Utah Tech Spotlight Events

Jason Alba speaks on effective social marketing, and his books

Posted by Steve Spencer

Article posted on Jun 05

A couple of years ago I started looking into the local Social networking/blogging/twitter/etc scene, and wondering where to start. What could I really do to get value, and build a helpful network without just spinning my wheels? Many people here in, and outside of the valley were a huge help (far too many to list here now). But one in particular seemed to really be able to cut through all of the crap, and ignore all of the hype, and point a valuable path based on experience. Not only that, but he has always been so willing to share what he has learned, and so humble to deal with.

I know many others have shared similar experiences with Jason. For those that haven’t, I hope you enjoy the video. Give him a call… he;ll go to lunch with anybody!

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Posted in Cool Utah Tech, Events, Podcast

Utah Innovation Awards

Posted by Steve Spencer

Article posted on May 29

Last week Stoel Rives and The Utah Technology Council held their 2008 Utah Innovation Awards Ceremony. The eight winners this year were chosen after much deliberation by a committe of 60 experts from private industry, government, and higher education. We from the Tech Spotlight were also pleased to have an opportunity to attend and get video with several of the winners. The eight winners this year, and their respective categories include:

Category	Company/Innovation Entity	Innovation Name
Biotechnology/Pharmaceuticals	Allocure	Cell Therapy for Acute Renal Failure
Chemicals/Materials Science	Ceramatec, Inc.	NaSICON Membrane Technology
Clean Technology and Energy	Mountain West Energy LLC	In-situ Vapor Extraction
Computer Hardware/Electrical Devices	Raytheon-Sarcos	Robotic Exoskeleton
Consumer Software	Zinch Inc.	Student Profile and College Wizard
Enterprise B-2-B Software	Solera Networks, Inc.	Solera Networks DS Series Packet Capture Appliance
Mechanical Devices	Klymit™	Noble-Gas-Based Adjustable Insulation
Medical Devices	Anecare Laboratories, Inc.	QED-100

We hope you enjoy the footage as much as we enjoyed the event. We will also be posting a full transcript in the coming days.

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Posted in Cool Utah Tech, Events, Podcast

Utah Researchers move toward faster computing with a “bug eye view”

Posted by Steve Spencer

Article posted on May 23

How can we make the next big leap in computer speeds? The answer: Using light rather than electricity. But that has proven to be a huge challenge for scientists. Enter a cool little Brazilian Beetle, Some Utah researchers, and some amazing possibilities.

Read the full post here.

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Posted in Events

Speed Pitching Event

Posted by Steve Spencer

Article posted on May 23

Last week I got the information on another of the Speed Pitching Events put on by Funding Universe. If you read this blog, you’ll know that I speak about these events fairly often. I want to make it clear to everyone however, that this is not because I am in any way involved or affiliated. Quite frankly, I have built businesses before. I have been, and am an entrepreneur. I have labored over business plans, and wondered if I was doing it right. I have wondered who the heck to talk to to get money. That is exactly why I am so totally impressed with these events.

I cannot tell you how many people I have spoken to locally that have, or are trying to star up their own business. I always ask them: “have you done one of the speed pitching events?” Most say, “ya, we’ve considered it… I just don’t know.” What don’t you know?? This is a non-threatening event. The people there are so experienced, and so helpful. To hell with funding… that’s just the icing on cake! The ability to pick the brains of, and get the input of a whole room of brilliant people who know business, and have them guide you is TREMENDOUS! Count yourself blessed even if you walk out without funding, but with a whole new set of insights, rather than just the guidance from your Uncle Ed, who once owner a toaster shop. Add on top of that the fact that if your idea is good, and ready, that you may very well get funding. Then add the fact that this is a local event, all in one afternoon, rather than a cross country roadshow, and you would be a fool not to go.

Anyway… in case you can’t tell… I really support these. :) hope to see you there.

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Posted in Events

Livepitch and Networking event

Posted by Steve Spencer

Article posted on Apr 24

You all know that I am a huge fan of the Speed Pitching events put on by Funding Universe. Well, next week is a great opportunity for all of you to do more than just read about how cool these events are. Funding Universe is putting on their first ever Livepitch and Networking event. What is this? Well, for starters it is a great place to come meet local investors and entrepreneurs in a social setting. Each person attending will get a certain amount of “funny money.” Like an entrepreneur’s pitch? Vote with your dollars (or funny dollar int his case.) Additionally, a panel of investors will be judging all of the pitches. At the end, the two winners will be chosen: one by the investor judges, and one by you, the audience based on your contributions of “funny money.”

