Founder Showcase 9 (January 19, 2012)

Keynote Speakers

Mark Suster, General Partner at GRP Partners and Writer at Both Sides of the Table

Mark joined GRP Partners in 2007 after having worked with GRP for nearly 8 years as a two-time entrepreneur. Most recently he was a VP at Salesforce.com following its acquisition of Koral, where Mark was the Founder & CEO. Prior to Koral, Mark was Founder & CEO of BuildOnline. Mark currently sits on the Boards of many companies, and writes the influential blog “Both Sides of the Table.”

Mike Maples, Jr., Managing Partner at FLOODGATE

Mike Maples, Jr. is the managing partner of FLOODGATE, and was recently named as one of “8 Rising VC Stars” by Fortune Magazine. His early investments include Twitter, Digg, Chegg, ng:moco, IMVU, Formspring.me, Gowalla, Kno, YuMe Networks, TaskRabbit, Kongregate, BranchOut, and many more.

Dave McClure, Founding Partner at 500 Startups

Dave McClure is a greedy venture capitalist & founding partner at 500 Startups, an internet startup seed fund and incubator program in Mountain View, CA. Dave has been geeking out in Silicon Valley for over twenty years, and has worked with companies such as PayPal, Mint, Founders Fund, Facebook, LinkedIn, SlideShare, Twilio, Simply Hired, O’Reilly Media, Intel, & Microsoft.

Interviewers

Evelyn Rusli, Reporter, New York Times

Evelyn Rusli is a reporter at The New York Times. Previously she was an Anchor Reporter at TechCrunch and the Forbes Video Network, with nearly 200 television appearances, including on BBC, CNN and MSNBC. At Forbes, she interviewed top business leaders, including Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Carlos Slim, and filed reporting from the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland.

Ina Fried, Senior Editor, All Things Digital

Ina Fried is the Senior Editor for All Things Digital, where she authors the blog Mobilized. Prior to that, she was a senior staff writer for News.com. She is a frequent commenter on technology news on NPR and other print and broadcast outlets. In April of 2011, Ina scored an exclusive interview with CEO Steve Jobs and other Apple executives about the iPhone location tracking controversy.

Alexia Tsotsis, Writer, TechCrunch

Alexia Tsotsis is a writer for TechCrunch. Before TechCrunch, she ran the SFweekly.com website while covering the tech scene, and human behavior in the digital age. At TechCrunch, she covers early stage startups, and has interviewed everyone from Groupon’s Andrew Mason to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. Most recently she made the Forbes “30 Under 30: Rising Stars of Media List.”

Founder Showcase Champion

Spinnakr is a service for displaying targeted messaging on your website based on the specific audience segments. Spinnakr graduated from the Washington D.C. Founder Institute, as well as 500 Startups.

Runner-Up

Kloudless is a service for managing all of your stuff across the cloud and devices.

Demo Table Winners

• ClientMagnet – ClientMagnet enables you to easily predict your customers’ needs and respond with email marketing.
• TagSeats – With TagSeats you can discover friends’ seats at concerts and sporting events – and share yours!
• Breezy – Breezy enables you to print any document from any device to any printer.

Finalists

• Appsperse – Appsperse is a cross promotion platform for mobile applications.
• Gickup – An easy to use video chat gaming platform
• IndustryGraph – A local sales & support channel for B2B cloud services
• JetJaw – The proactive way to protect & promote your brand
• PetHub – Award-winning technology to keep pets safe
• Zoko – Kickstarter for parties

Founder Showcase 8 (November 8, 2011)

Keynote Speaker

Michael Arrington, General Partner at CrunchFund, Founder of TechCrunch, and Blogger at UNCRUNCHED.com

Michael Arrington is a General Partner at CrunchFund, a recently launched early stage VC firm with $20 million in backing. He is also the Founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news that he sold to Aol in 2010. A serial entrepreneur, Michael previously cofounded Achex, and founded Zip.ca and Pool.com. In 2008, Time Magazine named him as one of the world’s 100 most influential people. He now blogs at UNCRUNCHED.com.

Founder Showcase Champion

Neo is an online lender that taps financial and social data to better evaluate creditworthiness and provide more affordable car loans. While current car loans rely solely on credit scores, Neo uses a more comprehensive approach to evaluate loan affordability. This enables better rates and significant savings over traditional loan sources – specifically the 84mm Gen Y consumers with limited or no credit history (40% of the car buying population).

Runner-Up

I-DISPO is the largest community for sharing and booking appointments online. This Paris-based startup also recently secured a partnership with Bing in France to power all restaurant reservations directly on the search results page. At the event they also announced their entry into the U.S. market.

Demo Table Winner

Whit.li uses context-based pattern matching to enable companies to organize users based on compatibility to create a faster, more personalized online experience.

