Profitero recently won the IBM SmartCampGlobal Final competition and claimed the IBM Global Entrepreneur Of The Year 2012 title and were covered in the  Wall Street Journal , Washington Post and  this week The Street named Profitero one of 5Start-Ups Big Tech Is Eyeing In 2012.

People for a Smarter Planet is a collective of communities sponsored by IBM to foster activities, conversations and discussions to help solve problems that can benefit from all of humanity. IBM invites followers of its People for a Smarter Planet Facebook page to share ideas, engage and discuss, or participate in one of the growing list of projects.

Profitero with Mike and Claudia from IBM

To follow the discussions on these topics make sure you ‘like’ the People for a Smarter Planet Facebook page today! We look forward to conversing with you on Facebook on Smarter Friday. We will be tweeting about the discussions on the day from our @profitero twitter account. Don’t forget to like our Profitero Facebook page too!

Last week I had the privilege to join the winners of the Novartis/IBM NCD Challenge in New York/New Jersey.

NCDs are diseases of long duration and generally slow progression. They include heart disease, stroke, cancer, asthma, diabetes, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s disease, cataracts, and more. While often referred to as “chronic diseases”, NCDs are distinguished by their non-infectious cause.  In short they are the global health burden of the 21st century

The global competition was designed to bring together industry and academia to create innovative, easy-to-use solutions that fight the human and social burden of NCDs.

According to the World Health Organization, nearly two-thirds of all deaths occur due to non-communicable diseases which contribute to more than 60 percent of deaths worldwide. Over the coming decade, some 388 million people worldwide will die of one or more chronic illnesses and the cumulative losses in global economic output due to NCDs will total $47 trillion by 2030. Modest investments to prevent and treat NCDs could save tens of millions of lives and bring major economic returns.

Over recent years Novartis and IBM have collaborated on social innovation based on our shared values in this area. The NCD Challenge is a great example of this type of collaboration.

The NCD Challenge is similar to SmartCamp mentoring however focused on an early stage in the development of the idea.  During the competition, the teams were supported by mentors and subject matter coaching to provide industry expertise to complement each team’s knowledge and research.

Katherine Holland, general manager, global life sciences was our host and summed it up nicely – “The NCD Challenge illustrates the type of ingenuity, motivation and accessibility that will help control the growing epidemic of NCDs in many parts of the world,”

Winners of the competition are Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, and ESADE Business School-Universidad Ramon Llull in Barcelona, Spain. These winning solutions for two categories, developing nations and developed nations, help address the problem.Developing World Solution:

2Vidas – Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley

2Vidas is a pharmacy-based membership program for low- to middle-income pregnant women to address the growing problem of diabetes in Mexico. The project’s aim is to make a lasting health impact on two lives during a finite period in which women have increased motivation to take better care of themselves for the health of their babies.The program works by providing pregnant women access to monitoring tools at local pharmacies, support through peer-led sessions, and encouragement via positive SMS messaging that rewards self-management and offers health tips. The potential economic impact is the ability to save women 58-98% of out-of-pocket monitoring costs, depending on frequency of use, and the health system an average of $110 per enrolled woman per year through improved diabetes control – lowering the risk profile of the mother’s pregnancy and baby’s propensity for NCDs. 2Vidas membership program will deliver estimated $10.4 million in systemic cost savings and $475,000 in added value creation over five years. Team members included: Emily Ewell (team lead), Jenny Chang, Tara English, Rachel Sherman

Developed World Solution:

Dr. Diabetes – ESADE Business School-Universidad Ramon Llull

Dr. Diabetes utilizes a handheld device with an application and two cloud servers. It is a total solution designed to provide diabetes awareness, monitoring and management to patients with chronic illness, initially for China. It also provides early awareness to the public and streamlines diabetes management for patients. The solution provides medical data via cloud computing to physicians for accurate diagnosis, and to pharmaceutical companies and hospitals for efficient research and development. The solution is designed to be scalable to support other NCDs.It is designed to lower the risk of complications, decrease treatment costs to patients by up to 73 percent, and decrease their hospital visits by 65 percent. Team members included:Ching-Chia Hsu (team lead), Meng-Chi Chen, Alexander Anthonysamy, Kohei Sato, Feras Nagadi.

