Tennessee’s Venture Community Is All Eyes On Chattanooga’s Gig Tank

Entrepreneurship and startups are a hot bed of activity this month in the great state of Tennessee. As we reported earlier, there are three different accelerators graduating this month, all with their own demo day. Possibly because it’s the first of the three graduations, or possibly because they have a unique program, Chattanooga’s Gig Tank has attracted a lot of attention from the entire state.

The City of Chattanooga along with the Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce have organized an entire press junket tied to various events throughout the city that are celebrating the graduation of the first Gig Tank class of entrepreneurs and students.

A little background.

Chattanooga was actually the first city in the United States to offer gigabit ethernet to the household, not just the node within a 600 mile radius. Every house and every business within Chattanooga’s gig footprint have the fiber piped to their home. The backbone of what is referred to here are “The Gig City”, is a smart grid. The City of Chattanooga has deployed a smart grid to communicate information from electric meters and other utilities for all residents and business’ within the footprint.

Now, it’s the decision of the resident or the business, if they want to also utilize that same fiber line for data services, tv and telephone. The “Gig” was deployed last year, a year ahead of Kansas City and Google. The gigabit ethernet in Kansas City functions more like a traditional cable company. The gigabit ethernet goes to the node, or the street, then Google signs customers up to bring the service down to the home. Of course one of the big things to consider in all of this is there aren’t wireless routers that can support wireless transmission of a full gigabit data stream, wirelessly to the device. Most traditional computers also can’t function at the gigabit speed. Right now, end users will experience speeds from 30-100mbps which is of course a huge feat in itself.

The GigTank is a traditional accelerator program that was designed for startups to utilize that huge bandwidth to develop startups. Unlike most traditional accelerators the GigTank had two classes, an entrepreneur class which received a $15,000 seed investment and a chance to win $100,000 in additional funding Thursday morning. The other class is a class of student led startups that received free room and board, but did not receive a seed investment. The students are competing for a $50,000 prize.

Also unlike most traditional accelerators, all of the startups will pitch the judges in a closed door session Thursday morning ahead of the actual pitch presentations on stage tomorrow.

Needless to say all of this excitement in Chattanooga has attracted a lot of attention. When commenting to a local reporter StartupTN President and President of Nashville’s Entrepreneur Center, Michael Burcham said “There will be 500 people here tomorrow who’ve either started companies, or invested in companies, and most of them are coming from out of town”. If the buses the city are running specifically for the event from the area hotels are any indication, there are definitely a lot of people from out of town here.

Jared Nixon, a partner in Daymond John’s Shark Branding, is one of those out of town guests. He’s here in Chattanooga to scope out the startups that are participating in the event, but he’s also intrigued by the infrastructure around the gig itself.

There are folks in town from Warner Brothers, Mozilla, US Ignite and other nationally known companies and ecosystem partners.

Even the Nashville centric Burcham, who happily announced that 70% of the investors and 90% of the venture capital is in Nashville, is eager to see the ideas that come out of the GigTank which is equally important to Burcham in his role as StartupTN President. Burcham says he looks for two main components in deals he does, the “idea” and the competition. If there’s no competition in the space, he stays away from that idea because there’s no market. One of Burcham’s strongest suits is nurturing good ideas. He does this on a daily basis through the Entrepreneur Center and Jumpstart Foundry, Nashville’s GigTank counterpart.

While there are a lot of startups presenting at Gig Tank’s demo day with similar ideas happening all over the country, these startups had a huge internet pipe to work on, and hopefully these ideas will win far more than the $150,000 available from the GigTank itself. Hopefully there are some multi-million dollar ideas in the bunch.

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5 Angel.Co Startups From Everywhere Else: Nashville Edition

Nibletz.com is the voice of startups “everywhere else” and your source for Tennessee startup news. As many of our readers know we’ve been working on a series called “5 Angel List Startups From Everywhere Else”. It stems from the weekly traction email that most angel.co members receive. We’ve noticed time and time again that the “trending” startups on the Angel List email are predominantly from Silicon Valley. This of course isn’t the fault of angel.co it’s an amazingly great resource. But here you’ll find five startups profiled from “everywhere else”.

Since it’s Demo Day Month in Tennessee we thought what a great time to do “5 Angel List startups from everywhere else, Nashville Edition” if you’re looking for the Memphis edition, you can find it here.