Finalists

• Be Scrappy: an online marketplace that connects people who need tools for home improvement and do-it-yourself projects with lenders that have them. The startup just launched with four tool rental locations in San Francisco and will soon enable peer-to-peer rentals.
• Client Magnet: an online service that helps SMBs drive retention by analyzing their customers and then recommending a marketing strategy based on hundreds of ready to run print, web and email campaigns.
• Explorence: Explorence makes outdoor video games, turning your phone into a Wii and you into the controller.
• Gushcloud: a social media platform where users get rewarded for promoting the brands they like, and companies can reach their target audience with any budget.
• Pllop: an About.me for creative expression. It allows you to easily create touch-enabled micro-sites that work great on both tablets and desktops.
• Say Mmm: Say Mmm makes meal planning and grocery shopping simple with a set of online tools that do the work for you. The company’s latest feature will automatically convert any recipe or recipe URL into an organized grocery list with nutritional information.
• Takeoff: an online tool that makes it easy to collaborate during video production. It’s like Basecamp, but for video.
• Touchbase: a private family network that builds trust by enabling sharing of things like location and status, without tracking a child’s every move.

Founder Showcase 7 (June 15, 2011)

Keynote Speakers

Mark Suster, General Partner at GRP Partners, Writer at Both Sides of the Table, Host of This Week in Venture Capital

Mark joined GRP Partners in 2007 after having worked with GRP for nearly 8 years as a two-time entrepreneur. Most recently Mark was VP of Product Management at Salesforce.com following its acquisition of Koral, where Mark was the Founder & CEO. Prior to Koral, Mark was Founder & CEO of BuildOnline, which was acquired by SWORD Group (PARIS: SWP). Mark currently sits on the Boards of Ad.ly, Awe.sm, Burstly, GumGum, and Ring Revenue, and is a Board Observer of Qualys. Mark also writes the influential blog “Both Sides of the Table,” and hosts “This Week in Venture Capital.”

Naval Ravikant, Co-Founder of AngelList and Venture Hacks

Naval is an entrepreneur and angel investor, a co-author of Venture Hacks, and a co-maintainer of AngelList – the leading community of startups and investors that makes fund-raising efficient. Previously he was a co-founder at Genoa Corp (acquired by Finisar), Epinions.com (IPO via Shopping.com), and Vast.com (largest white-label classifieds marketplace). Naval also has advised Bix.com, iPivot, and XFire, among others, and invested in many companies, including Twitter, FourSquare, DocVerse (sold to Google), Mixer Labs (sold to Twitter), Jambool (Social Gold), SnapLogic, PlanCast, Stack Overflow, Heyzap, and Disqus.

Founder Showcase Champion

Kaggle hosts predictive modeling competitions, which are an amazingly effective way to develop predictive algorithms. Predictive algorithms run everything from bank credit scoring to insurance company actuarial calculations and from powering stock market trading decisions to search results. Currently the only way to outsource algorithm building is to a consultant. Kaggle allows companies to outsource to the crowd and only pay those who achieve amazing results.

Runner-Up

Nexercise is a free iPhone game, where you do a minimum of 15 minutes of ANY physical activity and get awarded virtual coupons (discounts ranging between 25%-75%) and the chance to win free products. Last year, in the US, $127 Billion was spent on ‘high margin’ healthy foods, products & services and Nexercise capitalizes on this market by collecting 10-20% MSRP of every virtual coupon redeemed. Nexercise uses proprietary algorithms on smartphone sensor data to prove that users really did physical activity + game mechanics that leverage 10 key psychological drivers, to increase consistency, duration, and frequency of physical activity.