The competition runners up are:

Smart Strip – Said Business School, University of Oxford. A non-invasive, mobile blood glucometer band that measures blood glucose transdermally

Oxford Asthma – Said Business School, University of Oxford. Low-cost solution for large scale monitoring and diagnosis of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Other finalists in the competition include:

DiaMapp – Jordan University. Smart phone technology for managing diabetes type 1 in children, empowering patients and their families to care for themselves

Move4Health – Karolinska Institutet. Prescription for physical activity by physicians, targeted for Vietnam, supported by mobile technology to measure activity and provide healthcare follow up

My Health Portal – ESADE Business School-Universidad Ramon Llul. Secure online portal based on cloud computing technology that bridges the communication gap between patient and doctor

TeleHealth – University of Melbourne. An innovative integrated telehealth solution that can globally individualize the care and management of people with diabetes.

People can join the conversation on the topic of fighting non-communicable diseases at: People for a Smarter Planet on Facebook at http://on.fb.me/9S1Jp8 , and on Twitter at #NCD

The week kicked off on Monday in Foster City. Zia YuSUF and the exec team from Streetline hosted a session in their offices to share their experiences since winning the event the previous year. Their progress has been breath taking including raising a $15m round and signing a global agreement with IBM. The recurring message was that team is everything. You need strong leaders who support each other because they have a burning passion for what they do. The best want to work with the best. This is how you achieve great things. This is how you attract great talent. The session demonstrated the art of the possible – this is what Silicon Valley is all about.

After Streetline we moved on to the other valley – Napa Valley. Our good friends are SVB had kindly arranged for a trip to two wineries where they are investors. This was an opportunity for the teams to get to know each other in an informal setting. We believe that a lot of the value of the program is the peer based connections that are made during the process. Being a CEO of a start-up is for the most part a lonely business and having the opportunity to talk with you peers can be very valuable. A glass of fine wine helps the process.

What we didn’t realise was just how much we could learn from the wine business. Our first stop was http://www.trefethen.com. Loren was our host. He started by walking us around the vineyard (backwards in his case) explaining the ecosystem and systems they had put in place to great a truly amazing product. He spoke at length about building a sustainable business and human capital development. His passion for the vineyard and the wine was inspiring. Loren talked about the finest details of the landscape, the history of the valley, the natural habitat, the vines, the ecosystem, and the production process. This passion is the fuel to which creates things of beauty made to stand the test of time. He talked about their approach to investment, people management, pricing, marketing and the product. All of this passion, energy and experience results in some truly world-class wine. In fact, they took the “Best Chardonnay in the World” honors at the 1979 Gault Millau World Wine Olympics in Paris. In the process they put Napa Valley firmly on the world stage to rival the incumbent from the old world who had dominated wine for centuries. After 2 hours of non stop tasting and Q&A our driver managed to extract us from Trefethen.

I left wondering how the next winery could possibly compare. The destination was Staglin. This was different. We started by a tour of the production process. We talked about the role of the wine maker and just how much of an art form it is. How it would be a long time before information technology could replace the human nose. We talked about many things however there was a common thread: relentless focus on the most minute details and continuous innovation needed to be the best in the world.

What we hadn’t counted on hearing was the path that had brought Garen and Shari to this place. Garen talked about co-managing the venture fund at Thomas Watson Jr in the 1970’s recalling a series of entrepreneurial activities in the private and public sectors including his role with ADP and many other commercial successes. Overall it would be difficult to find a better embodiment of the spirit of the valley.

