Not too long ago Rob Kischuk issued a challenge. Essentially he threw down the gauntlet to Atlanta Startup Weekend participants. If you are going to play, play with the intent to launch. Paul Stamatiou took up the rally cry. And Paul had a pretty consistent question during the opening pitches. "Can you build it in a weekend?"
Atlanta has a strong Startup Weekend history. Both Skribit and Twitpay were companies that made it out of the gate before the end of the weekend. Both have received seed funding. There is a bit of a legacy to uphold. The big plan was select and form on Friday, get to prototype before going home on Saturday, and get out the door by Sunday presentation time.
And did the people that participated in Atlanta Startup Weekend 3 answer the challenge and hold up the legacy. Six products were launched this past weekend. Yes six. And two others made it to rather impressive demos.
Remarkable. Eight teams had something to show on Sunday night. Rumor is that two of them have revenue. XpenseTrack went to Startup Gauntlet on Tuesday night and won the pitch competition.
It will be interesting to watch these projects develop. There are one or two in the bunch that could evolve into interesting companies.
ChubbyBrain, whose name is perhaps only surpassed by BackPackBuddy, is issuing a series of reports on the state of incubators around the nation. They recently covered Georgia. Not surprisingly, ATDC dominates the market with over a 50% share when you combine the Atlanta and Savannah results.
ATDC is really not just an incubator any more. It is more of a venture accelerator with an incubation space for companies that need it. If you do the math on the old ATDC data that CubbyBrain used of 39 companies it would put the total market at about 75 companies incubating in Georgia, or 36 non ATDC companies. ATDC now has 218 member companies. The ATDC share under the new model is more like 86%. It also makes ATDC the largest program in the country.
There are 10 active projects currently at Atlanta Startup Weekend 3. Presentations start in less then an hour. Eager to see who can launch. We may see four alphas or better.
EventTank EventTank
aggregates event data from various social networking and event listing
web sites to create a searchable database that allows third parties to
recieve a comprehensive listing of events that is categorized by
interest, date, time, and geographic area, etc.
FakeWhale For all the things you wish they'd said.
FanTrendz Real-time news trends for your fantasy sports team.
FlexSeats FlexSeats is time sharing for season ticket holders. It allows groups of friends and businesses to get together and share the cost of season tickets without the hassle of dividing up tickets, handling money, and handling conflicts.
Moody Tweets Moody Tweets is a Twitter application offering users the ability to express their personality and mood in an easy, fun and customized manner.
Socialytix Socialytix analyzes your social networks to help you determine which relationships are the strongest, which need attention, and which should be abandoned altogether. From there, you can build an action plan to strengthen your most important relationships and build on forgotten ones.
Today's Bracket Difinitive answers to questions that don't matter.
Touchdown Nation Touchdown Nation – the hottest football game on Facebook! Build your team. Train your players. Win games. Who will dominate the field?
Voicify A quick and simple way to find out what people think. Voicify calls your customers, friend, or team members with the questions you want answered. It then displays the results in easy to read graphs to help you make better decisions about your business or personal life.
Xpense Track Everyone hates expense reports. All those receipts. So many forms. XpenseTrack provides your company with a simple, paperless online receipt management system. Free yourself from the hassle of receipts. Go Receipt Free!
This morning I woke up to find Ev's avatar in my personal tweet stream.
I was a bit taken aback. I don't follow @ev. Did not understand why he showed up. So I followed the link and sure enough he does a fine job explaining this.
Seems like Twitter has a bit of an retweet attribution problem. Here is how they decided to solve it.
"In order to get rid of the attribution
confusion, in your timeline we show the avatar and username of the
original author of the tweet—with the person who retweeted it (whom you
actually follow) in the metadata underneath."
So Fred Wilson, whom I follow, is merely mentioned in small text at the base of the retweet. Ev, who I do not follow, is noted prominently with his avatar and user name.
End result is increased exposure, reach, and influence for users that get retweeted. It will be interesting to see how this effects user behavior.
This is the second in a series pulling content off my first web presence. A personal list from 1999. Can not believe The Lord of the Rings did not make the cut. It bumps nine or ten off the list today. Will have to gave that some thought.
