Company / Organization Categories Final Judging Committee
Jay Jacobs, President, The Shurn Group, New York, NY
Ajoy Mallik, Global Head, Co-Innovation, Tata Consultancy Services, Mumbai, India
Vince Menichelli, Managing Partner, Trestle Ventures, Philadelphia, PA
Deanna L. Newberry, Director - Category Management, Honeywell Consumer Products Group, Morris Township, NY
Theresa Ogando, President, Ogando Design, Whitehouse Station, NJ
Randy Orrell, Corporate Account (Walmart) Business Manager, SC Johnson, Lowell, AR
Denise Smith, VP Development, The State Theatre Centre for the Arts, Easton, PA
Daniel Sweeza, VP Operations, Air Evac EMS, Inc., West Plains, MO
Roberta Targonski, Director, Process Excellence, Johnson & Johnson, New Brunswick, NJ 

Chair of Company Category Judging
Bill Kirk, Weather Trends International

Bill Kirk is the CEO and co-founder of Weather Trends International (WTI), based in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. He has 20 years experience and a contagious passion when it comes to applying weather intelligence to business strategies in retail, manufacturing, utilities, media, consumer products, the financial sector, and the military.

Kirk helped WTI win 6 national and international business technology awards in 2009, including a Red Herring Technology Award and a 2009 Stevie Award for Most Innovative Company of the Year in The American Business Awards; and WTI appeared at #5 on the Forbes Most Promising Company Top 20 list.  This is the second company Kirk has founded. (His first sold for a 28X return-on-investment.)  Kirk has worked with executives at many Fortune 500 companies to help them minimize their weather exposure by utilizing proprietary year-ahead global forecasting technology. 
 
Earlier in his career, Kirk served as a Captain in the United States Air Force.  He worked with NASA and the Space Shuttle Columbia ferry flights, briefed thousands of F-16 fighter missions, and saved the government millions of dollars in the procurement of a multi-million dollar Satellite Data Handling System. 

As CEO of WTI, Kirk has published several business-weather and technical reports identifying winning strategies to capitalize on how weather influences retail sales and the overall economy.  Kirk is regularly featured and quoted as an expert in weather and retail sales on media and financial outlets such as CNBC, Bloomberg, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, ICSC, and Citigroup. He is named on four U.S. and U.K. patents as the inventor and co-inventor of business-weather forecasting technology. 
 
Kirk graduated from Rutgers University as an Air Force Distinguished Graduate with a B.S. in Meteorology.