Capital Factory 2011 Fast Pitches

Two weeks ago I spent an enjoyable day at the Capital Factory Demo Day. After the five startups that participated in the program presented for eight minutes several startups from the community gave three minute pitches. Here are some brief notes from the fast pitches:

Apptive
Create a mobile app with no programming
Takes less than an hour
Push content and notifications
Raising $500k

CopperEgg
Super real-time cloud monitoring
Monitoring in seconds instead of minutes
Server installed monitoring agent

TheDailyDot
Hometown newspaper for the web powered by social media

Forecast
Checked in 53 times at taco shack and friend never spontaneously joined
Free mobile app to tell friends where you’ll be later
Catch users at unique moment in buying cycle
27k users already
Raising $250k with half committed

Greenling
5000 customers
Subscription service for local organic food
In Austin and San Antonio
Technology enabled business service

Hoot.me
Switch Facebook into study mode
Browse live study sessions
Handles math text as well
Paid tutoring side and free peer-to-peer side
All college students at UT
Did DreamIt Ventures in NYC
Raising seed round

Ihiji
More and more devices require network functionality to work
Software platform for service oriented networks to self heal and remote issues
Actively selling for a year
Raising Series A

Infochimps
Selling data downloads and API access
Venture backed
Building context into the data

Loku
Big data plus Flipboard for local
Raised $1M
Raising series A

OwnLocal
The AppStore for Local
Small biz needs website, social media, SEO, and everything else (cloud based marketplace for apps)
Customers paying $100k year

NightRaft
Locate, authenticate, curate, serve
Problem: who’s in the live music audience
App for consumers connected to Facebook
Business value from data collected
Raising seed round

Ravel
Enterprise software to analyze big data
Examples are predictions, energy data, government

Ricochet Labs
Qrank
Make it easy to make mobile games with content
Platform to create a game layer across all knowledge
Self-serve web-based toolkit to make games
Branded Qrank game has 400k users

Rockify
Delivering content to mobile devices
Technology makes it easy to make cross platform apps and ability to push content

Spanning
Help companies manage critical data in the cloud
Google offers no backup and restore system
Spanning Backup for Google Apps
$30/user/year
Raising Series B

StormPulse
Bad weather reporting
Weather risk management tool
Weather is a long term trend

VolunteerSpot
Mom-center viral platform
850k volunteers
Adding 25k users per week
Raised seed round
7000 Facebook fans
Raising round

WPEngine.com
Managed WordPress Hosting
Speed, scale, security, support
Heroku for WordPress

The startups did a great job and I enjoyed the fast pitches.