fooala is building what it calls “Food 2.0″ – making it easier for restaurants to access their customers and diners to find the food they want to eat. They want to “sell food the right way on the internet.”
The founding team out of CMU is big and successful (if not enthusiastic enough – David, light [...]
First up is CloudFab, a company I have been close to since its inception. I was initially very skeptical about the prospects for the success of this company, but I am very impressed with what the entrepreneurs, Nick Pinkston and Steve Klabnik, have been able to build.
The idea is to democratize “distributed desktop manufacturing” by [...]
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 [...]
In the past week, I attended two events where I had to evaluate startup pitches delivered to investors: a boot camp for the upcoming 3RVF conference in Pittsburgh, and the interim demo day at AlphaLab. Both events were dry-run practice sessions so that presenting companies could be more polished when they were actually on the [...]
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. [...]