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An Article from the Philadelphia Inquirer

Venture Investors Visit Temple to get a glimpse of future at fair Students and foreign entrepreneurs showcased their innovations.
By Linda Loyd
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

Andrea Chen practiced her pitch for weeks. But she had only seven minutes yesterday to sell her company to a crowd of 100 venture-capital investors. Chen and fellow Temple University M.B.A. student Amy Chou came up with a business plan to sell streaming-video technology to kennels and pet-care centers. A camera installed in a kennel would allow pet owners to view their pets via the Internet while away from home. They call the company CmyPet Inc. (as in See My Pet).

M.B.A. students Amy Chou (left) and Andrea Chen view their display for CmyPet at the Temple Venture Fair, where nine young firms sought funding. (Michael S. Wirtz/Inquirer) "There's a huge demand," according to Chen, the company's president and chief operating officer, who kept the audience alert with an endearing video of a dog. "Ninety percent of people who use kennels would like to view their pets online. CmyPet brings your pet to you, anytime, anywhere."

 

That was the scene yesterday at Temple University Fox School of Business and Management's Venture Fair, which introduced student entrepreneurs in need of capital to venture-capital companies in search of investment opportunities. But as the young entrepreneurs learned, coming up with the idea may have been the easy part. Persuading venture capitalists to fund the hopeful start-ups could prove more difficult.

 

Temple's Venture Fair is unique and ambitious. It included projects developed solely by Temple students, such as CmyPet, and projects that Temple students worked on with start-up companies in Israel, Ireland, Russia and India.

 

Students in Temple's international M.B.A. program work as consultants on business incubator projects in those countries. Three years ago, Temple's business school dean, Moshe Porat, established a joint program with Ben Gurion University in Israel. Yesterday, several Temple students, and Israeli entrepreneurs, outlined some of these ventures:

  • Quigo Technologies Inc. was established in April 2000, with backing from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, to access information on the Web that traditional search engines such as Google and AltaVista cannot. Quigo, which focuses on mapping databases, can reach the "invisible Web," which is considered more than 550 times bigger than the "visible Web," chief executive officer Yaron Galai said yesterday.

  • Q-Scent, which was founded in April 2000 by two Israeli scientists, uses ion mobility spectrometry to instantly diagnose several types of vaginal infections, which are often misdiagnosed, the scientific director and owner, Zeev Karpas, told the crowd.

  • Concretec Ltd. has a patent pending in the United States and Israel on technology that can accurately predict the final strength of fresh concrete in five hours instead of the 28 days of conventional tests, said Tobias Umbeck, a Temple student who has worked on the cement-testing technology.

The venture firm representatives who came to Temple's Shusterman Hall yesterday said they were optimistic about what they saw from the nine young companies seeking venture financing. Those nine were whittled down from 110 projects in the Temple business plan competition.

 

Richard Genzer, a management consultant and entrepreneur, said half of the Philadelphia area's venture capitalists were in the audience yesterday. "They know dean Moshe Porat does some interesting things here, and they came because there may be the germ of an idea that they may be willing to invest in," Genzer said. "It's not charity. They came to listen."

 

Since the collapse of many dot-com companies last year, new start-ups and Temple students devising business plans of their own have become "much more realistic" about the amount of venture funding they expect, Porat said. While venture capital is still available, companies are not getting the same high valuations they once were, and "aspirations for funding have been reduced a little," Porat said.

 

The business plans "are much more detailed and elaborate, and students are much more involved with real people - entrepreneurs, mentors and executives," he said. "We don't have fewer plans. We had 110 projects entered in this competition. And technology is a very important component of most of them. But the students are more realistic. They know they aren't going to hit the lottery."

 

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