Two companies related to the University of Tennessee won first and second place in the 2011 Startup Business Plan Competition, sponsored by the Fairview Technology Center, last week.

490 Biotech, a life science company headed by university researchers, won first place, and MyUdaily, headed by Karl Hughes, senior in mechanical engineering, took second place.

“The Fairview competition was originally open to a whole bunch of groups,” Dan Close, 490 Biotech chief scientific officer, said. “Anyone could write in with their proposed business plan and what they wanted to do.”

After the application deadline on April 14, 10 candidates were chosen to compete.

Eventually five groups were chosen to pitch their ideas to a group of investors, who ranked the groups based on pitch, as well as business plan and idea.

490 Biotech’s idea consisted of a product that is a collection of light-emitting human cell lines genetically programmed to “report” on biological events or interactions that affect their metabolic status.

In other words, they are cells that produce light to measure the growth of specific types of cells.

“490 Biotech is founded around a technology that allows for continuous unstimulated light production from living human and animal cells,” Close said. “So basically, we have genetically engineered a way to encourage these cells to produce light, like a little, tiny, cellular light bulb.”

The cells produce light at a given rate. Depending on how much light is produced, researchers can determine how many cells are present.

For example, the growth of a tumor can be monitored, without surgical interference, simply by measuring the light that is produced.

“(The light) is not something you can see with the naked eye, at least not yet,” Close said.

The prizes for first place included $10,000 to help move the technology toward market, time with legal and marketing teams and office space.

Other members of 490 Biotech include Gary Sayler, founder and CEO, Steve Ripp, chief operating officer, and Stacey Patterson, chief technology officer.

Hughes started MyUdaily, which won second place in the competition.

“Some friends and I started Volblogs six months ago,” Hughes said. “That’s where the idea came from. What MyUdaily is, is an expansion of (Volblogs) but at other schools.”

Hughes started web programming as a hobby in eighth grade and eventually decided to make a blog for fun.

“We started Volblogs as a casual, fun thing with a few of my friends,” Hughes said.

The idea of MyUdaily is to establish school blogs at other colleges and universities.

“We realized that if students on our campus wanted this, students on other campuses would want this as well,” Hughes said. “As we looked around, we realized there weren’t many solutions to this where it was a group blog/news blog.”

Prizes for second place included office space and a $2,500 grant.

“It’s funny because we were sixth out of the five they were going to take,” Hughes said. “Then one team had to drop out, so they called us. It was pretty exciting, and the fact that we got second was great.”

Currently MyUdaily only consists of the Volblogs at UT, but Hughes hopes to expand to 10 campuses by the end of the summer.

“We want to stress that we aren’t here to take over for the school newspaper,” Hughes said. “It’s a very different kind of journalism. What we focus on is what we think is popular to students. A lot of college students want to have a pretty professional blog, and we think we can provide that.”