Comments Off on Nashville: Jumpstart Foundry’s Marcus Whitney Named CTO Of The Year By Nashville Technology Council0LikeLike 2,349
(photo: marcuswhitney.com)
Marcus Whitney is a renaissance man of sorts when it comes to entrepreneurism and startups in Nashville and Boston Massachusetts. Some of his credentials include being an advisor and curriculum lead at Nashville’s Jumpstart Foundry accelerator where he traditionally fires up the troops on day one. He is also an advisor to several Nashville area startups, co-founder of Southernalpha.com and an overall leader in Nashville’s startup community.
It’s actually for his day job though, as the CTO of social marketing, commerce and analytics startup Moontoast that has earned him the title of CTO Of The Year by the Nashville Technology Council.
Moontoast was founded in 2008 as a social knowledge base provider that eventually led to the social marketing and analytics suite that they employ today to companies big and small including some on the Fortune 500. Their stable of top-shelf clients include branding power house Proctor & Gamble, Ford, Kirkland’s, and Universal. Even Nashville country powerhouse record label Big Machine records uses Moontoast, you may have heard of their superstar Taylor Swift.
Whitney has grown to become an expert in the world of social and email engagement. Prior to starting Moontoast in 2008 he spent the previous four years of his career as Director of Technology and Partner at Emma. Emma is an email marketing firm that uses creative, out of the box approaches, to again engage their over 10,000 customers.
Whitney’s energetic personality and real life experiences have led him to be engaging in person as well. In different discussions with Whitney we’ve talked about how he and his team at Jumpstart Foundry are able to pull the real entrepreneur and founder out of a startup. Some startups come into the three month accelerator program with a great idea and a horrible pitch. Whitney is able to pull the real message out which has actually led to follow on funding for several program startups.
Whitney’s latest startup is Southernalpha.com a regional tech blog focused on high growth potential startups and technology in the southeast. They’re centralizing out of Nashville at the moment with plans to rapidly expand across the south east in the same way that Silicon Prairie news covers the Silicon Prairie.
Whitney was honored at the annual Nasvhille Technology Council Awards on October 23.
Comments Off on Calling All Startups Seed Hatchery Applications Now Open! Get A Free Ticket To Everywhereelse.co0LikeLike 2,169
Seed Hatchery, the startup accelerator in Memphis Tennessee is looking for a few, well really a bunch of great entrepreneurs and their startups. They’re looking for the type of entrepreneurs that are committed to growing their startup long term and aren’t afraid of hard work.
Seed Hatchery is now taking applications for their third class. The cohort based accelerator will begin in February and run for three consecutive months. At the end of the session you and your company will be ready to pitch real investors for opportunities to invest in your business. In the meantime you’ll be backed by the 3M’s Money, Mentors and a marine style bootcamp, in Memphis.
Although sometimes overlooked, Memphis is one of the most entrepreneurial minded cities in the world. Going back nearly 100 years, Memphis Tennessee was the epicenter for this little thing called “cotton” you may have heard of it. It was cotton and the cotton exchange that spurred one of the largest investment banks in history, Lehman Brothers.
Beyond that, other globally known phenomena like rock music (the blues), Elvis Presley, and R&B radio have their roots firmly planted in the Bluff City.
Is that not enough? Perhaps you’ve heard of this company that delivers packages via planes and trucks, overnight, yes FedEx was born and based in Memphis. Holiday Inn was born in Memphis as was Serv Pro, and Autozone.
With an entrepreneurial pedigree like that you can be assured that the mentor pool for the 2013 Seed Hatchery CoHort will be stronger than most regional accelerators Seed Hatchery’s size.
Seed Hatchery was the partner for the recent Zeroto510 medical device accelerator in Memphis where 5 of the 6 teams received follow on funding of over $100,000. One of the teams went on to immediately raise over 2 million dollars. While some startup communities are still just getting started, Seed Hatchery is backed by Launch Your City which has been working on strengthening entrepreneurs and their startups for the last six years.
If you’re a Memphis area entrepreneur or in any area and ready to relocate to Memphis it’s a great place to work and a great place to build a business. Not only that, but even though the accelerator is in the thick of the winter, it’s never ver cold in Memphis.
If you’re startup is chosen to participate you’ll receive a seed investment of $15,000, access to a very strong mentor network and a strong investment community. Seed Hatchery is looking for startups that are in the area or willing to relocate for the entire 90 day cohort and stick around Memphis to tap into the investor, entrepreneurial and startup community in the region after that. To kick off your stay in Memphis TN every team and their members selected for Seed Hatchery will receive a free ticket to the three day startup extravaganza known as “everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference” where you’ll get to see the great speakers already announced and have a small group session with recent graduates from TechStars, 500Startups, The Brandery and previous graduates of Seed Hatchery.