Finalists

• BlogMutt: BlogMutt helps small and niche blogs get the original content they need using the wisdom of the crowd and the best of game mechanics. Something like 7 million small businesses operate in the US. Nearly all of them have a website, and now are understanding that they need to fill up their blogs with original content. We’ll do that with a crowd of writers. What makes us unique? In the same way that 99Designs has turned website and logo design on its head using the power of crowdsourcing, we’ll bring the same to content creation. Also this is the third time the cofounders have worked together.
• Bundled.com: Bundled.com provides web delivered cross-promotions to merchants, franchises and restaurants. Our web and Facebook app builds and engages their customer list to driving viral sales of complimentary products or services. Our target has (or wants to have) an email list we combine these lists and product offerings to create a single bundled offer and cross promote the offer to the combined list adding both social media and our list. Were not a deal site, the merchant chooses the discount, we do the mechanics and promotion. We multiply their list growth and provide monthly bundles for ongoing campaigns increasing list size and retention.
• Buycentives: Buycentives one-to-one conversion tool allows companies to drive more sales by automatically shifting incentive dollars among individual online shoppers in real-time. It removes significant inefficiencies in the one-size-fits-none rebate ecosystem. 30+ U.S. automotive brands spent $30 billion just on rebates in 2010, wasting up to 20%. In addition, lenders, insurance providers and 17,000 dealerships want to offer data-driven incentives to drive conversion. Other markets include electronics. Buycentives lets brands directly influence an individual purchase at the point of sale. A predictive model determines the right incentive at the right time, which is delivered to an in-market shopper. Pay-for-performance pricing reduces client risk.
• Fashioning Change: Fashioning Change has developed a green shopping intervention application to help online eco-conscious consumers easily find, and purchase, authentically green brands without ever having to search for them. According to Forrester Research the US online retail market is $173 billion dollars and estimated to grow to $250 billion by 2014. Our application leverages a user’s existing online shopping behavior to introduce eco and ethical brand alternatives to name brands shoppers know they like and want. Our app eliminates the need for direct eco product research.
• Keepstream: Keepstream provides an online tool to curate, analyze, and share collections of social media content – important for social media managers, PR professionals, bloggers and journalists. Social media tools have already proven to be a critical business need, representing a $1.7 billion market growing 34% annually according to Forrester. In the belief that social media curation and analytics are tied together, Keepstream provides a platform that combines filtering the noise of social media with the analysis to make sense of it at a price fit for the small-medium sized business.
• Pick3: Pick3 has developed a mobile app that takes the concept of garage sale as a starting point to create virtual markets you can subscribe to and sell through. From selling, finding and browsing items, to paying and arranging for delivery. Pick3 is after the m-commerce market. Already a 5 billion dollar in the US, m-commerce is growing at an estimate 40% annually. Ebay alone sold over 1.5 billion through mobile sales last year. Focusing entirely on mobile Pick3 offers first and foremost simplicity. Selling is as simple as taking a picture and choosing a price range. That’s it. We all have at least 3 things laying around our house we could sell, Pick3 makes it dead simple.
• Picuous: Picuous allows webusers to easily, legally and freely use copyrighted pictures on the internet. It’s like a Scribd, a SoundCloud or a Vimeo, but for pictures. Pictures are easily the dominant media on the Internet, with Flick hosting 5 billion pictures, Picasa 6 billion, and Facebook 100 billion. Half of Tumblr’s 14 million daily posts are pictures. We display pictures in a player which allows them to be embedded, faved or shared on Twitter or Facebook. It also allows the picture owner to access detailed statistics, such as where the picture has been used and how many times it’s been viewed.
• VidCaster: Publishing online video is a complicated process. VidCaster simplifies this process by combining the best online video tools into one simple, integrated interface hosted on your own domain name. Here is an example: http://hackersandfounders.com. The online video platform (OVP) market grew 70% to $1.3B in 2010. VidCaster is poised to capture a large share of this market while also expanding the definition of an OVP thanks to its simple interface and end-to-end integrated solutions. Unlike existing free and paid online video solutions which provide just a video player, VidCaster includes everything you need — a web host, an integrated CMS, advertising, distribution, analytics and more – all on your own domain name.

Founder Showcase 6 (February 1, 2011)

Keynote Speaker

George Zachary, General Partner, Charles River Ventures

George Zachary joined Charles River Ventures in 2004, bringing more than 17 years of operating and investing experience in computing and consumer technology. Zachary focuses on building services and software technology companies, and he’s led CRV’s investments in Twitter, Yammer, Millennial Media, Cloudshare, Geni, SocialMedia, Metaplace, and Scribd (co-led with Bill Tai).

Showcase Champion

Topicmarks can take heaps of text and digitally read and summarize them in seconds. We help people quash information overflow by instantly extracting the key points, and remembering all the rest in your “external brain” forever. Topicmarks plays in the overall $128b information market, where value has been shifting from digital publishing through digital distribution to digital aggregation. The logical next step will be digital reading, or “what you do after googling”. Competitors focus on filtering and prioritizing, just telling you what to read first, not freeing you of reading itself. Topicmarks actually digitizes the reading itself so that you can process all information with digital speed. The core technology is ready and proven by a public beta that has attracted over 10,000 users worldwide. We’re now repackaging the beta with tools for specific target groups and use cases like writing a paper, launching in the next months.

Runner-Up

Fatminds enables an education seeker to find courses, webinars, seminars, certificates and degrees, based on location, Q&A, reviews, tuition reimbursement and relevant recommendations. Think Kayak meets Yelp meets Netflix for education. Education institutions alone spend over $5 billion annually in marketing to prospective students and there are currently 84 million adult learners taking at least one formal course a year. Competitors predominantly focus on the for-profit sector, expose users to a high pressure sales tactics, and don’t foster a long term relationship. Fatminds is focused on choice, targeted recommendations, community and objective decision making.