Next day was master-class day. We kicked off with Gerald Brady (SVB) talking about what makes a company great. Next up where the finalists from last year including Zia Yusuf ( Streetline) Albert Santalo (CareCloud) and Ashifi Gogo( Sproxil) hosted by Victor Westerlind, (Rockport Capital). Collectively they have raised $37m venture over the last 12 months. The spoke about how to scale a start-up into a global company. Following last years finalists we had Mark Gorenberg (Hummer-Winblad), Tim Gulieri ( Sierra Ventures), Promod Haque (Norwest) and Don Wood (DFJ) for a VC panel. We wrapped up the afternoon with the the companies pitching the VCs for the first time.

For the evening we headed for the crunchies in the Davies Sym Hall. We hadn’t told the finalists that we were sponsoring the best international category which gave us an opportunity to recognise that there is great innovation happening all around the world. It also gave us the opportunity to shine the spotlight on them in front of a massive audience of 2000 in the hall and many more by the power of video. Booby Hammer opened the show and introduced Major Ed Lee and Ron Conway. Jack Dorsey took not one but two awards. Peixe Urbano won the international award. It was a nice surprise to see Alex Tabor (co-founder and CTO) accept the award – Alex was one of our mentors at SmartCamp Rio and is a great role model for Latin American entrepreneurs coming to the valley. This is captured at 00:57:30 on the video below:

Video streaming by Ustream

Day 3 was mentoring day. Now the work really starts. We were delighted to have an amazing group of mentors from all around the world join the local SV community. We held 8 x 40 min sessions so all the mentors got to meet all the teams. It was amazing and exhausting at the same time. This is the very core of what SmartCamp is all about – connecting inspiring entrepreneurs with experienced and passionate mentors. We wrapped up the day at the Fairmount over looking the beautiful city of San Francisco.

Day4: The finale. Claudia Fan Munce and Michael Riegel were the IBM hosts. The first speaker was Gavin Newsom. Gavin has a history of entrepreneurship before moving into politics. His message was similar to Major Lee’s the previous night. This is the innovation capital of the world. It is great to see that the political system understands the value that these entrepreneurs bring to both the economy and society at large. Following Gavin we were had the VC panel of Promod Haque (Norwest), Evanlegous Simoudis (Trident) and Sasha Johnson (DFJ VTB Aurora). All of whom are actively investing around the world from Greece to Russia to India. The panel was an opportunity for the teams to understand the mindset of the judges and much more. Following the VC panel we had Manoj Saxena. Manoj is a successful serial entrepreneur who is now leading our efforts in one of the most exciting technology to commercialise Watson solutions. We hope we can find ways to connect Watson with the start-up community in the coming years.
Next we moved to the main act. The finalists. They each had six minutes to present followed up nine minutes of questions from the judges. They all put their best foot forward demonstrating passion and clarity for their ventures. You can see them here.

As the judges retired to make their decision Guy Kawasaki took the stage to share the twelve lessons he learned from Steve Jobs. I sat with the Judges as they struggled to pick just one company. The judging session took almost an hour – by far the longest since we started the program. They finally narrowed it down to three companies and picked Profitero as the IBM Global Entrepreneur of the Year.

Congratulations to Vol, Dmitry and the entire team. Over the coming weeks I’m sure you’ll be hearing a lot more.

Now it is important to say that this is only the mid point of the journey for all of these companies. The mentoring process is only half way thru and we believe there is great opportunity with all of these companies going forward.

That only leaves it for me to say thank you to everyone who helped make this a reality. There are many, many people involved including some who have not had a lot of sleep over the last couple of months. You know who you are. Thank you.

Next time: we would love to share our tentative plans for the next cycle and hear your ideas and feedback. Stay tuned.

Though his talk was entitled “The Art of Enchantment,” Kawasaki, in typical Kawasaki fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants fashion, announced he was supplanting that canned pitch with one more geared towards the gathered entrepreneurial masses, “12 Lessons I Learned Working With Steve Jobs.”

