Startup Blog: TechVenture 2011 Rocked Orlando

ORLANDO - Welcome to my first blog for the Florida Technology Journal! Thank you David Glass for giving me this opportunity to communicate to your readers. My name is Dennis R. Pape and I am the founder of Florida Venture Sourcing - a web site designed to connect Florida’s technology venture community. The site provides Florida’s tech startups visibility and connections to seed and early-stage investors and mentors. We also aggregate all the news, events, deals, service providers, and jobs in the Florida startup community. Please visit us and sign up for our newsletter. I intend to blog here about the Florida startup community and topics of interest to Florida technology venture startups, mentors, and investors.

Today, I want to tell you about TechVenture 2011, organized by Florida Technology Journal, which rocked Orlando last month at the Hard Rock Live at Universal Resort. The first day agenda featured the AT&T Mobile App Hackathon, a networking and learning event for mobile app developers and Tuesday's agenda featured 10 startup companies. I didn’t attend (my old school coding skills, BASIC and FORTRAN, would not have cut it!). According to AT&T, “the Orlando event was probably our warmest event for the year and for sure we will be coming back. The developers were programming in the sun outside and that was a welcome change from the 37 degree weather we've been having back in Seattle. Moving on to the apps that were developed... All in, there were 16 high quality apps that were developed by 73+ developers over the course of the day”. You can read AT&T’s recap here and Valencia College’s Josh Murdock’s account here.

I did attend the second day morning’s session, which featured an inspiring kickoff speech by Brent Britton, co-founder of Gazelle Lab in St. Petersburg, and a key note opening speech by Marc Cantor, co-founder of Macromedia and founder of Digital City Mechanics. Marc argues that the current model for economic development is grossly inefficient and mostly ineffective. He is implementing, in several communities in the US and elsewhere, his Digital City project which creates an online community and ecosystem that fosters education, community engagement, and multimedia job creation. Most of the slides Marc presented can be found here.

The setup at the Hard Rock was ideal for the 10 startup companies featured in Tuesday morning's session: CinematiKa, Code School, CycloOcean, Dropost.it, Eventgrabber, Jobzey, meet.com, Row Sham Bow, Trip Lingo, and VisApp. The audience was seated at tables on the stage floor and company tables were arranged around the perimeter of the stage floor so all of the attendees could easily see the companies and during the breaks mingle with the founders and see each of the company's demos.

Following Marc's presentation, each of the companies gave a 4 minute presentation with 4 slides. Kudos to David and his organizing team for making these presentations informative and meaningful - an intro slide with the elevator pitch, a second slide describing the market problem, a third slide describing the company's solution, and a fourth slide describing what the company was looking for (people, money, advice). I wish other events of this type would follow this format.

Here are the 10 companies that presented and some of my thoughts about what I heard:

cinematiKa Studios – CinematiKa Studios is an Orlando-based company developing an interactive entertainment platform for the iPad. The app combines three major storytelling platforms–book, movie and video game–into a multi-level production. The first project on the platform is a story called Angal Tentara. Ricardo Bernardini, founder and creative director of cinematiKa Studios gave a great presentation. The company is seeking funds on Kickstarter.com.

Code School - Code School is an Orlando company that has developed an online learning platform that teaches a variety of programming and web design skills. Their site is live now and they are getting market traction. Code School combines video and coding in the browser with game principles to make learning more fun and therefore more effective. Code School is a company formed by the guys at Envy Labs in Orlando and is an outgrowth of their work in teaching Ruby on Rails online. Great presentation by Gregg Pollack, founder and CTO of Envy Labs. This is one to watch.

Cyclo Ocean - Cyclo Ocean is a Vero Beach company developing a generator that captures and converts tidal and ocean current into clean renewable energy for the production of electricity. This, I think, is some great technology (they were one of eight finalists in the MegaWatt Ventures competition) that could turn out to be inexpensive enough to be commercially viable - but the commercialization story escaped me, as I suspect it did the rest of the audience, as the visual presentation was buried in the fine print of a pdf document. My advice - get a killer presentation together and I think you guys could go far.

Dropost.it - Dropost.it just graduated in the first class of startups from Gazelle Lab – a TechStars network member located in St. Petersburg. Dropost.it is developing a mobile app that replaces typical gift card giving and usage. The app accesses your social network and suggests gift cards to give, notifies the gift recipient via email or text when a gift is given, and “drops” the gift card electronically as money to the recipients’ Paypal account when he or she is in the vicinity of the gift establishment. Cool app and a much better, IMHO, presentation (because of the presentation format) than the one I saw at the Gazelle Lab Demo Day. Kudos to cofounders Orrett Davis (presenter) and Ty Mathen.

Eventgrabber - Eventgrabber is an Orlando-based company with an online platform that aggregates local events and recommends specific events to a user based on their personal preferences. Users can then purchase tickets to the event directly from the Eventgrabber site. TK Walker, CEO of EventGrabber gave an outstanding presentation. I think Eventgrabber could go far as they expand beyond Orlando.

Jobzey - Jobzey is an Orlando-based company developing an online job search platform that leverages your social network. Jobzey serves up job openings at companies that employ your social network friends and followers allowing you to get connections to a potential employer outside of their HR department. Lots of competition in this field but these guys could go far with funding. Great presentation by Mark Hall.

Meet.com - meet.com is an Orlando company developing a location-based mobile app that serves up photos of nearby members both in and out of your Facebook network. It enables easily meeting people nearby. Ian Jones, meet.com’s CEO and a veteran of the online dating industry, gave a great presentation. The online dating market is in the process of being disrupted by apps like this and meet.com, with its mobile-only focus, should go far after its launch in January.

Row Sham Bow - Row Sham Bow is an Orlando venture-backed game development studio (they closed on $3M from Intersouth Partners in April) founded by a veteran team with broad, game industry experience for EA Tiburon in Lake Mary. They are focused on developing social network games and using innovative analytics to modify their games to increase retention. Co-founder and CTO Nick Gonzalez gave a great presentation. One can easily see why this company closed on its VC round and those startups looking for funding would do well to take a close look at Row Sham Bow to learn about the characteristics of a VC-backed startup.

TripLingo - TripLingo is a cool mobile app for travelers interested in speaking like the locals. You can quickly find English phrases for the situation you are in and the app will display and voice formal, casual, slang or crazy ways to speak each one in the foreign language. TripLingo, an Atlanta-based company, recently secured seed funding from Atlanta Technology Angels. Another startup to study. Vince Baskerville gave their great presentation.

VisApp – VisApp is a Sarasota-based company that has developed an interesting platform that allows users to easily design and visualize home improvement products on their current house or one they are considering buying. The platform is designed to generate leads for sales to service providers in the Home and Garden Industry. The app has already received numerous awards. Bobbie Ayers, VisApp’s CEO, made a great presentation.
The TechVenture2011 event was a wonderful opportunity for some of Florida’s best startups to present their story.

We need many more of these opportunities for startups in Florida - particularly as the number of startups proliferate. I understand the organizers received well over 100 applications from companies interested in presenting. I hope the success of this event (with over 300 attendees) leads to more events like it in Florida in 2012.