Dan Hoffman of Invest Nebraska Corporation poses with Jimmy Winter of RockDex following Friday’s competition.
Congrats to Jimmy Winter of RockDex for winning Invest Nebraska Corporation’s first-ever East-2-West – The Nebraska New Venture Competition! Jimmy and RockDex take home the $50,000 equity investment, which they will use to expand their server capacity.
According to Jimmy, RockDex is a web-based tool that analyzes the trends, buzz and popularity of bands online. It helps the music industry make better decisions on where they’re spending their marketing money and time, so they know that its all going to the right places.
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Congrats to RockDex and all the contestants!
Additional coverage:
- Lincoln Journal Star: Omaha man wins business plan competition
- Silicon Prairie News (pre-competition): $50,000 Investment Up for Grabs at Friday’s East-2-West New Venture Competition
The contestants:
MileStone Local Surfaces Josh Shear, Jen Carlson and Brendan Wamstad-Evans of Lincoln
MileStone is a licensing company for sustainably manufactured surfaces from local recycled materials. This company sells the right to use a patent pending process of creating surfaces for commercial and residential applications.
LeYef, LLC Luke Alexander and Andrew Curran of Lincoln
LeYef, LLC will be an internet based platform enabling every hometown in the United States to have its very own free integrative website and is a comprehensive local website designed to facilitate the free flow of information throughout a community.
HempRev Mark Pluta, John Lupien and John Carpenter of Omaha
HempRev provides innovative technological solutions that support the production of bast fiber for the global textile market for a number of economically valuable products. These include, but are not limited to: paper, specialty pulps, composites, textiles, building materials, health food, nutraceuticals, and bioenergy feedstock.
RockDex Jimmy Winter of Omaha
RockDex collects and analyzes data such as song plays, fan interactions, and online buzz about artists from several social networks and presents that information to users in a convenient dashboard. This presents a high level view of how artists are performing online as well as the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
Invoice+ Brad Coughlin of Lincoln
Invoice+ is a web-based application which seamlessly merges time tracking and invoicing, eliminating wasted time and energy spent entering data into two separate web sites. Invoice+ will also offer essential accounting tools, make creating printed invoices more customizable, and integrate powerful e-mail marketing features.
Giftance Rory Berry of Los Angeles, California
Using a proprietary algorithm, Giftance analyzes salient personality and consumption attributes to determine an optimal gift for any intended gift recipient. Users can create a profile at this web site to track personality information for multiple gift recipients, which are then used to make very accurate recommendations.
Dally Up Kenis & Carrie Byam of Rural Deuel County
Dally Up will be offering a variety of products for the horse lover including tack, home décor, clothing, jewelry and items that spark the fancy of horse enthusiasts. The company’s means of sales and distribution will be based on the premise of “relationship marketing”, utilizing a combination of direct selling techniques.
