The Only Thing Certain is Death and Texts

10 Promising MassChallenge Ventures

Venture Certainty?  There is none.  But death, texting, and eight other concepts have a good chance.  These are some of the most unique or innovative of the 125 finalists at MassChallenge.  Click on the blue name of each, which is linked to more info.

Why do I like these ten? After Steps solves a need.  Textaurant applies available technology to an untapped customer experience.  Art Venue creates a market.  Flex Receipts is the future of transactions. HerCampus.com creates internship and job opportunities for thousands of college journalists.  National Family Mortgage reinvents the lending industry.  KangoGift disrupts the gift card industry.  Sabi Sushi brands an unbranded category.  Splitwise solves common disputes among friends.  TapWalk brings customers and retailers together.

The Top 10

After Steps – A complete end of life planning service online allowing estate, financial, funeral and legacy planning.  “The Easiest Way to Put Your Affairs in Order.

Textaurant – Replaces the restaurant buzzer.  Users wait online, not in line.  They can see wait times for restaurants online, get in the queue remotely and receive a free text alert before their table is ready, while spending time elsewhere in the mall or neighborhood.

Art Venue – A network of new art spaces connecting local businesses with artists wanting to show their art.  QR code placards enable instant sales of the art.

Flex Receipts – Creates digital receipts allowing users to access all their receipts in one place online.  Users can manage, view, categorize and print.

HerCampus.com – “A Collegiette’s Guide to Life” An online magazine for college women with entirely student-created content.  175+ college branches have stories specific to their school as well as national topics.  Founded by 3 Harvard undergrads, they also operate HerCampusShop.com and CampusTrendsetters.com

National Family Mortgage – An online resource helping families structure and manage real estate loans with their relatives.  This platform provides lower interest rates for borrowers, higher yield rates for investors (lenders) than traditional CD or savings plans, and keeps interest-paid within the family.

KangoGift – A mobile gifting platform that allows users to give instant gifts by cell phone.  Users can enter recipient’s mobile number or Facebook wall, pick a retailer and gift, and recipient receives the gift via text or Facebook.  All that’s left is redeeming the gift at selected shop.  Allowing friends and relatives to treat each other remotely, known as micro gifting.

Sabi Sushi – Aims to become the Chipotle of Sushi by bringing a traditionally “slow and expensive” or “quick and low quality” sushi experience mainstream by redefining the category through store design, food, service, and music.

Splitwise.com – Addresses those tough to deal with roommate situations.  Its Fairness Calculators provide unbiased answers on how much rent each housemate should pay based upon a number of inputs unique to each house situation.  Splitwise aims to solve room size, split-furniture sale, recurring overnight guest, and even obnoxious noise (wink, wink) disputes among roommates with adjusted rent.

TapWalk – Changes the way people interact with the world around them by connecting them with relevant places in their immediate surroundings.  This app uses location-based technology to alert mall, airport, campus, and event venue goers of things they may be looking for in real-time as they are walking around.

$1 Million Spurs Job Creation En Masse

Quote in Upper Left: “Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those doing it”

MassChallenge – Boston, MA

It’s raw, it’s unfinished, it’s bare office space with IdeaPaint covering the walls.  Dry-erase markered graphics, business models, and ideas are drawn-out by companies as old as the marker is dry, spanning from floor to exposed joist. This is MassChallenge, located in Boston, the breeding ground for new venture creation on the East Coast.

I had the opportunity to tour the space and speak with MassChallenge Director Scott Bailey about how MassChallenge is creating dynamic entrepreneurs and ventures in just its first two years.  Bailey says MassChallenge empowers novice entrepreneurs to execute on their ideas by creating a resource-rich environment.  The catalyst: A $1,000,000 Global Start-up Competition to attract and accelerate the best start-ups to launch immediately.

Anyone from anywhere can enter – this past year 733 aspiring entrepreneurs applied.  Through rigorous vetting by expert judges the field was narrowed to 125 finalists.  Their reward?  Four months in the MassChallenge accelerator located in a full floor overlooking the Boston skyline.  The start-ups set up shop, with nothing more than a banner identifying each company and several flat surfaces for laptops and pizza boxes.  This temporary space has a real raw, yet collaborative feel.  You just know some big-time future ventures are brewing here…it’s in the air.

These young companies are offered tons of guidance by founders, angels, experts, etc. who are all passionate about the next wave of business and job creation.  MassChallenge sees whole new categories of business converging, and with this convergence, opportunistic go-getters backed with the right resources can create the next generation of economic growth engines.

Take Aways:

• Click here for 10 of my favorite new ventures launching at MassChallenge.
• See related article from The Economist on job creation at MassChallenge
• See this Bloomberg.com  article about IdeaPaint, a 2003 start-up with explosive growth prospects, which was started by a Babson College student

Ready for Lift Off…4 Venture Ideas Ready to Launch!

