I know, 777 yards, etc….  But there are 3 things that bugged me about the end of that game, and don’t seem to be in any articles I have read.

• Why isn’t anyone commenting about that Husky Defensive Tackle jumping in front of someone else to snag the last kickoff, then proceeding to fumble away any shot at a miracle comeback?  It was not inconceivable to think the Huskies could have scored quickly and recovered an on-site kick in that game.  What was the defensive guy thinking?
• Also, why hasn’t anyone written about how unacceptable it was for the Huskies to have to burn their last time out with the clock ALREADY STOPPED, because they only had 10 men on the field?
• And furthermore, if the Huskies had scored 2x and won the game, we’d have been able to scold the Baylor running back who selfishly went into the end zone for his 5th TD.  My clock math could be wrong, but I think he should have slid down at the 1 yard line so they could ice the clock.  (Along those lines, when a team scores a last second meaningless touchdown to suddenly cover the spread, which was 9, I always have to wonder….Especially when the last second touchdown comes on a 43 yard run with the safeties playing in separate time zones from where you’d expect them to be. )

We’ve all seen Mad Men. Well this is the kind of video you get when your Creative department is drinking scotch and hitting on secretaries all day. Take a drink every time you see something sexist and/or something that would get a Marketing Director fired today.

And just like that, the old starts to make way for the new.

I’ve said it every May since 2007 – judging the Investment Round of the UW Business Plan Competition is one of my favorite days of the year.  It’s exciting to absorb the energy and inspiration from all of these young entrepreneurs and idea generators.  Sure, most of the 38 “companies” on display won’t ever go past this day, but everyone who takes part surely takes something they learned, something they discovered, or an idea they came up with into future companies.

Enough hyperbole – Let’s talk about what I saw.

Now, the problem for me every year is that there are always these awesome engineering and medical companies that I just don’t get.  A UW med student will tell me something like, “When you combine this UW technology with this UW technology, you get a compound that completely eliminates both cancer and male pattern baldness, AND adds 4 inches to your vertical leap. We would just need 4 years and $50 million to make it work.” And since I don’t understand anything about biology, I would invest in them.  Or, they’ll show me a prototype of a jet pack or invisibility cloak.  The idea sounds cool and reasonable, and I say, “I want one of those.”  Only later do I learn why the technology is impossible.

So this year – and I apologize to the science guys – but I really only visited the companies that I thought I would really understand well enough to ask hard questions of.  And without commenting on who I through my investment “dollars” at, here are some of the ideas I liked and people I liked talking to.

1) Seattleite Magazine – I’ll mention them first, only because I met founder Jane Yuan a few months back and saw an early version of their business plan.  There could be a market for this kind of online pub in Seattle.  It’s a fun read, with lots of good pics of Seattle people and places.

2) Breadcrumb – The reverse of FourSquare, Breadcrumb notifies a person’s emergency contacts in the event that they DON’T check in when expected, dramatically improving search and rescue efforts for missing or injured people.  Perfect for hikers, campers, mountain climbers, fisherman, etc… whose parents worry about them.

3) Online Pay Station – I really root for these guys.  Think old school market meets unlimited product options. This is a company for African residents – enabling people without bank accounts or credit cards make online orders via companies like Amazon.com.  They pay Online Pay Station (OPS) cash at an OPS Internet Cafe, OPS makes a bulk buy to save on shipping, receives the order, then warehouses the merchandise until the buyer picks it up.  

4) PotaVida – Did you know that you can put dirty water in a plastic bottle, stick it in the sun, and then the sun will kill all the really nasty, dangerous organisms in the water in 6 hours or so?  I didn’t.  The problem is, you don’t *really* know when the water is clean.  PotaVida makes a little LED based contraption that tells you when the water is safe.  Go to a disaster relief location, put 100 bottles on a roof at once, but a PotaVida device on one of them, and suddenly you know when the water is safe to hand out.

5) Punchkeeper – Take all of the loyalty cards that you have to carry around, and put them in one app on your mobile phone.  Snap a pic of a QR code to get credit.  That simple.

6) Sky Fu – They call it “Self Defense for the Social Web.”  I summarize it as Radian6 for small businesses who need to monitor Yelp, Trip Advisor and the like.  

7) Pterofin – Designs and manufactures innovative wind energy devices for residential and commercial use.  I don’t get why it works better than regular turbine, but they say it does, so why not beleive them.

8) TripBox – Makes travel planning easier.  Cool demo.  Hard to describe. Maybe Widget based travel planning.

