Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: investors

SXSW Adding Great New Wrinkle for 2012: ‘Startup Village’

October 30, 2011 / / 0 Comments

StartupVillage-logoYou've likely heard of the "SXSW Accelerator," which has been a feature for several years at the huge, annual South By Southwest festival, held every March in Austin, Texas. Well, here's something new for 2012: SXSW has announced the creation of a home base for startups, VCs/investors, media, and other entrepreneurial-minded attendees to gather, mix, and mingle during the Interactive portion of the event. It's called SXSW Startup Village.

The 19th annual SXSW Interactive Festival takes place March 9-13, 2012. Startup Village will include the Accelerator program, targeted panels, meetups, lounges, and mentoring/coaching sessions, and will primarily be located on the fourth floor of the Austin Downtown Hilton, making it easy for the startup crowd to find the programming and networking opportunities most important to them.

Want to hang out with startups of the quality of Siri (which won the Accelerator's web category in 2010, then was acquired by Apple) and Hipmunk (the 2011 winner)? Then this is the place for you!  I'm sure planning to attend.

I spoke recently via Skype with Chris Valentine (photo), coordinator of the SXSW Startup Village, and asked him some questions.  ChrisValentine-croppedHow big is SXSW Interactive?  He told me about 10,000 people attended the last one. And he noted it has an "international scope."  How many startups applied to last year's SXSW Accelerator?  About 400 in various categories, and that was narrowed down to 40 who were invited to present at the event.  Who were the winners last year?  Here's a link announcing the seven winners in 2011, which includes two that were music-related (there's also an Accelerator program for the music portion of the festival, which follows the interactive event). For the 2012 Accelerator, Valentine said 56 companies will get to present, due the the fact that new categories have been added, including Mobile and Health.

—-

[Timeout for a Minnesota Connection: At last year's SXSW Accelerator, Minnesota gaming startup OONQR was a finalist in the Entertainment category. Cofounder and CEO Justin Peck told me that his company's SXSW experience "exceeded our expectations." He was impressed that the Accelerator program "made room for a tiny midwestern startup in their lineup of successful, well-established companies." He said their trip to Austin wouldn't have been possible without the two free tickets they got to SXSW as a result of being accepted to present at the Accelerator. "I'm glad to see they're expanding it. Startup Village sounds like promising addition to the program."]

UPDATE: Chris of course remembered the QONQR guys and spoke highly of their startup. Then I brought up how many Minnesotans have been attending SXSW Interactive for years — hundreds went last year. Many gang up in cars and drive down, and some even rent houses to save on accommodation expenses! Chris seemed surprised when I told him we have one of the largest interactive marketing communities in the entire country. The Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) has more than 1300 members and holds the largest annual event of its kind, right here in MInneapolis: the "MIMA Summit." It attracts more than 1000 attendees every fall. My coverage of the recent event, with my colleagues at Minnov8.com, is here, here, and here.

—-

SXSW_2012-logoThe SXSW people define the purpose of the new Startup Village as "uniting the startup, entrepreneur, and investor communities under one roof for focused programming and networking opportunities during SXSW Interactive."

Valentine explained: “Over the last few years, startups and the entrepreneurs who nurture them have become a vital part of the SXSW Interactive festival." He said SXSW wants these attendees to learn, network, and share their experiences, and to foster an environment of innovation and collaboration. "We’re magnifying that atmosphere by converging startup-specific programming, events, and the SXSW Accelerator program in one dedicated location.”

Startup Village panel programming will consist of discussions and workshops specifically designed to educate budding and current entrepreneurs on best practices and lessons learned. Startup Village will also feature mentoring/coaching sessions, lounge areas, and designated meetups for attendees to network with some of today’s up-and-coming startups, seasoned entrepreneurs, and investors.

The 2012 SXSW Accelerator competition kicks off its two-day Interactive showcase on Monday, March 12, while the SXSW Music Accelerator, which spotlights the latest in music technologies, takes place on Wednesday, March 14. For companies wishing to participate in the Accelerator program, applications are being accepted through November 18. To apply for the Interactive Accelerator, visit http://sxsw.com/interactive/accelerator/enter, and to apply for the Music Accelerator, visit http://sxsw.com/music/accelerator/enter.

Startup Village programming will be open to SXSW Interactive, Gold, and Platinum registrants. SXSW music registrants will be admitted to Startup Village programming and events on Tuesday, March 13, 2012. For more information, visit www.sxsw.com/interactive.

