name contacts.

I am now getting in touch with smaller independent retail outlets. Building these relationships takes a lot of time, but they're important. The large national chains do not want to carry our products until we have created demand. The smaller stores are interested in learning about our games, demo programs, and whether we can conduct in-store demonstrations.

10:30 a.m. -- Data entry. Boring. We still have about 100 business cards from the Toy Fair, and all of the contact information needs to be entered into our customer relationship database. The small, independent store owners are looking for products that are not yet being carried by the large toy retailers. They compete by finding the coolest new games and providing great customer service.

11:30 a.m. -- Take a shower and cook breakfast.

Noon -- More data entry while eating.

12:30 p.m. -- Satish usually arrives around this time, and we talk strategy. He does more of the sales and accounting, while I do everything else. That said, we don't have set tasks. Since we work together and talk about everything that is going on in the company, we can easily divide tasks based upon who is most suited for each.

1 p.m. -- You guessed it, more data entry.

2 p.m. -- The next few hours are usually devoted to follow-up phone calls for the retail businesses that I entered into the database several days ago. These calls are often enjoyable. I always push our most recent product, Wits & Wagers , because of the amazing reception it received over the 2005 holiday season. It's the first trivia game you can win without knowing any trivia because you can bet on an answer provided by another player.

My goal with these calls is to get the owner excited about our games so he or she will play it with friends or family. Because we believe that our games sell themselves once they are played, the trick is in getting them into people's hands.

6 p.m. -- Cook dinner, while Satish and I talk about marketing initiatives and bat around ideas for game names and slogans.

7 p.m. -- About twice a week we have some sort of company event. Today, I give a talk to the Smith School MBA Entrepreneurship club about our experience of starting North Star Games. I spoke about packaging and marketing problems that we faced when trying to get into the mass channels.

Our newest marketing initiative is to run trivia nights at several local bars because this enables us to get a crowd of 30 to 40 people to play Wits & Wagers at the same time. We run the board game like a trivia game show. Running these trivia nights is fun and makes all the hard work worthwhile.

If there is not a company event scheduled for the evening, I usually go to the gym to play basketball or indoor soccer for several hours.

10 p.m. -- I spend another hour or two responding to e-mails or working on marketing materials.

12:30 a.m. -- I watch 30 minutes of recorded TV or curl up and read a book.

1:00 a.m. -- Ahh, sweet sleep.

Satish and I have come to terms with the fact that North Star Games does not have the resources to shoot meteorically into the mainstream. The truth is that the short-term prospects for the company include lots of hard work for little immediate payoff. It takes time to build a great company (see BW Online, 10/25/05, "Teaching the Startup Mentality" ).

There is already a group of people who believe that Wits & Wagers will become the next national board game blockbuster, and I believe in that possibility. In fact, the national game buyer for Target ( TGT ) said it was the best game he had come across during his five years in the position.

But he also said that without a recognizable brand name, the game would not sell well in his stores. The mission he set out for us was to get more exposure for the game, and that is precisely what we are doing.

If I could do my MBA again, I would focus more on marketing instead of finance. While finance is important for large companies, it is not as important during the start-up stage. My biggest misconception was that a superior product was the most important factor in creating a successful company.

While this might be true in the long run, there will never be a long run for your company if you cannot sell your product from the start. Now, I believe that tailoring your product and marketing message to a group that can be reached inexpensively is the most essential ingredient for success.

May 8th and 9th 2006 DuPont Country Club & Brantwyn Estate

Early Stage East has remained geographically the largest venture conference focused on early stage companies from New England to the Carolinas since 1998. More than 375 companies have presented at Early Stage East conferences and have gone on to raise more than $650 million in venture funding. Some featured industries include information technology, life sciences, enterprise software, pharmaceutical industries, industrial bio technology and many more.  For more information on Early Stage east visit www.earlystageeast.org.

June 23rd 2006 Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner

Don't miss the event the Washington Post calls “a confab of powerful communicators and content providers in the region.”  This information gathering and powerful networking event is intended for media, entertainment and technology businesses, educational institutions, and government agencies involved in the digital distribution of media. For sponsor packages, speaker information, contacts, and additional information visit www.DigitalMediaConference.com.  When registering be sure to mention you are a Dingman Community Member and receive a 25% discount on your registration fee!

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