Finalists

• BookBrewer: BookBrewer helps aspiring authors and bloggers quickly create and publish eBooks to retailers such as Amazon, Apple, Borders, Barnes & Noble and Google Editions. We run a standalone service, as well as a co-branded service for Borders. eBooks sales are increasing 300% a year and are projected to account for 15% of a $20B market by 2012. There are 145 million blogs in existence, and we’re targeting the top 100,000. Our goal is to get them to publish 10,000 books in year 1. We’re the only major retailer-aligned eBook creation service that offers simple online tools for creating DRM-protected books that can be distributed to every major retail site, and the only one with a blog-import feature.
• CipherPoint: CipherPoint provides a solution to transparently secure content in Enterprise Content Management Systems such as SharePoint. We serve organizations that use or want to use ECMs to store or manage sensitive or regulated information. CipherPoint’s solutions address a $930M need driven by data security and compliance requirements in the Enterprise Content Management market which is growing at 20% CAGR. Our initial target market is Microsoft SharePoint. CipherPoint is the first mover with solutions to address the threat of IT administrators viewing sensitive content. In addition, our solutions are centrally managed, transparent to end users, and include advanced key management capabilities. We have released a production product and started to build a sales pipeline including early stage sales opportunities in the SMB and enterprise markets.
• KlickFu: KlickFu enables users to play instant games and apps and access social media with a single click at the point of the mouse cursor–to fill odd gaps of time during the day with something fun or useful. The social games market is currently $2B annually, growing 20% per year. KlickFu has a unique, patent-pending method for launching apps directly at the point of the cursor and instantly accessing content in a single click. We have launched the initial version of the KlickFu desktop application and are starting distribution with a major software partner next month.
• LetsLunch: Tired of eating alone or with the same faces everyday? LetsLunch will help you expand your social network by matching you with interesting people to go to lunch. 50 million people within close proximity to each other eat out during lunch every day , either alone or with the same people. We could utilize this time to network with other like-minded people. Other companies don’t understand that people want to meet other people face to face without excessive effort, like searching for matches,restaurants, etc. Customers won’t need to visit the website every time — we send them matches. We are about to launch our site for Beta Testing.
• Loudlever: Loudlever helps magazine publishers lower their content acquisition costs, while enabling them to get a handle on their copyright, licensing and royalty obligations. There are over 60,000 print-based magazines/periodicals in the US. The number of online-only magazines, journals, and community-powered blogs is several times this size and growing exponentially. Loudlever is mapping the writer/publisher ‘genome’ through our site, HeyPublisher.com, enabling publishers to discover writers outside their submission stream, and writers to find markets for their work more quickly. The company has 100+ online publishers currently using our service to handle submissions, with works from nearly 1,000 writers having been submitted to-date.
• Mosoro: Mosoro connects Bluetooth & WiFi augmented objects through smartphone apps to the Internet, opening new ways to interact with & monetize the objects around us. Mosoro’s technology platform spans numerous industries but a fun one to highlight is toys & skateboards. Retail sales of stuffed plush animals including teddy bears was $4.44B, toy vehicles sales were $1.4B, & skateboards sales were $4.8B in 2009. Mosoro’s team has built successful companies in the Bluetooth/WiFi, mobile content, consumer electronic, personalization, & social media spaces and is using their depth of knowledge and industry connections to quickly evangelize the Mosoro platform In early 2011 Mosoro will release a API & mobile libraries allowing anyone to connect a physical object to the Internet through a smartphone.
• VisuTalk: VisuTalk allows businesses to leverage new mobile video technologies from Apple (facetime) and Skype and significantly increase revenues and reduce costs through more accurate real-time communication with their customers. We make video calls useful. The market rapidly growing. Private researcher Market Murmurs expects the market to exceed 500M in 2011 and increase to 1.5B in 2012. In addition, the number of individuals with mobile devices capable of video calling increases to over 50M in 2012. VisuTalk’s layer of intelligence allows for search so experts can instantly be consulted. In addition, transactions are embedded within the call, so problems are quickly and easily solved. Clients save money and time. VisuTalk”s solutions are based upon our visual calling platform, but can be ‘glued” to any communication protocol as it opens APIs, adopts standards or open sources it product; Facetime & Skype are two examples moving in this direction.
• Wholeshare: Wholeshare saves people 20% on their groceries by organizing group purchases. The site helps consumers who live or work near each other form groups and buy together, allowing them to bypass grocery stores and buy directly from wholesale sellers. Our model also allows people to buy directly from local farmers, leveraging the rapidly growing demand for local and organic food. Last year, organic food was $24.8B (out of $600B+ for all food) and has grown 16.9% yearly since 2000. Unlike other online food retailers and listing services, we’re building a network of local buying groups, enabling wholesale sellers to directly access the consumer market without changing how they do business. The site is currently in private beta – we’ve partnered with one natural food distributor (with over 5000 products) and have a handful of initial groups.

Founder Showcase 5 (October 21, 2010)

Keynote Speaker

Mike Maples, Jr. – Founding Partner of FLOODGATE

Mike Maples, Jr. is the Managing Partner of FLOODGATE, and was recently named as one of “8 Rising VC Stars” by Fortune Magazine for his investments in business and consumer technology companies – such as Twitter and Digg. Before becoming a full-time investor, Mike was an entrepreneur and operating executive who worked in a variety of senior management roles in high-growth companies. His background spans a variety of markets including consumer technology, small business, and the enterprise, and he has led various functions in product development, marketing, business development, and corporate strategy.

Showcase Champion

BreezyPrint enables users to print securely from mobile devices. Mobile printing is an exploding market, intersecting a category (productivity apps) grossing >$208MM annually with annual growth of 62%. Recent estimates from HP predict that over 12Bn pages will be printed from smartphones every year by 2012, and BreezyPrint is the only secure, cross-platform, enterprise-ready mobile print solution on the market. We support all printers and all major mobile platforms, and our growing, global partner network allows printing in thousands of locations worldwide. We launched on BlackBerry in April and have doubled our userbase every month since. We recently launched an Android version, our iOS and WP7 versions will launch this month, and we are conducting pilot programs with two Fortune-100 companies.

Runner-Up

micromobs is the easiest way to create and manage a group discussion online. There are over 300 million online groups representing an over $10 billion market for premium services. micromobs focuses on two core principles which are currently plaguing online groups – privacy and simplicity; with this focus micromobs enables quick group creation and high engagement within groups. micromobs launched our beta application publicly at the end of May and has seen a tremendous response from users and the press.

