Past Breakfast Clubs

01.30.2004 - Pryor-Hale Warmup

As part of the preparation for Michigan's $10,000 Pryor-Hale Business Plan competition, the Entrepreneur & Venture Capital club invited competition teams to the Breakfast Club with three goals in mind: 1) Provide a low-pressure forum for teams to practice their presentation 2) Generate real-time feedback from the audience on what works in the plan and identify areas of improvement and 3) Expose the business school community to "competition-quality" business plans. Rodney Emerson (MBA2) of the RiskReps team and Praveen Suthrum (MBA2) of NextServices graciously accepted the offer and agreed to present.

About RiskReps: Today's professional sports leagues and the entertainment industry have created a new breed of self-made millionaires. Though talented in their respective professions, many who receive this instant wealth are not as financially savvy as they need to be given the magnitude of their wealth. This disparity has resulted in a flurry of athletes and entertainers who, despite earning millions of dollars, have found themselves bankrupt in a few short years. These problems plague many of the "superstars" who are usually introduced to financial advisors by their agents and are often unaware of where much of their money has been invested. In the NFL, 78 players were defrauded for more than $42 million from 1999 to 2002. These trends, combined with the overall lack of education and understanding of investments provide RiskReps with a tremendous opportunity to protect and educate these new investors and allay the fears they have of losing all they have earned in what tend to be relatively brief careers. Our products will monitor the risk of client's investments and help them become more aware of how their money managers' investment decisions will impact their long-term wealth.

About NextServices: According to American Healthcare Association, 40% of US hospitals are in losses. At the root of such plummeting performance are administrative
expenses: 21 cents of every healthcare dollar is spent in mundane activities like disease coding and claims management. NextServices brings process optimization capabilities to such tasks through statistical analysis and targeted outsourcing. We offer end-to-end claims processing to medium-sized healthcare providers. With the healthcare expenditure reaching 15% of the US GDP, NextServices presents a compelling way to cut costs.

12.12.2003 - Wireless - Raj Shaw

[PPT] Qualcomm

The aim of this presentation is to understand the challenges that Qualcomm faces in the highly systemic Wireless telecommunications industry. Specifically, we shall analyze two choices that Qualcomm faces. The first decision Qualcomm faces is whether to go alone with its CDMA2000 standard or to encourage the WCDMA standard. Its second decision choice is whether to embrace the IEEE 802.11 open standards or not. Further, we shall analyze the possibility of an upcoming Wireless data revolution, and the factors that need to be in place to make it happen.

Here is some Qualcomm and CDMA reference material:
http://www.qualcomm.com/cdma/
http://www.cdg.org/index.asp
http://www.3gpp2.org

One source for WCDMA info:
http://www.3gpp.org/
http://www.3gpp.org/specs/specs.htm

For Wi-Fi
www.ieee.org
search web for 802.11
or 802.15 (new standard)

Also, any of the following company websites may also be useful: Nokia, Mot, ATT, Verizon, Sprint, Ericsson

11.14.2003 - Nanotechnology - Mike Crowley

[PPT] Nanotechnology - A Brief Overview