At the SmartView Roundtable An Eco-Entrepreneur's Dream

At the SmartView Roundtable: An Eco-Entrepreneur’s Dream
Three winners of the “SmartView Eco Entrepreneur Challenge
YouTube Contest” at the Roundtable at NASDAQ on May 14th with
Opportunity to Present Best Green Start-up ideas to group of 100 Senior Financial Executives

(New York, NY, May 14, 2010) -- The three chosen winners of the SmartView Eco Entrepreneur Challenge will come to the NASDAQ MarketSite at 4 Times Square on Friday, May 14th to present their green start-up ideas for any industry, from any area of specialization. Their audience: approximately 100 senior financial executives, sustainability officers and CEOs, members of the Global Reporting Initiative, pioneering developer of the world’s most widely used sustainability framework, and executives from a number of significant organizations and companies including Ceres, Trucost, Royal Bank of Canada, Generation Investment Management, Parametric Portfolio, Ativo Capital Management, Brennan Investment Management, and Akin Gump.

The contest was sponsored by CRD Analytics, BrownFlynn, Deloitte & Touche LLP and Green Nurture.com. The three winners, their hometowns and their sustainable ideas are:

Agavenol™, the future of ethanol feedstock (www.agavenol.com) comprises Cesar Raul Gonzalez and Marco Ugarte, Arizona State University students. Most (95%) of the corn for US ethanol comes from the Corn Belt, and is transported via unsustainable means to highly populated areas. Furthermore, 1/3 of the U.S. is under abnormally dry conditions. Agave plants offer a partial answer to energy needs. They are low maintenance, have easy containment, are drought, temperature and salt resistant and can be improved upon. Agavenol would utilize its own resources and partner networks of local ethanol producers (such as Pinal Energy) and Native American communities in Arizona. The business plan promises over $6 million in annual revenues, 25 jobs, 65 million gallons of water saved, 4500 acres of idle land reclaimed and 2 million tones of CO2 avoided. The outputs from this business are compounded up the value chain and result in 40 jobs per community in the Native American communities and 45 jobs per facility at the ethanol producers and up to $90 million in upstream revenues from ethanol production.

Arun Storrs, the RUNI Collection, Yale, New Haven (www.therunicolection.blogspot.com; www.therunicollection.etsy.com) Mission: to create an eco-fashion line that models ethical and environmentally-sustainable business practices by merging fashion (“create beautiful fashion that appeals to both eco and non eco customers”); the environment (“Develop a cradle to cradle product life cycle”) and women’s empowerment (“Establish a fair trade women’s cooperative to employ and empower young Nepalese women”). The Runi collection counters the fast fashion movement by providing fashion-forward men’s and women’s eco-clothing and use's fashion to raise awareness of issues facing young women in developing nations. Efforts to build a green manufacturing facility in Nepal are currently in progress.

Nom^3 (“Nom, Nom, Nom, the sound of a happy customer”) “A food truck. A food revolution.” This is start-up from Columbia University students in New York. “From the student body, we have discovered an unmet need of the community: demand for healthy, fresh and sustainable food options,” the Columbia entrants said in their proposal. Mission statement: 1) Food: Making healthy, fresh and delicious meals accessible to the college campus and its neighborhood 2) Community: engaging the community in dialogue over food sustainability and communal dining 3) Education: Informing customers on food origins, healthy lifestyles, sand the environmental impact of their food choices.

Nom (3) can be a food bus, a co-op restaurant and can be expanded regionally and nationally across college campuses. The project’s potential market: 20,000 students at Columbia’s Morningside campus, 7,000 faculty and administration, 60,000 people in the neighborhood, daily tourists and visitors. NOM (3) is comprised of: Gita Deo, Cindy Zhang, Gelseigh Karl-Cannon, Vivian Luo and Dehui Kong.

Michael Muyot, President of CRD Analytics, one of the SmartView Roundtable hosting/ partner organizations, said:

“Two years ago I was chosen to come to the Amsterdam Global Conference on Sustainability & Transparency. I was asked to speak at the Readers Choice Awards Dinner to an international audience on the subject of GRI guidelines and how they were starting to be used for investment research on Wall Street. This was an incredible opportunity that changed the trajectory of my career. It had a tremendous impact on the development of the SmartView platform, our sustainability ratings, developing the first Sustainability index with NASDAQ using GRI [G3] guidelines and hosting the SmartView roundtable event. Hosting the Eco Entrepreneur Challenge was our way of paying it forward to some other well deserving eco-entrepreneurs.”

As part of the excitement for winning, each of the three winners gets to deliver a five-minute pitch to 100 senior executives; they will be introduced to two conference attendees of their choice; and they will join the Global Reporting Initiative, or GRI onstage for the drama and excitement of the NASDAQ closing bell ceremony.

Entrants created a 30-second YouTube video that described their eco-idea or startup. Thirty percent of the score was based on YouTube views; 30% on the evaluation of the description; and 40% was based on judges’ evaluation of the overall merit, viability and presentation.

About CRD Analytics
CRD Analytics is an independent provider of investment analytics. The company's rigorous evaluation of financial, social, environmental and governance data is used to quantitatively determine the potential sustainability of a company, industry sector or investment portfolio, allowing for informed investment decisions and delivering optimized, risk-adjusted sustainable performance. Using its proprietary, patent-pending SmartViewTM Platform, CRD Analytics empowers its clients with actionable and performance-driven information distilled from large sets of complex data. For more information visit: www.crdanalytics.com

About Green Nurture.com (“Start the conversation™")
GreenNurture is the premier turn-key corporate sustainability program focused on engaging the human resources of an organization and empowering them to take environmental action. We do it by providing:

• Employee Engagement - A social-networking structure actively involves your entire workforce in your sustainability initiatives and provides a forum for their ideas, creativity and commitments. Learn More
• Knowledge - Educational eco-articles written by our schooled journalistic staff foster the awareness that becomes a springboard for employee action. Learn More
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