Finalists

• InstantIMPACT: InstantIMPACT enables people to be engaged in the political decisions locally and nationally by providing a simple web application that allows users to track initiatives, voice their opinion, and connect to related advocacy groups. Advocacy groups spend $25B a year fund-raising, InstantIMPACT gives these advocacy groups a better way to connect to individuals that share their beliefs than email spam. Competitors focus on advocacy groups providing email marketing and CRM solutions to the organization; in contrast, focuses on individual citizens providing a simple way to engage with multiple levels of government and advocacy groups.
• Next Play Sports: Next Play Sports creates mobile apps that take fantasy sports to the next level by allowing players to predict their team’s next play while watching the game in real time. Fantasy Sports is a $3-4B market with 30MM+ users. We provide an innovative new platform for fan interactivity that enhances the game-watching experience and provides an instant gratification you don’t get with traditional fantasy sports. Prototype of flagship NFL football app built.
• Ohanae: Ohanae focuses on high assurance user-centric identity, addressing the technical and adoption challenge of how people can manage their own identity across the range of websites, ‘software + services’, and government agencies that they use. There are close to two billion Internet users worldwide, of which one billion online users are OpenID ready (Google, Yahoo, etc.). Ohanae pioneered the concept of Universal Cloud ID, assuring user identities while focusing on simplicity and value. Ohanae delivers high assurance OpenID with built-in data privacy protection and identity theft prevention for Web apps and ‘Software + Services’.
• Pick1: Pick1 is a semantic aggregator of tangible poll results, providing real-time analysis on massive amounts of otherwise unexploited opinion data and thus creating value for users, advertisers, brands. The volume of global market researches last documented by ESOMAR was of $32,5 billions worldwide yearly, in the 2009 US Market Research and Public Opinion Polling industry was worth $15,5 billions. Pick1 (Doochoo’s product) merges the scalability of the Web with the accuracy of traditional polling, it gives to opinions on the web a social relevance through the ‘one head, one vote’ principle… a real-time global referendum 2.0.
• ShowForce: ShowForce is a fast & effective way to find what you want, connect with people, and discover the best of trade shows & conferences. Attendees get to the right places faster, exhibitors get targeted traffic, & organizers open up a new revenue stream. The service helps exhibitors do targeted lead generation through CPA-based advertising. ShowForce is a platform for events that’s free for organizers (our partners). As a result, it benefits from wider distribution, better SEO + SEM, and positive network-effects. Also, attendees, exhibitors, and organizers all benefit from the service. The service is live on iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch.
• Social Samba: SocialSamba enables television, movie and book writers/producers to script characters into a social network. Fans of these stories “friend” the characters and experience their fictional lives like they experience real people through Facebook. Our solution does for these stories what Zynga did for gaming – same Facebook market, same virtual goods business, but with characters that fans love. 9 of the top 15 “fanned” pages in Facebook are stories (potential customers) and only 2 are games. We are developing v1.0 and have 3 writers creating pilots for launch in Q4 2010. 6 more full stories will go live in Q1 2011, proving the business.
• Swingvine: The $2.5B scrapbooking market helps people capture life in a meaningful way but excludes 70% of households due to adoption hurdles and costs ($2,000+ on average). We address this gap digitally in a sentimental, social, & universally accessible way. We capture memories (imagery, text, maps, other media) in a space that delivers sentiment via personalization & music, convenience via smartphone recording integration, and permanence via perpetual storage for family, children, & generations to come. We launched a self-funded early product this summer focused on mobile (smartphones now outsell digital cameras).
• Tripping: Tripping gives travelers a safe and easy way to connect with local people. This is a $10 – $15 billion market comprised of travelers in North America, Europe and British Commonwealth countries. We’re taking market share away from our competitors by building innovative technology, creating strategic partnerships and integrating social media, location-based data and mobile technology. Tripping has thousands of users from 100+ countries and our growth will soon accelerate: we’re about to announce partnerships with the Grateful Dead, Ivy League universities, study abroad programs, international volunteer organizations and more.

Founder Showcase 4 (August 3, 2010)

Speakers

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX

Elon Musk is the Chairman, CEO, and Product Architect of Tesla Motors, driving the development of Tesla’s product strategy, product development and design efforts. Elon has been involved in key product decisions since the start of Tesla Motors, co-leading design of the Tesla Roadster, for which he won an Index and a Global Green award, the latter presented by Mikhail Gorbachev. Elon is also the CEO and CTO of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Chairman of the board of Solar City. Previously, Elon co-founded Zip2 and PayPal, which was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.3 billion.

Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo.com

Jason McCabe Calacanis is the Founder and CEO of Mahalo.com, a human-powered search engine. Prior to Mahalo.com’s launch in May, 2007, he was an “Entrepreneur in Action” at Sequoia Capital, a position he held since December 2006. Jason co-founded and was the CEO of Weblogs, Inc., a network of popular weblogs that was sold to AOL in November 2005. Upon joining AOL, he was appointed senior vice president. In addition, he was named general manager of AOL’s Netscape. Prior to forming Weblogs Inc., Jason was the founder of Rising Tide Studios, which sold its flagship publication to Dow Jones.