Applying is free and the application is open now. It’s not for the faint at heart but if you’re passionate about your idea and hard working, if you’re not afraid of rolling up your sleeves this is for you.
Comments Off on Baltimore Startup bytelion Introducing Crowdfunding Platform For 6 Minority, Veteran Or Women Led Startups At A Time0LikeLike 4,330
A software company in Maryland called bytelion is planning on unveiling a new crowdfunding platform by the end of this month. The new platform, called Select 6, is different from every other crowdfunding platform in a couple of key ways.
First off Select 6 is specifically targeting startups and ideas from minorities, women and veterans. These startups are sometimes overlooked by other traditional capital or skipped over on other crowdfunding sites with thousands of projects at a time.
Select 6 will feature 6 startups or ideas at a time. Rather than going to a site like Kickstarter or Indiegogo with thousands and thousands of projects, Select 6 will select six different startups to get funded and after those specific ideas and startups have either reached a time limit or raised their allotted funds, the next six will start the funding process.
Those 6 startups or idea, founders, which Select 6 calls pilots, will also participate in the S6 Startup Accelerator
Crowdfunding is one of the most exciting social innovations to empower creative and socially-minded entrepreneurs in recent years, Select 6 will be the first to channel this medium to provide more resources, exposure to professional mentors, and access to institutionalized funding that many minority, women, and veterans have a hard time finding when they start a business.
Even though minority and women-led ventures statistically perform the same or better year over year when compared to all startups that are angel-funded, a staggeringly low number of angel investors and startup accelerator programs nation-wide have MWV’s in mind or in their programs.
The mission of Select 6 is to help MWV-led startups create success stories in the marketplace and community; To share the education, experience and entertainment that is entrepreneurship & innovation with the public; To create sound investments in promising startups that can scale and expand.
Howard Cheng, founder and Chief Entrepreneur of Select 6, is emphatic about one thing: “We want to help MWV entrepreneurs and innovators find their wings and take flight with the help of diverse communities because we believe in their potential and tenacity. Entrepreneurship and innovation are key engines of economic and community growth, and Select 6 is our solution to addressing a national concern of creating value and jobs in the marketplace.”
Bytelion’s CEO, Terrance McGregor shares: “We are excited to work with Select 6 to develop such a meaningful platform for MWVs. We will continue to serve as a resource for Select 6 and S6 Pilots to get lean in their web development and startup approach. Staying lean and agile is the only way to go for SMEs because we can’t anticipate and predict everything, but we help clients get from idea to product faster with daily incremental improvements and updates that they can track and control. Time after time, we see that going lean speeds up the development process and keeps costs under control.”
Comments Off on Meet Rhode Island 500 Startups Startup: Waigo Translate (Translate Abroad)0LikeLike 2,230
Here at nibletz we’ve been fortunate enough to be chosen as the first test site for Markerly, our good friend Sarah Ware’s DC based publisher tools startup, and member of the just announced, 5th class at 500 startups. Through this great relationship we’ve got an awesome tool on the site, in Markerly, and exclusive early access to some of their cohorts.
Earlier this morning as the embargo lifted on this years 500 startups class, we brought you an interview with Australian startup Kickfolio. We also brought you an interview with Boston startup Privy.
Now we turn our sites again to the north east part of the country and Rhode Island startup Waigo Translate.
Waigo Translate is one of those uniquely cool startups that Dave McClure, Paul Singh and the entire 500 startups organization prides themselves on.
Waigo Translate is an app that turns your iPhone camera into a translation device. Waigo Translate current works with Chinese, Japanese and Korean, with more languages on the way. Yes that means you could use your phone to translate the written lyrics to Gangnam Style.
We got a chance to talk with Waigo Translate’s Marketing Director, Rob Sanchez. Check out the interview below.
Comments Off on Startup Super Group Initiative Launched: Startup America, Startup Weekend, TechStars, Udacity, Steve Blank0LikeLike 2,261
What do you get when you put together Startup America, Startup Weekend, TechStars, and Udacity, and then let Steve Blank run the whole thing? Startup Weekend Next, that’s what!
Startup Weekend announced the largest Startup initiative to date today. The startup “super group” (as our good friend Michael del Castillo calls it), consists of Startup America, Startup Weekend, TechStars, and Udacity. It’s all being led by Blank who wrote the book on startups “The Startup Owners Manual”.
