I mentioned earlier that I was a mentor for a team involved in the Utah Entrepreneur Challenge, the business plan competition that I competed in two years ago and came in as a runner up. The team that I was assigned to had a fairly cool product, nothing earth-shattering necessarily but a new technology in an old product that seemed promising. What the heck do I know, though, the team didn't even make the finals. I figured the competition must be pretty stiff this year for them not even to make the top ten, and I was right about that at least.
I got a ticket to attend the awards banquet, which DH was super-excited about, because last time the food was, apparently, fantastic. All I can remember from the last time was being a complete nervous wreck, and I don't remember enjoying anything until I got the $5,000 check. So DH, who normally is so anti-social that anything that includes 30 minutes of networking over hors d'ouevres would be the equivalent of getting shards of glass in his eye, told me to get a ticket for him too and we'd make a date of it. Yeah, the food is that good.
So we got a sitter for Thursday and started our 5 hour long date. You know, when we were dating and before we had kids, the date really was about where we were going or what we were going to do. Now, the 45 drive to the University of Utah is as much the destination as anything. We kept marvelling over the fact that we could talk without being interrupted. Honestly, we could have gotten Wendy's take out and sat in the parking lot for 5 hours and it would have been just as satisfying to me, being able to complete my thoughts!
We grabbed some hors d'ouevres and punch (I love punch!) and mingled with each other during the social 1/2 hour, then slowly made our way to the banquet hall downstairs. Because we were among the last to get down there (and I took a bathroom break on the way) most of the tables were full already. Which was fine with us - we grabbed a table on the edge of the room and it just so happened that nobody sat with us. Even better! No need to make polite chit-chat with people that we don't know and who, most likely, don't care about us any more than we do about them. Although I'm sure they would have been lovely people.
No, instead we got to sit and continue to talk to each other over our dinner of steak and mashed potatoes and vegetables. The salad was served in a bowl made of parmesan cheese and herbs, which tasted fantastic. (DH asked me what the bowls were made of, and I told him I knew how to make those bowls and he said, Yeah, I know how to make a car, too, you just put the parts together in the way they go. I replied, Yes, but if you gave me some cheese I could actually make one of those bowls. I don't know if he was impressed or not.)
Here's the real reason that DH wanted to go to the dinner so badly - they set the dessert on the table before we ever sat down. He desperately wanted to be the only one at the table, so that he could have his choice of desserts. Tonight's dessert was cheesecakes - slices of regular cheesecake swirled with strawberry, or some kind of chocolate-raspberry cheesecake which wasn't as good as it looked. I think we probably had 5 slices between the two of us. It was so fun and relaxing to be there and eat whatever we wanted and just sit and talk, we had a fantastic time.
There was a point to the evening, however, and here's where your quiz comes in. They awarded $40,000 to the first place team in the Entrepreneur Challenge, and $5,000 to the 2 runners-up. We were given a program with a little write-up of each participating company, so DH and I tried to decide who we thought would be the winner. And for your entertainment, here are your choices.
1. The company that makes and sells gear (apparel, balls, etc) for street soccer players. Their products are available in some stores currently.
2. The company that makes a 3-wheeled scooter which maneuvers like a motorcycle but is cheap, safer than 2-wheelers, and environmentally friendly. Reminded me of the Segway, with a seat. Has a working prototype.
3. The company that has a patented technology to create ethanol out of algae from the Great Salt Lake, which is 171 times more efficient than corn-made ethanol.
4. The company that gives away free personalized domain names that are to be used as a home page, collecting all of your accounts (myspace, blogs, flickr, etc) into one easy-to-remember webpage, such as www.Emily.IsABadMom.com for example. Basically eliminates the need to bookmark individual pages.
5. The company that manufactures and sells racks to hold large, heavy items such as tires and propane tanks. Their products are currently in use at some tire stores.
6. The company that has invented a new way to clean environmental messes, such as chemical spills, etc.
7. The company that is a research lab to help pharmaceutical companies et. al. do FDA required testing.
8. The company that makes legal software for do-it-youselfers, who make their will or other documents and then get it reviewed by actual lawyers.
9. The company that automatically sends marketing tools to clients, like birthday cards/thank you cards, brochures, etc.
10. The company that creates a website for colleges and high school students to more easily find each other. Students post profiles that colleges can search to find recruiting prospects and colleges post profiles for students to be more interested in their school.
