by Ramu Yalamanchi

SigBiz has seen great progress since its recent return as aACM special interest group. The focus of SigBiz has been defined as the following: "To encourage cross-college interaction and investigation while nurturing an understanding of business issues in technical enterprises." SigBiz has an underlying theme of encouraging budding entrepreneurs. In the recent past, the computer science department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign has seen a number of highly successful entrepreneurs. Success breeds success. In order to keep the momentum of Netscape, Spyglass, and SPRY (to name a few), SigBiz provides a platform to collect and foster successful entrepreneurs providing tools for success.

On Friday, October 13, a core group of members attended the MIT Enterprise Forum held at the Beckman Institute. The MIT Enterprise Forum is a group which originated with entrepreneurial MIT alumni twenty some years ago. The group extended to major cities throughout America and drew more than just MIT alumni. The Chicago chapter of the MIT Enterprise Forum brought a group of highly successful venture capitalists, lawyers, and successful business people to provide opportunities to budding entrepreneurs in Urbana-Champaign. A number of interested SigBiz members attended the forum and interacted with people from industry. The forum provided positive exposure for our SIG to some successful Chicago people involved in technical enterprises.

On Monday, October 30th, 7:00 PM, SigBiz held its first general meeting, entitled "The World Wide Web and Electronic Commerce: The Making of Technical Entrepreneurs." The meeting was opened by Professor Pete Delisle. Pete Delisle will be serving as the faculty advisor for our SIG. Professor Delisle was followed by Brad Whitmore and Carlos Pero from Ravenna Communications. Brad and Carlos are involved in the web development business. Finally, Luke Nosek and Scott Banister spoke about their company SponsorNet. SponsorNet has an innovative idea for gaining exposure on the web.

SigBiz meets each Monday at 7:00 in front of 1225 DCL and then goes to a room for this week's business discussion. Typically, the 2nd and 4th Mondays have special general events. On the second Monday of each month, SigBiz holds a grill session. The grill session is intended to provide constructive criticism to entrepreneurial ideas that are awaiting evaluation. An idea is presented to the SIG followed by a technical and business critique of how the idea may survive. Those interested in having their ideas grilled are encouraged to contact Castedo Ellerman (castedo@uiuc.edu). On the fourth Monday of each month, SigBiz holds a general meeting with speakers from industry who talk on some aspect of entrepreneurship.

SigBiz encourages interested individuals from all disciplines to attend our meetings.