The second entrepreneur panel of the afternoon included a diverse mix of companies.
Bambi Francisco pitched her new company, Vator.Tv. Vator (short for elevator pitch) is a community site for entrepreneurs who can create a home page for their company and can network within the site. Vator's tagline is "Where startups launch and grow up" and their goal is to assist startups by providing support for funding, business development, promotion and infrastructure growth. Most of the pitches are via video - either short interviews by Bambi or her staff, or user-uploaded videos. The Company has strong backing (Paypal's Peter Thiel, Richard Rosenblatt of MySpace and Georges Harik of Google) and seems compelling, but I was surprised to hear that they really haven't figured out a business model yet (somewhat ironic for a site of this nature). According to Bambi, they have held a series of competitions, each with a corporate sponsor, which have generated about $40k in revenue to-date (the company launched this past June). She also suggested possible revenues from syndicating the content or alerting companies to new startups on a lead-gen basis. They have about 1,000 company profiles up, so they are attracting participation. If they develop a solid community, I could see this being acquired by a targeted media company (maybe Inc.) but I can't see this becoming more than a modest product line extension.
The second presenter was Nikos Iatropoulos, CEO of Lingospot. Lingospot offers technology to help publishers cross-link their content. Unlike the "more like this" providers such as Sphere, Lingospot uses NLP to identify key terms on a page, offering links to other content by that publisher for those terms, as well as links out to sites like Wikipedia, youtube, flickr or amazon. Their value proposition is a modest bump to page views. Nikos suggested that a typical publisher could see a 2-5% increase in page views out-of-the-box and could improve that if they train the system. I think Lingospot offers a nice feature but I'm not sure that it's a sustainable standalone business.
Dr. Bob Levine, CEO of ArchieMD was the next presenter. ArchieMD provides 3-D models of human figures, organ systems and medical technology and processes. They also create interactive products that can show a medical process. Today, they distribute their content through partners like Reed Elsevier and Houghton Mifflin in the health professions and K-12 space. They are looking to enter the litigation (jury education) space and are hoping to find a partner for that. They have an interesting niche and, though fairly narrow, should be a sustainable business.
Keibi Technologies CEO Paul Remer followed. Launched in 2006, Keibi helps sites with user-generated video assure their advertising partners that they will suppress offensive or inappropriate material. Today, most sites with UGC have to manually moderate their sites or rely upon other users to point out offensive content. Keibi offers a moderation suite that uses a combination of technology along with pattern detection to score uploaded video for its likelihood to be offensive. For example, a user who has uploaded offensive material before will trigger a higher score than one who has not. This approach is important as automating the recognition of "offensive material" is a challenge. While supreme court justices may define pornography as "I know it when I see it", that's a bigger challenge for a computer. Keibi's pitch is as a productivity solution. Sites will still need moderators, but using their moderation suite, their productivity will be much higher and sites will need fewer moderators. Keibi also offers an outsource model, where they will provide the moderators and are working on certification services to meet the needs of specific advertisers. I think this is an interesting niche. Advertisers today are cautious about running ads on UGC sites and those that do tend to pay remnant CPM rates. If Keibi can help sites reduce the fear of UGC, this could be a big win for those websites.
The final presenter of the day was Michael Breyer of Courtroom Connect. Courtroom Connect initially launched by providing wireless access in courtrooms so that attorneys and others could communicate with their offices. They quickly found that the greater opportunity was to leverage that technology to broadcast trials out. While CourtTV and other mass media focus on the sensational trials, Courtroom Connect follows the money. So, a patent lawsuit for a biotech company might not make compelling television, but the plaintiff and defense firms will want to watch it, as will hedge funds and others. In addition to the live broadcasts, they maintain a video archive of the trials. This content is compelling to attorneys who might want to see how a jury responded to various arguments in a similar case, or see how a judge acted in a prior case. Launched in 2005, the Company now has installed permanent networks in more than 50 courthouses across the country and generated $2.5M in revenues in the past year. They are seeking capital to expand their coverage.
The second panel was not as compelling as the earlier group, but finished strongly. Both Keibi and Courtroom Connect have solid business models and are positioned well for a strong market.
