This is a call to all who plan on applying for CapVenture. Submit your application by this Fri 6/19. There's a $50 discount to those who are accepted to the program. Final application deadline is Weds 7/15.
As a reminder, ATDC, along with our partner TAG, are accepting applications for the 2009 CapVenture Program.
CapVenture
is a unique program that educates and equips CEOs and executives of
early-stage companies for smarter and more productive capitalization of
their businesses. Now in its 3rd year, CapVenture has been incredibly
successful; past
participants include Centrafuse, Global Crypto Systems, Purewire, and
Solo-Health.
Technology companies that are selected for this year's CapVenture will be guided
through extensive workshops on fund raising preparation, an elevator
pitch exercise and review, executive summary review, investor
communications and practice investor pitches. Participants will also
receive weekly mentoring from Atlanta investors and entrepreneurs.
CapVenture’s series of presentations and workshops prepare executives
for the opportunity to meet angel and venture investors and culminates
with an Investor Forum and Celebration. After the final event, the
top-rated CapVenture companies will also have an opportunity to present
at the 2nd annual Venture Atlanta conference in October.
TechAmerica is pleased to announce the 7th annual Spirit of Endeavor Awards Banquet, Chaired by Adam Beckerman, Partner, Habif, Arogeti & Wynne, will be held on Thursday, September 17, 2009 at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta.
Nominations are being accepted from June 1st - July 31st 2009 and are open to TechAmerica members and nonmembers. Award categories include Outstanding Leadership, Technology Entrepreneur, Emerging Business, Technology Innovation, and Leadership in Technology Education. In addition the NEW awards category of "Cool Technology of the Year" has been added and the winner will be determined via live, on-site text voting and presented at the event!
For award criteria and to make a nomination visit the Spirit of Endeavor Awards website. Additional information including sponsorship and registration information, may also be found on the site. Nominations will be accepted from June 1 – July 31, 2009.
Last week, I had the pleasure to be a guest speaker, along side Mr. Ben Dyer, at Shotput Ventures. For those who don't know Shotput Ventures, it's a sort of "Bootcamp" for earliest possible stage startups, concept stage companies. Shotput Ventures partners David Cummings, Sanjay Parekh, Allen Graber, Suleman Ali, Wayt King, Dave Wright, Mitch Free, Jeff Hillimire and Dave Williams decided to bring the "Y Combinator" model down to Atlanta.
After sifting through hundreds of applicants, the Shotput dudes settled on 8 worthy ideas. For these fortunate few, they get the pleasure of working night and day through a "Hot Lanta" summer trying to crank out a product and test it in the market. Teams meet every Weds from 6pm to 9pm to hear inspring testomonials from seasoned entrepreneurs, share typical startup typical fare of pizza and sodas (extra caffeine please) and update each other on progress/challenges.
Being in the same room with these young, would wood be entreprenuers, took me back. Crazy long hours, fast food every night, less than comfortable working conditions, and the constant reminder of cash position or lack there of. Both personally and professionally. All that didn't matter. All the external matters were out of focus. What was in focus was the task at hand, making a difference.
It was all there last Weds. Were they conscious that it 90 degrees in the conference room? or that the Dow was up nearly 2000 pts in the past 3 months? Probably not, and it didn't matter. All that mattered was that they were about to embark on a great adventure, togther. And they had believers and coaches.
It's no picnic but I assure you at it's conclusion, they'll fondly look back at this experience as one of the best of their lives.
As I head off to watch the finals of the GRA/TAG Business Launch 2009 this morning I wanted to share with you the tactics that Balaya used to be the leading vote getter in the People’s Choice Contest, and boy did they earn it. Balaya’s win was no accident, but a well thought out social media marketing plan. The tactics employed by Balaya are transferable to many different social media marketing situations and Seth Michalak was kind enough to share them.
- The customized TinyURL tinyurl.com/vote-for-number-16 was created as a reference URL to be used in many of their tactics. Nice.
- Using the Balaya blog they pointed out the contest not once, but twice and asked people to not only vote for them but to pass the message among friends.
- Through use of the multiple Twitter accounts members of the Balaya team regularly posted the TinyURL link to the voting page and encouraged individuals to vote and re-tweet.
- They sent an email to a large list of individuals who have supported Balaya, asking for their votes, as well as asking them to pass the info along to their address books. Many people did so. One individual passed the email to 300 people, another did an additional 150 and many who sent it to about 50 more people.