The four organizations, and Blank are teaming up to help launch 10,000 startups. Startup Weekend Next will be a rolling four week program with hands on training, education and inspiration.
The backbone behind Startup Weekend Next will be The Lean Launchpad Class that Blank came up with, adapting the ideas and lessons from the Startup Owners Manual and applying them to real life companies and scenarios. The class is currently taught at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia, Caltech,Princeton, the University of Michigan and Georgia Tech.
Blank also recently put the class online at Udacity where over 50,000 people have already started taking the course.
Certainly with the Udacity online course tens of thousands more entrepreneurs are able to take the course without being enrolled in some of the top colleges in the United States. As Blank points out in his blog though, the online version
“… doesn’t require you to form a team, and there’s no immediate instructor feedback. More importantly, it makes no demands of you to stand and deliver your weekly customer development progress in front of your peers. In sum, it lacks the rigorous and collaborative hands-on experience that entrepreneurs get in our university classes”
After pondering and then collaborating to find ways to make the Lean Launch Pad accessible to entrepreneurs in a classroom environment the Startup Weekend Next initiative was born.
Startup America will leverage their 30 startup regions, and their Startup America Regional Champions throughout the country to assist, promote and engage entrepreneurs in the classes. Techstars will leverage it’s world class mentor network to help coach the teams.
There is a small fee between $140 and $299 assessed to basically just cover the costs of hosting the classes.
Blank described on his blog how Startup Weekend Next will work:
You form a startup team (if you don’t have one, taking the 54-hour Startup Weekend class is a great a way to find one) and come into class with an initial idea
Your team arrives with an initial Business Model Canvas. (Your pre-class reading is to watch the Lean LaunchPad initial lectures on Udacity)
You present your hypotheses and what you learned in front of your peers and coaches
You’ll take the suggestions from the meeting, get out of the building and talk to ten plus customers per week.
You’ll refine your business model by iterating or pivoting your product, your target customers, pricing, channels, partners, etc.
Repeat for four weeks– all while working with volunteer mentor partners from Startup Weekend, Startup America and TechStars – serial entrepreneurs and seasoned startup investors – to see whether your business idea was truly a vision or simply a hallucination.
Blank is calling this endeavor a “pre-accelerator”. The possibilities of where a startup can go after Startup Weekend Next are endless.
Comments Off on $1.1 Million Awarded To 18 Startups In MassChallenge Awards0LikeLike 1,928
MassChallenge, the largest accelerator program in the world, celebrated their awards dinner for their most recent session in Boston Tuesday night. The dignitaries, entrepreneurs, celebrities and investors that filled the Boston Convention and Exhibit Center were there to see the best of the best of startup innovation coming out of the program that’s gone on to produce hundreds of millions in follow on funding and exits.
The 18 startups that received cash awards were narrowed down from a field of over 1200 applicants and then a pool of 26 finalists.
The four startups that won the diamond award of $100,000 each were:
Global Research & Innovation Technology
LiquiGlide
Rally Point
Strong Arm Technologies.
12 gold winners took home $50,000 cash prizes each and they were:
Bounce Imaging
Coach Up
Guided Surgery Solutions
Lab Automate Technologies
Ministry Of Supply
Nordic Technology Group
BuysideFX
Dynamo Micropower
Integral Research
Lovin Spoonfuls
NBA Math Hoops
Recovers.org
Ten startups were selected to stay on with free office space until next years class arrives in May.
In addition to those prizes directly from MassChallenge and it’s supporters, there were several community awards given out as well. Lovin Spoonfuls and NBA Math Hoops were the recipients of the $30,000 John W. Henry foundation prize for social impact.
Global Research Innovation won an additional $15,000 Perkin’s School For The Blind Assistive Technology Prize. PlenOptika won $10,000 as part of the same prize.
Rainbank and Bounce Imaging were recipients of a $15,000 prize from VenCorps for the greatest potential to positively impact New York City.
125 of the startups selected from the original 1237 applicants were part of the four month accelerator program. A round of judging narrowed those 125 startups down to the 26 that were competing Tuesday evening.
Comments Off on MassChallenge Reveals Final 26 Startups Of 20120LikeLike 2,390
MassChallenge, the world’s largest global startup accelerator competition announced the final 26 startups that will compete before the judges. The 26 startups will pick between 10 and 20 startups who will be announced at MassChallenge’s high profile awards ceremony event on October 23.
This year’s MassChallenge competition opened up on March 1st and attracted 1,237 applications from 35 countries and 26 U.S. states. From there 125 startups were chosen to participate in MassChallenge’s 3 month accelerator program. The accelerator program offered the startups free office space, access to resources and one of the best mentor networks in the world.