DEMO ’09 Presenters Announced – Best Damn Gig Goin’ In This Economy, and I’m There!

February 27, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Could it be any more fun than getting to see this many entrepreneurs get up on stage and pitch their exciting new stuff at DEMO?  Or maybe you'd rather sit at home and whine about "the economy"?  Go ahead, wallow in your lamestream-media bullcrap.  DEMO-stage
 I'm goin' to the Disneyland of Entrepreneurship and Innovation: DEMO '09!  Where the excitement of what's new and what's coming next in cool, new technology will encourage and inspire all those lucky enough to be there.  And, if even if you can't be in the room, you'll have lots of online options to feel like you're almost there — which the DEMO folks tell you all about right here.

Yes, there are only 39 presenters this time, when 60-something have been common at most events in recent years.  But, hey, what would you expect in these times?  It's not quantity — it's quality!  The DEMO producers never disappoint on that.

Here's the current crop of lucky presenters:

• 7 Billion People, Inc., Austin, TX
• Always Innovating, Inc., Mountain View, CA
• AppZero Corp., Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
• Asurion Mobile Applications, Inc., San Mateo, CA
• Avaak, Inc., San Diego, CA
• BitGravity, Inc., Burlingame, CA
• bluBuzz, LLC, Holland, MI
• Cc:Betty, Inc., Palo Alto, CA
• Citrix Online, Goleta, CA
• Coveroo, Inc., San Francisco, CA
• deskNET, Lausanne, CH
• Document Depository Corp., LLC, Wayne, PA
• eFormic, Ltd., Stuttgart, DE
• Ensembli, Ltd., Sheffield, Great Britain
• Evri, Inc., Seattle, WA
• Gazaro, Inc., Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
• HAM-IT, Inc., North Andover, MA
• Home-Account, Inc., San Francisco, CA
• HowSimple, LLC, Huntington Beach, CA
• Jadoos, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA
• Kutano Corp., Burnaby, BC, Canada
• Liquid Media, LLC, Arvada, CO
• Ontier, Inc., Portland, OR
• Primal Fusion, Inc., Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
• Promptu Systems Corp., Menlo Park, CA
• Purewire, Inc., Atlanta, GA
• Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, Inc., San Diego, CA
• Qubes, Inc., Taipei, Taiwan
• Silverstone Solutions, Inc., San Francisco, CA
• Skout, Inc., San Francisco, CA
• SmartyCard, San Mateo, CA
• Symantec Corp., Mountain View, CA
• Technicopia, LLC, Carmel Valley, CA
• Transformyx, Inc., Baton Rouge, LA
• Vokle, Inc., Santa Monica, CA
• Xandros, Inc., Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
• XMARKS, San Francisco, CA
• Zipadi Technologies, LLC, Bluffdale, UT
• Zuora, Inc., Redwood City, CA

DEMO-09-logo+datesIf you're attending or presenting, look me up, starting Sunday evening at the opening reception. Then I'll be in the grand hall all day Monday and Tuesday, sitting in the press area up front.  In a new wrinkle this year, I'll be doing audio interviews with startup team members and various friends and colleagues I run into — then posting those MP3s regularly to my blog during the two-and-a-half days.  And, of course, I'll be live-tweeting the whole affair as well — as I have several times now.

To communicate with me, please comment here on my blog, or you can always reply or DM me on my Twitter page, which is simply @GraemeThickins.  Please follow me there for the full-on firehose of DEMO updates!  My tweets will also be running at this aggregator page, where all DEMO '09 attendees' tweets will appear: @DEMOchatter.

Hints of What’s Coming at DEMO ’09

February 16, 2009 / / 0 Comments

As noted to the right in my sidebar, I'll be reporting from the DEMO conference coming up soon in Southern California. I always look forward to this time of year. I think it will be my seventh or eighth DEMO event in a row (they're held twice a year), and maybe my tenth overall. DEMO is "The Launchpad for Emerging Technology."  DEMO-09-logo+dates
Nowhere else can you get a reading on what's coming in tech better than you can at this event. Click in that graphic to the right for details about registering.

DEMO prides itself in finding the "diamonds in the rough" before anyone else. Over the years, this event has been the site of the first launch of such ventures as Palm, Java, TiVo, and E*TRADE in the mid/late '90s, and, in more recent years, Salesforce.com, VMware, Six Apart, OddPost, IronPort, GrandCentral, and Glam Media, to name a few. 
DEMO says it focuses "on real products ready for market—regardless of their geography." Presenting firms hail from many countries.