Babson Park, MA

In a flurry of creative thinking and persuasive rhetoric, Babson College’s 12^th annual Rocket Pitch launched.  86 Babson MBAs, 16 Alumni, and a handful of under graduates were on the docket to pitch 130+ business ideas.  This common entrepreneurial format, known as the Elevator Pitch, gives wanna-be founders two, or in this case three, minutes to convince their audience that the idea not only has merit, but also is a high-potential business concept and warrants further analysis.

Babson College boasts the country’s #1 program in entrepreneurship, and after sitting in on this half-day event, it does not surprise me.  The pitches were split into four categories: consumer products/services, high tech, web 2.0, and social.  This meant that there were four auditoriums, one for each category, spread over three floors of the building.  I had reviewed the executive summaries of all 130 pitches the night before and had my game plan about which pitches I wanted to hear.  And, yep, you guessed it; there was no coherent order to them.  And no time to take the building’s elevator up and down and back up again to hear the next elevator pitch!  With only 2 minutes between pitches, it made for a lot of running!

My Top 4 Favorite Ideas

Parko, a platform that matches drivers to owners of unused parking spots.  In true collaborative consumption form, this concept is the Air BnB of parking.  The mobile app allows drivers to find a spot on the go and in their geographic area.  It allows users to monetize down-time of their owned or contract parking.

LeaseItForward.com, a website allowing users to write reviews of their previous apartment and research reviews on the new apartment they are considering.  This is the CarFax or Angie’s List of apartments.  The founder made a convincing point, he said renters will spend ~$20,000 annually on an apartment and they have virtually no way to gather user reviews, whereas, a quick Google search of a $600 Ipad purchase yields millions of reviews.

Another one I liked was The Driveway Doctors.  These guys aim to turn the automotive repair industry on its head.  They are the Geek Squad of car mechanics.  Their mobile repair vehicles come to the customer’s home or office to check the car and make necessary repairs.  Sometimes the most innovative businesses are the ones that apply new technology to traditionally low tech business models.

The last one is Mimbo, an online rating website with reviews and opinions (arrows up or down) on products, services, events, activities, etc.  People share their personal experiences with others.  With the website tools, users can analyze the aggregate reviews of any topic and compare two competitors head to head.  This is a more intelligent, exact, and Web 2.0 Yelp.  Take a look…

Now That’s A Good Idea!

Here are some of my favorite ideas that have been assisted by Idea Village in the last two years.  My favorite is the first one – Bideo.  It is the ideal complement to Twitter in the displacement of traditional news sources.  Where Twitter brings the story, Bideo adds the video/photo.  See each idea in brief and the corresponding Trend.  Don’t miss Idea Village’s biggest home run, Naked Pizza, at the bottom!!

Bideo

An online auction platform utilizing crowd-sourced newsworthy images.  Facilitates selling the images to publications through a free-market bidding system.  Leverages free market dynamics to provide payment to creators of high-demand video and photos.  Favorable Trend(s): Crowd-sourcing; 86,400 second news cycle

Pocket Police

Targets university campuses with an app that makes emergency responding based on GPS location possible and provides personally identifying information to emergency responders.  Favorable Trend(s): GPS location-based applications

VoiceHIT

An electronic health records & clinical documentation software that automates documentation during patient encounters, improves patient experiences, and eliminates provider-based manual data entry.  Favorable Trend(s): EMR

Wire Fly

Specializes in servicing high-density communities with affordable high-speed Internet service.  Favorable Trend(s): Collaborative Consumption; Wireless Connectivity (Access)

Live Set

Provides live concerts on the web in HD video and high quality audio bringing live concerts to your living room.  Favorable Trend(s): Video migration to streaming

Pollbob

An online social polling network that allows users to create surveys.  An app and website platform facilitate quick discovery of how people feel about any given topic.  Opinion poll and market intel made easy.  Favorable Trend(s): Web 2.0

Idea Village Venture Success Story

Naked Pizza

Is changing the way people eat and rocking the food industry in the process.  They have created an all-natural and healthful pizza.  Naked Pizza is experiencing phenomenal growth, founded in just 2009, they opened two stores a week in 2010 and have 500 stores in development.  Favorable Trend(s): All-Natural nutritious solutions

It Takes a Village to Raise a C…ompany

Idea Village – New Orleans, LA

Five entrepreneurs from New Orleans, LA founded Idea Village in 1999.  The impetus was to re-energize a city in decline, which had lost over 41,000 young professionals in the 1990s.  Their vision was to create an environment providing guidance for venture success and to serve as catalyst to create job creators.  I had the opportunity to speak with Tim Williamson, co-founder and CEO, regarding Idea Village and venturing.

