Event
ITEN 2nd Thursday - December 8th
Stop by Vino Nadoz (new location) just a few doors south of Maggiano's in the Boulevard across Brentwood from the Galleria. It's a happy two hours with all of your friends from ITEN and beyond. December Special Guest: Rob Wolf, founder of E-Sponder. E-Sponder is an emergency response SaaS company that Rob successfully sold earlier this year. Come hear his experiences in starting, running and successfully exiting from his venture. More Information. |
NO TALK, ALL ACTION
Launch a Startup in 54 Hours
Startup Weekend is coming to St. Louis. Keep your calendar open from Friday evening, January 27, to Sunday, January 29.
Startup Weekend is a 54-hour event where developers, designers, marketers, product managers and startup enthusiasts come together to share ideas, form teams, buid products, and launch startups!
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 Tech Entrepreneurship Group at Washington University Gets Connected Washington University Tech Entrepreneurs Bring Co-Working and Networking to New Campus Space
October 26, 2011, 2011 - St. Louis, MO - An undergraduate student organization at Washington University in St. Louis, WUTE - Wash U Tech Entrepreneurs - is making strides in undergraduate co-working and networking. Working with a new space on the third floor of the Danforth University Center on Washington University's campus, WUTE now has their own lounge that functions as a co-working space for coders and programmers of all backgrounds and educational levels. The lounge also serves as their meeting space for all their exciting new events this year. Aside from publicized meetings, though, students can be found doing serious programming work in the WUTE lounge. With monitors and a whiteboard, the brainstorming essentials are there, and students are encouraged to go in there and code together. WUTE is striving this year to bring quality networking opportunities to Washington University undergrads. They actively look for speakers for their weekly meetings on Tuesday nights, and they hope that all WUTE members and attendees learn something new about today's tech entrepreneurial scene from each speaker. Additionally, WUTE members will often follow up with these speakers to create additional networking opportunities, specifically by attending St. Louis networking events associated with the speakers or by staying in touch via WUTE's quickly growing LinkedIn group. Recent speakers have included Jim McKelvey, the co-founder of Square (iPhone credit card reader), and Director of St. Louis' own IT Entrepreneur Network, Jim Brasunas. For more information, contact Adam Cohen, adam@adcocreate.com, (949) 547-3393. | |
The Center for the Application of Information Technology (CAIT)
The Center for the Application of Information Technology (CAIT) at Washington University's School of Engineering and Applied Science is proud to support the local IT startup community. As a part of its commitment to the success of the community, CAIT is offering a 50% off or 3-for-1 registration discount to local startups. This discount applies until May 31, 2012.
Course subjects include Ruby on Rails, Android Development, Project Management and much more. Courses are offered in both daytime and evening formats. Please view the full course list.
If you are a client of one of these programs, Click here to register for the discount code to continue your journey to build something GIGANTIC!
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A Framework for Discussing Ecosystems
-Executive Summary
By Ken Harrington
Managing Director
Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies Washington University in
St.Louis Campus Box 1133 One Brookings Drive St. Louis, MO 63130
- Studying a region's current and past strengths is a common practice that helps leaders and economic development organizations define Industry Clusters. Clusters are important because their intellectual and physical assets can provide a foundation for future innovation and economic growth. However, that future is highly dependent upon the energy and vibrancy of a region's Innovation Ecosystems within its Industry Clusters. These Innovation Ecosystems need to be intentionally designed to encourage entrepreneurial activity across four phases of innovation.
- At the start, a region's Innovation Ecosystems contain many stakeholders that have yet to form relationships or innovation plans. For example, entrepreneurs, university researchers, large company employees, small company leaders, young people, economic development organizations and many others may not know of one another's motivations or assets. Intersecting people and uncovering their common interests stimulates new ideas and collaborative relationships that spur innovation. FULL ARTICLE
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 Mentor Spotlight
Jeff Lash
I've been involved with ITEN since earlier in 2011, though several friends and colleagues have been telling me about it for several years. I am a mentor for a few companies, and also lead one of the Business Model Validation teams.