Kawasaki started his pitch by joking that he’d just been in the greenroom where the judges for the competition were gathered, and that there were five bottles of wine in there, so don’t expect a verdict anytime soon!

Then, he got semi-serious and explained he’d worked from Apple on two different occasions, 1983-1987 and again in 1995-1997, so he was uniquely positioned to comment on what all he learned from Jobs.

Before he turned to the lessons, Kawasaki suggested “the world is a lot less interesting without Steve Jobs. Most entrepreneurs would be fortunate to create one standard…Jobs created five or six (the iPhone, the iPad, the iPod, etc.)

Kawasaki went on: “I’m sure right now he’s up there telling God how to run the universe.”

Then, on the the lessons.

Number one.  “Experts” are clueless.  As entrepreneurs, if you start listening to all the experts, you will be led wrong.  Time and time again people told Steve Jobs nobody would buy an (insert Apple product here)…At one point, even Michael Dell told Apple they should dissolve the company and give the money back to shareholders.  Ignore the experts. Correlation and causation are not necessarily the same thing.

Rich and famous often equals “lucky.”

Number Two. Customers can’t tell you what they need.  If you ask customers they’ll say give us better, faster, cheaper, and status quote.  Build the product YOU want to use, and that you think the world can use.  Fact: Nobody told Apple to build the Macintosh…iPod…iPad…

Number Three.  Jump to the NEXT curve.  He then explained a simple but revealing analogy.  Ice 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0

Ice 1.0 was when ice harvesters sawed blocks of ice out of the lake when it was frozen and then distributed it.

Ice 2.0 saw the advent of the ice factory, so you could get ice any time of the year, and didn’t have to be in a “cold” city.

Ice 3.0 saw the advent of the “ice box,” better known as the refrigerator.

The ice harvesters did NOT embrace the ice factory, and the ice factories did NOT embrace the refrigerator.  Yet, all served the same purpose: Keeping your food fresh.

So, if you want to be successful, put your solution to the problem in terms of the benefits, NOT the process you use to get there.

Number Four.  The biggest challenges beget the best work.  Ram a big challenge down the throat of your employes.  The challenge Steve Jobs gave us was to compete with IBM.  Remember the print ad we ran. It’s headline was” “Welcome, IBM.  Seriously.” IBM was a magnificent competitor, and it was a great challenge for us to take them on.

So, find a mighty opposite for yourself.

Number Five. Design counts.  Don’t think it’s all about price.  Most people also care about design, and Apple’s premium pricing has proven that over and over again.

Number Six.  Use big graphics and big fonts.  Consider this slide when Jobs introduced the Windows version of iTunes.  It had a massive Windows logo, then underneath the following headline: “The best Windows app ever written.

Number Seven.  Changing your mind is a sign of intelligence, not a sign of stupidity or lack of conviction.  When things change, you have to react and reform.  Steve Jobs demonstrated this when he evolved from accepting no independent applications for the iPhone one year, to fully embracing them the next.

He saw which way the wind was about to blow, and he realized to bolster the iPhone app ecosystem, he needed to open it up to outside developers.

Number Eight.  Value is NOT equal to price.  Nobody ever bought an Apple piece of equipment because it was the cheapest thing.

Number Nine.  A players hire A+ players.  You should always be hiring someone as good or better than you in your own field.

Number Ten.  Real CEOs can demo.  They can run the product, show the product, build stuff with the product.

They don’t hand it over to someone else.  They DO the demo.

Number Eleven. Real entrepreneurs ship.  Don’t worry, be crappy.

Imagine you were the first refrigerator company.  The first fridge had to be better than the best ice factory, but it didn’t have to be perfect.

Once you jump curves, that’s when the real excitement begins. When you ship, you’ll learn more in two weeks from your customers than you will sitting in a dark room.