Wannado

Let’s kick this thing off with one of the Jumpstart Foundry graduates from 2011. The startup called “wannado” is your guide to everything you wanna do. Great name, great concept.

We actually got to see a preview of wannado the other night in Memphis and it blew me away. The app has a robust feature set, yet an aesthetically pleasing user interface. It simply does exactly as they say it will, it tells you what’s available around you to do. If you’re looking for a show or a concert, it’s there. If you’re looking for a business networking event, it’s there. If you’re looking for a cooking class, a lecture, a speaker, a book club, they’re all there for you and everything is served up according to your preferences.

Wannado has an amazing sharing circle breakout piece which allows you to easily share an event any way you like. They also allow you to share events with friends that don’t have the wannado app without having to download the wannado app. They’re given a text message which takes them to a landing page for that event with an equally pleasing user experience.

Truth be told they weren’t on the Angel.co site but we like them that much so check it out here. They are still in private beta but sign up for an update and you’ll be the first person on your block to know wannado. (you like what we did there)

Find wannado on the web here and if you’re reading this wannado, you may want to sign up for the Angel List it’s free.

The next two entries come from the same entrepreneur. Phillip Maddox is the co-founder of Deedsy and VenueBlast.

Deedsy

Deedsy is a good deed engine. The premise is simple, do good deeds, and earn points. A good deed can be anything from a hug to house sitting, to picking up trash. Whatever good deed you do, with Deedsy you earn points.

You can create deeds for others to do and look for a “do gooder” to do that deed for you and then they’ll earn points. It’s a great feel good startup that will promote doing good in your life and community.

You can start off with 25 points if you head over here to the deedsy site and add your name to their LaunchRock.

Here’s a link to their Angel List page

VenueBlast

VenueBlast is the other entry from founder Phillip Maddox. VenueBlast is your ticket to live music online. Basically it’s a video streaming venue for live music and entertainment productions. For the end user they promise great quality productions that can be found in streaming or even pay per view offerings.

For the client they offer a robust set of features that can be delivered to the end user in a variety of ways. Their feature set is constantly evolving to stay up to date with the changes in streaming technology optimized for concerts and live entertainment. They also offer the ability for companies to sponsor live concerts and streaming events and offer analytics back to the customer.

Earlier this week VenueBlast reported that they’re working on some exciting new features and they hope to rollout to the public soon.

Find VenueBlast on the web here and on the Angel List here

Populr.me

Populr.me is the easiest way to quickly crete a great looking micro-site that the Nashville startup calls “pops”. Within minutes you’re able to create,deliver and manage your microsite for whatever the function.

One of their users, Jason Moore, is in the healthcare industry uses Populr.me to create microsites to push out to their healthcare industry partners in hospital and provider systems. Moore said that their custom communication via a secure portal is a game changer.

Populr.me offers a simple drag and drop layout engine making editing and publishing a cinch. They also offer unlimited custom domains with analytics available as well.

Populr.me is so popular that they won the 2012 Governor’s Innovation Conference and the $5,000 check to go along with it.

Here’s Populr.me’s website and here is their Angel List page

Meevl

Meevl is a Slovakian startup that graduated from Jumpstart Foundry in the 2011 class. They’ve actually relocated back to Slovakia but nonetheless they appear under Nashville on the Angel List.

Meevl is a unique startup. The Meevl platform easily allows employees to participate in reporting company news, typically a task handled by a PR person or team in large companies. With Meevl when an employee gets recognized for an achievement, has a baby, or maybe an employee related policy changes, Meevl crowdsources the news from the company employees.

“Currently, social media management platforms are mostly for small teams, where members watch their company’s presence on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and so on,” Vladimir Tucek told BetaKit. “Even if it’s a really huge company, [social media] is managed by a very small team, and all content is produced by that team. We’d like to involve more employees in this process.”

By virtue of the employee participation in the Meevl platform companies can crowdsource news from their employee base, possibly reduce the PR budget for inhouse news and employee morale would stand to improve.

