Category Archives: Accelerators

Business Accelerators – Necessary, or Just Trendy?

Image via Wikipedia

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 – Making the Process of Applicant Tracking Easier

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 [...]

StockCastr – Unleash Your Inner Jim Cramer

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 [...]

bitblinder – Giving Consumers Unrestricted Private Internet Access

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 [...]

iTwixie – A Clean Social Network for Tween Girls

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 [...]

exactbrand – Consistent Web-to-Paper Branding Using Technology

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.  [...]

Bueda – Semantic Tag Matching for Ads

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 [...]

Liveblogging AlphaLab – Demo Day Presentations

I am at AlphaLab this morning, and I will try to get a short blurb off on each presenting company – looks like a great set of companies and nice audience.

Tapping Into the Pittsburgh Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

A couple weeks back, I gave a presentation at McKinsey, the consulting firm where I used to work.  It was great to see and talk to some old friends whom I hadn’t seen in such a long time, and to meet the new faces – the highly talented core of consultants that McKinsey is so [...]

OpenCoffee Club – Monday, April 13

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone at our next OpenCoffee on Monday, April 13, 9AM at AlphaLab on the SouthSide. If you’re not familiar with OCC, it is simply an informal gathering for those who are interested in the local startup scene to get together and chat. The attendance mix includes entrepreneurs, investors, tech [...]