Number Twelve.  Marketing equals unique value.  Pets.Com was a classic example where that rule did NOT apply.

You have a dog.  You have a cow.  You kill the cow, put in the can, and give it to the dog.

That was the Pets.com business model.  Shipping dog food. The problem was, it’s dead cows in cans. It weighed a lot.  It was less convenient and just as expensive to order it via the Internet.  It wasn’t unique.  It wasn’t valuable.

And finally, number thirteen. (Never mind Guy said there would only be twelve).

Some things need to be believed to be seen.

But sometimes you also need to believe in things before you will see them.

Congratulations again to Profitero, and the other eight finalists, all of whom were celebrated in their efforts to help IBM with its mission to build a Smarter Planet and to improve the world through their even smarter entrepreneurialism!

Volodymyr Pigrukh is the CEO and co-founder of Profitero, a Dublin-based startup finalist in this year’s IBM SmartCamp Global Finals which provides a next-generation pricing intelligence service for retailers and manufacturers.

The company is a mere one year and three months old, and though Volodymyr is originally from Belarus, he started Profitero in Dublin.

Like many startup concepts, the idea appeared almost by accident, when his associate who managed several online stores came to realize he had no way of effectively pricing mobile accessories.  So, he developed a prototype solution that would crawl his competitor’s websites and get real-time pricing information that would in turn help his accessories’ website create competitive pricing.

Profitero has already raised $1 million in venture capital, and has 13 full time employees and a few key name brands they’ve already partnered with.

So what’s the value prop? Profitero helps its clients increase sales and maximize profits by leveraging high-quality online competitive data at scale.

This, in turn, allows businesses to react quickly to changes in their competitors’ prices.

To date, retailers and manufacturers have found Profitero’s data essential for pricing strategy, forecasting, price management, merchandising planning, product promotions, and market/brand positioning.

It’s currently monitoring 27.5 million products across 2,500 European retail websites, and it plans to grow this to 100 million products in 2012.

When Manoj hit the stage at this afternoon’s IBM SmartCamp Global Finals in San Francisco to explain why he’s back at a big company like IBM, he started with his own start in mind.

Though he’s been with IBM for five years, and had an early background in corporate America at 3M, he started his own company in 1998 (Exterprise), which was acquired in 2001 before he started another company, Webify, which was later acquired by IBM.

One of the reasons he has since stayed at IBM, Manoj explains, is that “it’s the place to be if you want to have impact and change the world.”

He continued: “As you grow older, you start to understand what your core competence is, and mine is converting PowerPoints to products to profits.”

Manoj explained how startup culture and reality has changed dramatically from the dot com boom to present times.  In the past, you would build it and they would come, and it was all about eyeballs, traffic, and the amount of money raised as a badge of honor.

Today, if they come, you can then go build it, but you’d be well advised to validate THEN scale, and that actual revenues are the path to profitability.  Moreover, it’s advisable to take as little money up front as possible, so that you can focus on building value, a business, and not just a startup.

Ultimately, Manoj explained, companies are bought, not sold, and if you focus on building a business around a greater purpose, the riches will come.

He then turned to Watson, and the role the Watson technology is playing as IBM works to build a smarter planet.

Watson, Manoj explained, was a part of an IBM research project that followed in the spirit of the Deep Blue/Kasparov chess match of 1997, but that this time around, more focus was put on the commercialization of the technology.

What made Watson so unique was that not only is it smart at answering questions, but also that it can process and analyze 200 million pages in three seconds. The business implications of such a capability in our emerging data-drowning environment are critical. There are now 2 billion people on the Web, and “businesses on a smarter planet where people are dying of thirst in an ocean of data.”

So, Watson has been geared towards some select industries initially, namely healthcare and financial services, with others yet to come.

On the healthcare front, Manoj revealed some startling statistics. One in five diagnoses today are estimated to be inaccurate or incomplete, and there are 1.5 million errors in the way medication are prescribed, delivered, and taken in the U.S. alone each year.