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Startups,It’s Demo Day Month In Tennessee: Chattanooga, Memphis And Nashville

There are a lot of spring/summer accelerator programs “everywhere else”, Tennessee has three significant programs that will be coming to a close in the coming weeks and culminating with a demo day at the end of their session. Chattanooga, Memphis and Nashville are exploding with startup and entrepreneurial growth and it shows in the graduating classes of Gig Tank (Chattanooga), Zero To 510 (Memphis) and Jumpstart Foundry in Nashville.

The next few Thursdays will be filled with great companies, great entrepreneurs, great angels and venture capitalists and great national coverage provided by nibletz.com, and to our ever growing list of some of the top members of the venture community that subscribe to us by email and follow us on Twitter. We’ve seen 17 startups that we’ve covered in the last year, pick up traction starting with a story written on nibletz.com and seen by the venture community “everywhere else”, which is what is why our mission, as the voice of startups everywhere else, is so important. We’ve received thank you cards, thank you emails and heck even some cash from these 17 startups and at last count they were collectively funded to over $20M.

That trend will hopefully continue over the next three weeks as we continue to case the national spotlight on one of the fastest growing startup ecosystems in the country, the great state of Tennessee.

Chattanooga

The Gig Tank started back in May. This is a unique accelerator program because it’s really two programs in one. First there is an entrepreneur track. The entrepreneur’s track started May 14th. All of the teams selected for that track received a $15,000 seed investment, lodging and a host of services from GigTank sponsors. Their season ends with a demo day and a $100,000 cash prize up for grabs for the most disruptive business plan.

The second track for GigTank is a student track. The students started their track on June 11th. They just needed to come up with a great idea to utilize Chattanooga’s gigabit internet, the first gigabit internet in the country (sorry Google). The students are competing for a chance to win a $50,000 prize and the chance to pitch their idea in front of a solid group of angels and VC’s.

GigTank comes to a close with a demo day on August 9th.

Click here for GigTank’s Website

Memphis

Memphis is bursting at the seams with entrepreneurial and startup activity. In the last few months alone we’ve covered their 48 hour launch event and Startup Weekend Memphis.

Memphis has a great infrastructure set up for entrepreneurs and startups, with most of it being based at Emerge Memphis. Launch Your City, Launch Memphis and of course the Seed Hatchery accelerator play a key role in the Memphis tech community.

August 16th it will be all eyes on Memphis again as the Zero to 510 accelerator holds their demo day. Zero to 510 is a medical device accelerator program and a joint venture between BioWorks and SeedHatchery. It’s the nation’s first cohort-based medical device incubator. The program is funded by Innova Memphis an early stage investment firm.

The companies presenting at demo day on the 16th are:

BioNanovations- a startup using bio nanotechnology for rapid detection and monitoring of bacterial infection

Handminder- has developed a technology that will help rehabilitate those with loss of function in their hands and fingers from a stroke.

NanOphthalmics- This company uses nanotechnology to more effectively treat corneal abrasions which leads to faster healing with less pain.

Randall Surgical- These guys have created an environmentally friendly alternative to traditional patient positioners used in 20 million+ surgeries in the US every year.

Restore Medical- has found a way to drastically cut down the time it takes to sterilize instruments in the OR while cutting costs and insuring compliance under the upcoming radical changes in healthcare.

Urova Medical- They’ve come up with a new way to treat feminine stress urinary incontinence.

Click here for ZeroTo510’s website

Nashville

Jumpstart Foundry is in it’s third year and they keep kicking out hit after hit after hit. One of our favorite Tennessee startups, RentStuff (who recently moved to Chicago’s 1871) is a product of Jumpstart Foundry. Co-founded in 2010 by serial startup founder Marcus Whitney, the Jumpstart Foundry follows the traditional accelerator model that has been so successful in other regions.

According to their site they’ve seen a 62% success rate to date, which is actually VERY high and quite impressive. Jumpstart Foundry (not to be confused with the national Cleveland based Jumpstart Inc) has seen a good number of their graduates see post program capital. Wannado (2011), Daio (2011), RentStuff (2011), Bizen (2010), NextGxDx (2010), and Spitsecnd (2010) have all received additional growth capital.

This years class is equally as impressive and will share their ideas on Demo Day August 23rd. Here are the companies presenting at their demo day:

Contigo Financial, an online consumer lender offering a suite of responsible loan products through the workplace.

Jamplify (formerly OKDJ), a social media marketing platform which turns fans into active promoters of online content.

