Give me your best pitch

Does it ever scare you that the entrepreneurs on the verge of entering the marketplace are college students? Or even 15-year-old boys?
It used to scare me but not anymore. I realized at a business pitch competition last Monday that these new entrepreneurs understand me more than I understand them. Now, that is scary.
If the winners of the Pitch Slam have their way, you won’t have to spend your Saturdays running from place to place to buy groceries, wait hours for a doctor or flip through newspapers or computer screens to find the news you want.
These were just a few of the ideas floated at the Pitch Slam, one of the Innovate!100 activities at the University of Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute. Keith Politte, manager of the RJI Technology Testing Center, said the two-day gathering was organized to bolster economic development as well as town/gown collaborations.
Here’s how the slam worked: Entrepreneurs had five minutes to pitch their ideas to a panel of business-savvy judges, which included start-up entrepreneurs. One of them was Justin Beck, who graduated from college a year ago and is now CEO of PerBlue, a mobile and social gaming company in Madison, Wis., that has seven employees.
Other ideas pitched at the event included local coupons sent to your smart phone, a better way to pay or collect rent and a few other ideas I didn’t really understand.
Not bad for people who, for the most part, would still get carded at drinking establishments.
The Pitch Slam competition is the brain child of GuidewireGroup, a marketing/analysis organization that has developed a way to measure whether a start-up is likely to make it in today’s marketplace. Guidewire has developed a scorecard the judges use that measures things such as whether there actually is a market for the product being pitched. There’s no more going on a gut feeling that this company or that company will earn a profit.
The event also included presentations by already successful entrepreneurs such as Beck.
Guidewire is holding Pitch Slams throughout the world this year. This one is the first the organization has held in the US, said Mike Sigal, president and chief development officer of GuidewireGroup. The winners of these Pitch Slams will be entered into competition for Innovate!100 (Note, no adherence to stodgy spacing and punctuation rules.) The Innovate!100 list will be announced in November, and those organizations will be offered guidance and assistance from Guidewire and its sponsors, which include PayPal, Cisco, Bing and other firms.
Now, the winner of Monday’s Pitch Slam: RelayFoods.com, a business pitched by Zach Buckner, who has an electrical engineering master’s degree from the University of Virginia. His company allows shoppers to buy fresh, wholesome and specialty foods from a variety of sources such as grocers, farmers markets, bakeries, wine and beer stores. Shoppers can make all these purchases online through one site and have them delivered to their workplace in one neat, tidy tote without paying a dime more than if they’d gone to those 37 different places themselves. The money to pay for the service comes from a slim cut paid to RelayFoods from the vendors themselves.
The idea appears to be solid: The company is already making money. Currently operating in Charlottesville and Richmond,Va., the firm has plans to open up in other cities.

Pitch Slam’s first runner-up, however, is a homegrown idea. Vikram Arun, 14, and Nahush Katti, 15, both sophomores of Rock Bridge High School, pitched a telemedicine application called DoctorOn. Instead of visiting a doctor’s office, reading old magazines in the waiting room for hours and putting on an embarrassing open-backed garment, a patient using this service would interact with a doctor via Webcams. The patient could be miles from a hospital or doctor’s office while sitting or standing in front of a personal computer equipped with a camera and the DoctorOn system.
The second runner-up was pitched by Richard Ward, a veteran entrepreneur of, well, more mature stature. (OK, he was closer to my 55 years than to the local high school boys’ age.) CentraMart Services would involve getting local newspapers to offer news via smart phones, the Internet and e-mail, with the news gathered by community contributors and reporters. Ward’s operation would integrate journalism principles of trusted sources, public interests and reasonable public discussion, all while allowing commerce online. It’s kind of like eBay meets your local newspaper, with a little bit of Facebook thrown in. It’s also designed to make money. And that could be scary — for traditional print dailies that is.