Winning is getting to be a habit with Lisa Chan, Harvard business management graduate and executive vice president of ZaraCom Technologies, Inc. in Rockville, Maryland. Last month, she won first place in the fifth and $10,000 in the annual StartRight! Women’s Business Plan Competition.

Rockville Economic Development, Inc. (REDI) announced Zaracom was one of the four women-owned companies chosen from 39 entries.

“I’m not surprised about the award, but I’m happy–this technology already won an award before,” she said in a15-minute telephone interview. She was rushing through meetings that day, before leaving for a six-week trip to Hong Kong, Singapore, China and Japan to meet potential customers.

In September last year, ZaraCom won the grand prize and $25,000 in the third annual China Business Plan Competition of the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.

Zaracom, whose worth is $12.7 million, is the market leader in providing wireless carriers a patent-pending artificial intelligence technology that proactively identifies network “bottlenecks” and assists with “network optimization that saves millions in unnecessary infrastructure spending.” Ms. Chan helped found the company with Chief Technology Officer Dr. Jeffery Chang. Chang was her former co-worker at Etrunk in Taiwan.

ZaraCom’s artificial intelligence technology is marketed to the 630 worldwide wireless telephone carriers. Among its customers in the U.S. include Verizon Wireless and AT&T. ZaraCom has provided the technology to Japan’s KDDI and Vodafone Japan (renamed SoftBank), as well as to the largest carrier in the world, China Mobile.

ZaraCom joined the Montgomery County Business Incubator Network in 2006. Since then, it has received funding from the state of Maryland, Montgomery County and the University of Maryland. In 2007, the company was nominated as a “Maryland Incubator Company of the Year.”

Niche Market

“When I first heard of this technology developed by Jeffery, I was so surprised when I learned about the true value of the product,” said Chang, who majored in marketing and PR. She brought the technology to the commercialization stage after a lunch meeting convinced her that the technology was highly marketable. “I asked him, ‘Are you sure, you’re not kidding me?’”

Dr. Chang, in a 15-minute telephone interview, laughed when he recounted that meeting. ““She told me she just sold another product for $8 million, and my product could be worth maybe ten times more.”

The wireless communications major explained the technology he developed “enables wireless users to locate the root cause of a problem among the tens and thousands of possibilities, or lots of reasons mixed together–and suggests the solution. For example, a drop call can be a transmission problem or an overload problem.”

He said he spent two years developing the technology, working with his professors and classmates in Taiwan. He told Lisa about it in 2003. “The product has no competition in the U.S. right now, only contractors–this is a niche market,” he said.

Other StartRight winners

“The quality of business plans that our expert panel of judges evaluated was at an all-time high,” said REDI Executive Director Sally Sternbach. This acknowledgment makes ZaraCom’s Chan’s win even more impressive. “For the first time in the competition’s history we are awarding two third-place prizes,” she added.

Sharon Flank of InfraTrac, located in Silver Spring, Maryland won second place in the StartRight awards for near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy that can detect and prevent counterfeiting of pills, powders, liquids, vaccines and plastics. Hospitals will test the technology’s ability to prevent medication errors in the future.

The Center for Medicine in the Public Interest reports that nearly $39 billion of annual global pharmaceutical commerce is counterfeit, with that amount expected to rise to $75 billion by 2010.

Colleen Nye and Dr. Loleta Robinson of Syan Biosciences, located in Baltimore, Maryland, and Jessica Feltz of The Turning Point in Frederick, Maryland tied for third place. Ms. Nye and Dr. Robinson are in the process of licensing and marketing “lab-on-a-chip” technology, making rapid, accurate and inexpensive diagnostic analysis possible in a non-laboratory setting. This could be useful in remote areas around the world.

The Turning Point uses a group acupuncture setting in a traditional Asian approach to provide high-quality alternative healthcare at an affordable price. Acupuncture has long been endorsed by the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization. REDI noted boutique acupuncturists charge more than $100 per treatment, and with the number of uninsured Americans exceeding 50 million, Turning Point offers a welcome solution. * By Jennie L. Ilustre