The Skillery, a marketplace for classes and workshops led by experts in the community.

Evermind, the first consumer-friendly senior monitoring system. If you can plug-in a surge protector and use a smartphone, Evermind is easy.

Wax, an app that allows extreme athletes to compete with one another by completing tricks and challenges.

PhotoRankr, the first online photography marketplace to leverage the power of social media.

OurVinyl, allows users to discover new music through video. The modern day MTV minus the re-runs.

Click here for Jumpstart Foundry’s Website

Startup Weekend Memphis: And The Winner Is…. CoachSpeak

Startup Weekend Memphis saw some great ideas formulated from the Friday pitches. The four finalist teams were: BuyersUnite, Capta Vita (Legacy Interview), RightNowPal (Event Czar) and CoachSpeak. After Saturday evenings gut check all four finalist teams and the three individual entrepreneurs that would pitch on Sunday started to hunker down and focus on the prize at the end of the weekend. Three startups would walk away with $1000 cash, 9 hours of legal services and 9 hours of accounting services. One team would walk away victorious as the winners of Startup Weekend Memphis 2012.

By 10pm Saturday night the 7 presenting startups had pivoted a total of 24 times (seriously). The mentors had been in for hours on Saturday and everyone was scrambling. Around nine PM I checked in with Derek Chapman and Joseph Dees the two guys behind CoachSpeak and they were in an intense debate on several different key issues. We put in a call to a good friend of Nibletz.com Gabe Lozana the founder of St. Louis startup LockerDome who agreed to a quick by phone mentoring session.

That late night phone call sure paid off as CoachSpeak came in first place with the judges on Sunday evening.

Chapman walked the judges through the concept, the revenue and the execution of CoachSpeak which is a social network for professional coaches and athletic personnel from the high school level on up.

Chapman, who is the founder of CoachSpeak, demonstrated a great use case for when coaches change jobs and cities and need to fill coaching team positions very quickly. Startup Weekend Memphis judge, and entrepreneur, Ekundayo Bandele threw Chapman a curve ball asking what happens if a collegiate coach moves his whole team from one school to another, doesn’t that make the service irrelevant.

Simple answer, that never ever happens, but more so Chapman was able to explain how if that did happen that would leave openings to fill at the school the coach came from. More important than that though is that CoachSpeak is already up and running and has 120 professional coaches in their network.

The network isn’t just about filling jobs, it’s about sharing information, camaraderie between coaches, sharing scouting information, job hunting, vendor placement and more.

Dees, who is a financial advisor at Regions Bank in Birmingham Alabama had come into Memphis for his first Startup Weekend. Since graduating from UAB Dees had always had a knack for creating business plans and has actually consulted on several successful business plan. He was the perfect partner for Chapman who had ironed out the entire concept except for the revenue streams and subscriber base.

Obviously the judges liked the collaborative effort between the two!

Chapman plans on continuing to build out CoachSpeak and will probably go to some of the judges who are local entrepreneurs eager to invest in the latest tech startups brewing from Memphis.

LaunchMemphis/SeedHatchery’s Elizabeth Lemmonds was on-site Sunday evening for the final pitches and actually enjoying attending an event that she didn’t have to organize. Prior to her taking a position with Launch Your City (Launch Memphis/Seed Hatcher’s parent) Lemmonds would attend entrepreneurial events in Memphis.

As we reported on Friday, this Startup Weekend was organized by local entrepreneurs James Ruffer and Chris Przybyszewski who are not affiliated with any other organization. The two of them organized this Startup Weekend as a fun and laid back way to spur more startups and entrepreneurship in Memphis. Ruffer, Przybszewski and Lemmonds let all of the finalists know along with any attendees that the resources of Launch Your City, Launch Memphis (and if they apply) Seed Hatchery are all available to these new startups and entrepreneurs at Emerge Memphis.

The LaunchPad free drop in co-working space and Launch Memphis were sponsors of Nibletz coverage of this Startup Weekend.