Sarah Lacy, Award-Winning Journalist and Author

Sarah Lacy is an award winning journalist who has spent more than a decade writing about nearly everything in Silicon Valley, from the largest publicly traded companies to the tiniest startups. She is the editor-at-large for TechCrunch.com and author of the critically-acclaimed book, “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0″ (Gotham Books, May 2008). Lacy is now working on her second book, which is about entrepreneurship in the developing world.

Showcase Champion

SeePort makes video wifi devices and software that connect people with live, real time video and chat. Their stand alone, persistent, consumer-oriented devices are loaded with patented video software and a cloud-based hosting solution, offering the highest quality video telepresence on the market. SeePort is building prototypes and plans to release the product by CES 2011. They have also formed a marketing and sales partnership with a major multinational US corporation that produces imaging, photographic materials and equipment. We are raising a seed round to complete software development, and industrial, electrical and mechanical design. A series A round will follow.

Runner-Up

Aprendi Learning provides software for universities to build, grow and manage large online classes and degree programs. Our technology provides effective instructional design that sets consistent standards for online classes, thus allowing universities to easily offer course credit across a network of top-tier schools. Aprendi is currently developing our product and pitching pilot programs at universities along the West coast, and we have generated interest from top Research I universities. We are currently raising $500,000 in convertible debt.

Finalists

• Ergolution: We integrate injury reduction practices into the lives of knowledge workers and efficiently manage employee injury data, which reduces expenses. US companies spend an estimated 150B on work related injuries. We are the first to combine a business process system with an ergonomic injury reduction platform and compliance solution. Our product is close to completion and is currently in user acceptance testing. We are looking to raise $500K for sales, marketing and a defensible patent strategy.
• FatPencil:FatPencil delivers web-based and mobile experience logging, first to aviators, then expanding to other professionals in the transportation industry. FatPencil beats the competition by combining cloud-based event logging and mobile applications that allow the professional to log the event while it’s on their mind. We are raising an Angel round of $500k to develop and deploy enhanced web services and mobile applications for FatPencil Logbook, and accelerate development of our B2B offering.
• Geotoko: Geotoko is a powerful campaign management platform that allows businesses to run contests and sweepstakes using location-based services (LBS) like foursquare, gowalla, brightkite etc. After officially launching at Techcrunch Disrupt in May 2010, Geotoko has over 1000 businesses signed up, including some of the leading fortune 500 brands. Geotoko is currently in closed beta working with our launch partners to set up and run successful location-based campaigns. Geotoko is looking to raise a $500,000 on a $2.5M pre-money valuation.
• Liv: Liv allows you to collect and organize all your favorite products from all over the Internet to one wish list to compare, share, and store for later. By leveraging users’ existing friend lists, you can recommend and share products with your friends Product recommendations from friends is the pinnacle of advertising and marketing. Liv is looking to raise $400K to hire very talented engineers, a social media/fashion blogger specialist, and to keep Liv’s servers running efficiently and quickly.
• MediaShares: MediaShares’ U.S. Patented and SEC-compliant Business Method for Crowdfunding allows ANY company to raise major funding through an online IPO by selling NASDAQ listed stock on its own Web site to its customers, fans, or affinity group. We have perfected a business method, system and software to combine funding with social marketing. Our first NASDAQ Capital Market offering to finance a major feature film by selling shares to movie fans will soon be underway. The company also has a LOI from a NASCAR Team. Immediate funding secured will pay to complete the first four online IPO’s in-house (if $3.0 MM).
• ShareSquare: Like bit.ly for the real world, ShareSquare allows marketers to integrate ecommerce & online content with real world advertising using a special type of barcode and the consumer’s mobile. A self-serve authoring & management platform enables the creation of a mobile optimized ShareSquare campaign in minutes, for FREE. Subscription analytics drive the revenue model instead of upfront setup costs, encouraging rapid adoption. ShareSquare is raising a $150k seed round.
• TouristWay: TouristWay is a web application designed for independent operators that want to build their own travel portal and sell their original travel ideas directly. In other words: Expedia in a box. TouristWay has been officially released, over 200 users per month sign up for our free-trial and 3% of them purchase TouristWay for an average subscription fee of $ 100/month. TouristWay is looking to raise 500,000 USD to be used for development and improved customer support.
• TribeVibe: TribeVibe tracks and measures the impact of content across the real-time social web, without having to manually aggregate and analyze it. By acting as a common gateway between publishing systems, analytics and social media, Tribevibe tells you in real-time how content is being talked about around the social web. We are ready to launch and scale to our goal of 100,000 users before turning on the Pro paid version. $500k seed to fund operations and further development through the alpha and beta phases over the next twelve months.

Founder Showcase 3 (May 18, 2010)

Speakers

Philip Kaplan, CEO and Co-Founder, Blippy

“Philip (@pud) oversees Blippy’s product management and innovation. Prior to founding Blippy, Philip founded several businesses including PK Interactive, a software company that developed Web-based applications for Fortune 500 clients including Toyota and Mead Paper. Philip’s personal sites have earned accolades including Yahoo and Rolling Stone’s Site-of-the-Year, and #6 in TIME Magazine’s “Best of 2000.” Philip is a regular public speaker and is the bestselling author of F’d Companies (Simon & Schuster). He is on the board of the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University.”

