Is your social life less than ideal? Do you long for a portable version of Thefacebook.com? Viendo, a service for cell phones that provides a map with the location of your friends, does that and more — it also gives you personalized information about local hot spots, events and parties.

While the finished product isn’t ready, the team of four Stanford students working on Viendo took a step closer to making the service a reality on Saturday at the first ever Business Symposium when they won $2,000 in the Business Plan Competition.

The symposium, sponsored by the Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students, or BASES, in conjunction with the Asian Business Association of UC Berkeley, included more than just the contest. Six workshops covered topics ranging from accounting and finance to social entrepreneurship. Speakers hailed from companies such as Intel and Deloitte Consulting.

“Our speakers are our sponsors and alumni — most of whom have assisted us before in events like this,” said junior Nancy Gong, an officer of BASES Interact, a component of BASES. “Throughout the year, we invite them to mixers and other events to ensure that they are kept up to date with BASES’ events. UC Berkeley also recruited their sponsors and alumni.”

BASES is one of the largest professional groups in the Bay Area. Created in 1996 by a group of Stanford engineering students to promote entrepreneurship, it has since expanded to include students of all disciplines and degrees. In addition to the Business Plan Competition, BASES sponsors three other business plan competitions, entrepreneurial workshops and seminars and several other events.

Senior Karen Law, one of the event organizers and vice president of BASES Interact, said that organizers wanted to hold a large-scale event to attract undergraduates, since the other competitions attract a larger number of graduate students.

“Our goal was to reach out to students who ordinarily wouldn’t enter these competitions and expose them to some of the key aspects of entrepreneurship, to inspire them to pursue their own ideas,” Law said. “Because we wanted the Business Symposium to be more prominent than other Interact events within Stanford, we looked to Berkeley to expand the event.”

The symposium featured the final round of the Business Plan Competition, which included presentations to a panel of Bay Area business representatives by nine teams chosen from a preliminary round. Their presentations were judged according to innovation, plausibility, analysis of obstacles, financial sustainability, value to society and management.

The teams created extremely different products and services, including software to facilitate tutoring in East Palo Alto, a college laundry service and leather laptop bags marketed especially for the “metropolitan woman.” The judging panel asked questions about the specific details of the business plans.

While Stanford students represented six of the nine teams in the final round, Law said that most of the initial participants in the competition were from Berkeley.

“While we had a large group of participants coming from Berkeley, we had hoped we would have more Stanford participation outside of the teams that advanced to the final round,” she said. “The response we received was strongly in favor of making the Business Symposium an annual event, so increasing the number of participants, especially from Stanford, will be a goal for next year.”

Viendo, the winning team, consists of sophomore computer science majors Sam Altman, Alok Deshpande and Nick Sivo, and senior Peter Deming, a management science and engineering major. Altman said that the team had begun working on the concept of a cell phone social network well before they entered the competition.

“I got together with some friends of mine from the dorm and my CS classes,” he said. “We didn’t prepare for this competition very much, but I think the presentation went well.”

Junior Vinay Mahagaokar, the creator of Textopedia — the Web site that allows students to sell textbooks to other students on campus — and a BASES Interact officer, said that BASES and business plan competitions help students pursue business ideas.

“Writing a business plan forces a student to think through all aspects of his or her idea,” he said. “While presenting a business plan, judges ask difficult questions that challenge one’s ideas. This forces the students to improve upon the weaker points in their business plans.”

NetVention, a company from UC Berkeley that created a system to coordinate convention-scale events, took second place. Stanford sophomore George Kwon, juniors Adam Kircher and Schuyler Ullman and senior Josh Seifert won the third-place prize with campuSmart, a free online marketplace to connect local users.

Kircher said his own experiences contributed to the concept behind campuSmart.

“This project was inspired by the pain and suffering I went through as a freshman on campus trying to find a bike,” he said. “I tried everything: Craig’s list, eBay, SUMarket — but nothing worked out. I realized that other people probably have the same needs, since there’s no good way to sell things yourself here.”

Kwon said that the success of campuSmart in the competition was based, in part, on its simplicity.

“There aren’t very many complicated components in our venture,” he said. “The questions the judges asked were really basic — they didn’t probe as much as they did with the other groups, so we weren’t really nervous during the presentation.”

The $500 prize for the campuSmart team will go toward funding the venture, the team members said.

“First we’ll probably have a celebratory dinner,” Kircher said. “But after that, it’s all hard work.”