August 2009

September Event Roundup

Aug 31, 2009 in Entrepreneurship

Time for the monthly Atlanta entrepreneur event roundup. With the launch of the new atdc.org calendar this might be the last one of these. The pace is picking up and also getting more expensive. To go to all these events will set you back about $600. That's a big ouch, but it is good to have choices and over half of these events are free.

IgniteATL
Ignite is a night of presentations on a variety of topics, with a twist. Each presentation has 20 slides, that automatically advance after 15 seconds. Over 400 people have signed up to attend on September 3 at 6:30. I don't know where they are going to put them all. Some slots are available. Free. After party at Octane.

SEMPO Meetup
SEMPO Atlanta is the local working group of Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO) that is gearing up. They are having their second meetup at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University on September 10 at 6:30. Bill Hunt, co-author of the best-selling book "Search Engine Marketing, Inc." is the featured speaker. The $25 cost includes drinks and apps. Register.

Twestival
Support ATL Twestival! Come out to meet, learn, drink, and raise money for Not For Sale, a non profit whose mission is to abolish slavery across the globe. September 12, Octane at 8. In the evening.

Lift: The B2B Social Commerce Summit
Brought to you by OfficeArrow and the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative, this is a two day deal at the Georgia Tech Conference Center on September 15 and 16. While the price is a little rich for early stage tech companies the conference is really focused on more mature firms. It has a great group of national speakers and includes some locals as well (like my good friends at BLiNQ Media). OALIFTEDU gets you a full ride for $349. ONEDAY $199. Learn more.

CapitalLounge
On September 16 Michael, Scott, and company are offering up their quarterly CapitalLounge. CapLounge is a free, private networking event for fast-growth entrepreneurs based in the Southeast, as well as venture capital and angel investors from across the country. Go. Did I mention it's free.

Atlanta Linux Fest
The Atlanta Linux Fest is a free grassroots conference on September 19 for the Open Source Software community to gather and share information about Linux and OSS. Lots of local devs on the speaking list. Takes place at IBM. Register.

151 Locust
A small hive if activity is starting to emerge in Avondale Estates and our friends out at 151 Locust are having another gathering on September 23. There will be a brief presentation on revenue models and market sizing followed by several entrepreneurs presenting their models for review and discussion. Beer, wine and food will be provided. It's free. Register.

Georgia PDMA Fall Summit
"Innovate Now! Fearless Product Development in Today's Environment” sponsored by the Georgia chapter of the Product Development & Management Association (PDMA) is taking place at Coca-Cola HQ on September 24. It costs $125 to join the fun. Register.

New Media Atlanta
Chirs Brogan is heading to town to headline the New Media Atlanta Conference on September 25th during work hours. Focus is making the business case for social media. Seems to have a bit of a real estate bent. Cost $100 or so to make the scene. Register.

Update: Best Social Media Marketing Presentation

Aug 19, 2009 in Internet, Marketing

An update by Marta Kagen of her popular social media marketing slideshare presentation previously posted on FoG.

Startups Are Hard

Aug 18, 2009 in Entrepreneurship, Startups

Urvaksh Karkaria, the Atlanta Business Chronicle's technology writer and the force behind AtlanTech recently asked me to write a viewpoint article. "Starting a tech company is a challenge, period" appeared in the August 14 print and online edition of the Atlanta Business Chronicle. It is being republished here in its entirety with the consent of ABC editor David Allison.

Starting a technology company is hard. It does not matter where you live — Boston, New York City, San Francisco or Seattle. Starting a technology company is hard. If it were easy anyone could do it, and if anyone could do it the exercise would be much less valuable.

Atlanta is no different than many places. It’s hard to start a company here as well. And, while it has its own unique set of challenges, Atlanta also has a number of advantages that make it a good place to start a company.

One of the primary ingredients needed to start a technology startup is smart, geeky people. Atlanta is blessed with three major research universities located within six miles of each other. Georgia Tech where the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) is based, ranks as a top four engineering school by U.S. News and World Report. On top of this technical leadership, Emory University, Georgia Tech and Georgia State University all have top ranked business schools. The Savannah College of Art and Design is also based in this small circle. Atlanta has more than enough smart people to create technology startups.

The other ingredient that is needed to start up a technology company is rich people. One of the things that rich people get to do that others do not is decide where to live, and many chose Atlanta.

So Atlanta has a great pool of smart people and a large number of rich people, two of the primary ingredients necessary to start technology companies. The city does, however, have some unique challenges. The three biggest challenges facing technology startups in Atlanta are lack of investment capital, isolation and culture.

While Atlanta is indeed the home of a large number of rich people, they are not the right kind of rich people. Atlanta needs a stronger pool of local angel investors that invest in technology startups. With the notable exceptions of folks such as John Imlay via Sig Mosley, Tom Noonan and a few others, there are surprisingly few active angel investors with a demonstrated record of investing in technology startups.