9) Digital Menu – Almost makes too much sense to work.  Rather than spending money printing out paper based menus every day, restaurants just go to this site, pick from the templates, update the menu, and Digital Menu turns it into a mobile or tablet based menu that can be shared online, across social channels, and that you can even view at the restaurant.

10) Soothie Suckers –  Kids don’t want to take herbal medicine.  So the solution – put it in a popsicle.  That’s the theory here.  For what it is worth, the popsicle tastes good.

There were a lot more great companies on display – 28 more in fact.  But that would make the blog 100 pages long.  Here’s the list of the companies that made the next round.  But congrats to everyone who made it from the initial 100+ down to this final 38.

I love when I get to promote something that has popped out of the UW’s Foster School of Business.

Check out Frames for Facebook, a slick little iPhone app that lets you customize those 5 little pictures at the top of your Facebook profile that everyone gets to see.

All you do is choose a pic from your phone, manipulate its position across the 5 frames, and hit publish.  I played with a few things (some which worked better than others) and agree with the people who have told me they think it has great entertainment possibilities. For example, if the light was right, this Kid Rock photo would be pretty cool. 

So, my friends and colleagues have been working in the online space for a long time.  Going back to driving downloads and pushing POS items, all the way now to Facebook Apps and QR codes.  We’ve seen a ton of fads and fixtures.  I bet I’ve signed up and tried out hundreds of programs.

Last night Rich Barton spoke to a group of alumni from the UW CIE.  He ran us through a list of his new projects, and a history of Zillow.  But he framed all of his companies under 3 simple tenets, which pretty much sums up the entire history of the internet, no and forever.

1. If it can be found, it will be found.
2. If it can be rated, it will be rated.
3. If it can be free, it will be free.

Find me a company that has been able to break this.  Anyone?

In the last few months, thanks mainly to my association with the UW Foster School of Business, I’ve been able to meet with a number of top flight students and recent graduates hunting for jobs in Advertising or Marketing.

I keep seeing a few common themes.  There aren’t that many new marketing jobs out there, many firms who have marketing jobs are cutting people, and many people who currently have these jobs are reinventing themselves so they can keep getting their paychecks.  This does not lead to a simple path to employment for a rookie.

So, as a person at a company who is hiring, not firing, at the current moment, here are a few things from my personal perspective that I think can help you. (Please note: this point of view is not necessarily endorsed by my company and will not necessarily help your resume get through our screeners.  It’s simply my opinion.)

• If you are going after a job in marketing, first and foremost, you better be able to market yourself.  Think about the 4 P’s and apply them to you.  Your personal “brand” should be packaged professionally, priced appropriately, promoted in the right areas and you should come to the table with the proper set of skills to provide solutions to the problems that job is designed to deal with.
• Remember that the job opening is there for the benefit of the company, not you.  Some executive, director or hiring manager has a specific and relevant problem that needs to be solved.  It’s not an opening for a “job.”  It’s a call for someone to provide a solution to an outstanding issue.
• There is no such thing as “menial work” while you search for a career job.  The market stinks.  We get that.  But showing up every day for work at your barista job shows you understand customers.  Working as a deckhand on a fishing boat illustrates that you will work hard.  Spending 20 hours a week donating time to a non-profit proves you have a general interest in learning skills and networking.  Any of those things prove you are scrappy and worth hiring.
• This environment favors the scrappy.  The Social Media world makes it easy to prove competence in the field you are interested in.  Take side projects, help friends, work on any marketing gig you can find.
• Start a blog.  It’s free. It takes 20 minutes a day.  Write about anything professional you read and have an opinion on.  If nothing else, it proves you are reading the things I want my employees to know something about.
• Know all the tools.  Basecamp, Google Docs, Office Live, Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, Digsby, etc… just know all the online applications that make collaboration easier.
• Above all, remember there are two type of people who are distinctly different.  There are unemployed people who want a marketing job, and marketing people who aren’t currently employed.  Be the latter.  
• Finally, for the non-recent grads.  If you are applying for a senior level role in a small firm, come with a book of business, or at leastthe willingness to build one.  Senior people are expensive.  Small firms rarely have a stack of cash sitting around in which to donate to a new person.  Show that you can generate clients, no matter how small, so that you can help the firm justify your senior level paycheck.

