Inspirational Technology

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.

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.

Local Arizona company and Grid7 Tempe neighbor VSocial has relaunched their site and announced they’ve raised a $1.5 million first round of funding. They also made Techcrunch. We had a great conversation with Brad Webb, Vsocial CTO in Venturecast #5. It’s great to see our local companies picking up some momentum.

Grid7 Venturecast #8 with Fred Mapp is now online. Fred is a bit different guest for us as he’s the former CIO of AMD, American Express and Honeywell. Some pretty big players in the industry. It was an interesting conversation to hear some of the lessons he’s learned from managing IT in some very large organizations.

We’ve just released the latest Grid7 Venturecast with Jason Barney founder and CTO of iTool. iTool was acquired by Onvia and Jason eventually went on to achieve great success in Real Estate and is now the founder of the Groove Cellar recording studio in Gilbert Az.

This is a notable venturecast on a few levels. In my opinion, it’s the most interesting one we’ve done so far. Jason does a great job of sharing the experience gained from leading a venture backed startup and also ties it together with the knowledge he’s gained by achieving success in a completely different industry. It’s also interesting because Jason is no longer in the tech industry and that gives him a different perspective and willingness to discuss things that others would probably avoid.

Of less significance, this is the first venturecast where I actively participated in the interview. Normally I just listen, but I always ask so many questions after it’s over, that we decided to change things up a little from here on and have me actually talk. We’ll see how that goes, I tend to clam up when things like microphones are around.

This podcast was recorded in Groove Cellar Studios using professional grade mics and cool stuff like that. We normally just record with the internal Mic on a Macbook, hardly high tech. Before the recording, Jason also gave us a fascinating tour of the studio. I wish we could have recorded that on video, it was really interesting.

One final note. I was personally involved in the very early stages of iTool, but left to found another company before the service went live. Sean also worked for iTool at one point in time. So we’ve both known Jason for a long time and that’s certainly reflected in the recording. Hopefully the discussions with missing context aren’t too problematic.

The latest Grid7 Venturecast is a conversation with LeSean Smith who shares his experiences about the life and death of africa.com along with some advice for budding entrepreneurs.