Most of the people are probably not familiar with the term "NVC." It stands for New Venture Championship. This is a well-known international entrepreneurial business plan competition for graduate students, which is hosted by the University of Oregon every year. A lot of teams from universities all over the world, such as Stanford University, University of Chicago, and University of California Berkeley, gather up in Portland, Oregon each year to participate in this competition. They have to present and also defend their business plan to number of judges. The winner of this competition receives $25,000. NVC, a university based competition, was also rated as one of the top three business plan championships in the world, by Business Week.

  The business idea "Pickple" presented was called "talk-war." They used the fact that numerous people nowadays post comments online on the current news and events to express their opinions. They created a website called "talk-war (www.t-war.co.kr)  and formed an environment where people can express themselves by posting comments and arguments on current issues online, virtually creating a 'war' based cyber space. People can choose either to support or critique an issue, and try to convince the other people who have different opinion. This website had the fastest registering rate within all the new websites created last year.

  With this business plan, "Pickple" made it to top 20 teams and advanced to the semifinals. "Pickple was also came first place in the lightning round, which consists of all the teams that did not make it through the semifinals."

  Although they did not advance to finals, winning an innovative award meant more than just an award. NVC is one of the most highly acclaimed business plan competitions in the world, and many teams who participate in this competition, have been preparing for decades. Therefore, other universities already had know-hows and tips from former teams that participated before. Yoon quoted, ?t is the first time competing in this championship for HYU, and we are probably the first team in Korea. Because it was our first time, we basically had a lot of difficulties. Many universities prepare for this competition for years or maybe decades, yet we only had few months to prepare. We also lacked in members. Maximum of five people could form a team, yet we only had three in total; therefore, everything was in a rush and our team had no time to watch other universities?presentations.?Winning an award in these circumstances is simply stunning.

  More information on NVC can be found online at www.venturechampionship.com