This is an amazing chance to see what is going on in Utah, and meet the people who are making it happen! Don’t miss it!!!

When: Friday May 2, 2008
Venue: Miller Business Innovation Center
Building: Karen Gale Conference Center
Rooms: Wasatch and Cottonwood
Time: 9 am - 10:30 am
Cost: FREE! ($10 to apply to present)
Go to http://www.fundinguniverse.com/services/339/420/utah-livepitch-and-networking.html for more information or to register.

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Posted in Events

Utah Entrepreneurial Challenge

Posted by Steve Spencer

Article posted on Apr 14

One of the programs that I really love here in Utah is the Utah Entrepreneurial challenge. I was really pleased and blessed this year to have been given the opportunity to be a mentor to one of the teams. The team I was working with is called Qgia. Qgia’s product is pretty slick. It’s a very inexpensive solution for companies (and even individuals in the case of yahoo or ebay stores) to be able to either upload video they have produced, or even point at video hosted somewhere else, and then have it played on their site/online store. What makes it cooler though, is that you can upload images to be used as “buttons”, and tell how many seconds into the video there popup, where, and what url they should direct to. So imagine a Convention/visitor’s bureau video that hi-lights Utah destinations, and then as each one is show there is a button right on the video for a call to action for that section of the video. Further, this can be directly integrated into a shopping cart… so if the image is someone boarding at Brighton, the “buy now” button might jump right to a cart with a pass in it already. I know their website is still under construction, but if you want to talk to these guys sooner, just let me know and I’ll help. I know that Mark and his team are headed for grea things (Heck, I’m ready to star using it!)

Another company that I have written about several times is Klymit. These guys have got a really neat product that uses Argo, among other gasses inside of a jacket liner. Combine this with a small pressurized canister (the size of a CO2 can that might be used ina BB gun), a adjuster dial, andSHAZAM! What you have is an unbelievably lightjacket (so they tell me… I am still waiting in line to buy one) that let’s you literally “dial-in” the appropriate level of insulation. Dial it up while riding the lift up, dial it down when you’re carving moguls. Cool stuff. (as a note: Nick Sorenson’s presentation was very polished. Nice job.)

The winner this year was Amwell (not sure if they have a website… anyone know of one?) Amwell is one of those companies that really makes you feel good to be a human bieng. They have developed a product with innovative technology for vaginal application of medecines. They use case they are headed into trials for is supposed to prevent pregnancy, HIV, and other STD’s. I apologize that I don’t know more about it… but I’ll see what I can find out as far as web resources to point you to.

The winner this year walked away with $50,000. Second and Third took $10,000 each, and the rest of the top ten walked with $2,000 each. Not a bad jump to your business. Good job to everyone involved, and a shout out to Qgia, good job for making the top ten!!

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Posted in Events

Local Review: Utah First Friday (Guest Post by Jason Alba)

Posted by Steve Spencer

Article posted on Feb 07

As I have often said in reviewing local events, it is hard to really say that an event is good or bad in some respects, as it really comes down to rather or not you are really the target audience or not. As such, I asked a great friend of mine, Jason Alba from Jibber Jobber to help me out a bit. I know Jason often attends and has spoken highly of the Utah First Friday events. As such, here is a review of Utah First Fridays from Jason (Thanks much Jason!!):

I went to the Utah First Friday meeting at the Miller Center last week. The featured guest was John Arnold, flown in from Denver. John works for Constant Contact, wrote E-Mail Marketing or Dummies, and regularly gives seminars in Salt Lake to help businesses get more out of their e-mail marketing campaign.

I needed to go to this presentation for several reasons:

As an author, this was one of my first opportunities to see how a “big” author does presentations. I have a bunch of presentations this month in Silicon Valley and I really wanted to see John – he does this all the time, he has a Dummies book… I figured he’d be an excellent example to learn from.
I’m presenting at UFF next month, on March 7th, and I wanted to get an idea of what the quality of the presentation would be. At the very least, I wanted to know what I would be compared with.
I’m always looking at different marketing techniques to incorporate into my own business. I figured this would be an excellent opportunity to hear from the expert on something that I think is kind of boring, but I know companies are using it effectively.
I’m always curious to see what kind of people end up at a First Friday meeting. I’ve been about five times now, and the mix is always diverse. I wanted to see if that’s changing.