Here’s yo links:

Check out the winning team’s startup at CoachSpeak.com

For more information on LaunchMemphis, Seed Hatchery, and the LaunchPad Click here

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Nashville Startup: InQuicker Gets You In The ER, Well Quicker, INTERVIEW

If it’s the weekend and you break your arm, or your toe, perhaps your nose or have some semi-emergency that requires you visit the ER but isn’t life threatening than I’m sure you’ve experienced the extremely long wait time that is the ER waiting room. Whatever the reason you’re in the ER, I’m sure you’re experiencing some kind of discomfort and ER waiting rooms are far from comfortable. What if you could use a web app to speed up the ER waiting process.

Well Nashville startup InQuicker is here to help. InQuicker is an online waiting room. In conjunction with their hospital partners someone who needs the emergency room services and is not in a life threatening emergency can sign in at the InQuicker online waiting room. InQuicker gives the patient a projected wait time. When the patient arrives at the hospital or clinic they are greeted by a healthcare provider.

InQuicker reports that eight out of ten patients that use InQuicker get seen within ten to fifteen minutes of the time they arrive. For just a rough idea on the value of InQuicker, they recently ran a study with their ER partners and found that patients can wait up to 208 minutes to get into the ER to see a doctor. That’s a lot of time you could be nursing your injury or ailment in the comfort of your own home.

InQuicker is very beneficial in the emergency room, but they also work with doctors offices as well.

We got a chance to interview InQuicker. Check out that interview below:

Buyer’s Unite Pitches Reverse Groupon Concept At Startup Weekend Memphis

Chicago startup Groupon has confirmed to the world the power of the group. LivingSocial and countless other startups compete in the same group daily deal model as Groupon with great success.

Joe Kennedy, a self proclaimed serial entrepreneur, has decided to flip that group daily deal model on it’s head. Instead of coming up with the group deal, and having a buy in, his startup puts the group together to form an adhoc buyers group. If you’re not familiar with the buyers group concept the best comparison would be to a food or grocery co-op. This is where communities are able to force a discount by joining together for a group buy.

Kennedy presented the idea at Startup Weekend in Memphis on Friday evening and got more interest from the group in attendance than he thought. Local young entrepreneur Harold Strong from Yadoog, a startup birthed at 48 Hour Launch in June, dove head first into assisting Kennedy and leading the team of 6 into product development.

Kennedy confirmed at press time that they will definitely be ready to show off proof of concept if not more Sunday evening during the Startup Weekend Memphis finals. In addition to reserving their intellectual property, and hashing out the technical infrastructure they also had to come up with the first vertical that Buyer’s Unite would tackle. The concept itself can work on any vertical but the team chose health insurance to insure (see what we did there), easy quick scalability.

Buyer’s Unite will offer several buying groups that their users can join but for the first group they hope to go to insurance carriers with thousands of people in the group ready to buy. That would in effect force the carrier to offer a sizable discount to guarantee that much business.

There are several monetization options and revenue models but Kennedy likes the idea of a very small fee on the transaction once the deal is complete. Paying $3.50-$5.00 for the ability to save over $100 on health insurance is a win win for everyone. We’ll see tomorrow if it’s a win for the judges.

Check out the video pitch below:

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Nashville Startup: ClockOut Gamifying Taking Off From Work, Small Business Will Love This

The Startup Weekend Memphis team has taken a few solo entrepreneur projects and given them a spot to present in tomorrow’s finals for $1000 a piece. One of those solo entrepreneurs Brandon Heller from Long Island NY by way of Nashville.

Heller is working on ClockOut. When pitched Friday night it was a simple app to take the process of asking off a shift at work and making it social. Through the ClockOut app smaller restaurants, franchisees, bars and small businesses, with shift type work, would have the ability to let their employees take ownership of swapping shifts.

With the app, integrated through Facebook, two employees could swap shifts, or get a shift covered, have a historic log of it on a private Facebook network, and then inform the manager. This way the manager knows the shift is covered, and everything goes on like a well oiled machine.

To take any need for fees away from the small business Heller also decided (with the help of one of the Startup Weekend coaches) to ganmify the process. Now employee A who needs a shift covered pays $5.00 to ClockOut. ClockOut holds onto the $5.00 less their fee. Now employee B who picks up the shift gets a point for every shift they covered. When employee B has covered 10 shifts they get all the remaining money in that pot of $5.00 payments.

For some shift workers $5.00 may be a little steep but it also may be worth it for whatever reason they are calling out. The $5.00 shift covering game encourages people to pick up shifts, knowing that when they’ve covered enough shifts they’ll get the money they earned plus an incentive from ClockOut.