If you look at the most successful Atlanta technology startups since the Internet era dawned, companies such as Cbeyond, CipherTrust, Firethorn, Internet Security Systems, Knology, Jboss, nFront, MindSpring, and WebMD, very few of the founders of these companies are investing in the next cycle of startups. In the not too distant future if companies such as CardioMEMs, SecureWorks, SilverPop, and Suniva have successful public offerings perhaps this cycle will change. To be clear, the Atlanta challenge is not venture capital, it’s early-stage seed capital. It’s just enough investment capital from angels that Atlanta entrepreneurs are not tempted to move.

Earliest-stage technology entrepreneurs by nature work in relative isolation. But Atlanta with its sprawl has an even larger problem. There is no startup density. The only two places you can walk into in Atlanta and overhear conversations around technology startups are Octane and Tech Square Starbucks. Density is extremely important for a successful startup environment and technology entrepreneurs.

There are many organizations working locally to address this issue, but two stand out. The first is Shotput Ventures, an accelerator micro-fund that mentors and invests in pre-formation Internet companies. The second is ATDC, which recently announced a broad strategy to provide comprehensive assistance to technology entrepreneurs starting at the concept phase of company development.

Finally there is the issue of culture. There is no question that Atlanta is culturally vibrant. One could argue it’s the most culturally vibrant city in the South. Atlanta is also culturally traditional. The majority of the people have values that many would consider to be conservative. The anchors of Atlanta business, such as Coca-Cola, Georgia-Pacific, and UPS, are traditional and conservative. There is nothing wrong with traditional and conservative.

However, to a technology startup, traditional and conservative equates to stodgy and not open to new ideas. Technology startups are all about new ideas. A startup’s very essence is about change. With very few anchor companies to support the development of startups and with the means to engage the broader established business community, Atlanta technology entrepreneurs are culturally stranded.

But despite these unique challenges, Atlanta technology entrepreneurs toll on in greater numbers than ever before. Knowing the unique challenges facing Atlanta startups is interesting. Building on the strengths of Atlanta is more so. Let’s focus on helping entrepreneurs build the next wave of great technology startups.

Startup Timeline

Aug 14, 2009 in Startups

Merrick Furst's description of the activity of starting a company.

Government’s Gone Cloud

Aug 12, 2009 in Computing, Open Source, Presentations

This is a guest post by John Willis and Curtis Hill of Zabovo John runs the AWSome Cloud Computing meetup group which the ATDC is proud to host. Today John is speaking at the Military Open Source Software Conference at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. This article is based on his presentation.

Last week the first sentence of an article in the InformationWeek periodical specifically targeted at IT employees of the U.S. Government read as follows:

‘The General Services Administration has issued a Request For Quotation for cloud storage, Web hosting, and virtual machine services.’

This dry and seemingly innocent statement is in reality a blockbuster, a headliner worthy of amazement possibly and further investigation surely. Any computer industry veteran with federal government dealings will tell you the phrase ‘U.S. government technology innovation’ is an oxymoron (with the notable exceptions of the DOD and NASA). And now - low and behold! – the stodgiest of the stodgy is rapidly moving (that’s correct – rapidly) past all but the most innovative organizations in the world into the era of cloud computing! I’ll throw in a few cloud basics in a minute but just for those who aren’t ‘in on’ the cloud computing debate many still question whether cloud computing is a transformational advance in computing as many others claim or just a horribly overblown catch phrase meaning little. The InformationWeek statement is a really big nail in the coffin of the catch phrase camp. It’s not the first and it won’t be the last.

Why the sudden change after years of being exactly the slow moving inefficient bureaucracy all small government proponents complain about. Surely even the victory of a candidate who campaigned on upgrading the nation’s technology infrastructure could not have caused such a swift change in culture in 7 months. Maybe this technology innovation is too compelling to ignore even for this historically laggard organization. Maybe both. Neither seems likely but here we have it.

Let’s look at a few basic definitions to make sure everybody is on the same page. To follow the theme I will take this information from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST):

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three delivery models, and four deployment models.

Essential characteristics:

On-demand self-service
Ubiquitous network access
Location independent resource pooling
Rapid elasticity
Measured service

Delivery models:

Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS) - Use provider’s applications over a network
Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Deploy customer-created applications to a cloud
Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Rent processing, storage, network capacity, and other fundamental computing resources

Deployment models:

Private cloud - enterprise owned or leased
Community cloud - shared infrastructure for specific community
Public cloud - Sold to the public, mega-scale infrastructure
Hybrid cloud - Composition of two or more clouds

Private enterprise is still trying to achieve a collective understanding of cloud computing and its value if any. Many continue to argue over the viability of clouds for any but a few unique applications (massive data, map/reduce, etc.), claiming obstacles ranging from security to audit ability to performance. After investigating these issues for many months, NIST has moved past these arguments and published a very mature definition of cloud computing, and an even more mature document on how to efficiently and securely implement a cloud computing environment. The document examines each advantage and each challenge presented by cloud computing. NIST sees the huge advantages many others see but they have also taken a hard look at the challenges and they view them as difficult but solvable. NIST is even helping drive some of the standards in area such as security.