Regarding the presentation style, it was great. Definitely the type of caliber you hope to see at an event like this. The audience was engaged, and at the end with Pat Vaughn asked if there was any interest in learning more from John almost half the audience raised their hands.

Two things I found interesting. First, he only had one book for sale. I’m sure it gets old lugging around a bunch of books for sale. He did have a slip you could fill out to get an autographed copy. I’m not sure I’ll do that. Second, he gave away $20 in a little experiment/contest. The guy that got the $20 didn’t know he could keep it – this was actually pretty cool.

Regarding the content of John’s presentation, it was really good. He basically had five main points and shared examples, stories and “how-to’s.” I don’t remember any examples that were similar to my company, but just hearing the specifics of what other companies are doing, and things that he thought was cool, was good to hear. I think I’m on-track with what I’m offering. His examples had a more local, store-front appeal to them but still it was good stuff.

Regarding the people, I didn’t actually get to do much networking. The roads were horrible and I ended up quite late. I recognized a buddy, who introduced me to Carl Baumeister, CEO of Fruition Consultants. This was all the networking I did

I would actually like to hear about e-mail marketing from Twelve Horses, seriously. John is going to be more at the beginner, small business level, the Dummies. Twelve Horses is doing stuff at the huge company, very interesting stuff that goes beyond the basics. Not that I’m as big as those companies, but I want more leading edge information.

Overall, though, I was glad I went.

If you come next month, March 7th, you’ll see me present on LinkedIn. I’ll even have a few books with me, if you haven’t picked one up yet. Hope to see you there!

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Posted in Events

Speed Pitching this week. A bit you may not know…

Posted by Steve Spencer

Article posted on Feb 05

Just a reminder to everyone that there will be another investor speed pitching event tomorrow. For those that are not yet aware of what these are, just real quick:

It’s like speed dating, but between investors and local entrepreneurs. You have 5 minutes each to pitch your idea to a table of investors. Then you move on to the next table and pitch again. If you would like to participate head on over to Funding Universe to learn more.

For those that have heard me gush a bit about these in the past, I wanted to pull together a bit of info to make sure I was being entirely objective on these… so here’s to scoop: Of the last 150 ideas pitched, 147 of them got at least one of the investors to request a followup meeting to learn more. Additionally, I have spoken to a couple of different companies who have received funding through the event, and asked them to tell me the good, bad and even the ugly. The only negative vibe I got back at all is that Funding Universe decides what ideas to include in the event based solely on reading the business plans, rather than hearing all of the presentations (I am guessing due to time constraints,) so make sure your plan reads well if you want to make it in!

I’ll be at the event again this week, so be sure to say hi!

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Posted in Events

Utah Social Media Developer Garage — Dec 11 (tonight)

Posted by Clint Goudie-Nice

Article posted on Dec 11

The Utah Social Media Developers Garage will be tonight, December 11, at 7pm at our office in Draper. Jesse Stay has lined up Jeff Barr, evangelist for Amazon Web Services, who will speak on how Amazon AWS is being used in Social environments. After Jeff’s talk, there will be a round-table discussion with topics such as Google’s OpenSocial, Facebook, and other Social Media.

We would like to thank Jesse and his consulting company SNAPlic8 for putting this event together and Bungee Labs for providing the food.

We hope to see you there!

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Posted in Events

Podcast: Jeremy Hanks from Doba

Posted by Steve Spencer

Article posted on Dec 04

You know, Jeremy Hanks is a very easy person to get excited about. If he’s not busy making his company of one Inc’s 50 fastest growing companies, then he’s probably busy interviewing with Utah Business Magazine about the fact that his companies is one of the best companies to work for (You can see his smiling face on the cover of this month’s issue), or just generally finding ways to make Utah a better place (such as wit the event where he got Guy Kawasaki here to Utah to speak to 500 people, and then donated all of the proceeds to charity!)

As I read through the article on why people love working at Doba, there were several specifics… renting out theaters for family movie nights, ping pong tables, and more. But one thing that I know is really at the core of it all (and I think you will hear this come through in the podcast) is that Jeremy is just a really nice guy. There are few people I have ever met that are more genuine, and just generally likable.

Please join me during this podcast in learning more about what is not only a successful, and exciting (not to mention fun to work at) company here in Utah, but also in celebrating a person who is a real icon of what an entrepreneur, and a person should be.

Listen Now (34.2 MB, MP3)