Wednesday, October 14, 2009 – Demo Day for the 3rd AlphaLab class! It looks like a great lineup of startups, perhaps the best yet, and they are more prepared and drilled than any other class to come out of here. I am looking forward to seeing how they do and giving some candid feedback on [...]
I have written a bit before about business accelerators, and I sit on the board of a local accelerator here in Pittsburgh called AlphaLab. There is a pretty significant national trend afoot right now for every town to put up their own accelerator, and you are seeing them pop up everywhere. I think this is [...]
Last week, I wrote about my experiences with two demo days at business accelerators: LaunchBox Digital in Washington, DC and TechStars in Boulder, CO. I tried to get an invitation to YCombinator in Boston as well, but somehow it slipped through the cracks.
One of the most impressive things I saw at both sites was “The [...]
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Last week I attended two “demo days” at two different startup incubators, and in the next few days I plan to write on what I saw at LaunchBox Digital in DC and TechStars in Boulder.
But before I dig in, a little background is in order – there was an excellent series of posts [...]
TheResumator, founded by Don Charlton, aims to make the process of collecting resumes and tracking a standard hiring process much, much easier.
Don has a great looking site – his strength is clearly on the design and branding side – and this simple idea has been equally simply implemented into a clean, compelling application. Anyone can [...]
Jack Colletti, Dan Davis, and Aruna Endabetla present StockCastr – where “American Idol” meets Jim Cramer.
The simple idea here is to give the at-home amateur a platform to provide rich video and data content around stocks and investments that they believe in and want others to access. In essence, this allows anyone to create their [...]
Next up is bitblinder, presented by Josh Albrecht and Matt Kaniaris. These two compelling founders out of Pitt are creating a way for consumers to access the internet in a private, secure, and unrestricted way.
This business looks a whole lot like a proxy server, or other basic anonymizers, but these guys have thought through some [...]
Rebecca Gaynier is presenting iTwixie – billed as a clean social network for tween girls (ages 8-14 years old).
The pitch is a good one – girls in the tween ages don’t like what the little kids do (Club Penguin, WebKinz), but aren’t quite ready for the older girl sites, even though they are targeted at [...]
Next up is John Carman (and his co-founder, Scott Connolly) talking about their startup, Ajax Street, and their first product, exactbrand (you can find more information at their blog post here).
Still in the early stages of development, the basic idea behind their company is to develop technologies to make consistent branding more effective and efficient. [...]
First up is Bueda, a CMU spinout headed up by Vasco Pedro. The idea behind Bueda is to better monetize ads on user-generated content (UGC) sites using tags and tighter semantic matching.
Certainly a very large market, but also quite crowded, and one that hasn’t necessarily delivered the technology promise as much as the hype. Vasco [...]