Definitely an interesting concept. Check out the initial pitch video from Friday below:

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Startup Weekend Memphis: Legacy Interview (Friday Pitch Video)

This is the first time we’ve seen an idea quite like this presented at a startup hackathon. Legacy Interview works off the concept of chronicling a friend of loved ones life through interviews with mini-questions and video interviews. The idea comes after the founder realized that his father may not live forever.

As we get older we get into more in more in-depth conversations with our closest loved ones, as they get older though those conversations get harder and harder to have. The sad realization is that the friend of loved one won’t be here forever and you want them to share their lives with you as long as they can. Hold onto those moments with Legacy Interview and save them down the road for generations to come.

I’m in mid 30’s and I constantly wonder what would life have been like if all of these resources were available since my childhood.

Time capsuling our digital lives is becoming quite popular. My grandchildren, and yours as well will have way more access to our lives and legacies than ever before. Legacy Interview will contribute to that by providing a very easy mobile platform.

Legacy Interview will present on Sunday in the Startup Weekend Memphis finals. We’ll see where this idea goes after Startup Weekend. It would be a shoe in for integration with ancestry.com and even deadsoci.al

Check out the video interview below:

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Startup Weekend Memphis: CoachSpeak (Friday Pitch Video)

Startup Weekend Memphis produced some great ideas. Sunday we’ll get to see how they did with the important part, execution.

One of those ideas is a new startup called CoachSpeak. Coach Speak is a new professional social network aimed specifically at higher level coaches, for example college football coaches. Now that most everyone has a social media account on one of the mainstream social networks like Facebook,Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn, it’s time to branch back out with niche networks.

Yesterday we brought you the story about Florida startup PitchShark which is a social network specifically for those producing independent films.

CoachSpeak will link coaches together in new ways.

Here’s how the concept was explained and why it makes sense. Let’s say we’re back in December of 2008 and Auburn University has just released Tommy Tuberville. Once they announced Gene Chizik he needed to get moving, he needed to get to Auburn and immediately work on building his staff up.

Now lets say Chizik has a LinkedIn page. Now, after the announcement that he’s headed to Auburn, he is going to be flooded with people who even on LnkedIn’s professional network, are only linking in because he’s the coach at Auburn. He has a lot of people to wade through in order to get straight to other coaches like an offensive line coach, defensive line coach or special teams coach.

If Chizik was part of a closed, professional social network of coaches he could easily access the coaches he knew or had met personally and even coaches that he didn’t know. A niche social network in this case is abetter alternative.

Over the past few weeks I find myself in more and more conversations about niche social networks. Are they over-saturating the social landscape or are they needed?

If you look at professional social networks like CoachSpeak or PitchShark, while they are online and social they are more like professional organizations. So there is a clear advantage to something like CoachSpeak.

Check out the pitch video below.

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Startup Weekend Memphis: Event Czar Pitch Video

Sure I’ll go ahead and acknowledge the elephant in the room right now, event apps are becoming a dime a dozen. However it looks like Event Czar has a different idea in the event space.

Event Czar wants to be your event aggregator and discovery engine on a local level wherever and whenever you’re going out looking for anything to do. Event Czar plans to do this by leveraging big data, data mining and an algorithm that will match your interests up with events that may appeal to you.

Say you’re not in the mood for your “normal” time event, you’ll be able to see all the events in the area as well.

Event Czar is also going to cut out some of the noise associated with more traditional platforms for finding events, for example when conversations start diluting the results, and when there is chatter coming from a future event. Event Czar wants to be you’re right now app (although you will be able to see events in the future to plan accordingly).

This was by far the biggest team at the end of Friday night and they hope to have a proof of concept if not an MVP by the end of the weekend.

Check out the original idea pitch for Event Czar below:

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Startup Weekend Memphis Kicks Off After Four Year Hiatus

The first officially sanctioned Startup Weekend event in Memphis TN was back in 2008. This year Startup Weekend is back in Memphis and has been spearheaded by startup evangelist James Ruffer along with Chris Przybyszewski and Amanda Lewis.

Ruffer and Przybszewski kicked off the event Friday night with some great authentic Memphis Barbecue provided by Baby Jacks. After that the fun and games started with a general overview of the event, the sponsors and of course the prizes.