All 26 startup teams will have one minute each to pitch their startup to over 1200 attendees at the awards ceremony. The stakes are high, with over $10,000,000 in prizes with no strings attached. There will be over $1,000,000 in grants awarded and $9,000,000 worth of in-kind benefits.
Unlike many other accelerators, the entire MassChallenge program is non-equity based, meaning that participating companies, and companies that receive monetary awards, give up no equity.
Here are the 26 startups:
Akrivis Technologies
Black Island Wind Turbines
Bounce Imaging
BuysideFX
Capital Market Exchange (CMX)
Cellanyx Diagnostics
CoachUp
Dynamo Micropower
Global Research Innovation & Technology (GRIT)
Guided Surgery Solutions
HelmetHub Corporation
iAgree
IntegralReach
Lab Automate Technologies Inc
LiquiGlide
Lovin’ Spoonfuls Inc
Ministry of Supply Inc.
NBA Math Hoops
Neumitra
Nordic Technology Group (NTG)
OnDeckBiotech
RallyPoint
Recovers.org
Strong Arm Technologies, Inc.
Ubiqi Health
WindGap Medical Inc.
MassChallenge features top notch judges from the Boston tech community and from around the world. This years judges are:
Colin Angle
Co-Founder, CEO and Chairman of the Board, iRobot
Sam Bastia
Global Strategy Executive, Verizon Communications
Josh Boger
Founder and former CEO/Chair, Vertex Pharmaceuticals
Desh Deshpande
Serial entrepreneur and mentor, Chair A123 Systems
Paul English
Founder & CTO, Kayak.com
Corinne Grousbeck
Brand Strategist & Advisor at Gemvara
Wyc Grousbeck
CEO, governor, and co-owner of the Boston Celtics
Jamie Kiggen
President, Riverside Company
Jit Saxena
Founder and Former CEO, Netezza
Niraj Shah
CEO and Co-Founder, Wayfair (formerly CSN Stores)
Amy Stursberg
Executive Director, Blackstone Charitable Foundation
Mike Wilens
Special Advisor, Senior Fidelity Management
“Over 400 entrepreneurs from across the globe came together in the Boston Innovation District to address some of the world’s most challenging problems together with the tremendous resources in the Boston startup community,” said MassChallenge Chief Mentorship Officer Karl Büttner. “MassChallenge 2012 represents another great example of the growth, energy and excitement that can only be produced through collaboration. It is truly inspiring to work closely with the hundreds of MassChallenge mentors and judges who volunteer their time, effort and advice to help the 125 MassChallenge startups grow.”
Comments Off on Kansas City’s Think Big Accelerator Becomes Latest Microsoft Bizspark Partner0LikeLike 2,035
Kansas City’s brand new Think Big Accelerator has just announced that they are the latest partner in the Microsoft Bizspark program.
Think Big Partners and the Think Big Accelerator for emerging early stage, high growth potential startups just announced their first class of six startups last week. The six startups will participate in the accelerator program for 22 weeks of intense training to prepare the startups for a demo day to investors at the end of the session in January.
The six startups selected to go through the program received a seed investment between $18 and $25,000 dollars in exchange for 6-8% equity.
The six startups are:
H2OCloud (New York, New York): H2OCloud is a cloud-based application that connects music fans to bands in a mobile-based platform. H2OCloud helps bands create more revenue through better marketing, smarter asset management and improve the overall fan experience and artist-fan interaction.
inCharge (Kansas City, Missouri): inCharge is a kiosk-based mobile phone charging station that provides digital out-of-home targeted advertising to the consumer. inCharge’s initial focus is high teledensity overseas markets.
Kahootz (Kansas City, Missouri): Kahootz is a consumer-focused online calendar platform that provides users with easier ways to combine, share and manage all obligations and profiles on one easy-to-maintain social-based platform. Kahootz also enables user-controlled, privacy-enabled, permission-based business-to-consumer markets through event promotion syndication.
Keyzio (Kansas City, Missouri): Keyzio has been defined as the Match.com for real estate for two people who don’t know they are trying to find each other. The Keyzio platform connects people and helps them find, buy and sell real estate that may not normally be available through MLS.
Phone2Action (Los Angeles, California): Phone2Action uses location-based mobile technology to instantly connect constituents to their lawmakers making in-the-moment advocacy easier.
Weejay (Kansas City, MO): Weejay is a virtual jukebox application that allows customers to control music in particular venues through mobile devices. Weejay’s venue management feature dashboard enables total control of music for a specific venue and creates better revenue opportunities for venue owners to enhance the overall patron experience.
