Maatiam

Overview:
Maatiam (formerly FreePledge) is a young for-profit social venture that aims to become the leading social retail channel that enables consumers to support their causes while shopping online.

Maatiam has developed solutions that bring together socially conscious consumers, socially responsible corporations, online retailers, and nonprofit organizations. Maatiam has created a win-win-win-win situation by introducing consumption based philanthropy to the average online consumers.

Graduate Student Role:
We are seeking a graduate student to work with the funding team to develop a business plan to address our target strategic partners in the retail space (market analysis including industry trends, competition, market size, barriers to entry; business model; value proposition).

Contact information:
Caroline Bernadi
Co-founder
Caroline@maatiam.com
650 283 7265
www.maatiam.com

Maatiam

Maatiam (formerly FreePledge) is a young for-profit social venture that aims to become the leading social retail channel that enables consumers to support their causes while shopping online.

Maatiam has developed solutions that bring together socially conscious consumers, socially responsible corporations, online retailers, and nonprofit organizations. Maatiam has created a win-win-win-win situation by introducing consumption based philanthropy to the average online consumers.

Graduate Student Role:
We are seeking a graduate student to work with the funding team to develop a business plan to address our target strategic partners in the retail space (market analysis including industry trends, competition, market size, barriers to entry; business model; value proposition).

Contact information:
Caroline Bernadi
Co-founder
Caroline@maatiam.com
650 283 7265
www.maatiam.com

Catalog Choice

Catalog Choice - a national direct mail opt-out site. The site currently focuses on catalogs but can easily be expanded to other forms of mail. The service is free to consumers. There is a companion service that we are offering to Merchants whereby we provide them with the list of opt-out requests in machine readable form. The service is provided by Catalog Choice, a project of the Ecology Center; National Wildlife Federation and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). You can visit the site at www.catalogchoice.og. Our merchant service is profiled at www.catalogchoice.org/merchant. The site launched on October 9, 2007. Within four weeks, we have 100,000 registered users opting out of over 750,000 catalog titles.

Contact
Chuck Teller
Executive Director
Catalog Choice at chuck@catalogchoice.org

Consume Alert

Consume Alert is a FOR-Profit start-up with a social mission. Through a suite of web-based applications and services, Consume Alert will protect consumers from unknowingly purchasing or retaining recalled and otherwise hazardous products, vastly reducing the 27,100 deaths and 33.1 million injuries related to consumer products that occur each year in the US alone. Consume Alert is currently being developed by a team grad students, with input from several faculty advisors, from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and School of Information (formerly SIMS).

Our greatest need for the founding team is for web-developers, especially those with skills in MySQL, PHP and XML.

There are also several other areas in which students could get involved for class projects and b-plan teams:

- Web Design
- Market research
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Issues related to IP and the Web
- Financial modeling and analysis
- Social impact analysis

In addition to the GSVC, we will be entering the Berkeley B-plan competion, and potentially other business plan competitions. We are also scheduled to present to VCs in December. Any student working on the b-plan or otherwise involved with the project will have the opportunity to participate in these events.

Contact
Jennifer P. Toney
MBA Candidate, 2008
Haas School of Business
University of California, Berkeley
jennifer_toney@mba.berkeley.edu