New Launch for ITEN Company LocalDeal.com
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Contegix Supports ITEN; Now Please Help Us Support Them. Contegix is the local web hosting company that hosts the ITEN website. They do this for free as a way to support our community. They have also become a sponsor of Geek Night and Matthew Porter, their CEO, is a mentor for ITEN. Our experience with them as a hosting company has been truly outstanding, and we'd like to invite the ITEN community to help us show our appreciation for Contegix. Here's their simple request: "As a Linux hosting company, Contegix lives and breathes Open Source. It is truly in our DNA. We love helping and sponsoring ITEN and many other open source communities and projects, such as Codehaus, Apache, and many others.
Now is the one time of the year when we ask for help from these organizations. Last year, we were chosen by the Linux community for The 2009 Linux Journal Reader's Choice Award. We appreciated every single vote.
This year's voting is live, and we would greatly appreciate your support by voting for Contegix. Please go to http://contegix.com/lj2010 and vote for us (Contegix) in the "Best Linux-friendly Web Hosting Company" category. You need to scroll down pretty far to find our category. You do NOT need to vote for the other categories in order to make your vote for Contegix count. You only have to fill in a vote for those you want, such as Contegix. You do NOT need to subscribe to the magazine in order to vote.Thank you for your support, it means a lot to us, Matthew Porter, CEO and Co-Founder."
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| Company Spotlight |
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ppl Share was founded by parents that saw tremendous inefficiencies and overhead in the way that the parent communities at K-12 schools interact, communicate, and raise funds. "When your kids reach school age, you are introduced into a pretty chaotic environment. We were frustrated with the waste in paper sent home every day, lack of being connected as working parents, and the push to sell cookie dough and other overpriced fundraisers."
As they talked with several PTOs across St. Louis, the same problem areas continued to be raised. In addition, the cutbacks in school district funding and the soft economy have placed increased pressure on the parent community to fill the gap. "We just thought that this community, in which we are members, is in need of creative solutions to these issues."
To solve these problems, they launched pplShare (www.pplshare.com), a one stop, private web platform that provides a host of features for communication and planning. In addition, it enables completely new, internet-based tools for parents to raise money for their children's schools without having to go door to door. "We take revenue generating concepts that work at a national level and then provide the same services at a local level, which in turn the parent community utilizes as fundraisers. We believe the traditional approach to school fundraising is going through a major change and we plan to capitalize on internet-based innovations for the benefit of the Parent Organizations and ultimately, for the benefit of our children."
The company is now increasing its number of PTOs across St. Louis - the current customer base includes schools from Ladue, Clayton, and the St. Louis Magnet program to name a few. The long term vision is to connect PTOs across St. Louis in order to share best practices to foster stronger communities and to save money for PTOs through group buying power. Many PTOs are signing on this summer in order to be ready with their online buzzbook environment on the first day of school this fall.
Please contact ppl Devices' CEO, Dave Reini, at dreini@ppldevices.com / 636-293-5127 if you know a parent community organization that would be interested in seeing a demonstration of the product.
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Sponsor Spotlight
The Missouri Technology Corporation ("MTC") is ITEN's original sponsor, and ITEN would not exist without the MTC's generous grant to Innovate St. Louis that gave rise to our organization. We are pleased to present this overview of ITEN's founding sponsor, the MTC:The MTC was created by the Missouri General Assembly in 1994 and is charged by law with leading Missouri's technology-based economic development programs. It is governed by a board of directors appointed by Missouri's Governor, Speaker of the House, and President Pro Tem of the Senate, and includes the President of the University of Missouri system and the Director of the Department of Economic Development. MTC promotes entrepreneurship, fosters the growth of new high-tech companies, and leads efforts to expand Missouri's high-tech clusters in areas such as plant science, animal health, information technology, applied engineering, and materials science. These clusters are often linked to Missouri's historic strength and current leading position in agriculture. The Missouri Technology Corporation continues to build momentum for Missouri's innovation economy and providing critical funding to Missouri entrepreneurs that are creating new companies that are putting Missourians back to work. The MTC was an original funding partner in the establishment of the IT Entrepreneur Network ("ITEN"). ITEN is one of a number of initiatives that MTC has undertaken to grow Missouri's high-tech clusters and provide support for Missouri entrepreneurs.
MTC is working at a very rapid pace on a number of important fronts to help high-tech entrepreneurs realize their potential to Missouri.
"The last 12 months have been a extremely productive for our small staff. We have significantly increased our outreach and education efforts to spread the message about the importance of entrepreneurism as an economic development strategy, alongside business recruitment and expansion, to a vast audience, including state policymakers, strategic partners, local communities and many other important stakeholders," said Jason Hall, Executive Director of MTC. "At the same time, we have continued to aggressively lead efforts that are creating high-paying, high-tech jobs in projects across the state from Joplin to Mexico, to New Madrid County and St. Louis. It is clear that entrepreneurship and the high-tech economy is a winning strategy in all corners of Missouri."MTC also has an eye on the future. "We remain optimistic about the prospects of the General Assembly passing Governor Nixon's Missouri Science and Innovation Reinvestment Act ("MOSIRA") legislation next year and the transformative benefits it will have on our economy and the resources it will bring to the entrepreneurs of Missouri. MOSIRA will provide a stable, performance-based funding mechanism that will allow Missouri to compete with other states that are successfully pursuing similar entrepreneur-focused initiatives, such as Ohio, Kansas and Texas," Hall said.The Missouri General Assembly did not pass the MOSIRA legislation during the 2010 legislative session. However, the initiative is a priority of Governor Nixon, has bipartisan support in the General Assembly, and has a statewide coalition of supporters that plan to pursue it again during the 2011 legislative session.Further information about MTC is available at www.missouritechnology.com.
