Inspirational Technology

On the latest Grid7 Entrepreneurship Podcast, Peter Burns founder of the Institute for Entrepreneurship discusses his initiative aimed at rolling out university programs for Entrepreneurship across the country. As part of this he talks about the University Entrepreneurs fund. This fund was first created last year as a $1 million venture capital fund for student entrepreneurs. Now Peter is looking to push it to $250 million and take it to a national level. Students from the Entrepreneurship program at any of the universities where the Institute for Entrepreneurship provides their program are eligible. From those programs, the best prospects can receive seed funding to get their projects off the ground. If I were still a student I’d be pretty damn excited about this program.

Overall this looks to be a great way to both train and seed the entrepreneurial spirit in young minds. Best of all, this is starting in Arizona with the College for Entrepreneurship at Grand Canyon University.

For Grid7 Venturecast #14 we recorded the audio for the presentations at the Arizona Entrepreneurship: Revolution in Marketing Conference. This was an event focused on introducing the concepts of social media and how it can be applied to help market a business. You know blogging, wikis, social networks and such. The opening presentation was by Chris Heuer of the Social Media Club and the closing presentation was given by Robert Scoble of Podtech and the Scoble Show.

The conference was mildly interesting to me, but I’ve been doing all the stuff they’re talking about for a long time so there wasn’t really a whole lot to learn from it. In reality, it was pretty fluffy overall. However, you could see all the business people in the audience drooling over the prospects opened up by this “new concept” of blogging and social networking. That’s a good thing, it seems most people in Arizona are quite behind the curve when it comes to this stuff. Anyway, if nothing else, Scoble’s section is worth a listen. Just make sure you stick with it past the part where he’s reading his RSS feeds on stage.

It has actually been out for a while (I’ve been slacking at this blogging thing) but the latest in our series of interviews with entrepreneurs in Arizona is online. This is an interview with the founders of UStrive.

Ustrive is a commerce platform that integrates with other social networking sites enabling the user to monetize his or her media across services like YouTube, Photobucket and Flickr. Bob Schobert (CEO) and Mike Fleet (lead developer) share their experience in developing Ustrive and offer advice to avoid some of the pitfalls of working with contract developers. Ustrive officially launched their site this morning - big thanks to Bob and Mike for squeezing in this interview given the timing. Start a dialogue with them via the comments link below.

Grid7 Venturecast #12 with the founders of LeadBot is now online.

The three original founders of Leadbot.com (Bill Ramsey, Rob McAleer and Ben Wagner) share their experience of building an online brokerage for quality financial services leads. From a grim morning of a catastrophic data loss where they were forced to serve their web site off of a laptop to a record-breaking seven-figure year of revenues for ‘06, Leadbot is a come-back story of a startup business that has overcome adversity and firmly established itself as a reputable company with loyal customers. Their core belief: for even most tech-oriented businesses, the success factor comes down to the focus on the human elements and the relationships you build with your customers.

I think this was a pretty good conversation with some real “in the trenches” entrepreneurial experiences being shared.

The latest installment of the Grid7 Venturecast is now online. This installment features inventor Lon Safko.

Lon Safko is the godfather of the Assistive Speech Technology Industry having invented the technology that became the Dragon Naturally Speaking product. Eighteen of Lon’s inventions were recently inducted into the Smithsonian alongside thinkers such as Darwin, Wyeth and Edison for having made the most significant contribution this century to the human-computer interface.

Lon is an interesting guy and recently had some of his inventions added to the Smithsonian.

Grid7 Venturecast #10 with Pat Sullivan founder and former CEO of ACT! Software and SalesLogix is now up on the Grid7 website. Pat has been a leading figure in the Arizona software community for a long time and has now moved on to found something a little different in Jigsaw Health.

Phoenix BarCamp is tomorrow, if you’re a geek in Phoenix it’s the place to be. This will be held at the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe starting at 9AM.

This event mainly exists to get people in the technology community around Phoenix into a single place so we can have some good discussions on technical and creative topics. It’s an event for both the development and the design communities and the schedule for the day will emerge as it occurs. If you’re planning to come, please be prepared to truly participate, this isn’t an event for people to get up in front of a crowd and just give presentations.

We’ll have free tshirts and lunch, thanks to the BarCamp sponsors: Microsoft, Neurogami, Integrum, Grid7 and JumpBox.

Mark Suster CEO of Koral is talking about his experiences raising a round of venture capital.

So I’m stuck with the paper shuffler and the Blackberry man. I am not kidding you when I say that I was on the verge of literally saying, “let’s just call this meeting a day. It’s clear you have no respect for me and no interest in my company.” I bit my tongue (which my wife will tell you is rare). I finished the next 15 painful minutes and said goodbye. My only regret … the $25 I had to pay to park in their building. They were seriously the most pompous, self-centered, unprofessional group of people that I have come across in a long time. I went to back to their website and unsurprisingly there were no great companies I had ever heard of. I later learned that they were a spin out from an investment bank. It all made sense. They were not “real” VCs. If you are raising money in the Bay Area and want to know who this firm is to avoid them drop me a line at msuster@koral.com and I’ll tell you the name.

Not kind words for this particular firm.

I saw Mark demo Koral at the Office 2.0 conference and it looked like a pretty compelling product, certainly one of the better products falling into the “Office 2.0″ bucket. It’s a shame this group couldn’t give him the respect he deserves, ultimately though, it’s just an opportunity missed for them. I’m sure Mark will have no trouble finding the money he needs elsewhere.

Phoenix BarCamp is coming up next Saturday Dec 9. This will be held at the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe.

This event mainly exists to get people in the technology community around Phoenix into a single place so we can have some good discussions on technical and creative topics. It’s an event for both the development and the design communities and the schedule for the day will emerge as it occurs. If you’re planning to come, please be prepared to truly participate, this isn’t an event for people to get up in front of a crowd and just give presentations.

As an added incentive, we’re also planning to have free tshirts and lunch, thanks to the BarCamp sponsors: Microsoft, Neurogami, Integrum, Grid7 and JumpBox.

Through Grid7 we just released the audio of the sessions from the Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference. All the recordings are now online and are taking the place of Grid7 Venturecast #9.

It was a hectic day at the conference, we launched JumpBox, did some interviews with the press, talked with a whole bunch of people and on top of all that ran around trying to capture audio from all the sessions.

The conference was a great event though. The turnout was surprising with a sell out at I believe 450 people. The sessions were interesting, though the session “What does it take to make a company succeed in Arizona?” had a refrain I’m getting really tired of hearing. At the end of the day, the story is always the same, startup companies in Arizona have an extremely hard time getting funded. There’s a ton of money in Arizona, but it pretty much all goes into real estate. We just started working on a round of funding for JumpBox and trying to do that in Arizona is not something I look forward to.