Jay Jamison, CEO and Founder, Moonshoot

Jay co-founded and works as President of Moonshoot, an early stage venture backed startup. He also is a Mentor at The Funded’s Founder’s Institute. Prior to Moonshoot, Jay worked at Microsoft for nearly 10 years. He worked on both Windows Server in product management, and he spent 3 years working for Microsoft Japan, turning around the Windows Client business group. Jay achieved multiple gold star awards, a high lifetime average review score, and was a member of Steve Ballmer’s inaugural “Bench” Class of 2004, aimed at developing future leaders in MSFT.

Winning Company

MightyMeeting lets you Present Anywhere™. Start or join web meetings directly from your iPhone or an Android phone. Post webcasts and demo videos to blogs, Facebook, or Twitter. MightyMeeting is a player in the mobile collaboration and web conferencing markets. The SMB web conferencing industry broke above $1B in sales with 19% growth in 2008. CRM revenue is projected to surpass the $10B mark by 2012. Have you ever seen a sales person without a laptop? Yes. Have you ever seen a sales person without a cell phone? No!! Never! MightyMeeting is a unique real-time sales and marketing tool optimized for mobile devices and social publishing. The beta version is online and in the App Store. We are now building out the infrastructure, improving web apps and players, and developing native applications for tier-2 mobile devices.

Presenting Companies

Skydera: Skydera develops a cloud utility platform that it licenses to small and medium sized enterprise companies to manage public cloud infrastructure , enabling the IT department to manage the complete IT stack in the cloud. Global IT spending devoted to cloud computing has been steadily rising over the last three years and is expected to reach $47 billion dollars by year 2012. Skydera’s competitive advantage is a vertically integrated platform, tying together command, control, provisioning and monitoring into a clean unified interface; enabling complete control over server/application setup and deployment. Skydera has secured five companies to use the platform for its beta program that will start at the end of January. The version 1.0 platform will be launch in August 2010 with the addition of on-Premise management tool by the end of the year.

MoLo Rewards: MoLo Rewards develops a platform for green loyalty programs and coupons using Near Field Communication (NFC) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) at the point of sale. Forty million people printed and used online coupons in 2008, and U.S. loyalty program membership currently tops 1.3 billion individual memberships. U.S. marketers spent $45.8 billion on promotional marketing in 2007. MoLo Rewards has completed a patented front-end and back-end system for multiple hardware platforms, and the company presented the solution at DEMOFall 2009. MoLo Rewards is currently looking to secure investments of $3 million, funding to be used to aid the acquisition of our first three national retail contracts.

SnapItTo.Me helps people looking for photos find custom photography through hosted photo contests, saving them time and money, while helping photographers gain wider access to opportunities and credentialize their growing portfolios. The stock and commissioned photography market grew to over $12bn while the sale of digital SLR cameras to everyday consumers grew 25%, reaching $+100m a year – signaling the continued growth in amateur and professional photography. SnapItTo.Me connects people who need photos w/ photographers through 3 services: 1) enabling photo seekers to host photo contests, 2) allowing photographers to compete in contests, & 3) creating photographer profiles w/ portfolios, ratings & reviews. Currently, SnapItTo.Me is preparing for public beta launch in Q1 of 2010.

ZeSecret.com solves the problem of a teenager John who wants to find out what his secret crush Mary thinks about him, but is not ready to take a risk of revealing his feelings upfront before Mary reveals what her feelings are. For 20mln 16-20 year olds in the US ZeSecret.com is a mathematically safe way to make a first move. Mechanisms, similar to those used by corporations to settle multimillion claims out of court, eliminate the disadvantage of being the first out of two who speaks. Had no external funding, invested 500k of personal money. Currently have half-stable beta, visitors to registered users conversion rate is 11.5% for US and almost 18% for Indian markets.

Udemy enables anyone to create webinars or online courses and share them with the world. On Udemy, users can create an online course using text, video, pictures or any other media form available on the web. Udemy targets the online education market, which is over $26 billion, and specifically hopes to capture part of the $1 billion spent on online tutoring in the US. Udemy is unique because it provides teachers with a full set of tools to create a full-featured online course, including the ability to do live and recorded courses, and pull content from other UGC sites such as YouTube, Flickr and Scribd. Udemy will be launching in early Q4 2009, after 2 years of development and an extremely full-featured product.

Info-Surge offers a web solution to help health care professionals educate patients about medical procedures. 80% of Dr./patient communication is repetitive. Delivering info online offers clients up to 50% time savings & better risk management. The US market alone has over 140 MM medical procedures annually.

Online Dating 2.0: we are like Zoosk for Grownups! Profile & connection through social networks & social gaming aspect as single people put out a “bounty” to get introduced to someone with whom they might be compatible. Also unique matchmaking tool. Online dating $957M in 2008.”US Paid Content Forecast, 2007 to 2012″, online dating sites are projected to increase from $900 million of revenue in 2007 to $1.9 billion in 2012, or an increase of 16% over five years. No recession with 15% rise users.