One of my favorite things over the past four years has been the UW Business Plan Competition.  As a grad student, in 2005, I had two ideas and we went nowhere.  In 2006, I jumped on another student team and we won "Best Consumer Product."  Last year, I was a first round judge and merely observed the rest.  And this year, thanks to the kindness of some of my favorite people, I was invited to judge the tradeshow round.

Quick moment of clarification for those who don’t know anything about this.  Every year, about 60-80 teams submit a business plan.  Some teams are made up of 4 students, some teams are established companies with a student consultant.  It’s a broad range, so you see a lot of neat ideas.  These 60-80 teams are whittled down to 32, who then fill a room and pitch their idea to about 100 judges in a tradeshow type setting.  That list gets cut down to 16, then down to 4, and a winner is chosen.  So, Wednesday, we had the tradeshow round of 32, and our job as judges was to "invest" 1000 fake dollars into at least 5 companies.  You are free to split that 1000 however you like, as long as 5 or more companies are given money.  The 16 teams who receive the most money move on to the next round.

Now, my favorite part about this whole competition is that since most of the people you talk to are undergrad, MBA or PhD students, they still have this sense of optimism and naivety.  For example, you ask an undergrad with a dream, "What’s your exit strategy?" and his response is pure and good.  He says, "Exit?  We’re going to make this a profitable business.  I don’t want to sell it.  This is my idea, and it’s going to work."  Wow, as a human being, you love hearing that.  But then you have to crush his hopes and dreams, and invite him to join the real world.  You have to tell him, "Well, here’s the thing.  If I’m a VC, and I put money in, there better damn sure be an exit.  Because I’m not really in the business of giving you a bunch of coin so you can build a company that doesn’t make me rich.  You will sell, and you will sell when I tell you to."

Anyway, the whole thing is great.  Wide eyed, naive students getting creative and coming up with some crazy cool ideas.  It’s the kind of place that you walk out of wishing they all would get the money they need to build the product they want to build.  Sure, there were some plain dumb ideas – but only dumb from the standpoint that they were unfundable.  Every idea itself had merit.  Even the ideas with terrible business plans and execution were at least interesting ideas.     

I’m being lazy and not going through the whole list of companies.  But here were some ideas that stood out for me.  I’m not saying all their business plans were great, but the ideas stuck in my head

• A way to deliver medicine through the nose to the brain, to get cancer medicine pas the blood brain barrier.
• A company who developed a new strain of algae that they could farm for oil.
• An exercise device specifically tailored for people in retirement homes.  A kind of "soloflex" for people in wheelchairs.
• A system for capturing excess carbon from buildings to decrease heating costs.
• A career web site specifically tailored to kids right out of school.
• A "match.com" for tradeshow attendees, where you fill out a profile, and the site suggests other people attending the show you should meet with.
• A company that produces organic clothing.
• A sunflower village in Kenya so villagers can earn money.
• A Web site for coaches to help them manage their teams.
• And other cool ideas….

Congrats to all the teams who made it to the next round.   And I hope those teams that didnt make it, continue to tweak their plans and shoot for success.

If you are looking for a fun way to spend a Wednesday evening, and especially if you are a Washington alum, come on down to the Douglas Forum at UW for an event focused on Social Media. Here’s the Facebook link.

I’ll be lucky enough to moderate this great panel:

- Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz.org
- Gary Kamikawa, VP Mktg, Mpire.com
- Justin Marshall, Social Media Architect, Zaaz
- Jessica Michaels, Group Media Director, Wunderman

The event runs from 6:00 – 7:30pm and is free.

Something must have been in the air this weekend.  Because as Barack Obama was sweeping through the caucuses, two UW MBA Teams were busy shouting "Yes We Can" as well.

Down in California, the UW VCIC Team brought pride back to the program with a win in the Regional Championship.  The team now preps for the International Competition in Chapel Hill, NC.  The UW has won this event twice, back in 2004 and of course in the "dynasty" year of 2006

A mere 3000 miles away in Winston-Salem, NC, the UW won the Wake Forest Marketing Case Competition.  This was the first win for the school, after a 2nd place finish in 2006 and 3rd place in 2007. 

Aside from the pride and satisfaction these wins bring, the students also win cash, so now’s the time to hit them up for the bar tab.  But more importantly, what is now a 5th year of success in VCIC and a 3rd year at Wake Forest, proves to be real proof that a foundation for success has been effectively laid.  These aren’t "flash in the pan" single wins.  The school is now establishing constant success at these regional and national events.  And that is something the faculty, alumni, the Seattle community and current students can really take joint credit in.

Congratulations, all.