1. No Wi-Fi access. There was a signal, it was just password protected. When I asked for creditionals they told me that it would cost $250 for the day. Hello! That's 12 months of service on Boingo and they have 60,000 locations. There were over 500 people that had paid $100 each and 40 companies that had paid $1,000 each at the event. Wi-Fi is pretty much expected at conferences these days. If I can go to Taco Bell and buy a Carne Asada Taquito and get free access you think I could get it for shelling out a hundred bills for the morning. The Cobb Galleria Centre needs to enter the 21st century. Or as Chris Anderson said, think of bandwidth as free.
2. Using videos to make presentations when the person in the video was in the room. That's not innovative, its silly.
The Ugly
1. Not staying on schedule. By the time 10:00am we were an hour behind. By the time Chris got up to speak the place was half empty and folks were walking out on him to get to meetings they had previously planned. Not exactly the impression you want the Editor In Chief of WIRED to leave town with. Somebody needs to make the trains run on time.
I just heard that CoalTek (which has the worst Web site of any venture backed company that I have ever seen), has raised an additional $33 million in its C round. The investment deal was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, but also included participation by Warburg Pincus, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, DFJ Element and Braemar Energy Partners.
Some big names in these parts.
CoalTek is a Georgia-based developer of clean burning coal technology.
The quarterly PwC Shaking the MoneyTree update took place this moring. As Scott previously reported there was a nice upswing in Georgia early stage deals. Georgia also cracked the state top ten for Q4.
Bruce Robertson gave a nice presentation with some astute comments. One of them being that venture funds have raised $56 billion in the past 24 months and that money has to go somewhere. Part of the somewhere is driving valuations up. Another part is getting VCs on planes heading out of Boston to DC and ATL.
Biggest surprise of the day was seeing eHatchery involved in a $4.7 million deal. I'll have to find the scoop from Levy on that one.
Yesterday was my first full day at my computer since I started my sacrifice. I am not doing too well. I did 52 Google searches. I also did 28 searches on Ask and 5 on Live. Most of the Google searches were due to me using the imbedded search window in Camino. This weekend I am going to try to change out the default search engine from Google to Ask. Just like browsers, search share is all about distribution and not technology.
I did much better in staying away from Yahoo. I did not visit my.yahoo the entire day. Netvibes turns out to be a nice clean personalized portal. I have not decided if I like the fact I have to click twice instead of once to go to the actual Web page of my RSS feeds, but it works.
One thing Netvibes needs is a better module for stock quotes. The current module only presents a quote. When you expand the window for a particular stock it only shows a day chart. If you click on that it takes you out to finance.yahoo.com. There is no news notification on the stock module front door and one is badly needed. I think there is a real opportunity here for some company to improve this and had a nice conversation with my friends over at InvestorVillage about it.
That is the tag of the 2007 Georgia Tech Business Plan Competition. Tonight they held the elevator pitch and show stopper portions of the contest at Flor, which is a pretty happenin' place for a carpet store. It was really, really refreshing to engage with a bunch of twenty somethings that want to be entrepreneurs. The place was just full of energy.
I got to meet Terry Blum and Kathleen Kurre who are doing fantastic things to foster entrepreneurship in students. You can tell that they really want these folks to succeed.
And succeed they will. Five companies were chosen as finalists.
Pharmaceutical Intelligence which has an algorithm to shorten the drug discovery process.
TIGON which is a color nanoparticle play. Can you believe that I knew the purpose of a colored nanoparticle?
I walked up to the guys at Intelligent Drug Delivery Technique and told that that's what I needed in college. Without skipping a beat the guy replied "what intelligence?" I had to explain I was referring to the first three words. But basically this guy has figured out how to target meds, such as chemo. Interesting stuff.
But what got me really going was Sustainable Refrigeration. They were so, so passionate about creating environmentally friendly friges that did not use electricity for third world countries. Kinda like the $100 PC for medicine and food.
Jeffrey Leavitt put on a DLA Venture Pipeline presentation today to a packed house over at TSRB. Seems DLA is using the Venture Pipeline as an angle to lure entreprenuers into their practice.
Seems to be working. Jeff claimed that DLA was involved with 11 of the 19 Georgia VC deals reported in Q4 of last year. That explains the smiles on all the entreprenuers networking at 7:30am. Jeff also offered up three interesting factoids.
First, VC funds are getting larger. Over the past 10 years we have gone from only 2% of funds being over $500 million to 21% being over that figure. If you believe the concept the further you go the larger the fund has to be to give you any attention this is good news for Atlanta.
Second, in 2006 VC investment levels surpassed $25 billion. This is the third year of a healthy upward trend and a level that many people did not think would be reached.
Lastly, valuation trends continue upward rising to nearly $19 million in 2006 from $10 million in 2003. Personally I think it would be good to see this figure settle at its current range.
John Hurley was very upbeat about Atlanta getting on the radar screen of VC from both California and Boston. He specifically mentioned Crosslink Captial, Draper Fisher, Sigma Partners, Technology Partners, U.S. Venture Partners, VantagePoint Ventures and Versant Ventures based in Cali. From Boston Advent International, Boston Millennia, General Catalyst Partners, Kodiak, Matrix, and SV Life were cited.
If you are looking to raise a little it's a good list to research. That or you can got a hold of Jeff or Doug Spear.
Lent is upon us. It lasts until April 7, which is the day before Easter.
In Lent, it's traditional to give up something that we do a lot of and that we find pleasure in. This 'giving up' is done as a discipline for learning self-control, to free our minds from the chase after material things, and as a reminder of Christ's sufferings. It seems the most popular thing people do these days is give up food.
I am giving up Google and Yahoo! for Lent.
I have been using Google since the fall of 1998. It is currently the default search engine in the tool bar of Camino. From the looks of things it is not going to be all that easy to change. If anybody is geeky enough to understand and willing to help me do so it would be most appreciated.
MyYahoo! has been my default home page for I can not remember how long. It seems that a lot of work has gone into customizing it so that it is just so with stock quotes and RSS feeds. I am going to try Netvibes.
It will be an interesting experiment. And even more interesting to see if I switch back after 40 days.
Yaplet is a nice Ajax browser side app created by some Tech students. Yaplet allows you to chat with others that are viewing the same Web page. Here is a nice demo.
find my voice again, learn about this new corner of the Internet, see how it might work for my clients, and shameless self-promotion.
I have accomplished all these goals.
Here are a few facts. This is my 135th post. The posts have generated 2,525 visitors, 52 comments and 3 trackbacks. The number of visitors function has a positive first and second derivative. I expect the number of visitors to double by July.
Technorati, and the faithful know how I feel about it, has the blog ranked at 788,400. While that may seem really low it actually it puts FoG in the 98th percentile of all blogs in terms of popularity.
Ariel Silverstone recently introduced me to the concept of the singularity. The law of accelerating returns, on which the singularity is based, is easily observed in the world of technology. The singularity itself is a much more abstract Matrix like construct. This video makes some of it easy to understand and is quite entertaining.
Thanks to Tony A for sending this my way. I would point to him if I could.
My name is Lance Weatherby. This is my blog. I am a technology entrepreneur and currently a Venture Catalyst at Georgia Tech. I help launch and build technology companies.
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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