My experience and expertise is in product development, product development, and user experience design, and those are the areas I tend to focus on with ITEN companies. Though most of my professional experience has been with large organizations, I have spent some experience working in small companies and doing work on the site with entrepreneurs, so I try to use my experiences to help founders develop successful products.
In my "day job" in product management at Elsevier, I work with product managers who are developing new products and enhancements to existing products, helping them refine their business cases and make sure that we are designing products which will meet our market needs. When working with ITEN companies, the process is very similar. Often there will be a company which has an interesting technology yet is not sure how to best leverage it; or, there will be a company with a great idea for a product which the market wants, but they're not sure how to get it developed. I spend most of my time in the intersection of those two aspects of product development. It's great to be able to work with founders and teams to help give them specific guidance on areas where they need help.
The best advice I have for entrepreneurs is to really understand the market, their current and potential customers, and to have a clear picture of what problems they are solving. There's a common saying that no one wants to buy a drill, they just want a hole. Many times product developers get so excited about the features of the drill that they lose sight of the end goal. Too often founders focus on the specific technology or a solution they've designed -- but they haven't done the work to validate that the solution actually solves a problem (and, for that matter, a problem for which someone will pay to have solved). The companies which are really successful are the ones who have found a pervasive problem which impacts a large enough group of potential customers who are willing to pay for that problem to be solved -- and the company has an easy-to-use solution.
On the side, I also blog regularly at How To Be a Good Product Manager and am active on twitter (@jefflash). Locally, I also help coordinate the St. Louis Product Management Group, which is an informal group designed to foster a local community of those working in product management and product management. If you're interested in product management, please join us!
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Company Spotlight
RollSale
RollSale is a technology designed to disrupt the traditionalused car supply chain, where middlemen like auto auctions and wholesalers have traditionally added many hundreds of dollars in per-unit cost that is generally borne by consumers in the form ofdepreciation, and also by retail dealers whom often lose much of their marginwhen they have to atone for an unsatisfactory trade-in value in order to make adeal. At RollSale, we have created asocial network of sorts, exclusively for car dealers, where they communicatesolely in terms of available inventory. This network allows dealers to take ownership of a new used car supply chain, free from the costs and fees of auctions and middlemen, driven by mobile technology that allows a dealer to broadcast details about a prospective trade or aged unit in under two minutes, and receive bids back from the local and nationwide dealers that are looking for it just moments later.
RollSale's revenue is based upon a hybrid subscription and pay-per-use pricing model, but the product is free for use by dealers participating in the December beta test. After their nationwide rollout in February, dealers will be able to use RollSale for free for unlimited use for 60 days to try it out.
RollSale's creator, President and CTO Mike Nichols, was an early automotive internet retailing pioneer in the 90's, and recently was an executive for LA startup and 2009 TechCrunch 50 finalist Mota Motors; there he designed and deployed partner products for companies like eBay Motors and AutoTrader.com. CEO Brian Moore is a former IBM'er that has helped companies like General Motors and MorganStanley through innovation and transition.
For more details, visit www.rollsale.com
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T-Rex Open House Reception Celebrates Success
On the evening of November 16, resident ventures and others pitched their deals to a standing room only crowd. They came to celebrate the opening of the new IT start-up space downtown on the 12th floor of 611 Olive Street. Photos from the reception can be found at: http://www.smugmug.com/downloads/597d60f87f566852b425/289103 (46.87 MB) and will be available until Dec. 2.
Open since September 1, T-Rex is already bursting at the seams with ventures from Capital Innovators and ITEN-affiliated companies snatching up the low-cost office space. A number of the resident ventures will be expanding in 2012, and with others wishing to move in, it looks like T-Rex is going to be expanding sooner than anticipated! Congratulations to the founding organizations for taking a chance on the future of St. Louis and the future of an exciting downtown: the St. Louis Development Corporation, the RCGA, and the Downtown St. Louis Partnership. Pat Bannister, Jay DeLong and Kevin Farrell, respectively, were the inspirational leaders in this effort for their organizations.
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