Rochester, N.Y., May 13, 2008: SiMPore Inc. today presented the strongest business plan to a panel of venture capitalist judges, earning the company a $100,000 payday. Their winning business plan beat four others in the final round of the second-annual Golden Horseshoe Business Challenge.

SiMPore, located in Henrietta, is an early-stage company commercializing a breakthrough membrane technology for the separation and purification of biomolecules and other nano-sized particles.

The Golden Horseshoe Business Challenge is a cross-border, inter-regional business plan competition. It was created to stimulate entrepreneurial growth and investment, and to shine a spotlight on one of the largest and most innovative population centers in North America. The Golden Horseshoe Business Challenge is targeted toward entrepreneurs in four cities in Western New York and Ontario, Canada — Rochester, Buffalo and Ithaca in Western New York, as well as the Region of Waterloo, Ontario.

"Winning the Golden Horseshoe is validation of our technology and a fabulous reward for the team's hard work," said Rick Richmond, CEO. "The $100,000 will go a long way toward bringing our product to market. The Golden Horseshoe Business Challenge also will bring us recognition that will help us with customer acquisition and recruiting employees. We especially appreciate the support that we received from the University of Rochester and High Tech Rochester."

"This is an excellent opportunity to reach out and support entrepreneurs in Western New York and Southern Ontario, and provide them with the one, true resource they need the most— access to start-up funding," said Duncan Moore, Vice Provost of Entrepreneurship at the University of Rochester.

Other competitors included:

Rochester, NY

• Second place winner: SensiVida Medical Systems Inc. SensiVida Medical Systems, of Canandaigua, makes medical products that reduce the invasiveness, labor and costs of certain tests.

Buffalo, NY

• First place winner: NanoAxis. NanoAxis creates functionalized quantum dots for drug/gene delivery and customized medical devices using patented quantum dot development and manufacturing.
• Second place winner: Mentor Café. Mentor Café is creating a website & associated software to become the premier destination for mentorship on the Internet.

Ithaca, NY

• First place winner: FreeGreen. FreeGreen addresses both the growing consumer interest around green homes and the $3B home product advertising market by providing consumers with free, environmentally friendly home plans, while charging green product vendors, retailers, and distributors a fee for specifying their products and services into FreeGreen's home plans.
• Second place winner: GeneWeave. GeneWeave has an innovative point-of-need bacterial detection diagnostic with lab-quality performance yet it is lower in cost than its competition.

Waterloo, Ontario

• First place winner: Osiris Technology. Osiris Technologies has developed WaterGuard™, a cutting-edge nanotechnology that will revolutionize the water testing industry. WaterGuard™ is a real-time, portable water analyzer, which requires less processing time and is more cost effective than the current testing solutions available on the market.
• Second place winner: VitatraK. VitatraK is a physician prescribed device composed of a Blackberry®, using licensed software, which reads information from wireless nodes placed on the patient's chest. The information is sent from the Blackberry® to a secure server that stores patient information that a physician is able to access anytime.

About Golden Horseshoe:

The Golden Horseshoe Business Challenge is a cross-border, inter-regional business plan competition. It was created to stimulate entrepreneurial growth and investment, and to shine a spotlight on one of the largest and most innovative population centers in North America. The winner of this second-annual competition will receive a $100,000 cash prize. Several organizers and sponsors have returned for the second annual event.

Special thanks go to event sponsors Mark S. Ain, CEO and chairman of payroll firm Kronos Inc. and a prominent alumnus of the University of Rochester William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration and the Finger Lakes Wired program.

Regional sponsors included Greater Rochester Enterprise (GRE), High Tech Rochester (HTR), Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and the University of Rochester (UR) The State University of New York at Buffalo Office of Science, Technology Transfer and Economic Outreach (STOR), The Johnson School (with support from BR Ventures, Cornell Center for Materials Research, Tompkins County Area Development and Entrepreneurship@Cornell), the Center for Business Entrepreneurship & Technology, the Finger Lakes' Entrepreneurs' Forum.

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