- Balaya did a lot on Facebook . Using status messages, members of the Balaya team posted the TinyURL and asked individuals to vote. They had many friends and supporters who followed suit, and used status messages to do the same. Balaya had a great supporter create a Facebook event group for the competition. Invites to this group probably exceeded 1,000 total users during the duration of the competition. You can see an image of the Facebook page below.
- Members of the Balaya team also used the “What are you working on?” field on LinkedIn to promote the TinyURL and encourage voting.
- Messages about the competition and the TinyURL were posted to many groups using Balaya’s primary product, tick-it, a desktop ticker style communication tool.
- Balaya posted a description of the competition and a link on their website.
- Balaya enlisted ‘The Creative Coast Alliance,’ an arm of the Savannah Economic Development Authority, to include a request for votes and a link to the contest in their monthly e-newsletter that is delivered to a large mailing list in the Savannah area.
- And finally good old world networking. Balaya asked people to vote in the different offices they were in and around during the course of the competition.
It’s a long list, but no one ever said this social media marketing stuff was easy. But hopefully, some of the tactics that Balaya used to win the People’s Choice Contest can be used by many startups to help grow their business down the road.
The 2009 TAG/GRA Business Launch finalists have been announced. Congratulations to AccelerEyes, Band Metrics and TalentSoup who were selected from over 75 companies to compete for over $300,000 in cash and services.
Come out this Wednesday, June 3rd to watch these three startups pitch their business plans to an all-star panel of judges.
AccelerEyes
AccelerEyes was formed in June 2007 to deliver on its vision of creating and leading the movement towards “Personal Supercomputing.” Just as personal computing dominated mainframe computing in the 1980s, AccelerEyes will dominate clustered supercomputing by bringing a level of supercomputing power to personal computers. AccelerEyes will accomplish this mission by delivering powerful software solutions to the high performance computing (HPC) market.
Band Metrics
Band Metrics analyzes, ranks and scores the overall popularity of a musician, band or song by aggregating and interpreting all relevant online content. The Company achieves this through its patent-pending Popularity Profiling System ("PPS"). This system aggregates comprehensive information about bands and musicians from across the global Internet landscape, calculating both quantitative and qualitative data and then returning the results in an easy-to-use, Google style analytical dashboard.
TalentSoup
An interactive service that provides a highly efficient matching engine to connect talent with advertising projects.
ATDC, along with our partner TAG, are now accepting applications for the 2009 CapVenture Program.
CapVenture is a unique program that educates and equips CEOs and executives of early-stage companies for smarter and more productive capitalization of their businesses. Now in its 3rd year, CapVenture has been incredibly successful; past
participants include Centrafuse, Global Crypto Systems, Purewire, and Solo-Health.
Technology companies that are selected for this year’s CapVenture will be guided
through extensive workshops on fund raising preparation, an elevator
pitch exercise and review, executive summary review, investor
communications and practice investor pitches. Participants will also
receive weekly mentoring from Atlanta investors and entrepreneurs.
CapVenture’s series of presentations and workshops prepare executives
for the opportunity to meet angel and venture investors and culminates
with an Investor Forum and Celebration. After the final event, the
top-rated CapVenture companies will also have an opportunity to present
at the 2nd annual Venture Atlanta conference in October.
ATDC spends innumerable hours every week coaching entrepreneurs on their investment pitches. We see many entrepreneurs with good intentions make common mistakes and help them avoid common pitfalls as they prepare to present their companies in the best possible light. A great opportunity to observe fellow entrepreneurs in action is next Tuesday May 19th at MIT Forum of Atlanta’s Run it By the Pros workshop.
At Run it By the Pros four new companies will present their business plans to a panel of experts. The Venue : Law Offices of Carlton Fields, One Atlantic Center, 1201 West Peachtree Street, 49th Floor, Atlanta, GA, 30309; Time: 3:30 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. You can register here (members only but TAG members are eligible and can attend at the MIT Forum Member $25 rate). Clarification: You must be a member of the MIT Enterprise Forum to attend.
ATDC graduate entrepreneur Patrick Taylor of Oversight Systems will serve as the experienced entrepreneur on the panel along with VC’s Mark Johnson of Total Technology Ventures, Linnea Geiss of Arcapita, and Lawrence Gold from Carlton Field.
In addition to attending Run it By the Pros many an entrepreneur will find our articles on Telling a Compelling Story and Top VC Questions valuable resources when prepping to pitch their own deal.
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Thursday, May7, 2009
7:30 to 9am
Ashford Club
75 5th Street, NW
5565 Glenridge Connector # 100
Atlanta, GA Map
Click here to register!