Atlanta Startup Weekend is less than a week away from starting. Over 75 people have signed up. The total registrants may reach 100 (registration closes on Wednesday). And we have some great local sponsors in MailChimp, JungleDisk, and A Small Orange that are going to be offering some resources to Startup Weekend participants.
With that said, there is a dirty little secret about Startup Weekend. Actually it's
not confined to Startup Weekend. It applies to lots of well known
startup related programs. Startup Weekend, TechStars, YC, the GRA/TAG
Business Launch competition. The further along you are when the
programming actually starts, the better your chance of success when the
program ends. So what does that mean for Atlanta Startup Weekend?
If you have an idea start developing the idea into something that you can easily share on opening night.
Below is a nice tutorial.
Exceptions for Atlanta is we are limiting the first round pitches to 60 seconds and not allowing slides.
If you have an idea it also would not be too bad an idea to start
recruiting your team before the event starts. As an example, the
idea for Twitpay was well socialized last year before the weekend began
and several key team members knew that was what they were going to work
on before they walked in the door on Friday night. So recruit people
that you know and want to work with to sign up for the weekend so they
can work on your project.
If you don't have an idea go to the idea wiki and chime on the ideas that others are submitting.
It's time to get started. If you have any other insights or questions bring them on.
In a nice opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal, by Schramm et al. They essentially say that the age of the business not the size is the more precise characteristic of companies creating jobs.
The more precise factor is not the size of businesses, but rather their
age. According to the Census Bureau, nearly all net job creation in the
U.S. since 1980 occurred in firms less than five years old. A Kauffman
Foundation report released yesterday shows that as recently as 2007,
two-thirds of the jobs created were in such firms. Put more starkly,
without new businesses, job creation in the American economy would have
been negative for many years.
The authors go on to cite economic and regulatory barriers that are in the way of young companies and propose a four pronged solution.
Welcome immigrants seeking scientific training to our universities by granting permanent residency and work status.
Unbridle academic entrepreneurs by opening up licensing to non-university entities.
Provide easier assess to capital.
Fix the cost burden of SOX compliance for small companies.
Seems like a reasonable course of action to me. How about you?
Hat tip to John Cottingham and Mike Eckert for pointing the way.
There is this big debate about if you should or shouldnot try and determine ROI on social media efforts. I am clearly in the former camp.
Evan LaPointe, whom I had the pleasure to interact with a bit recently is not really a social media guy. He is a web analytics guy. Dare I say an expert. He was a nice article on Search Engine Land pondering the question if Web analytics is easy or difficult to do. The answer is both.
Money quote:
"But the most important—and hardest—thing to do is tie it all back to
the two very simple metrics that drive all business value: revenue and
profitability."
Yep. And I think that is why some people don't want to measure social media ROI. It's hard.
It's also important. To quote someone a bit more famous than Evan, "what's measured gets managed." If you want to improve how social media drives business value you have to measure it's impact on revenue and profitability.
Christina Warren has an excellent article over on Mashable entitled "HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI." It's a great roundup of the tools available today and chock full of content. Including Oliver Blanchard's Social Media ROI presentation.
It's simply astounding how many social media marketing practitioners take the stance that you can not measure the ROI of social media. It's even more astounding that 84% of social media programs are not measured. I honestly do not think that I have ever undertaken a marketing program that did not have ROI metrics attached. Never, ever. It's appalling.
Why are so many social media consultants/companies/experts so averse to measuring the impact that social media has on business results? Perhaps they don't know how. Perhaps they don't like the results. I really don't know. A notable exception is Chris Brogan. He says something to the effect of "sure I measure ROI, that's why they give me money." Good for him.
The position of most social media types reminds of the time when I did an agency review and the astonishment displayed upon learning that customer revenue generated was the end game measurement of any marketing effort. The agency folks were aghast. Measure sales. As a results of marketing efforts. Good god man what is wrong with you!
Folks if it is marketing, and that's the general classification of many social media programs, you can measure it. Measure it all the way to ROI.
In the curious way that the Internet sometimes ensnares you. A series of events led me back to my first Web site. There is some oddly interesting stuff in there. This is a first in a series. My personal bio, circa 2000.