With the announcement of their partnership with Microsoft’s BizSpark program, these six startups will receive a higher level of Windows Azure cloud access, setting up each entrepreneur for success in the cloud. Microsoft BizSpark will also provide the six startups in the Think Big Accelerator program with consulting, insight, mentorship and expertise.
“We are excited to have Think Big Partners join our BizSpark Plus Partner Program,” said Mark Relph, Senior Director, Strategic and Emerging Business Team at Microsoft. “Think Big Accelerator startups have the potential to spur business growth in the Midwest. With Windows Azure, startups can save the cost of investing in IT infrastructure and only pay for technology resources as they use them. We look forward providing member startups with access to technology, resources and business connections.”
“The partnership we have developed with Microsoft will not only benefit the startups involved with the Think Big Accelerator program, but will also help to strengthen the entire Kansas City startup community,” said Herb Sih, co-founder of Think Big Partners. “We are excited to already provide Midwestern startups with the benefits of the Microsoft partnership, such as the Azure Cloud and Windows 8 App Kickstarts for developers. This is a great partnership for our startups, the accelerator and Kansas City entrepreneurs.”
We are one week away from seeing the 2012 class at The Brandery accelerator in Cincinnati. The Brandery is a top 10 accelerator and focuses on branding and marketing. They’ve attracted hundreds of applications from across the globe for each of their last three sessions.
While The Brandery follows a co-hort accelerator model, as well as the Global Accelerator model, what sets them apart is their focus on branding and marketing. Being situated in Cincinnati Ohio puts them at ground zero for one of the biggest branded companies in the world Proctor & Gamble (P&G). P&G’s influence can be found within the walls of the Brandery. General Manager, Mike Bott, came to the Brandery after a successful stint as brand manager for Olay and other P&G brands. P&G’s roots don’t stop there, Brandery Co-Founder Rob McDonald is the son of the current CEO at P&G Robert McDonald. The younger McDonald is a lawyer at Taft during the day though.
The Brandery pulls from other marketing resources as well. Take co-founder Dave Knox for instance, Knox is the Chief Marketing Officer at Rock Fish a digital agency with a laundry list of clients that are household names. PF Chiangs, Sam’s Club, Bunn, and White Cloud are just a few of the brands that trust RockFish for their creative needs.
The Brandery is a hard core accelerator. There’s no working part time and participating at The Brandery. We spent five days with The Brandery founders and the staff in Cincinnati’s Over The Rhine neighborhood earlier this summer. There was a constant swarm of activity in the bullpen where each startup has desk space and white boards. There was also class after class in The Brandery’s second floor class room. Folks come from all over the country to talk with The Brandery’s startups and even skype in for lectures.
Some of The Brandery’s startups from this class had pivoted by the time we went to visit in August, others have pivoted again as they got closer to demo day. Even startup evangelist Nick Tippmann found himself changing teams with less than two months to go. No matter what way you look at it, next week’s demo day is shaping up to be an eventful one.
“We’re pumped to showcase our companies on Demo Day. They have done a fantastic job leveraging the relationships and partnerships in Cincinnati and our broader national network to refine and validate their businesses. Its awesome that the Cincinnati and Brandery communities are working together to build something special” Bott told nibletz.com
From what we’ve heard on our visit to Cincinnati McDonald gets more and more excited every year. In addition to helping teams with legal issues, McDonald gets out in the community with the Brandery teams every chance he gets including festivals, events and even Reds games. The Brandery teams were also major parts of Startup Weekend Cincinnati over the summer. McDonald, Knox, Bott and many of the teams founders were on hand throughout the weekend to provide mentorship and guidance. In fact Austin Hackett, the founder of Crowd Hall (A 2012 Brandery Company) pitched his own startup on startup weekend, the one that actually looked most complete.
Accelerators are intense and sometimes a bit insane. Gut checks at an accelerator happen often and pivots are inevitable. Greg Svitak and Kurt Pettit from Cleveland Ohio entered The Brandery with a startup called Flock’d. The premise for the idea was good, they wanted to do “swarm” like deals at night clubs and bars. Pettit explained to us that the idea was abandoned because every municipality in the country has their own liquor advertising laws which made a nationwide app in that space all but impossible.
Svitak and Pettit regrouped and developed AndTix which is a ticket selling platform for major sporting events. Neither man is any stranger to startups. Pettit has been a designer that’s done startup work for years. Svitak was one of the organizers for the 2012 startup bus to SXSW. After wrestling with the ticketing idea for a little over a week, they regrouped again and plan to show off a great concept in ticketing next week.