Those are your top ten finalists! Pick which ones you think would be the best winner and runners-up and ponder that while you read some reviews of books and movies that I've found recently. Then I'll give you the winners at the end.
Books
The Pursuit of Happyness
I haven't seen the movie yet, but it must be better than the book, if only for the fact that the book uses the f-word so many times you start to think that it is the only word this guy and his acquaintances knows. The book details his abusive childhood, his horrible stepfather, the mistakes his family makes in dealing with the situation, all of which combine to make him say, "My life will not be like this. I will be a father to my children." Which of course doesn't stop him from cheating on his wife and having children out of wedlock (at least, I can't remember if he married the mother of his children or not... If he did he divorced her too, I know they didn't stay together.) But he does make being a father a priority, which is admirable, and works very hard to create a good life for himself and his family. You know the ending, he ends up as a multi-millionaire, and you have to love endings like that. It is uplifting to hear any story where hard work and perseverance can take you from abused childhood and homelessness to more money than you know what to do with, especially because it can only happen in America. I'd say, pass on the book unless you can handle that much foul language (it's seriously bad in parts) but I'd guess the movie makes the point just as well.
The Prestige
Another movie that I haven't seen, but have read the book. It was interesting, not quite captivating but the plot moved along enough that it kept me hooked the whole time. I kept thinking it would make a really boring movie, though, so I need to watch the movie and see how they changed the book. It was about 13 hours long, and the last 6 minutes were so terrifying that it kept me up that night, scared to leave my room. Seriously, 13 hours of average, 6 minutes of terror? You'd think if the author was capable of evoking this much emotion he'd do it a little more often in the book than just right at the end. It didn't help that I polished it off late at night right before bed and had to wake up with Boy #3 at 1 a.m. I'd say if you've got a credit to spare, or can get it for free somehow, it would be worth a listen, but I don't know that I'd tell you to spend money on it.
Left to Tell, by Immaculee Ilibagiza
A fascinating true story of a woman who survived the Rwandan genocide in 1994. She and a pile of other women hid in a bathroom for months at a time, while I went to my senior prom and graduated and went on a trip to the Mall of America. The most surprising part of the story, to me, was that I was alive when this was happening and knew nothing about it. Granted, I was 17 at the time, full of self-centeredness and before I had ever read a newspaper from start to finish on a regular basis. But seriously, this is the kind of thing I assume happened during the Holocaust 60 years ago, not now that we are all civilized people who have learned our lessons. It makes me wonder about the Darfur situation and what role regular people have in demanding that something be done. And what role governments should play in interfering with a country's civil war - it seems like we get in trouble if we interfere, and we get in trouble if we don't. This book showed me that there's a lot of thinking to be done on this subject. Very inspiring story, I would absolutely recommend it.
Movies
The Illusionist
This was a movie which my neighbors lent us, and we really enjoyed. It was entertaining and suspenseful with some nice twists. The best part, though, is that the audio commentary tells you how each trick was done, which is great because otherwise I was convinced that the whole thing was just computer generated images. Nope, every trick was done as much as possible the way a real magician would do it, although some things were done in 3D just for budget's sake. Very cool, I really liked that one.
Stranger Than Fiction
This Will Farrell-Emma Thompson movie was one that I really wanted to see when it was in the theaters, but we didn't make it. Will Farrell plays an IRS auditor who all of a sudden starts hearing a voice narrating his life, which is disturbing enough before he hears that he is about to die. I love both Will Farrell and Emma Thompson, who plays the narrator, but it's kind of a shame that Will Farrell didn't get to at least smile in the majority of the movie. He is somber and sedate most of the time, which is disappointing, but I liked the movie even for that. This one is worth renting.
Books I Have Started But Couldn't Finish, Just In the Last 5 Months
The Janson Directive, by Robert Ludlum
Why don't I believe the reviews on Audible? When every one of them says that it is long and drawn out with lots and lots of minute detail that is unnecessary, bogging down an otherwise decent storyline, why do I insist on wasting a credit on that? Am I trying to prove everyone else wrong? Or just to join ranks with my fellow long-winded writers? Just because I write that way myself doesn't mean I want to read it. I made it about halfway through the 20.5 hour torture-fest.
Water for Elephants
This book had promise, it was a seriously-hyped book, but I got turned off after a particularly descriptive sex scene followed by some bad language, all in the first 2 hours. It wasn't a premise that really captivated me either, an old man reminiscing about his days working with a traveling circus. My general rule of thumb, and not one that I can stick to all the time, is that if it is too vulgar to listen to in the car with my kids, or if I'd freak out if I found my 9 year old listening to it, I try to avoid the book. This one would have met the 9-year-old-freak-out requirement.