Welcome to the World!
I was in a hurry to get here. Born a bit early on a night when my parents were planning on going to a University of Louisville basketball game. The date was December 17, 1960. They made it to the hospital. I am still a UofL fan.
The Wonder Years
Oh the wonder years. That time in life where everything is all fun! Grew up in Louisville, home of the Kentucky Derby.
Spent a lot of time playing baseball and football. My parents were divorced was I was seven. It had a major impact on my life. My dad lived on the Ohio River and did until he passed away. Water skied quite a bit when I was in my teens. Miss my dad quite a bit these days.
High School
If you want to throw me in a category I was a jock. Played football, wrestled, dated cheerleaders, wrestled with cheerleaders. Led Zeppelin ruled.
College
I discovered that I have a brain. Dean's List and all that stuff. For the record I went to Eastern Kentucky University.
OK, maybe I really did not need a brain. Did not join a frat, got invited to more parties that way. Was a psych major for a while. Did not like playing with rats. Switched to marketing. Sold bibles door to door the summer between my junior and senior year.
Early Adulthood
Went into sales when the girl across the hall told me her father was the Vice President of Marketing at a Louisville firm. Bought a boat. Skied some more. Was a pretty decent beach volleyball player. Quit my job and left Louisville to pursue my MBA. I doubt if I will ever live in Louisville again. Not that it is a bad
place or anything.
My Wife and Real Adulthood
Abby, my wife, most recently worked at Coca-Cola, a place which isn't quite as cool a place to be as MindSpring. She had to wear suits, panty hose and stuff like that. On the days that she felt really daring she actually wore pants to work! She was afraid to do it the first time. However, their bennies made up for other
shortcomings. We have talked about her becoming a MindSpringer but she is a marketer too and we don't think that would work out. I interview a lot of her former co-workers. Before Coke she worked at Leo Burnett and Taco Bell. She left Coke when Kate, our daughter, got an ear infection and had to have tubes put in. I am more proud of her as a professional mom then I am of her being a professional professional.
Abby and I met at Indiana University while in graduate school. She had a few dates with my roommate. Five years later she invited me to go out and play in NYC and (she claims) innocently told me I could stay the night with her in the city (I lived across the Hudson in Hoboken) if we stayed out too late. Well .... one
thing led to another and the rest is history. We have been married since the spring of 1995. I am very happy.
Our First Baby
We had our first child together in the fall of 1998, Katherine Clarie. She came out 9 pounds 3 ounces. Abby had to go natural (not her choice!). Kate is a great tempered strong girl. We like to tell ourselves that it is due to superior parenting skills. We actually know better. We are simply blessed. I am happier.
Our Second Baby
Our second child was born on January 2, James Benjamin. He was five hours and 11 minutes too late to be a millennium baby. Or actually he was about 364 days early. Another big one weighing in at 9 pounds 4 ounces. A boy and a girl. I think we will stop.
Being employed by Georgia Tech means that I don’t travel
that much for business these days. In all the time I have been at ATDC I think I have gotten on a plane for business exactly once (make that twice, it was a round trip ticket). The first week of November I am going to do it again. I am going to TechJournal South’s Internet Summit 09 in
Raleigh. Not only am I going, I am paying for the trip out of my own pocket. For me to start writing personal checks I need to be a little excited. And I am super excited
about Internet Summit.
First of all Eric Gregg the publisher of TechJournal South and director of TechJournal South always puts on a heck of a show. They have what looks to be a great networking event on the opening night followed by a day of top notch panels/presentations with executives from comScore, Blogger, Digg, ESPN, Meebo, Pandora, Tapulous, Technorati, Twitter, and Salesforce to name a few. And Don Brown from Twitpay is on the agenda as well. They are also having a demo pit where a dozen or so of the
local Internet hotties are going to be showing off their goods.
Looking forward to what I expect to be more than a
full day of connecting and learning with these folks that are a bit outside of
my normal circle. Registration is still open. They are expecting a record crowd. I hope to see you there.
The opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone (with the exception of comments by others of course). They do not represent the opinion or position of any other person on entity. All postings adhere to my personal values.
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