In another fascinating development a fellow by the name of Vivek Kundra was tapped by Obama as the Nation’s first Chief Information Officer. Before taking the federal CIO role Kundra was the CIO for the city of Washington, D. C. The punch line? In less than two years Kundra moved the city to Google Apps replacing Microsoft Office software with Google’s SaaS offering. The city now posts their procurement process on You Tube. Kundra launched the ‘Apps For Democracy’ WEB 2.0 style collaboration contest in hopes of giving citizens a portal into such government information as crime reports and pothole repair schedules . Kundra expected maybe 10 apps and got 47 in 30 days. This endeavor saved the city ~$2.6M even after the $50K prize money was paid. Kundra works by the mantra that citizens are "co-creators rather than subjects." This 34 year old Gen-Xer is now in charge of information technology for the whole government! Looks like this may no longer be your grandfather’s federal government – at least in IT.

All of the primary cloud vendors have stepped up their efforts to sell this latest technology to the government since they too see the sleeping giant awakening. Companies like Amazon and Google who had done little business with the government in the past are now pushing the adoption of their cloud based technologies in all parts of the government. SalesForce.com, possibly the most successful SaaS, has also sold its software to several branches of the government. The DOD and NASA have both adopted elements of cloud computing. NASA uses SalesForce.com and the open source cloud software Eucalyptus. DOD is very actively promoting cloud computing internally.

The most innovative companies in the world today have provided the missing pieces needed to launch cloud computing as the NEXT BIG THING. Even the traditionally sloth like U. S. government is on board. To be sure, many of the truly transformational changes cloud computing will drive won’t be possible until the various technologies collectively dubbed ‘cloud computing’ mature even further. Additional innovations (some already envisioned, some not) such as better security, improved virtualization management and real cloud interoperability are needed to speed cloud adoption rates. Nonetheless, cloud computing is a transformational advance in technology on the level of the worldwide web or PC’s – or even bigger. If you don’t agree and you are a CIO you should look for a career ‘Plan B’.

Shotput

Aug 11, 2009 in Angels, Entrepreneurship, Internet, Presentations, Startups

Yesterday was Shotput's inaugural demo day.

Shotput is one of many Y Combinator style startup accelerator programs. David Cummings and the entire Shotput team worked very hard to select the best capital light Internet startups they could find and coach them over the course of the summer.

Eight companies presented at the Technology Square Research Building auditorium. It was a packed house. Standing room only. The effort of the Shotput team and volunteers showed. All the companies did a great job. And I am not just being nice. The presentations and the demos were all first-rate.

Inevitably the question that was asked over and over again at the reception following the presentations was "which were your favorites". I hesitated to answer the question. But when pressed I did. My top three.

EventHive is an application to make conferences more engaging. They popped out of the gate at shotput.eventhive.com. Nice app for presenters to get real time questions, feedback and polling. Users have the option to comment within a specific event or broadcast more widely via Twitter. It worked like a champ and many of the 100 or so attendees used the app to make the Shotput event more interactive. While currently raw, EventHive has the potential to handle event commentary in a much more elegant way than Twitter hashtags. Like it. A lot.

Looxii is developing web apps that make it as simple as possible for companies to get the most out of the social web. They demonstrated a social analytics dashboard, that really did not impress the back channel. I met the founding team during Georgia Tech's digitial media demo day. Smart guys. My bet is they figure out a play before it is all said and done.

Khush's LaDiDa was the best demo of the day. Literally applause in the middle of the demo. LaDiDa, is a reservse karaoke iPhone application that analyzes sung vocals and composes matching accompaniment. Khush was founded by a group of technologists from Georgia Tech's Center for Music Technology.

Again, a great day for all of the companies, not just these three.

And a great day for Atlanta. Over two years ago I was calling for a VentureLab for non Georgia university system startups and supporting Wayt King in bringing the YC model to Atlanta. Now we have them both.

Well done.

Frugal Formation

Aug 06, 2009 in Entrepreneurship, Startups

In the wake of the new ATDC John Cottingham, my associate, and I are getting a number of requests from entrepreneurs who are currently bootstrapping on how to form a corporation. While I am no attorney I thought it would be interesting to lay out the five steps I personally went through when forming a Georgia corporation last month.

1. Did a trademark search at the United States Patent Office to see if there is a filing for the name on record. Searched Google and Bing as well. No use. Cost = $0.

2. Filed a name reservation from with the the state of Georiga. Cost = $25.

3. Used the information sent in the Name Reservation Confirmation to file Articles of Incorporation online. "The Corporations Division strongly recommends that filers obtain professional legal, tax, and/or business advice to assure the filer's goals and intentions are met, and that requirements of the law are satisfied, both before and after incorporation." I ignored them. Cost = $100.

4 Published an announcement in a legal organ of the state of Georiga. Cost = $40.

5 Applied for an EIN. Cost = $0.

This certainly is not a long term solution for a meaningful company. It is a short-term solution that cost $165, enables me to open bank accounts, allows me to take money from a customer, and provides some personal liability protection behind a corporate shield. If the company keeps moving I am certainly going to bring in an attorney and spend $4,824.13.

For the moment I am being capital light and frugal.