MIT Enterprise Forum Fast Pitch event
I attended the Fast Pitch event that the MIT Enterprise Forum of Washington, D.C. held last night at the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association Conference Center. Straight from the MITEF DC web site…
Our Fast Pitch Event is an exciting opportunity to hear several companies present their businesses to receive questions and feedback from the audience and our expert panel. The focus is on helping the presenting companies to enhance their pitches and business focus by driving a market-based perspective. This is a dynamic and interactive event with significant time for audience Q&A.
Here’s how the Fast Pitch format worked. There were four companies represented last night. Each presenter had five minutes to talk about his company. They weren’t allowed to use PowerPoint (yeah!). After their five-minute presentation was over, the three panelists were allowed to ask follow-up questions. After the panelists had an opportunity to ask their questions, the audience was given an opportunity to ask questions. After taking a few questions from the audience, each of the panelists was given an opportunity to provide feedback to the presenter on his delivery, the content of his presentations, questions he should be thinking about, business strategy, etc.
I’m always amazed at how many ways different people and companies make money. The four companies that presented last night were:
iConecto‘s tagline is “What’s Good For the Body is Good For the Brain”. They partner with “leading health enterprises, government and Fortune 1000 companies to design, develop and deploy Health eGames, social media, immersive learning simulations (ILS) and virtual worlds for productivity, enhanced customer relationships, performance and profits.” According to the presenter, Julia Loughran, whose title is listed as “Serious Games Expert”, the idea for the company came to the founder, Douglas Goldstein, when he noticed his son working up a serious sweat when playing Wii Boxing. Laura mentioned that the size of the Health eGames marketplace was about $6.7 Billion dollars. That does seem to a bit to me, but certainly casual games is a growing industry.
The second presenter was Skip West of MAXSA Innovations. He was my favorite presenter of the evening. His company develops consumer products in a couple of different areas, including automotive accessories, lighting and safety products. Skip had a suitcase full of different gadgets that his company brings to market. He was very enthusiastic about his company’s products. Unlike the other presenters, he wasn’t looking for money or investors. Instead, he was looking for advice on what direction to take the company in. Should he continue to stay on the current path that he’s on or should he take some additional risks and look for large distribution channels, such as Target or WalMart, to sell his product?
The third presenter was SLG Mobile, a company that specializes in software for the BlackBerry and Android (soon). Their claim to fame is BeamReader, a native PDF reader for the BlackBerry. The presenter said that SLG had over 100,000 customers (individuals and enterprise users) for their PDF reading software. I didn’t quite understand his point about why there aren’t any Java-based PDF readers in the marketplace, but, to his credit, SLG Mobile does have a product out there that seems to solve a problem in the marketplace. The common theme throughout many of the comments was what happens if Research in Motion or Adobe decide to develop their own PDF reader for the BlackBerry platform. While he had a pat answer to the question, I think many in the audience remained unconvinced.
The fourth and final presenter was Casey Golden from Small Act Network. Small Act Network helps non-profits use social media to raise money. Casey was very passionate about his desire to help non-profits. It sounded like most of their current revenue stream comes from consulting and training services to non-profits. He mentioned that Small Act was looking for funding to help develop a dashboard which would allow non-profits to manage their info on various social media platforms in a single application. Neat idea.
Kudos to the presenters and the panelists. I really enjoyed learning what each of these four companies did. It’s good to see people, even in these dismal economic times, take risks and start new businesses.