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Mentor Spotlight
Gary Smith is a very active mentor in ITEN. He is available to start-ups via Mentor Match on our website, he is a member of the ITEN Mock Angel group and Gary also serves on the screening board for our C-Level program. He enjoys mentoring, and those companies who have been fortunate enough to work with him have benefitted greatly.
Gary is an experienced C-Level executive with over 40 years of sales and operational leadership experience. These experiences were in Fortune 500 companies like IBM, MCI, EDS and Amdocs as well as smaller companies such as Aspect Communications and start-ups Intersect Software and Exchange Solutions Inc. His roles included Chief Sales Officer, COO, EVP of sales, Division President and Branch Manager. Gary's core competences include global sales leadership, extensive organizational, planning and execution skills and overall business knowledge.
Gary formed and operates Smith & Associates, LLC a Business Development consulting firm focused on sales and business growth strategies, plans and programs.
As Chief Sales Officer of EDS, Gary grew sales from $12B to $28B in just over one year marked by 12 mega deals averaging over $1B each. Prior to that, as Vice President of the Communications Industry Group, he led the successful pursuit and capture of a $3B IT outsourcing contract with BellSouth.
While at Amdocs, Gary was President of Global Managed Services and President of the North American Division where he led both the overall global growth in outsourcing services and the rollout and sales of new products in North America. Outsourcing revenues grew from 15% to nearly 50% of revenues. He was also the first division president to achieve CMMi Level 3 certification improving the quality of delivery to North American customers.
Gary is a 1967 graduate of Southeast Missouri State University with a marketing degree and is an Executive in Residence there. He also a Fellow at the University of Missouri - St. Louis and is a member of their Executive Leadership Consortium. He has lectured at Washington University, Maryland University, James Madison, University of Missouri - St. Louis, Southeast Missouri State University and the University of North Carolina. He is a mentor in both the VMS and ITEN entrepreneurial programs of Innovate St. Louis. Gary and his wife Jan live in St. Louis and have two children and five grandchildren.
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ITEN Presents The 'Killer Model'
Information Technology entrepreneurs are skilled and passionate at expressing their company's value propositions, benefits to their customers, enabling technologies, market opportunity, etc. They tend to struggle however when it comes to expressing their business model in financial and economic terms that candidate investors (angels to VC's to acquirers) desire to understand when they assess investment opportunities among many quality alternatives. Consequently, entrepreneurs need to hone their skills when it comes to expressing important dimensions of their business model or risk being crowded-out on funding opportunities to entrepreneurs who can.
Come join us for a free presentation, on Wednesday September 22nd, when we will address many key issues in understandable English with lots of relevant examples for tech entrepreneurs that are immediately useable for your situation. The result will be that you will leave with a clear understanding of the specific economic/financial models and investor friendly language as you express your business model and supporting analysis/metrics. Ted Feierstein, Senior Vice President with First Analysis Security in Chicago will be our guest presenter.
More information as it becomes available at www.itenstl.org/events .
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Geek/Programmer/Coder Corner
Strange Loop is an annual conference for software developers that takes place in St. Louis, founded and run by local developer Alex Miller. The 2010 conference will be held October 14-15th, returning to the University City Loop area. Keynote sessions will take place at the Pageant and additional rooms will be used at the Moonrise Hotel and the Regional Arts Commission.
In 2009 (the inaugural year), Strange Loop sold out with 320 attendees. In 2010, the larger venues will allow the conference to grow to 500 or more attendees. The schedule has been posted and features an impressive array of speakers from companies like Oracle, Google, Yahoo, IBM, eBay, Flickr, Twitter and other local experts. Major tracks for the conference cover emerging programming languages, alternative database technologies, scaling applications on the web, mobile applications, and more. Strange Loop is quickly becoming a top destination conference for a national audience of elite developers, and is a not-to-be-missed event for anyone interested in exploring the edges of today's programming.
Registration for Strange Loop is now open. The early bird rate is just $150 and is valid only till August 6th. After that the price will be $190 until October when the late registration price goes up to $250. Groups of 5 or more from a company will receive a discount of 10%. ITEN companies and mentors are also being offered a 10% discount, so make sure you specify your ITEN affiliation on your registration. For more information about Strange Loop and to register, go to http://strangeloop2010.com.
Code Retreat to be held on September 18
Code Retreat is an event for software developers interested in improving their craft by collaborating with other developers while practicing programming techniques in a fun and focused activity. This is an all-day event during which programmers will form groups of two or more to solve a novel problem: Conway's Game of Life.
See http://coderetreatstl.eventbrite.com/ for more information and to register.
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