26 year old Andy Zhang from Seattle Washington went into The Brandery with a concept called Fly Dutch which according to Angellist matched starutps and investors. Zhang, who is a trained lawyer among other things, actually pivoted FlyDutch into “woowhoo! online dating for the offline type”. His startup boasts no messaging, no surveys and no work. Could it be Pinterest for dating?
One of the teams we’ve seen as a standout since before this session at The Brandery started is Salt Lake City based CrowdHall. CrowdHall is a platform where celebrities, politicians, micro-celebrities, bloggers and others can communicate with their audience in a voting up and down question asking forum. Back in July they tested the platform with Bachelorette winner Jeff Holm. CrowdHall is the perfect platform for elections and online town hall meetings.
Co-Founder Jordan Menzel admitted that CrowdHall would be perfect for the Presidential Election, but the timing may be off. CrowdHall has stayed the course from entry to demo day and will reveal a polished, ready to go product that nestles nicely into it’s own space. We’re pretty sure that over the next few years and then again into the next election cycle CrowdHall will become a household name.
Our other standout team from this years session at The Brandery is Impulcity. We’ve covered Impulcity since before they were even selected for The Brandery. This Louisville startup is offering up a new way to find events in any area. They have hundreds of thousands of events organized and delivered into an app that has a slick and visually appealing UI and a feature set that includes the ability to share events, follow events, and add to an events wall.
CEO and Co-Founder Hunter Hammonds is putting his all into Impulcity. In July they had a full featured, working beta, in fact we were in the beta test. There really was nothing else like it available in any app store or market. Impulcity was able to find and recommend events based on location, likes and other algorithms and deliver them with great visuals and the information an end user needed to make a decision about what to do.
Impulcity may have been perfect to a lot of people’s standards however with just under a month to go Hammonds blew up the whole thing and started over from scratch. They took a lot of beta testers feedback and iterated to the product that will released next week.
The stylish Jay Finch came to Cincinnati and The Brandery from New York, with his offline-online crowdfunding hybrid, SockStock. The concept takes businesses in need of funding and allows patrons to micro-crowdfund projects at the businesses they frequent via Finch’s platform. Finch has already made inroads in Cincinnati with the Carol Ann and Ralph V Haile Jr /US Bank Foundation who are referring their creative entrepreneurs and artisans to SockStock to raise money for their own projects to grow their companies. Finch plans on staying in Cincinnati after demo day to further the SockStock platform.
We’re expecting great things from the 11 teams at The Brandery this year when demo day rolls around next week.
Comments Off on Baltimore Startups: Abell Foundation Looking For Next AccelerateBaltimore Class0LikeLike 2,118
The Abell Foundation is back again, teaming up with the Emerging Technology Center’s (ETC) in Baltimore Maryland. They’re looking for the best high growth potential startup businesses for the second class of AccelerateBaltimore. The Abell Foundation is backing AccelerateBaltimore with $150,000 in seed funding, to provide six new businesses with $25,000 each. The Baltimore Business Journal reports that this is a 50% increase in funding from last April’s class.
Emerging Technology Center’s CEO Deborah Tillett is hoping to attract national and even international startups to Baltimore’s growing technology hub.
“It’s about innovation in Baltimore,” Tillett said to the Business Journal. “We’ll open it up as far and as wide as we can to get a message out to make sure we get great quality companies.”
AccelerateBaltimore runs much like many other cohort based accelerator programs. In addition to the $25,000 in seed funding the six participating companies will also receive boot camp style intense training for thirteen weeks. They’ll also get free office space at one of the two ETC locations in either Johns Hopkins or Canton.
Both locations offer access to mentors, potential investors and other resources. However, the Canton location’s lease is up in September of next year. That won’t affect this next batch of startups going through the program. Tillett told the Business Journal last Thursday that no decision has been made as to whether or not they are renewing the lease at the Can Co building. The building also houses one of Baltimore’s most successful startups, the now publicly traded Millenial Media.
AccelerateBaltimore attracted some great startups in their first class, of them we’ve covered Kithly and NoBadGift.
It’s Investor Day/Demo Day season across the country. We’ve got Brandery’s demo day in Cincinnati in two weeks on October 3rd. RevTech in Charlotte’s demo day is also October 3rd. MassChallenge has a class graduating soon, and so do many more.
Here at nibletz, the voice of startups “everywhere else” we attend a lot of demo days and we get asked for feedback by lot’s of startups. So here we’re going to show off some pitch videos from investor/demo days and share what we personally like to see. Of course take our advice however you’d like.
