Westminster College Announces Entrepreneur Awards

What if you were to create kiosks offering a selection of 20,000 audio
books, 40,000 songs, 2,000 albums and various other audio selections
customers could quickly and easily have burned onto a compact disc.

BY LISA CARRICABURU
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

Call the kiosks AudioCandyBoxes — 9-square-foot sites offering greater
audio selection than a 40,000-square-foot Media Play store.
Sound like a good idea?
It did to a group of seasoned venture capitalists.
They selected Westminster College’s Jon Butler and his business plan for
Entertainment Now and the company’s AudioCandyBox product the winner
of this year’s Utah Entrepreneur Challenge.
The award announced late Wednesday carries $40,000 in prize money,
but its benefits to Butler could be much grander.
He and other participants in the 3-year-old competition open to students
statewide gained access to educational forums, mentors and donated
business-related services aimed at helping emerging entrepreneurs make
the leap from the classroom to the real world.
In Butler’s case, he took advantage of resources available through the
competition and at Westminster to build a company that is already in the
process of raising angel funding. Entertainment Now expects to have a
prototype completed and tested within six months, he said.
"The competition is very grueling but definitely worthwhile," added Brandt
Andersen of Brigham Young University, whose company uSight and its
enterprise resource planning software was one of 10 finalists in the
competition. "It gives you exposure and experience you otherwise never may
have had."
The Utah Entrepreneur Challenge was conceived by Jack Brittain, dean of
the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, and U. of U.
engineering student Stu Fetzer as a way for students to gain practical
experience.
Since 1999, it has grown to become the largest student-run business
plan competition in the nation in terms of prize money awarded and number
of participants, he said.
In addition to the $40,000 first-place award, $20,000 went to second-place
winner Aoron Gutierrez of Brigham Young University for his Bottling Bros.
company, a maker and distributor of five-gallon water bottles.
Third place and $10,000 went to Prosenjit Chatterjee of the U. of U. for
Universal Verifiers, a credit-card processing concern.
Tim Hunt, who won last year’s Utah Entrepreneur Challenge for
TermSeek, a translation services business based in Centerville, now has the
Defense Intelligence Agency, Intermountain Healthcare and The Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as customers.

http://www.sltrib.com/05022002/business/733358.htm