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Country, Volume 1
How this author has the audacity to assume that enough people were willing to sit through the first interminable volume and would naturally be clamoring for more is beyond me. The story of a group of scientists and philosophers in colonial America who buy an African princess and her son in order to run tests on them to prove whether or not black people/slaves had the same capacity for intelligence as white people. The book tries to prove that, yes, the son is very smart, but the author does it by having him use ridiculously flowery language and high-falutin' words that this fairly intelligent white person barely understood. Does that mean something? I'm not sure, all I know is it was painful to listen to and I don't think I even made it halfway. At one point I realized that I had accidentally hit the back button on my ipod and was listening to a section for the second time - it took me about 20 minutes to realize it, though, because it all sounded new to me.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
I am not a classics reader, and this book is the one that proved it. I had to sit through a 5 or 10 minute introduction to the book by some other famous writer, who found this book so influential and inspiring that she named her child after the girl in the book. Whose name I can't even remember because the book was so boring I wanted to scream! We were reading this for our book group, and I got about halfway through. At the meeting, everyone filled me in on the details of the rest of the plot, and I have to tell you that they made it sound much more interesting than it really was.
The Places In Between
I don't know that I made it more than an hour into this yawn-fest. A story of a man who walked across Afghanistan and various other dangerous countries right after 9/11. You'd think with all of the potential of this guy to get shot, or kidnapped, or tortured, or something, that the book would be more interesting, but sadly, as far as I got it was just a guy taking a walk.
So now that you've had time to ponder your top ten finalists in the Utah Entrepreneur Challenge, let me give you my prediction. I thought the winner would be:
3. The company that has a patented technology to create ethanol out of algae from the Great Salt Lake, which is 171 times more efficient than corn-made ethanol.
It's a popular, environmentally friendly idea that has broad potential for actually helping the world be a better place. I thought a runner up would be:
6. The company that has invented a new way to clean environmental messes, such as chemical spills, etc.
This team won a technology award for their process, so I thought they'd probably score well in this competition too. I've had this idea in my head since the first time I participated in the competition that tech companies have an advantage over traditional companies, because they are more cutting edge. After all, no one wants to invest in a new beauty salon or grocery store, they want to put their money in something with huge growth potential. Two years ago, the winning team was a bio-medical device that cost $3 to make and sold for $300, and everyone in the country needs like two of them. The money there was huge. Compared to that, I was really surprised that an animation studio (or the other runner-up, a pool table importing company) would be popular at all. I assumed that the competition just wasn't that stiff in my year, or we wouldn't have made it.
Turns out, that's not necessarily true. Here are the winners for this year:
1st runner-up: Calle - 1. The company that makes and sells gear (apparel, balls, etc) for street soccer players. They took the grand prize in the BYU competition, which means they already had netted $50,000. For soccer balls??? Really???
2nd runner-up: Mobile OX - 4. The company that gives away free personalized domain names that are to be used as a home page, collecting all of your accounts (myspace, blogs, flickr, etc) into one easy-to-remember webpage, such as www.Emily.IsABadMom.com for example. Basically eliminates the need to bookmark individual pages. Okay, is bookmarking pages and going to each one individually that much more work than having them all on one page? I still might try it, though... It's free after all.
Grand Prize winner: Zinch.com - 10. The company that creates a website for colleges and high school students to more easily find each other. Students post profiles that colleges can search to find recruiting prospects and colleges post profiles for students to be more interested in their school. Apparently there is something to be said for this company, although I don't see its importance. They are already in talks with some other company to be bought out.
I was really surprised by these results - nothing really earth-shattering, but definitely trendy. Social networking sites and gathering places seem to be all the rage, and I wonder if this is not the start of another internet bubble, because really, how are these companies proposing to make any money? MobileOX claims they make money through their search engine, and that their cost per user is ridiculously small. But Zinch? Do colleges have to pay to access the information about students or to post their profiles or something? There must be something I'm missing. Maybe the tech companies had really poorly written plans, or bad business models, or something to rule them out. Because if a soccer ball and clothing company can beat a company that is trying to improve the world with a cheaper gas-alternative, there must have been a fundamental flaw in their plan. Well, at least the dinner was really good!
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