Peer Belt develops software to collect and process passive user activity for the purpose of improving search results and information discovery. The nature of information online is changing from static pages to realtime streams, and, within the new information flow, user behavior predicts relevancy more so than links, keywords, and other models.

Contineo connects disparate medical information systems through a single unified mobile client, providing access to nurse call, electronic medical records and patient monitoring systems. With over 7500 hospitals in the US and 2.5 million nursing professionals servicing more than 33 million patients annually, the opportunity for increasing the efficacy and efficiency of health care delivery is tremendous.

Bonvoy allows you to book travel in facebook. Bonvoy uses the same back-end system as sites such as Expedia and Orbitz, so it offers the same travel deals. Users accrue reward points and build social capital by sharing them with friends. The online travel industry does near $93 billion in the US. Nearly a third of the entire US population is on facebook. Thusly, we are entering a potential $30 billion market and are also capturing the $95 billion group travel market.

TimeSight Systems has developed a killer application which compresses stored video over time as it ages and becomes less valuable, thereby saving up to 90% of the storage normally required for hi-resolution surveillance video. The surveillance market is exploding, reaching over $40B by 2013. In that, storage alone accounts for almost $7.5B in the same timeframe. This is becoming the major painpoint for advance deployments of surveillance, due to cost and complexity.

Founder Showcase 2 (January 24, 2010)

The Founder Showcase is an open startup pitch and networking event that highlights seed stage businesses, helping founders gain traction among the Silicon Valley elite.

Showcase guests were treated to food and drinks, as well as informative talks by two leading Silicon Valley CEOs – Philip Kaplan of Blippy, and Jay Jamison of Moonshoot.  

About The Speakers:

Philip Kaplan

Philip oversees Blippy’s product management and innovation.  Prior to founding Blippy, Philip founded several businesses including PK Interactive, a software company that developed Web-based applications for Fortune 500 clients including Toyota and Mead Paper.  Philip’s personal sites have earned accolades including Yahoo and Rolling Stone’s Site-of-the-Year, and #6 in TIME Magazine’s “Best of 2000.” Philip is a regular public speaker and is the bestselling author of F’d Companies (Simon & Schuster). He is on the board of the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. (Source: Blippy)

Jay Jamison

Jay co-founded and works as Chairman and President of Moonshoot, an early stage venture backed startup. He also is a Mentor at The Funded's Founder's Institute. Prior to Moonshoot, Jay worked at Microsoft for nearly 10 years. He worked on both Windows Server in product management, and he spent 3 years working for Microsoft Japan, turning around the Windows Client business group. Jay achieved multiple gold star awards, a high lifetime average review score, and was a member of Steve Ballmer's inaugural "Bench" Class of 2004, aimed at developing future leaders in MSFT.

The Juice Pitcher (October 6th, 2009)

TheFunded.com and Vator.tv have created a unique Silicon Valley networking event for seed and early stage founders, the Juice Pitcher. The evening event highlights the newest ideas and cutting-edge businesses, helping innovators gain traction among the Silicon Valley elite.

Learn about innovative companies today that you will read about tomorrow.

Ten founders selected by their peers and validated by the judges will present in front of an audience of over 200 founders, press, and investors. A variety of investors are attending, including JAFCO, Leapfrog, Polaris, Omidyar, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, First Round, Blue Run, as well as various angels. Guests will be also treated to two talks by leading silicon valley CEOs on how to build an investor-friendly business by Aaron Patzer of Mint.com and generate substantial revenues by Munjal Shah of Like.com. Snacks and drinks will be served.

The Agenda:
6:00-  6:30    Welcome and Socialize with Food
6:30-  7:00    Munjal Shah of Like.com
7:00-  7:30    First 5 Early Stage Stratup Pitches (3 mins each)
7:30-  7:45    Break
7:45-  8:15    Second 5 Early Stage Startup Pitches (3mins each)
8:15-  8:45    Aaron Patzer of Mint.com
8:45-  9:00    Juice Box - Critique on the Top Pitches
9:00-  9:30    Conclusion and Socialize with Beer and Wine

About The Speakers:

Munjal Shah
BusinessWeek declared Munjal one of the Top 10 up and coming CEOs in 2001. Munjal has been quoted of hundreds of magazines including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Business 2.0, and many others. Munjal has won a Demo God award for the launch of Riya (like.com) in 2006. Munjal sits on the advisor board to a number of very early stage startups including: Yousendit, Auyptima (sold to Oracle), Pubmatic, and MesmoTV.  (Source:  CrunchBase)

Aaron Patzer
Aaron is both the visionary and technical mind behind Mint, the first free, automatic and secure way to manage and save money online. He designed Mint to meet his own needs and those of people like him who value the immediacy of the Web, simplicity and their free time. With 10 patents filed or pending, Aaron brings strong innovation skills to Mint. Prior to founding Mint, Aaron was an architect and technical lead for the San Jose division of Nascentric.  (Source: Mint.com)

Platinum Sponsor

Microsoft BizSpark offers software, support, and visibility to new companies. As part of the program, BizSpark connects new companies with a nationwide community of Network Partners, including angel investors and incubator organizations, so it’s invaluable for anyone seeking funding or support.