For this years event there will be three finalists selected who will each receive $1000 in cash, 9 hours of free legal services from Butler Snow and 9 hours of free financial advice from local accounting firm Collins Thomas & Associates. Also the “grand prize” winner will receive consultation services from Southern Growth Studios who are local experts on developing business plans. The national sponsors also kicked in with free cloud based services including the use of AWS for the weekend, should one of the ideas need it.

16 ideas were pitched from a variety of categories including elder care, music education and instruction, services for spanish speaking people, an auction site for nearly abandoned startup ideas and even a web app idea to “Keep politicians on the straight and narrow”.

The four ideas that were selected were, an local event aggregation and discovery app tentatively called “Event Czar”; CoachSpeak a social network for professional coaches; Buyers Unite an almost flash like buyers group; Legacy Interview, a mobile application that lets anyone capture interview vignettes on video question by question in separate files; and Clockout a socially enabled time clock management system for small businesses. Yes that’s five but clockout is a solo entrepreneur who will develop his idea on his own this weekend and compete against the other four teams on Sunday.

Both Ruffer and Przybyszewski are no strangers to entrepreneurism. Ruffer has a variety of entrepreneurial endeavors under his belt. Right now he works in social media security, financial security and online security. This is Ruffer’s 13th Startup Weekend that he’s either attended or help organize.

Przbyszewski (I’m hoping that’s the last time I need to type that), is currently working on his third startup right now down the street at the Launch Memphis, LaunchPad which actually is in the field of veterinary medicine. Their startup is under wraps but the team behind it has a great idea, that’s being tested and will help curb a problem that kills animals, is a big concern for dogs and can affect people as well. It targets one of the top 10 diseases that doctor’s must inform the CDC about, really big impotent stuff.

So with both of this weekends organizers enmeshed in pretty big day jobs they wanted this startup weekend to be a little light, fun and collaborative. In Ruffer’s experience attending 13 Startup Weekend events he’s seen the entire gambit from hardcore, bootcamp style Startup Weekends to the lighthearted and laid back, creative juice flowing weekends like this.

At the end of the day, or actually the end of the weekend, the ideas that want to continue to grow have a variety of resources available to them including Launch Memphis, the Launch Pad and Seed Hatchery. When asked about competing with Launch Memphis’ 48 hour launch event just six weeks ago, Ruffer said that Memphis has grown so much that the city itself can support a variety of events adding “When the tide rises all the ships sail”. At the end of the day it’s about everyone supporting entrepreneurship and startup culture in Memphis.

Linkage:

The official Startup Weekend Memphis landing page

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Memphis Preparing For Startup Weekend

Memphis is hosting their first official Startup Weekend in four years this Friday through Sunday at Lab Four in Memphis. Over the three day weekend we will see some great ideas turned into startups and hopefully some emerge as actual companies, after all that’s the point behind Startup Weekend events.

The 54 hour event kicks off with preliminary idea pitches on Friday evening. Saturday is a day of working with mentors, teams and developing ideas and Sunday the finalist teams will pitch in front of the judges.

“We promise that this will be a fantastic, fun weekend, whether you want to come and work on your own idea for a company or hang out and help other people with theirs,” Co-event organizer James Ruffer told James Dowd’s Commercial Appeal. “The program has matured a lot in the past four years, and that’s why we wanted to bring it back. Not only will this energize the Memphis entrepreneurial community, but it’ll show other cities around the world that Memphis is serious about entrepreneurship.”

The early bird registration was extended through the 16th, but it’s not too late to register so if you’re in or around Memphis you should sign up here.

If you’re traveling from out of town there are two hotels participating in the fun. We’re sure we are going to see folks from Chattanooga, Knoxville and Nashville in Memphis for the big event. Memphis has a thriving startup scene.

What happens after Startup Weekend? Well if you’re serious about building your business in Memphis there are resources like the LaunchPad, LaunchMemphis and SeedHatchery all based at Emerge Memphis downtown. The LaunchPad features free drop in co-working space and office hours with the staff there to help cultivate your idea and develop your business.

Here are the links you need.

For more info on the LaunchPad click here

Help out our nationwide sneaker-strapped road trip here.

