Posts Tagged ‘Think Big Partners’
MDL Technology Urges Kansas City Tech Companies and Entrepreneurs To Apply For Flyover 50
Thursday, March 29th, 2012
Posted by: T.J. Bloom, COO of MDL Technology
Kansas City has become a hub spot for entrepreneurs in a variety of industries including tech and art. We are excited to be part of a community that is under consideration as the most “entrepreneurial city” in the nation. Organizations such as PIPELINE, Think Big Partners and the Kauffman Foundation have played a huge role in molding startups to make Kansas City the success it is today.
Five Elms Capital, a venture capital and private equity firm, wants to highlight and honor the most exciting, beneficial and fastest growing companies in its Flyover 50 contest.
Why Apply?
1. Recruit top talent. Potential employees want to work for growing companies, and Flyover 50 honorees are recognized as the fastest growing in the middle of the country.
2. Increase Visibility. Members of the Flyover 50 benefit from local, national, and industry recognition as one of the premiere businesses in the middle of the country.
3. Network with other Flyover 50 winners. Cities in the middle of the country tend to be geographically spread out, and at times, entrepreneurs may feel isolated. The Flyover 50 was designed to allow honorees to share ideas, collaborate, and find ways to partner.
4. Validate success. Being honored as a member of the Flyover 50 validates your success to customers, employees, and potential partners.
5. Support the entrepreneurial cause in the Midwest.
Companies located in Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas are eligible to apply.
About Flyover 50
Five Elms Capital created the Flyover 50 as a way to highlight hardworking entrepreneurs who are shaping the next generation of the communities we love. Flyover 50 honorees are the fastest growing companies in the middle of the country. To be honored as a member of the Flyover 50, a company must have annual revenue greater than $1 million in 2011.
The vast majority of both media coverage and capital is on the coasts. The Flyover 50 recognizes and celebrates the hard work and achievements of those who are building exciting companies in the middle of the country. Our fast-growing entrepreneurial community, highlighted by the Flyover 50 winners, provides plenty of reasons to land here!
Think Big Partners Take Kansas City Technology Startups To Silicon Valley
Thursday, March 22nd, 2012
Posted by: T.J. Bloom, COO of MDL Technology
Yesterday, 10 local technology startups left on a ‘field trip’ sponsored by Think Big Partners to Silicon Valley, an entrepreneurial mecca for technology businesses. The team at MDL Technology wants to wish each participant luck as they pitch their ideas to a number of investors at two different showcases.
Herb Sih, Think Big Partners co-founder, said, “The Think Big Field Trip is more than just an opportunity for Midwestern startups to get noticed and get funded. It’s also the chance for Think Big to go out to Silicon Valley and prove that big things are happening in the Midwest.”
Here is an article from Silicon Prairie News on the event as well as the startups participating.
Think Big Partners embarks on ‘field trip’ with 10 Midwestern startups
At a time of year when winter-weary travelers flock to sun-splashed beaches for spring break, 10 Midwestern startups are embarking on a coastal excursion of their own. But there won’t be much of a break involved in this spring trip.
Think Big Partners, the Kansas City, Mo.-based startup accelerator and business incubator, is chaperoning its Think Big Field Trip today through Friday, taking 10 startups to pitch in front of investors at two different showcases in Silicon Valley.
The 10 startups participating in the Field Trip (with descriptions courtesy of a Think Big Partners press release) are:
Audio Anywhere (Bixy): Audio Anywhere aims to increase ad revenues for online media platforms by a factor of 10. Ads are created through Bixy, the company’s self-service ad platform. Bixy is like Google AdWords for personalized interactive ads. Businesses utilize the Bixy toolkit to create their own ads in less than five minutes for as little as $50.
EyeVerify: Eveverify brings to market a software authentication module that will leverage the onboard cameras on mobile devices to take images of the blood vessels in the whites of the eyes to use as a unique biometric identifier, ultimately answering the question: who is holding the phone?
Klink Mobile: Klink Mobile enables the transfer of cellular airtime minutes and currency via a proprietary, cloud-based financial transaction platform.
LockerDome: Backed by Square co-founder, Jim McKelvey, LockerDome is one of the hottest sports startups in the country. LockerDome aims to be a person’s sports identity. The bet we’ve made is that people have three big personas in their life: social, professional, and recreational. Facebook covers social. LinkedIn covers professional. LockerDome wants to cover sports/recreational – an area that we believe people are more passionate about than any of the others and the only one of the three areas that completely transcends international borders.