A Jobs Plan Ahead of its Time

Williamson sees entrepreneurs as “People who change things.  They create jobs.”  He says, “All jobs today are being created by companies less than five years old.”  This underscores the importance of Idea Village and other peer organizations throughout America in the job creation/recession recovery puzzle.

What does the Idea Village offer, which is crucial to start-up success? 

Although funding is necessary in the early stages of venture creation, Williamson believes, “Money is typically not the most vital resource entrepreneurs need.”  Mentorship and guidance are.  In-kind legal, formation, marketing strategy and venture capital guidance are all offered with no legal commitment to pay back.  There’s access to collaborative office space at the Idea Village HQ and of course a portion of Idea Village’s role is providing seed capital.  Idea Village is independently funded and is run solely by donor and angel funding.

Idea Village entrepreneurs receive on average $50k to $75k in resources to launch a successful venture and contribute to the revitalization of New Orleans.  Ultimately, the ones that succeed will hopefully pay it forward to the next generation of entrepreneurs and job creators in NOLA.  I asked Tim how can other aspiring entrepreneurs develop the skills to launch successful ventures and contribute to job creation.  Below is his response:

7 Steps to Developing the Entrepreneurial Skill set

1. Create a cause – identify a problem and solution
2. Go to a cocktail party – develop an effective elevator pitch
3. Know what you don’t know – determine gaps in personal skills
4. Build a small group – a team that fills those gaps
5. 50 no challenge – pitch the idea to 50 people.  Write down each name and reason why they said no.  Evolve the pitch until you get support or quit
6. Get a customer – validate your business by getting a customer; then scale
7. 13 rounds – understand that no one will cheer for you until you show you are willing to go the distance (a Rocky I reference)

AcceleCycle: Why You Will Buy More Sooner & Feel Good About It

 

Mega brands NIKE and Best Buy are leading efforts encouraging the recycling of their products.  The photos above show my NIKEs, a recycling bin at the NIKE Town store in San Francisco (which collects used shoes), and finally a rubber sidewalk in Washington D.C.  The NIKE project actually turns used shoes into playground surfaces, but this sidewalk is another application of the recycled rubber.

There is a bit of irony here:  NIKE takes a commodity like rubber and through nothing more than marketing genius turns a $3.00 shoe into a $100 item…yes that’s what I spent.  The company then takes your $97 marketing value-added-item when you are done with it, and turns it back into a $0.50 per square foot commodity: a rubber surface.  Something tells me they are making money on the back-end of that cycle also.  Recycling of products, not just bottles and cans, is turning into a big business.  And, somebody is making  a lot of money at it.  I love businesses that have free raw materials.

The insight here is about accelerating consumption.  I call it AcceleCycle.  In a hyper-conscious environment of reducing waste and expanding recycling, sellers of products must find a way to encourage consumption.  Not only do they now have to convince you, the consumer, version 3.0 or 4.0 of their product is faster, sleeker, and better than the version you already shelled out hundreds of dollars for.  They have to make you feel OK with trashing your old version.  By creating an outlet for you to recycle or AcceleCycle, they are accelerating your consumption patterns.

Let the retailers create this wave.  They have the critical mass to propel the movement.  As an entrepreneur, find a way to jump on for the ride.  Many phases of this new cycle present opportunities for new products and services.  An upcoming post will feature several innovators who have done just that.  And in a short time have emerged as the front-runners in this new domain.

Best Buy Store – Fifth Avenue, New York City

Collection bin for plastic bags, wires, cords, cables, CDs, DVDs, cases, gift cards, remotes, controllers, ink and toner cartridges, and batteries.

E-cycle is a program for customers to earn Best Buy rewards points for recycling.  How do you suppose Best Buy is rewarded by this program??

Get in my Belly! A Trash Monster that Knows When it’s Still Hungry

Founded in just 2003, this innovative waste solutions company called Big Belly developed the world’s first solar powered trash compactor.  The idea came to founder Jim Foss while walking down a Boston street and observing a garbage truck in action.  He figured there could be a more efficient way to collect waste.  He created a different trash container, a compactor that uses Solar energy to power it’s smart system.  When it detects a 50% full container it compacts the trash to make more room.  This makes the collection process more efficient, no doubt.  The Big Belly container can hold 4 to 5 times as much garbage as the typical trash can.  But, that’s only where Big Belly made it’s dent.

The second innovation is really remarkable.  They have created a “Smart Grid for Waste and Recycling.”  A wireless grid connects each smart compactor to a software platform.  The software detects which containers need emptying and which do not.  This revolutionary platform has applied technology to a low-tech industry.  The result: Cutting waste collection trips by 80% and dramatically reducing fuel consumption.  Its simple, containers across the grid which are full are indicated as red, those near 50% yellow, and those empty green.  Collections then happen accordingly.  This process allows cities, parks, college campuses, government facilities, and sports stadiums to more efficiently deploy their resources and plan their operations.  The net effect is significantly reduced operating costs.