A couple of weeks ago, I was in Cleveland at a conference of seed-stage investors from across the U.S. For me, the high point of the conference was undoubtedly the keynote speech by David Wilhelm, founder of Adena Ventures in Athens, OH. The central storyline of his remarks seemed to be the following:
The current financial crisis is the [...]
Last up today is Sonya Labs, the creation of Rodrigo Guzman, Nathan Collins, and Walter Chen. These three Pittsburgh imports are creating the “Google of legal research.”
The legal profession today uses LexisNexis and Westlaw to find legal information to buld cases, but these resources are old-school, mostly manually based sources of legal information. SonyaLabs is [...]
Founder Felix Lloyd used to be a school teacher in Washington DC, and he hopes his startup, Skill-Life, willl be able to help school-aged children learn about personal finances. He likens his idea to “SIMS meets Quicken.”
Felix is a great salesman, and his entertaining walk through the Skill-Life online virtual world, Cents City, showed off [...]
Game Huddle is the creation of a couple avid gamers, John Carson and Tyler Ewing, likened to “eHarmony meets Facebook for gamers”.
The site provides a toolset for other big gamers that allow them to ply their passion in a social medium that gives them the ability to chooose who they play with, what news they [...]
Next up is crono, a CMU spinout of Jarun Ngamvirojcharoen, Liz Crawford, and Manuela Velloso. They have created an application that makes the process of scheduling meetings easier.
Currently, they don’t have a website (that I could find), and their alpha product only works in Google Calendar. They are targeting other polular calendar programs, such as [...]
Next up is online comic strip creation startup Chogger. Founders Jeremy Herrman, Alex Moore, and Jim Keder are behind what looks to be a very colorful and attractively designed site. On Chogger, you can create and distribute any type of digital comic you would like.
This is an interesting corner of the otherwise over-crowded social media [...]
BlenderHouse founders Jason Wilburn and Mike Cham kick the morning off, introducing their startup that provides social media “apps” to popular sites such as Facebook, Hi5, mySpace, etc. They have built two apps thus far, WhichWheels? that helps Facebook users decide which car they should buy based on recommendations from friends, and a “white-label” app [...]
I am at AlphaLab’s very first Demo Day, when each of the six companies that have been incubated over the last six months presents what their company is all about. There is a great crowd here – I would guess close to 150 people crowded in their Southside location on Carson Street – STANDING ROOM [...]
National VC Trends:
Monday, Dow Jones VentureSource came out with their 3rd quarter venture capital deal totals for the United States. As expected, the national trends in venture investing are not encouraging. It appears that the number of venture deals fell in all sectors, compared to the same quarter last year.
Some quick takeaways:
The number of healthcare deals [...]
I am headed off to AlphaLab in a few hours for the kickoff event of Podcamp Pittsburgh 3 – the Meet-n-Greet. Did someone say “cockatils”?
If you are in or around Pittsburgh this weekend, and want to attend an UnConference, you should stop in and check it out. We will be at the Art Institute on [...]