Each year, the MOOT CORP Program must raise $200,000 in funding. We are always interested in adding organizations to our group of financial backers. Corporations support our program for many reasons. These include the following opportunities:

• To meet and hire the best entrepreneurial MBAs. While many of the MBAs launch their ventures, typically only one or two of the team are involved in the launch; the others seek jobs in established entities.
• To gain new clients with high growth potential in emerging industries. Most of the ventures in the global Competition launch their ventures.
• To network with the outstanding business leaders who are MOOT CORPâ judges.
• To learn about, invest in, or partner with new ventures emerging from the best business schools in the world.
• To impact entrepreneurship education literally around the world through direct interaction with the faculty who teach these courses.

The MOOT CORP Program is soliciting individuals interested in providing entrepreneurial expertise to student teams enrolled in the New Venture Creation course which leads to the Texas MOOT CORP Competition. The course’s objective is to help MBAs develop the skills necessary for creating a new venture, with a particular focus on communicating through written and verbal presentations.

The Mentor Program is intended to be an informal service for students seeking to formulate and execute successful business plans. Individuals with the appropriate expertise will have the opportunity to provide business plan critique and feedback to startups in an informal hands-on way.

Fortune Small Business awarded the third prize of $5,000 to Bigfoot Networks, a company from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin with a new technology to prevent technical delays in online games. The third annual business-plan contest, the FSB Student Showdown, was very competitive. Eighty-two plans arrived from 66 schools, including Harvard and UCLA—up from 58 entries in 2004. To enter, teams had to have won a business-plan competition.

Harlan Beverly has won his share of tournaments in online games such as Counter-Strike: Source, a simulated battle against terrorists. But as a hard- core gamer for the past 15 years he has also suffered the agony of losing. "And it's not my fault," he groans. The culprit, he says, is a technical lag that slows many games when the servers that they are running on bog down with traffic. In online baseball, for instance, heavy server traffic might cause a delay when a batter swings