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This week the TAG/ATDC Entrepreneurs Society partnered up with the TAG Featured Speaker Series to present Don Yaeger, New York Times best seller and author of "What Makes the Great Ones Great" on Thursday at the Ashford Club.
Yaeger, author of 16 books, was formerly Associate Editor of Sports Illustrated, and has led to guest appearances on every major talk show in America – from Oprah to Nightline; from CNN to Good Morning America. In his 20-plus years as a journalist, he has conducted interviews with some of the greatest athletes of our time – Michael Jordan, Mia Hamm, Emmitt Smith, Serena Williams, Jimmy Connors and countless others. He has lived with Walter Payton, writing the NFL legend’s autobiography as Payton courageously battled cancer, and even interviewed the President of the United States in the Oval Office.
Using lessons learned from a lifetime in sports, Don will share the formula that he has seen in the great winners he’s worked with – and explains how that formula can work for others.
Characteristics necessary for entrepreneurial success are in many cases quite similar to those of great athletes – a PHD – persistence, hard work and determination.
As an athlete, I look forward to getting inspired by Don and perhaps hearing some interesting stories about the great individuals Don has worked with over his very interesting career.
Since January I have been devoting a good chunk of time leading the preliminary judging of the TAG/GRA Business Launch Competition.
This year 76 companies submitted preliminary applications and 47 full
business plans were presented. After the 47 plans were received
entrants were invited to provide an overview of their companies in a
three minute unaided presentation. Today TAG notified the companies of
their status. In alphabetical order the selected semifinalists are as
follows.
AccelerEyes: simple software for powerful visual computing.
BandMetrics: tracks, analyzes, and scores the overall popularity of
musical artists by aggregating and interpreting online content.
Balaya: Internet collaboration tools.
Cobot Health: an intelligent agent solution for personalized health conversations and recommendations within peer communities.
Fans Want More: a telemetry data collection service provider providing
new media visualization solutions to the sports industry.
Fizzbee: an online social networking product that lets users create an interactive story from a digital photo.
MedsFile: your medical records anytime, anywhere.
Millionaire Moms: a platform designed to help entrepreneurial Moms find and achieve their own vision of success.
ReinventEd: creates immersive game based learning experiences for middle and high school students.
TalentSoup: an Internet service that provides a highly efficient matching engine to connect talent with advertising projects.
VOC Systems: a speech based customer feedback method to service organizations that can benefit from on-site service recoveries.
VQLink:
provides headend and network products for video service providers that
enable them to add more HD channels and improve video quality while
lowering expenses.
WebIvy: enables marketing organizations to quickly and inexpensively optimize concept to market for online initiatives.
The
semifinalists are being offered an opportunity to practice their 20
minute pitches next Monday and will present and defend their plans
privately to an esteemed panel of judges
on May 6, 7 & 8. The selected finalists will present to a
panel of judges and the public on June 3 at IBM.
Regardless of
how far a company gets in the competition to win the $100k in cash and
$200k in prizes the aim of the contest is to move all of the companies
forward in their development. And from this perspective it is my hope
that all of the companies that entered believe that they are winners.
ATDC’s Lance Weatherby has made a big impact in his almost 3 years at the incubator. It is no coincidence that during his tenure at ATDC, many great community initiatives have started and been hosted by ATDC, including StartupWeekend, BarCamp, CloudCamp, and Meet the VC.He is also a friend of the StartUpChicks in Atlanta.
One of Lance's lasting contributions to the ATDC is his creation and leadership of ATDC’s blog, www.peachseedz.com. This blog is a great resource to Georgia's entrepreneurial community and has a growing subscriber base of over 3,000.
The enthusiasm that Lance has for web technology is inspiring and is bringing momentum to Atlanta. The ATDC has brought in more web companies since he began here as a
venture catalyst and he has inspired me, an early majority at best, to become active on Twitter and to experiment with Facebook. Along with Lance, a handful of other companies are
making Atlanta an exciting center for tech entrepreneurship. The
leaders of Shotput Ventures are a great story of current tech
entrepreneurs investing in future tech entrepreneurs – a good sign of
the maturation of Atlanta’s tech community.
Follow Lance on Twitter @lance and also consider following his personal blog, Force of Good, to learn from one of Atlanta’s biggest proponents of Atlanta tech startups.
If you are a subscriber to TechView Atlanta (subscribe now), check out a detailed profile of Lance in the April 13th release.