Interview With Memphis Startup Stiqrd’s Founder Aaron Pranther On Expansion

One thing we all know for sure is that loyalty and rewwards startups are a flourishing space. A lot of the better ideas for loyalty and rewards are starting in small markets. Stiqrd is one of those startups.

The great thing about Stiqrd though is that when we first talked with Aaron Pranther, CEO and co-founder of the company they were already talking about taking their concept and scaling it as quickly, as possible but also honing in on what makes them special as well.

So what makes Stiqrd special? For starters? Pranther has a background in both tech and the restaurant business. He knows the real pain from a restauranteurs perspective as well as from the perspective of someone who likes to eat out. Pranther knows all too well what it’s like to try and keep tabs on multiple reward “punch cards”.

Most people have had the experience of thinking you were at the last punch tab of one card to find out you either forgot the card at home or you were in the wrong establishment.

Stiqrd has made loyalty and rewards easy by having a qr code based system and an app to track your purchases and rewards. A very real problem that many in the “loyalty reward app” business are experiencing is that soon instead of having too many key-tags or punch cards you’re going to have too many apps. Pranther is one of the first founders of a loyalty/rewards startup to acknowledge that.

What’s going to make a loyalty and rewards startup successful is going to be their ability to scale in both users and customers and for that Pranther has introduced the 15 minute loyalty program. Through rigorous testing he has found that the Stiqrd program can be implemented in most businesses in under 15 minutes complete with working dashboard.

But Stiqrd is more than a do it yourself loyalty program. He has real people available to speak anytime of the day to business’ that want to set up the loyalty program.

Pranther plans on implementing the system across the country at a few select retail partners however any business owner can sign up, and it truly is that easy.

We got a chance to interview Pranther about Stiqrd and the 15 minute loyalty program. Check out the interview below:

Startup Weekend Memphis Reboots July 20th

Memphis has a thriving startup scene. In fact for a city of just over 650,000 they have more startup resources than most cities twice their size. Tennessee has a thriving chapter of Startup America and their are other organizations like Emerge Memphis, Seed Hatchery and Launch Memphis that cultivate startups throughout the region.

Now, after a four year hiatus, the official, nationally sanctioned “Startup Weekend” event is coming back to Memphis. Four years ago the main Startup Weekend Organization was still very new. Now, organizers of the Memphis Startup Weekend are thrilled to welcome the brand back to Memphis.

“We promise that this will be a fantastic, fun weekend, whether you want to come and work on your own idea for a company or hang out and help other people with theirs,” Ruffer told James Dowd’s Commercial Appeal. “The program has matured a lot in the past four years, and that’s why we wanted to bring it back. Not only will this energize the Memphis entrepreneurial community, but it’ll show other cities around the world that Memphis is serious about entrepreneurship.”

Startup Weekend Memphis will follow the traditional 54 hour StartupWeekend model. The event kicks off on Friday July 20th at 6:30pm. At that time, registered entrepreneurs will pitch the ideas they hope to have developed over the 54 hour period. After a quick voting period the startups to be developed will be selected.

Saturday, the startup teams will work with each other and with top notch mentors like Clay Banks, Demarcus Love, Cliff McKinney, Karen Spacek, Ted Townsend and Bioworks’ Allan Daisley who’s day job involves mentoring startups as well.

Sunday the teams will refine their ideas, try and have a proof of concept and practice their pitches. Sunday evening is make it or break it time as the teams will pitch their ideas in front of a panel of judges including James Dowd of Commercial appeal, who’s also the local media sponsor.

The teams are competing for over $20,00 worth of prizes that all startups would need. In fact one of the organizer’s Chris Pryzbyszewski says they still may have more prizes coming in.

The national and local organizers of StartupWeekend Mempis want the teams to stay around as long as they can all weekend long to flush out and build their ideas. There will be a virtually endless supply of caffeine and catered meals from Baby Jacks and more. If you haven’t been to a StartupWeekend event it’s an experience you must see first hand.

We’ll be there as well to cover the entire event, and support Memphis’ startup community one of the most thriving startup communities “everywhere else”

Links:

For more information on StartupWeekend Memphis click here

Check out our coverage of Memphis’ last startup event 48 Hour Launch

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Want your event covered, as long as it’s outside the Valley, email startups@nibletz.com

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