DEMO-TheMomenContinues

So, who attends this thing?  Media and bloggers, VCs, business development professionals, IT executives, and new technology firms from all over the world.  DEMO says 15,000 people have attended their events over the past
19 years. Read more here: Who Attends DEMO? Here's a sampling of companies the people of DEMO have told me will be attending the upcoming event on March 1-3: Deutsche Telekom AG, August Capital, Meakem Becker Venture Capital, First Round Capital, Allegis Capital, Motorola, Google, Hitachi America, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Symantec, UBS, NYSE, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, VentureBeat, Business Week, Forbes, ABC, eWeek, North Bridge Ventures, NTTCOMWARE, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Verizon, Alcatel-Lucent, SVB Capital, Mayfield Fund, Granite Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, and more.

What kinds of firms will be pitching?  Well, DEMO doesn't let out much in advance of the show — certainly not the list of presenters. That's a big secret. (Companies actually have been dropped from the event if they leak that they're presenting. And we press attendees, of course, have to honor that embargo as well.) The list of presenters is only released the Friday night before the event, which kicks off with a Sunday night reception. (I always post that list of presenters as soon as it's released to the press, so watch this space on the evening of February 27th.)  But the DEMO producers did provide me with an interesting set of stats on the DEMO '09 presenters, represented in a couple of charts. So, here's a Breakdown of DEMO '09 Presenters by Market Segment and Funding to Date:

DEMO-09-stats But should we really be expecting much excitement at DEMO this year?  Isn't the economy in the tank?  Does innovation really move ahead in these times?  You bet it does!  And the DEMO blog cites recent examples of that from the 2001 downturn. Sure, there will be fewer attendees, and fewer presenters. For the last several shows, we've seen about 65 presenters on average doing their six-minute pitches at each event. This time, it will undoubtedly be less, maybe may even fewer than 50. But I guarantee you we'll be hearing some of tomorrow's big winners, on stage for the first time. Because we always do. And the anticipation of that is, frankly, really exciting to me, and to the rest of 500+ who will be attending. It is an extremely upbeat affair, every single time.

There are some great updates being posted on The DEMO Blog, by Chris Shipley, Executive Producer, and other staff members.  Here are three recent posts:

• Two Panels Just Announced for DEMO '09 … VCs on one, past DEMO company CEOs on the other
• Smart Money Takes a Flight to Quality … "yes, it's a great time to throw a conference that launches new technology products, spots trends, and celebrates innovation"
• Making a Lasting Impact … about how one past DEMO presenter, battery company Boston Power, is growing rapidly

And give a quick listen to a podcast about DEMO '09 recorded on January 29 by my friend Keith Shaw of Network World and Carla Thompson of the Guidewire Group.

Your intrepid reporter: pumped and ready. I can't wait to live-tweet DEMO '09! I did somewhere between 200 and 300 newsy tweets at the last one — so (fair warning) get ready for the firehose!  And I'll be doing podcast interviews for the first time, too, with my whiz-bang new toy: a studio-quality handheld recorder. I'm gonna give it a go in the way of some short, ad-hoc interviews of presenting company founders, VCs, and various luminaries wandering the great hall, the pavilion, and (of course) the hallways. And I'm told I can upload these pretty quickly to my blog, giving those of you who can't be there at least a near-realtime sense of what's going on at DEMO.

Will you be going to DEMO '09?  If so, let us know in the comments! (And let's try to meet up face-to-face.)  If you can't make it, what would you most like to see covered? What answers would you be seeking if you were there? What you would most want to get out of the event?

DEMOfall 07: Day 2 – How’s Your Biz Plan Tracking? PlanHQ Will Tell You

September 28, 2007 / / 1 Comment

Who’d have thought it would take a confident, young startup from New Zealand to come up with an alternative to business plans that just gather dust on the shelf. Planhqonstage
I’m talking here about a way to create a plan that’s focused on tracking, accountability, and actually achieving your goals. What a concept, huh? PlanHQ says says 90% of business plans are never achieved because the focus is on documentation instead of execution. So, they’re out to change that, with a web-based service that has a remarkably simple, intuitive UI.  It’s designed to help the founding team see where they are with respect to their plan at any given moment.

With PlanHQ, team members always know what they’re responsible for, and can see their progress tracked online, in real time. And board members, investors, and advisors get regular progress reports.

Hey, these kiwis are smart guys! And I’m glad they made the trip.

Planhqscreen

© 2024 Graeme Thickins on Tech

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