Product Product Product
Product is the most important thing at Demo Day, at least in my opinion. We’re going to go out on a limb here and assume that a business plan, pitch deck or wireframe is what brought you to the accelerator in the first place. Now you’ve completed a three month accelerator and received a decent amount of seed funding. I don’t care what the reason, you better have a product. The accelerator staff may blow smoke up your ass but if I personally had given you the seed money, and I don’t see a product, youre going to be cutting my grass for many years to come.
Enough on the startup lingo
The point of the three month accelerator was not to hear about minimum viable products, bandwidth, game changing, disruption or that you’re a change agent. I also don’t want to hear “at the end of the day”. Truth be told most investors know the buzzwords and it’s often times a BS alert in the pitch, either that or a crutch. So at the end of the day those investors are going to go home to their families without investing.
Statistics are as boring as your statistics class
I love startup pitches on investor day that use real world examples of problems and not a hodge podge of statistics and a boat load of slides to show them. Remember that you rattling off statistics is nothing more than you rattling off statistics. Use your key statistics in nice colorful charts, leave them up for a few seconds but I’m sure you have your pitch deck in an emailable file or better yet on slideshare. If someone is jonesing to see all your stats, follow up later. Don’t put anyone to sleep
Growing organically and virally in the first year and making revenue in the second year
This is absolutely NOT a viable go-to-market strategy. We, and of course investors, want to know where your revenue is going to come from, the first year. In fact they want to know where your revenue is going to come from tomorrow. I don’t care what you told yourself in the mirror this morning, chances are very high that you’re not the next Kevin Systrom.
Stealth Mode
If you’re a nibletz reader you know we hate stealth mode, it’s bull shit. Somebody else already has your idea, it’s about execution and product not about keeping secrets. Now at investor day/demo day all of your cards should be on the table. If you’ve got a video capturing app and more features coming that are in stealth mode, why aren’t they in the product now. Perhaps you should have spent less time playing foosball and more time working on the product.
You can’t listen if you don’t stop talking
Whether you’re in a Q&A session right after a pitch, or fielding questions at a booth or in the crowd after the event, you can’t listen if you don’t stop talking. A lot of people are going to tell you what a great job you did. Take those compliments in stride. But when it comes time to answer questions, answer them concisely, and quickly. If you don’t understand the question, let the person asking it know that, they’ll respect you more. If an investor asks you something and you don’t know the answer to it, tell them it’s a really good question, jot a note down and either research the answer on your iPhone or with your team and get back to them that night, or follow up. If you bullshit they’ll smell it.
Don’t forget personality.
There’s a good chance that you were picked for the accelerator not because your ticket selling app was going to take on Ticketmaster and Live Nation, but rather because the board liked you, or your personality. Don’t forget to interject some of that in your pitch.
And now a video…
This is Banyan, they won a $100,000 in the GigTank challenge which was an investor day challenge for the Gig Tank accelerator in Chattanooga. Here’s why I love this pitch.
– First off I’m not big into the product I’m not sure how big the market is. It’s a collaborative research tool, it’s a great concept but again there’s not a huge market and researcher’s aren’t the best at sharing. That’s not the point though. I thought Toni Gemayel had a great pitch.
– Banyan had a product. Banyan was up and running and had been thoroughly tested
– Gig Tank’s theme was literally “high bandwidth” startups. The accelerator was built around Chattanooga’s 1Gb fiber. Researchers who use Banyan have to transmit enormous amounts of data. Gemayel conceptualized this by saying if a researcher wanted to send 2 terrabytes of data from Stanford to the UK under traditional bandwidth constraints it would be quicker to get on a plane and fly there.
– Banyan offered several plans at making money immediately, not two years down the road.
– Finally, Gemayel had everyone laughing with a really small joke at the end of the presentation. Watch the video to see it.
Comments Off on Memphis Startup: HandMinder Aims To Restore Hand Movement In Stroke Victims0LikeLike 2,659
There are some incredible startups coming out of Memphis Tennessee and HandMinder is one of them. Handminder was part of the first class at the ZeroTo510 accelerator. Zeroto510 is the first cohort based medical device accelerator and was a joint venture between Memphis BioWorks and Seed Hatchery, the local tech startup accelerator.
HandMinder was founded by Dr. Yu Liu, MD,Phd, Randall J Nelson PhD,John M Denton, Technical Advisor & CoFounder, James Bell who currently serves as the company’s CEO.
