Just over a month ago, a group of individuals gathered for the first Springboard Lunch at the Scott Technology Center, to listen to two companies pitch their ideas.
The impetus behind Springboard is simple — provide a venue where by companies who are looking for funding can present their ideas to a room full of people who in one way or another could help with funding, direction, expertise, or something in between. In many ways, it exists almost as an aggregate, allowing one person to pitch to many different participating organizations all at once, rather than individually.
Additionally, it provides a forum where by the participating organizations can spark a dialogue about the deals that they’re seeing and what (if any) steps they’re taking with those deals.
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The original Springboard Lunch post sums it up nicely:
Springboard is designed to bring visibility to either existing small companies or new startups. In either case, we are trying to assemble groups that often meet with companies individually but rarely gather in the same room to evaluate deals. We feel that if better coordinated, the various groups could be more effective and efficient in assisting the companies. On the flip side, this gives the entrepreneur a one-stop shop for pitching their deal.
At the first Springboard, two companies presented:
Go Poll Go – http://www.gopollgo.com
GoPollGo has developed polling technology that offers real-time advanced geographic vote segmentation and rich data visualization to allow for thorough respondent analysis. By mining and presenting sentiment data, GoPollGo allows organizations to instantly gauge users’ aggregated thoughts.
RockDex – http://www.rockdex.com
RockDex Pro is a revolutionary web application that tracks 1000’s of music websites and collects data on any artist, such as blog posts, tweets, plays, and much more. RockDex analyzes and presents the information to you in one convenient dashboard that gives you a high level view of what is happening online with the artists that are important to you.
We’re excited to follow this new program as it continues throughout the next few months and into next year. It’s a positive step towards more transparency with regards to deal flow, and hopefully can become a highly visible program that attracts entrepreneurs from throughout the region.
That being said, for now, Springboard is closed to the public, in the interest of having the audience be filled with people who could potentially impact the deals that are presenting that month. This audience will change from month to month, depending on the people presenting. However, Silicon Prairie News will continue to provide coverage of these events, and will give you an inside look into the presenting companies and the exciting things that they’re working on.