And yet 81% of physicians report spending five hours or less per month reading medical journals, even as medical information doubles every five years.

Which is where Dr. Watson’s technology can help doctors with their diagnoses.  Not to replace doctors, but to help them winnow down to the most likely diagnosis based on Watson’s ability to rapidly analyze millions of likely scenarios and generate and evaluate those hypotheses to identify the “best” outcome.

As Manoj suggested, think of it as a navigation system for doctors.

Kicking off the afternoon was guest speaker Gavin Newsome, former mayor of San Francisco and now California Lieutenant Governor.

Never mind, cheerleader for the resurgent state of California and Silicon Valley as the global hub of innovation and venture capital.

Newsome opened his comments with a warm welcome to the great state of California, and complimented IBM on its “remarkable capacity to get first round draft choices from around the world,” speaking, of course, of the nine IBM Smart Camp Global Finalists in attendance and anxiously awaiting the announcement of IBM Global Entrepreneur of the Year later this afternoon.

Newsome explained though California has faced some hard times of late, with 11.1% unemployment, the state is still about inviting the “best and the brightest” to “take risks, make mistakes, learn from them, and change the order of things.”

Newsome went to emphasize the importance of education, and joked that “when you [the nine SmartCamp finalists] decide to move out west, all nine of you, you’ll know we’re committed to your talent and growth.”

The lieutenant governor went on to explain California “was always in the future business,” highlighting the state’s open immigration policy and federal/state research partnerships.  As Newsome expanded, “California is not just about researching but about commercializing that research.  It’s not just about the power of an idea, but rather, about the power of an idea being tested.”

Newsome concluded his remarks with a tip of his hat to the IBM smarter planet initiative, acknowledging that 90+% of the world’s population will soon be living in cities, and that smart technology, driven by smarter entrepreneurs, will be key to addressing those growth challenges and creating a sustainable framework for their rapid expansion.

Great entrepreneurs generally seem to have some common characteristics: They have passion and commitment, they often have visions and the drive to change the world in some way, shape or form, and, they typically have the perseverance and wherewithal to move forward no matter how difficult the odds.

Such is how I would characterize the nine finalists in IBM’s 2011 SmartCamp Finals. Though there may not be a single common thread in the business ideas that have been brought to the table here — they are as diverse as our increasingly complex and globalized planet — the vision, drive, and eagerness to learn from one another and their Silicon Valley mentors has been a key theme of the IBM SmartCamp.

Sure, everyone would like to get fully funded and go make a gazillion dollars in the next great IPO.  But these finalists seem to realize they need to walk before they can run, and the wisdom and counsel that has been shared in the closed mentoring sessions during the last two days seems to be as distinctly valued as the opportunity to “win” the SmartCamp Global Finals.

The fact is, and it’s been said throughout the past couple of days, ALL the finalists are winners.  They wouldn’t have made it this far in the competition were they not, and no matter who gets the official “win,” it’s very clear that all the finalists have benefited tremendously from the networking and counsel shared amongst they and their peers.

As Facebook prepares to enter the public markets and offer the greatest IPO in the history of mankind, it’s probably a good time to step back and realize there are many ways that entrepreneurs can change the world.

Though much attention and focus has been generated by the consumer-facing social media applications that suck up much of the oxygen and ink, IBM SmartCamp in San Francisco this week has proven once again that the business-to-business opportunities presented by business analytics, and mobile/social/local technologies, are just as profound in the business realm, if not more so, than all the Facebooks of the world put together.

So, stay tuned to this blog and to the Twitter hashtag #ibmsmartcamp through the rest of this afternoon as we prepare to announce the “IBM Global Entrepreneur of the Year,” while recognizing all the finalists here at IBM SmartCamp were winners before they ever arrived, and have already changed the world in their own unique and diverse ways.