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May 2008

PTEN-GAP Competition Winners

Winners selected in the 2007-08 PTEN-GAP Competition.

Congratulations to the winners of the 2007-2008 PTEN - GAP business plan competition.

Three of the four winners are from Wake Forest University's Babcock Graduate School of Management and are clients of the Babcock Demon Incubator.

The annual Piedmont Triad Entrepreneurial Network (PTEN) Growth Accelerator Program (GAP) competition is designed to encourage and support the development of early-stage growth companies. Entrepreneurial ventures involved in the program are evaluated based on the quality of their business concepts and their potential for growth, including the breadth of the target market and the potential to create a sustainable competitive advantage.

Tom Clarkson, the director of the Babcock Demon Incubator at Wake Forest University and a GAP plan reviewer, considers GAP an important annual event. "It causes people looking to do start-ups to really refine their business model, develop a clear value proposition, and be able to articulate that in a way that investors can understand," Clarkson said. "And those selected as winners get many benefits; they can take courses, get visibility and advance their start-up in a way they couldn't do if the program didn't exist."

This year there were eight finalists and four winners, three of which are from WFU. Below are descriptions of the winning companies:

Filigree Nanotech Inc.(Full Time MBA '08, Claude Hou and Zach Denton)
Filigree Nanotech is a development-stage company that has a proprietary technique for producing nanomaterials including nanowires and nanocubes using silver blended with copper, gold and even aluminum. This results in compounds with more durability, increased conductivity and lower manufacturing costs for the electronics market.

Longfiber enGINeering Inc. (Evening MBA '07, Wesley Burgess)
LongfiberenGINeering Inc. has invented and is commercializing a technology that is the first major innovation to the cotton gin since Eli Whitney's work. The machine increases ginned-cotton yield by removing more fiber from the seed and increases quality by retaining the fiber's length.

Salzburg Therapeutics Inc. (Executive MBA '07, Bill Gmeiner)
Salzburg Therapeutics is developing Cytotoxamer™ and Genotoxamer™ technologies for treatment of prostate cancer and other malignancies.

Also representing WFU as a finalist in the competition:

Record Solutions Notebook (Executive MBA '06, John James, Denise Franklin, Jon Babek, Larry Katz, and Patrick Doran)
RS Notebooks will provide coordinated products and services allowing lab workers to easily record the results of their research in a way that documents their procedures and verifies the timing of their work for patent applications.

For more information about PTEN and to see a list of all winners and finalist, " click here."