A shocking 15 million people suffer from strokes across the globe. 12.5 million of those people survive and of those 12.5 million, 60% of them have some form of hand dysfunction after the stroke.
The devices that are currently on the market today that help rehab stroke victims’ hands deal with the problem from a total physiological perspective. The devices today allow functionality but not learned functionality. They provide localized muscular exercise but not brain function.
The HandMinder device, which fits like a glove, restores the neurological connection between the hand and the brain. The loss of hand movement in a stroke victim is a neurological problem, not just a physiological problem. By reprogramming the stroke victims brain to hand function, HandMinder closes the natural physiological loop.
Unlike other devices that address this issue, HandMinder is a take home product that allows stroke victims to rehabilitate their hands as often as they would like without having to take up extra time in their rehab clinics. It also allows them to continue their therapy while traveling, being outside and living somewhat normal lives.
When designing the HandMinder product, the team at HandMinder talked with stroke victims and their families. Because strokes are more prevalent in older patients, Handminder even talked with grandparents and grandchildren who were concerned with the way some of the medical devices looked. A lot of other devices used for this purpose, seemed somewhat scary to grandchildren which was a real concern for older patients. Handminder, while still a medical device, “looks cool”.
HandMinder presented at the ZeroTo510 demo day last month to a crowd of investors. They are currently working on their third prototype and plan to start field testing the device shortly.
Fresh off the heels of a top 10 finish in the annual Kellogg accelerator rankings, TechStars Boston fall program is underway. TechStars Katie Rae made the official announcement via the TechStars blog yesterday.
This is the first time they’ve run a second class in the same year at their Boston location. Competition is tough in the north east for both the startups and the accelerators. Although they didn’t make it in the top 15 rankings startups in the north east also look to the MassChallenge program to hone their entrepreneurial skills.
We were actually very pleased that two startups we’ve covered here at nibletz.com made the TechStars cut. Boston based athlete to private coach connection platform, CoachUp has made it into the fall class. Michigan based FetchNotes , an incredibly easy to use, feature packed note taking app has also made it into this fall class.
TechStars is credited with just about writing the program for most of the cohort based startup accelerators across the country. Many of the other cohort based accelerators like Cincinnati’s Brandery , Greenville’s Iron Yard Labs , and even Nashville’s Jumpstart Foundry are part of the Global Accelerator Network. The Global Accelerator Network is an offshoot of TechStars, that for a short period of time, was called the TechStars Network.
Here is the entire list of all 13 startups from TechStars.com
BetterFit Technologies provides personalized medicine for everyone. betterfit.com
BookingMarkets lets small and large web sites connect travelers with unique places to stay around the world. bookingmarkets.com
CoachUp helps athletes achieve their full potential by connecting them with private coaches. coachup.com
At Fashion Project you can shop daily designer deals and clean out your closet for your favorite cause. fashionproject.com
Fetchnotes makes it easy to stay on top of what’s going on in your life and communicate with the people that matter to you. fetchnotes.com
ImpulseSave makes saving your money as easy and gratifying as spending it. impulsesave.com
Med2Bed connects hospitals and post-acute care facilities to improve patient outcomes. med-2-bed.com
NBD uses unique surface chemistry to harvest water from humidity. nbdnano.com
Comments Off on New York Startup Jamplify Presents At Jumpstart Foundry Demo Day0LikeLike 1,844
What do you get when you take a bunch of good ole Goldman Sachs financial guys from New York and throw them into an accelerator in Nashville Tennessee? You get a social media, hybrid, promotional, crowdsourcing platform called Jamplify. Now at the first glance of the description I just gave them you may think we’re dealing with another Vooza, no that’s not the case at all.
Jamplify’s finished product, that’s actually available now (what a novel idea building an actual product at an accelerator), you get the most logical promotional vehicle for bands, musicians, and bloggers that’s available to date.
Jamplify crowdsources people for promoting the bands that they love. Rather than crowdsourcing for actual capital Jamplify is crowdsourcing for social capital and human capital, and then there’s the payoff.
Jamplify is like the kickstarter for fan based, crowd based musical promotion. As a fan of a band or a promotional ambassador you can agree to promote a band or musician. Based on your social graph and the amount of people that you actually touch with the campaigns short, trackable url you will become eligible for prizes from the band or artist you’re promoting.
The most interesting promotional “reward” or “perk” to date has been from a hip hop band where the artist actually recorded the outgoing voicemail message for that Jamplifier’s personal voice mail. Cool huh?
If you’re lost, you really shouldn’t be, but it would be great to check out the pitch video from JumpStart Foundry’s demo day in Nashville below:
Kyle