LiveOn: LiveOn aims to be the brand that consumers and businesses trust to preserve their digital legacy.
ABPathfinder: ABPathfinder brings technology to Autism therapy by providing tools for therapists to use in their everyday assessments.
InvenQuery: InvenQuery is a technology platform with mobile application that seamlessly integrates inventory management and point-of-sale, with the ability to administer and publish an e-commerce website. IQ software is agile, scalable and easy to use while maintaining sophisticated reporting mechanisms managers depend on to measure success.
RollSale: RollSale has created a technology that will disrupt the traditional ways in which automotive dealers conduct their wholesale trade. RollSale is a communications platform where dealers are able to connect with other dealers in an environment that mimics the function and usability of common social networks.
SEIN Analytics: SEIN is bringing to market an open cloud application and database for analyzing asset-backed securities (ABS). SEIN is leveraging its proprietary web scraping and data mining technology to rapidly standardize data across all ABS categories. With $2.7 trillion in ABS outstanding, SEIN is directly addressing the pain points of this large market, while taking advantage of new regulatory proposals for increased transparency.
Kauzu: Kauzu is a company that seeks to innovate and empower the U.S. employment industry by providing a dynamic, online environment with unique tools to create meaningful, timely connections. Kauzu is like eHarmony.com meets eBay for the employment industry, which will make job search and hiring timely, active, and satisfying.
Gremln: Gremln.com makes it easy for businesses to easily and effectively market themselves and their products on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn. Gremln provides comprehensive messages management, success analytics and social media ROI analysis for businesses of every size. Engage, learn, and monitor return with Gremln.com.
Learn more about the two day trip here!
MDL Technology Reviews Kansas City Companies’ Plans For Google’s High-Speed Fiber Network
Tuesday, March 6th, 2012
By: T.J. Bloom, COO of MDL Technology
As Google lays-out its new fiber network throughout the Kansas City area, many local businesses are creating ways to capitalize on the 1 Gbps fiber connection, anticipating that Google expands its network beyond residential users into the business community. An article from Network World, written by Brad Reed, highlights the Think Big Partner‘s recent Gigabit Challenge where Kansas City businesses created innovative ways to utilize the Google fiber network.
Kansas City businesses dream big with Google fiber, despite uncertain availability
Businesses in Kansas City have some big ideas for Google‘s new fiber network, although they still don’t know if they’ll be able to use it once it goes online.
That’s because Google originally conceived its experimental fiber network as a fiber-to-the-home network for residential users. But given the enthusiasm that Google has seen from the community as a whole, the company is now thinking about extending its fiber network’s capabilities to enterprise customers if its residential rollout is successful.
But as Google spokeswoman Jenna Wandres says, this will require rethinking the company’s infrastructure plans since business-class services require more than just the single fiber cable that residential homes will get for their Web connections. So any fiber rollout to businesses won’t happen at least until Google finishes building out its FTTH network for consumers. And since official construction of the experimental fiber network only started earlier this month, there is no estimated timetable for when the network could become available for the enterprise.
“We’re focused right now on fiber-to-the-home first,” says Wandres.
Even so, the mere presence of Google’s fiber network in their neighborhood has inspired Kansas City businesses to dream of what a 1Gbps fiber connection could mean for them. Think Big Partners, a Kansas City-based firm that describes itself as “an early-stage business incubator, startup accelerator and mentorship-based collaborative network,” recently concluded its Gigabit Challenge contest that encouraged Kansas City businesses to come up with innovative ways to use the Google Fiber network to “help establish an ecosystem that will cause innovation and disruptive technologies to surge.”
SEIN Analytics and Asset Management, which won the grand prize at the Gigabit Challenge, is a financial technology startup that is in the process of building a large database that tracks the performance of structured financial securities. Samuel Belu-John, the founder and developer of SEIN, says that the broadband technologies available right now allow the company to monitor 350 different kinds of public financial transactions. But since there are roughly 14,000 types of public financial transactions overall, SEIN will obviously need a much faster connection if it wants to significantly expand its overall database.
“As we expand you can see our database expanding very rapidly,” he says. “You can imagine that the amount of data we are drawing down is quite large. … What this high-speed network allows is for an entrepreneur to build something with a large amount of cloud data without putting up $1 million to $2 million to build out their own infrastructure.”