A plan for cleaning wastewater with ultraviolet light won the $15,000 first prize in the annual Big Bang! Business Plan Competition at the University of California, Davis, Wednesday night.

The funding will help students complete a prototype of the novel technology, which will be tested first at UC Davis' wastewater treatment facility. The system has the potential to replace chlorine as a disinfectant in swimming pools and hot tubs as well.

A $5,000 second prize went to a plan for a back-injury consulting firm. And a $3,000 “people’s choice” award -- selected by audience vote -- went to a start-up that markets a "rainskirt" made of recycled plastic bottles.

"This was the toughest deliberation in the history of this competition," said Roger Akers, a Sacramento venture capitalist who estimates that he has evaluated some 10,000 business plans in his 30-year career. Akers was one of seven volunteer judges who determined the top Big Bang! winners.

The Big Bang! competition, founded in 2000 by students at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management, has become one of the best-known business plan competitions on the West Coast.

Competitors vie not just for the chance to win cash, but also for the opportunity to develop their ideas and business plans with the help of investors, intellectual property attorneys and business leaders. Teams must include at least one UC Davis student, alumnus or staff or faculty member.

With this year’s prizes, UC Davis Big Bang! has awarded a total of $166,000 to 27 promising student-initiated projects.

Previous Big Bang! winners and finalists have gone on to form such companies as Vinperfect, based in Davis, which markets a high-tech wine stopper; Bloo Solar, based in West Sacramento, which sells low-cost solar energy technology; and VisualCalc in El Dorado Hills, a management software firm.

"You get to change the world," Scot Lenet, founder and managing director of DFJ Frontier, an early stage technology venture capital fund, said at the Wednesday night event. Lenet helped to judge the competition.

"We're kind of in an economic mess right now," Lenet remarked. "And it won't be the large companies that get us out of it. It's going to be the successful entrepreneurs."

Akers Capital and DFJ Frontier were among the 16 Northern California venture capital firms, law practices and major firms that provided the prize money, coaching and volunteer judges for this year's Big Bang!

MBA students run the competition without any financial support from the university. This year's student co-chairs were Julia Barg and Adelina Ratner.

The 2009 competition opened last fall with a field of 19 business plan submissions. The field was whittled down in preliminary judging rounds to five finalist teams. Those five teams presented their plans to volunteer judges during a closed-door session Wednesday afternoon, and to the public Wednesday evening.

UltraV, the winning business concept, relies on technology developed by Bassam Younis, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis. To bring his technology to market, Younis relied on the UC Davis Energy Efficiency Center to connect him with students in engineering and management. Those connections led to UltraV. Elisabetta Lambertini, a Ph.D. student in engineering, is chief technology officer of the incipient startup. MBA candidates Mananya Chansanchai and James Bui are vice president of business development and vice president of sales and marketing, respectively.

According to Chansanchai, 75 percent of wastewater treatment plants around the country still disinfect water with chlorine, a toxic chemical that is dangerous to transport and store. About 20 percent have adopted UV disinfection systems, but these systems use mercury lamps in direct contact with water. Because of their toxicity, mercury lamps are expensive to dispose of. Direct contact with water is another drawback, because the lamps become covered with algae and require frequent cleaning.

Younis' design uses xenon lamps that do not come into contact with water. Instead, the lamps pulse UV light at water as it circulates through an enclosed cylinder.

UltraV has an agreement to test the technology at the UC Davis wastewater treatment facility, which currently uses a mercury lamp UV disinfection system. The test will allow direct comparisons of the xenon and mercury systems.

The students applied for a $150,000 grant from the California Energy Commission to complete a prototype for the campus test. They also filed an application for a patent.

"This is an amazing opportunity," Chansanchai said after her team won the $15,000 Big Bang! prize. "We think we have a product that will make the world cleaner and healthier for our children."

The second-prize winner, BioDynamics Consulting, was developed by Rena Chhit, a student in the UC Davis Graduate School of Management's Bay Area Working Professional Program, and Michael Mashintchian, a UCLA MBA student. The linchpin of their business plan is an "industrial lumbar motion monitor" that the students say can effectively reduce workplace back injuries.

The monitor, designed to quickly diagnose back-injury risks, was invented by William Marrass, an engineer at Ohio State University's Institute for Ergonomics. Mashintchian had been working on a similar concept when he heard about Marrass' work.

"I cold-called him," Mashintchian says.

Impressed with Machintchian's pitch, Marrass granted his patent to BioDynamics Consulting and signed on as its chief technology officer.

UltraV and BioDynamics were also winners in a Little Bang contest in February sponsored by the Graduate School of Management’s Center for Entrepreneurship, which encourages campus scientists to explore the market potential of their research.

The Big Bang! "people's choice" award went to Libby Earthman and Reid Bryson, who have a start-up company that markets a "rainskirt." Earthman, who has an economics degree from Colorado College, is executive director of the Putah Creek Council, a local nonprofit. Bryson is a graduate student in land, air and water resources at UC Davis.

Earthman designed and sewed her first rainskirt while living in the Pacific Northwest, where she frequently arrived at work with wet pant legs or pantyhose on rainy days. The floor-length wrap-around garment fastens at the waist, can be put on in seconds, and, unlike rain pants, does not require removal of shoes or slacks.

So many passersby asked Earthman where they could buy a rainskirt like hers that she applied for a patent and started a company, Emergent Designs. The skirts are stitched out of a waterproof, breathable fabric made of recycled soda bottles and sell for $90 to $220.

The two other Big Bang! finalists announced Wednesday proposed companies to save water in grape vineyards and preserve sight in people with diabetes:

Tom Shapland, a viticulture graduate student at UC Davis, and Michael Crews, a first-year MBA student, teamed up to create Latent Harvest. The company aims to market a technology capable of giving farmers real-time crop water-use measurements. Currently, growers rely on estimates rather than direct measurements.

Five UC Davis students are behind VisionQuest, which proposes retinal scanning kiosks at retail stores. Scans would be relayed to VisionQuest ophthalmologists, who would study the scans for signs of diabetic retinopathy, a leading cause of blindness. Team members are Megan Roberts, a Ph.D. candidate in molecular, cellular and integrative physiology, and MBA candidates Nathan Bowersox, Christine Chen, Courtney Hans and Sam Wainer.

"Something special happens when you mix great technology, a solid business plan and prize money," Nicole Woolsey Biggart, dean of the management school, said Wednesday night. "Big Bang! is a showcase of what is happening at UC Davis -- big ideas put into action, and a growing entrepreneurial spirit campuswide."

For more information on the competition, visit the Big Bang! Web site at http://bigbang.gsm.ucdavis.edu.

About the Graduate School of Management

Established in 1981, the UC Davis Graduate School of Management provides management education to more than 500 students enrolled in Daytime MBA and Working Professional MBA programs on the UC Davis campus, in Sacramento, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. It also offers a technology management minor for undergraduates and business development programs in which doctoral science students develop skills to commercialize research.

About UC Davis

For 100 years, UC Davis has engaged in teaching, research and public service that matter to California and transform the world. Located close to the state capital, UC Davis has 31,000 students, an annual research budget that exceeds $500 million, a comprehensive health system and 13 specialized research centers. The university offers interdisciplinary graduate study and more than 100 undergraduate majors in four colleges — Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Biological Sciences, Engineering, and Letters and Science — and advanced degrees from six professional schools — Education, Law, Management, Medicine, Veterinary Medicine and the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing.