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 Globalizing Silicon Valley - See the Worldwide Schedule - Lead a Local Chapter

 

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Fall 2011 Washington DC
Applications: Oct 30, '11
Sessions: Nov 09, '11 - Feb 29, '12

Vision

Our vision is to Globalize Silicon Valley by creating and fostering local startup ecosystems in promising markets across the globe. We aim to help launch 1,000 technology companies per year in over 30 cities worldwide.

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Sponsors

 

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With 1,100 lawyers, 150 practice areas and a global presence, Holland & Knight offers the experience and resources to handle your most difficult legal challenges. But we are dedicated to going beyond, to being your counselors in the fullest sense of the word. That involves more than knowing the law. It's understanding your business and your needs almost as well as you do. It's thinking about how we can serve your long-term interests, and not just the problem of the moment. It's measuring our value by your standards.

There's a reason Holland & Knight perennially ranks among the top law firms for client service. The answer lies in the relationships we build. Get connected to experience the difference.

Adam J. August practices in the areas of mergers and acquisitions, securities offerings, commercial transactions, general corporate law and business bankruptcy. He counsels public and private company clients in a variety of industries including information technology, government contracting, software and telecommunications. He has been actively involved in merger, acquisition and disposition transactions with a combined value of over $1 billion, and financing/investment transactions and securities offerings worth over $600 million.

You can contact Adam J.August at 1600 Tysons Boulevard, Suite 700 | McLean, Virginia 22102

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We are proud to announce Harrisburg University of Science and Technology as one of our corporate sponsors for the fall semester. The only science and technology-focused comprehensive university located between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Harrisburg University’s academic mission is to create, to attract and to expand economic opportunities in the region. Connect with HU via email at CONNECT@HarrisburgU.edu to learn more about HU and its entrepreneurship and mentoring programs, too.

Events

Join us for a free event to meet local startup founders, and learn about FI.

• Seattle Startup Ideation Bootcamp (Feb. 21, 6:30 - 8:30 PM)
• Guadalajara Startup Ideation Bootcamp (Feb. 22, 6 - 9 PM)
• Redmond Startup Ideation Bootcamp (Feb. 23,  6:30 - 8:30 PM)
• Denver Startup Ideation Bootcamp (Feb. 27, 6 - 9 PM)
• St. Louis Startup Ideation Bootcamp (Feb. 29, 6 - 9 PM)  
• Los Angeles Startup Ideation Bootcamp  (March 6, 6 - 9:30 PM)  
• Budapest Startup Pitch Bootcamp (March 8, 5:30 - 7:30 PM)  
• Lisbon Startup Ideation Bootcamp (March 15, 6 - 9 PM)  

See all of our upcoming events here. 

Twitter (@founding)

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Ondango

Ecommerce / Retail in Berlin

Ondango is developing a shopping system that works completely within Facebook, to help people and small shops sell products through their Fan Pages as well as through Ondango's own chain of local virtual malls, by leveraging Facebook's viral features. e-Commerce within Facebook is a $3B opportunity now and will grow to $8B in 2014. The unique mix of social and local e-commerce, the end-to-end purchase process within Facebook and a reward system for buyers (using Facebook Credits) constitute Ondango’s USPs.

rentcycle

Ecommerce / Retail in Bay Area

Rentcycle is the OpenTable for the rental industry. This company serves the $85B rental industry, focusing first on the $38B tool and equipment rental sector then expanding into other rental categories. Consumers can search, compare and book rentable items while businesses can track inventory, manage reservations and increase online distribution.

udemy

Education in Bay Area

Udemy enables anyone to teach and learn online. On Udemy, instructor can create online courses via videos, presentations and live virtual classroom sessions. Currently, online education is a $52 billion industry that is dominated by online universities and enterprise education companies. Udemy is unique because it provides teachers with a full set of tools to create a full-featured online course, including the ability to do live and recorded courses, and pull content from other UGC sites such as YouTube, SlideShare and Scribd.

Cake Health

Internet / B2C in Bay Area

Cake Health is the best free way to save on your healthcare costs online. Healthcare has always been extremely paper intensive, from the way we select policy coverage, to getting doctors bills and insurance claims. Who has the time or the understanding to manage this effectively? Yet, with the cost of healthcare more than doubling for the average family in the last 9 years, and 80% of medical bills containing errors, it's critical to take control of these costs. Your plan status is updated so you always know what services are covered, claims are automatically categorized, out-of-pocket costs tracked, and alerts notify you for possible overcharges. You also receive custom recommendations for ways you could be saving money.

Breezy

Mobile / Wireless in Bay Area

Breezy enables users to print or fax securely from any device to any printer or fax machine. Mobile printing is an exploding market, intersecting a category (productivity apps) grossing >$208MM annually with annual growth of 62%. Gartner predicts that over 90% of the global Fortune 1000 will employ a cloud-based mobile print solution by 2014. Breezy is the most secure mobile print product on the market. We support all printers and all major mobile platforms, our RESTful API and set of mobile SDKs make it easy for any developer to add print support to their apps using our infrastructure, and our growing, global partner network allows printing in thousands of locations worldwide.

I-DISPO

Internet / B2C in Paris

I-DISPO allows businesses to share their availabilities and accept automatic booking from their users. I-DISPO allows businesses to share their availabilities and accept automatic booking from their users. Our company simplifies the communication networks we use today, replacing them with an open and unifying platform that will facilitate communication of any kind. Developers will be able to build applications on our platform utilizing our open data.

Identifii

in Singapore

Identifii is a web-service that provides Gen Y the ability to learn about their personality preferences and leverage their social network connections to make better career decisions. Our primary target market are the 42.3m Facebook users between the ages of 18 - 32 primarily in the Asia Pacific region. We will target, in particular, employers in the media & technology space which are heavy recruiters of this cohort of workers. Our IP is an online engine that first determines an experience score, a social media score and a personality type for every job seeker. These metrics are then used by our proprietary algorithm that matches job seeker to prospective job.

2RedBeans

in Bay Area

2RedBeans is a dating website for Chinese singles. The online dating industry reached $2 billion in 2011 for the US alone In the current Chinese online dating market, 3 problems exist: lack of appropriate first date locations, daters lack social skills to create a deep connection, and many are too reserved to even initiate interaction. 2RedBeans has found the solution to these problems. Our algorithm enables faster engagement between users leading to a higher success rate among daters.

Opportunity Green

Social Networking / Community in Los Angeles

Opportunity Green is the leading, global professional membership organization for progressive companies and high-level professionals offering green products and services. Our market is the $15 Billion Professional Membership Association Market, and the $11 Billion Event Industry. We have more authenticity, a better brand and credibility, and will use web applications to scale nationally

Vinogusto

Digital Media / Content in Brussels

Vinogusto.com locates and shares wine recommendations to help wine consumers to find the right wine for any occasion. Over 33 billion bottles of wine are drunk every year, which represents a market of over 200$ billion. Vinogusto.com has developped the necessary tools and content to provide wine recommendations based on the consumer's location; and makes wine recommendations fun and easy to share thanks to the "drink in" concept.

CouplesSpark

Social Networking / Community in Washington DC

CoupleSpark.com is a free website that helps anyone in a relationship settle conflicts/arguments by providing a neutral platform where each mate can present their side and other couples vote or comment on who is right. There are over 40MM active individuals on social networks in the US that are in a relationship, whether married, engaged or dating. We provide a very easy and fair platform that allows our diverse community of couples vote and give advice to the couple in conflict. We also provide integration to social networks, so couples can receive feedback from non-registered facebook or twitter users.

DRESS ME

Internet / B2C in Paris

(EN COURS DE MODIFICATION) Notre société - Dress-Me - est un espace communautaire de conseil en habillement, permettant aux jeunes femmes citadines de gérer leur dressing et de créer leurs looks grâce à des recommandations d'utilisateurs , d'experts et de partenaires du prêt à porter . Le marché de la mode européen et américain dépasse les 600 milliards d'Euros, avec près de 9% en e-commerce! Dress-Me pense accroître ce pourcentage de 2%, soit viser un marché de 12 millards d'Euros. Ohmymode a développé un outil de "mix and match" de vetements venus de catalogues de marques de prêt à porter. Polyvore et Closet Couture permettent même d'y adjoindre des vêtements de sa propre penderie.Dress-Me va plus loin en analysant le contenu du dressing des utilisateurs et en leur proposant,via la communauté ou notre espace conseil, des pièces adaptées à leur besoins.

Spinnakr

Software / B2B in Washington DC

Nexercise

Mobile / Wireless in Washington DC

Nexercise is a free mobile game, where users can win virtual medals, discounts, and free merchandise for being physically active. Last year in the US $127B spent on healthy foods, products, and services. Nexercise has developed a mobile game based on behavioral psychology to make exercise fun and instantly rewarding, versus competitors who provide tools that focus on tracking and measuring.

PetHub, Inc.

Internet / B2C in Seattle

We're solving the problem that microchips in pets are failing to solve: avoiding the killing of millions of lost pets each year. 6-8MM animals enter shelters each year with 1% of cats and 12% of dogs returning back to their original homes. Of those that don't find their way back home, 50% are euthanized. Microchips are considered the solution but only 3% of animals are chipped with 58% of those animals having out-of-date information. PetHub keeps pets from entering shelters in the first place by leveraging smartphone users (40% of us have them) and QR codes on pet ID tags that link to an animal's profile. (see also: http://PetHub.tv) $54B industry with an addressable market for us of $5B. 172MM pets in the U.S., $150MM in pet ID tag sales annually, $600MM by one microchip manufacturer (Avid). Freemium model storing pet data with upgrades to premium subscriptions offering notifications when a tag is scanned as well as referrals to emergency pet insurance in our higher level subscriptions (topping out at $4.95/month).

CauseVox

Software / B2B in Washington DC

We help non-profits get the funding they need for their cause. Our customizable platform makes launching crowd-based fundraising campaigns fast and easy. Through CauseVox, non-profit supporters are turned into fundraisers. Over $300 billion a year is donated to non-profits as individual contributions. Our segment, small and medium non-profits, has an a market size of $26 billion. Annually, our addressable market size is $2.6 billion. We provide non-profits with online fundraising campaign tools at a fraction of competitor costs while also providing a platform that is stress-free to use, beautifully designed, and fully customizable.

CipherPoint Software, Inc.

Security in Denver

CipherPoint secures information in enterprise collaboration platforms. Our market is $1B created by the intersection of the Data Security and Enterprise Content Management markets. Our first segment is SharePoint; 100M licenses to 64K organizations. Our software protects information from IT staff without burdening end-users with desktop software or assuming the responsibility to make security and compliance decisions.

CloudCanvas

Digital Media / Content in San Diego

CloudCanvas provides a robust set of creative tools in the web browser which empower both professional and amateur creators to easily make their own digital media. Worldwide, at least 50 million users have installed desktop graphics applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and many others. CloudCanvas attracts these creative users with a feature rich product combined with online conveniences, forward thinking technology and attractive pricing. CloudCanvas' powerful and easy to use tools allow digital artists to be creative anytime from just about anywhere including on iPhone and iPad and the upcoming Google ChromeOS.

Ecobold

Ecommerce / Retail in Bay Area

Ecobold is the "etsy" for natural and non-toxic household products. The Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability (LOHAS) is a $209B industry and is expected to be as high as $1T in the next 5 years. Ecobold is a one-stop platform that provides a natural and sustainable shopping experience in a very affordable and convenient manner. Unlike major marketplaces such as amazon or ebay, we are targeting the green industry and provide relevant information through video reviews to help consumers make smart purchasing decisions.

FatPencil Corporation

Internet / B2C in San Diego

FatPencil delivers web-based and mobile experience aggregation, first to aviators, then expanding to other professionals in the transportation industry. FatPencil's launch offering - flight logging for pilots, aircrew, and owners targets a market of 10 million professional aviators in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand. The aviation industry in these nations is over $711 billion. After successfully launching a compelling product for aviators, FatPencil will branch into the rail and maritime shipping industries. FatPencil is unique because it is the only modern, web-based and mobile product for transportation professionals to log their experience.

FeedBrewer, Inc.

Mobile / Wireless in Denver

BookBrewer makes it easy for anyone to self-publish a book electronically or in print, then sell it through major retailers like Amazon and Apple, or publish to branded iPad apps. The number of books self-published each year has grown from 58,000 in 2007 to nearly 2 million per year in 2011, and eBook sales are projected to generate $6B in the U.S. by the end of 2012. Our tools let authors focus what they know best -- their content -- by simply cutting and pasting chapters into forms. We then automatically generate their eBooks, Print on Demand books and ordering URLs, and send their eBooks to retailers so they can be purchased from the Kindle, Nook and iPad.

GatherGreen

Ecommerce / Retail in Los Angeles

Half of American households want to go green but believe it's too expensive, don't know who to trust, and don't find it convenient. Gather Green offers eco conscious consumers irresistible local daily deals, on healthy and sustainable products and services. 41M or 34% American households are passionate about green. Overall 50% of American households have positive feelings towards green. The current consumer market for green is a $250B dollar market growing at 9% annually. The majority of daily deal social commerce sites are undifferentiated and mass market. We are going after the green segment that by its nature is evangelical and motivated to endorse GatherGreen.

Grub Crawl

Internet / B2C in Bay Area

Grub Crawl is a fun, social dining experience that takes groups of people to three restaurants in one event; our Grub Crawl event platform will empower users to easily discover, create, and share their own Grub Crawls events. Grub Crawl is within the “Food” segment of the “Events” market, which is approximately sized at $24B. We focus on food events; but unlike other event creation platforms, we provide a database of partnering merchants for hosts to easily access and coordinate their events with these venues.

Hand Things Down

Mobile / Wireless in Seattle

Hand Things Down is creating mobile and web software to help busy moms use their social network to share the precious things their kids have outgrown. Our launch target are 22 million working moms in the United States who control 80% of the household spending. We believe we can capture 5% of that spending by connecting parents over their second degree social network. Unlike our competitors, we are launching with a mobile app to make it easy to share without being tethered to the computer. Our surveys revealed one of the reasons they don't use our competitors is because it's too much work to get photos from the camera to the computer.

In The Door, Inc.

Internet / B2C in Bay Area

InTheDoor.com shows you job openings at your friends' companies. Once you log in with Facebook, we show you at a glance all the companies that are hiring in your network. We use career info available on Facebook and a database of four million jobs to produce your social job map. Our intuitive interface helps you discover career possibilities in an easy to use format. Unlike other apps, we do not automatically post anything to the News Feed or your Facebook wall, so you can search privately.

JetJaw

Mobile / Wireless in Denver

JetJaw is a web-based software service that helps brick-and-mortar businesses proactively protect and instantly promote their brand. We are the aspirin for review sites like Yelp! and TripAdvisor. U.S. small and medium businesses spent $1.1B on social media marketing in 2011, and this will grow to $7.8B by 2016. Forrester Research predicts social media marketing spend will realize a 34% CAGR over the next 5 years. JetJaw is unique in these 5 ways: addresses issues BEFORE negativity goes viral, gets happy customers promoting through social media and review sites, gets quantifiable customer insights, is focused on B2B rather than consumers, and works on any device.

KlickFu Inc.

Digital Media / Content in Bay Area

KlickFu is creating a platform to enable users to play instant games and apps on the computer desktop... in other words, KlickFu is integrating casual games directly into the operating system experience to give users a fun or useful way to fill the odd gaps of time throughout the day. KlickFu's primary market is the casual gaming market, which is estimated to be $2.8B, growing 20% per year. KlickFu is the only product that enables an instant "one-click" gaming or app experience integrated directly into the operating system functionality.

KwiqApps Inc.

Mobile / Wireless in Bay Area

KwiqApps Inc., is developing applications and games to create an engaging and rewarding learning experience on mobile devices for today's learners. The company's mission is to revolutionize e-learning one App at a time. There were 55 million students enrolled in both public and private elementary and secondary schools in the US. Mobile devices is the fastest growing platform for e-learning. We are focused on developing a portfolio of quality apps and games targeting today's k-12 learners. We distribute our Apps primarily through various App Stores and cross-promotion within our own Apps.

LetsLunch

Events in Bay Area

We match you with people you should know... over lunch. 100 million people who go out to lunch everyday. We compute your reputation from social media and feedback you get from people you meet for lunches.

Memetales

in Seattle

Memetales is an online marketplace for children's picture books, experiences and merchandize. Eric Carle, a children's picture book author, brings in $50 million every year, not from the book The Hungry Caterpillar , but from the empire of merchandize around the book. Yet, children's book publishers today struggle to market their books in a declining publishing industry.The Memetales marketing platform was created to help these struggling publishers with tools to market their books effectively and secondly, give them access to a creative community that will help them monetize by creating media and merchandize related to the book. While the declining picture book industry is at 831 million USD, the toy and media industries are growing and stand at 69 and 397 billion dollars each. Our target creative community is the 42 million women (in the US alone) who are actively creating and consuming content and products online. By bringing together the creative community and the publishers, Memetales will help publishers exploit the now hidden value in their properties. Memetales does exactly what Disney has been doing for years but we will be the first ones to bring a Disney like marketing capability to the masses. Unlike Amazon, we are a niche marketplace supported by a very strong creative community.

micromobs

Internet / B2C in Bay Area

Micromobs is a realtime group micromessaging platform focused on subject matter and contextual relevance. The US online advertising market is ~$30 billion with ~$3 billion coming from social networking advertising. Micromobs allows independent non enterprise groups to share and communicate while giving users an inherent context to help them discover content in their real time discussions.

oneGoodLove.com

Social Networking / Community in Los Angeles

OneGoodLove is an online dating site created specifically for the relationship-minded gay and lesbian community. In the US alone, there are over 16MM single gays and lesbians. The US online dating revenue from the gay market is estimated to be $70MM. The US gay community is estimated to have a buying power of $835B and therefore offers up many additional revenue opportunities.. Our proprietary Personality Profile test was crafted by a gay PhD specifically for the gay and lesbian market based upon research on real-life successful gay long-term relationships.

Puzzazz, Inc.

Games / Entertainment in Seattle

Puzzazz is building the future of puzzles for the digital world. We currently sell ActiveBook puzzle collections (puzzle eBooks) for the Amazon Kindle and are expanding to additional platforms in 2011. We are part of both the $3B casual games market and the $2B mobile games market. Puzzles are a significant component that will continue to grow. We are launching a LOT of new titles in 2011. We are unique because we are experts at puzzles, technology, and building great experiences. We are focused on fun, challenging, high-quality puzzles and puzzle games that are appropriately challenging for each of our customers. This greatly increases loyalty and make them feel smart (because they are!).

Retailigence Corp.

Ecommerce / Retail in Bay Area

The Retailigence platform provides local retail product availability and price to 3rd party mobile phone applications. US consumers spend $1T /year at local retail stores, but the local availability of these products is invisible to consumers. RetaiLigence makes it easy for retailers to ensure visibility to mobile consumers, and easy for mobile applications to use local retail data.

Say Mmm

Internet / B2C in Bay Area

Say Mmm helps people save time and money with a set of web applications for planning meals, creating grocery lists, and organizing ideas and recipes from anywhere all in one place. In the US, over 120 million consumer units spent an average of $6,372, or 13% of expenditures, on food in 2009. Say Mmm differentiates itself by making the best meal planning and shopping list tools.

Screenius

Digital Media / Content in Bay Area

Screenius takes the friction out of video discovery by removing the need for search and making the whole experience personalized, social, fun and easy. Our immediate addressable market is with the 200 million owners of iOS devices in the world; our launch target audience is the intersection of this with aficionados of the Steampunk genre, a small but easily identifiable and marketed-to subset. Estimated ARPU is $1/month. Our differentiation is in (a) user experience -- more like a social game than a search engine; (b) our scalable personalization architecture -- privacy protected with social recommendations; and (c) business model – supported by the sale of virtual goods.

ShareSquare

Mobile / Wireless in Los Angeles

ShareSquare is a platform for crowd-sourced street teams to support the bands & brands they love, with real-time analytics and performance-based rewards. Domestic smartphone penetration eclipses feature phones in 2011, and the $8B OOH advertising industry currently has few modes of immediate engagement and NO actionable return-on-investment metrics. Using the self-serve CMS, artists & promoters can enhance physical collateral with a QR code corresponding to a custom HTML5 mobile web app. This now makes the fan’s point of passion actionable: a concert poster, sticker, album cover, merch tag (and more) becomes a rich point of discovery. The fan can immediately experience a music video, download tracks, join mailing lists, easily connect with them on social networks, win prizes, and soon even make purchases.

Skydera Inc.

Software / B2B in Bay Area

Skydera develops a hybrid Cloud Management platform that it will license to small and medium sized enterprise companies, providing security, monitoring and analytics for public cloud infrastructure. The addressable market size in 2009 for cloud based IT spending was $17 billion dollars out of a $376 billion total IT spending globally. IT spending on cloud based services is expected to grow to $44 billion dollars by the year 2013, with growth in cloud specific IT spending outpacing the global IT spending during that period. The competitive advantage Skydera holds is the platform is a vertically integrated system, tying together security, provisioning and monitoring into a clean unified platform.

SnapShop Inc

Mobile / Wireless in Bay Area

Snapshop is an augmented reality shopping app for the iPhone. It lets you browse catalogs and take photos of your living room with the furniture magically inserted into the picture. The market for furniture sales exceeds 77B, with 4.6B purchased online. We use patent pending technology to leverage a vast amount of existing 2D images of furniture in an augmented reality experience

Zambig

Advertising in San Diego

Zambig allows users to record their own voice about sports, jokes or opinions. Through strategic partnerships with Broadcast Radio stations, with their Internet Radio arms, we create valuable promotions that encourage interaction by the user. The advertising market is $150 Billion dollars annually. Zambig charges a percentage of all advertisers that use our platform. Zambig allows large Broadcast companies like Clear Channel, ESPN & CBS Radio stations to give their internet radio arms value by adding the ability for programming, promotions and sales to create their own programming, promotions and sponsorships.

Zirtual

Outsourcing / Services in Bay Area

Zirtual connects busy people with quality, long-term virtual assistants. We plan to pioneer the virtual assistant niche within the fast growing $55 billion dollar peer-to-peer outsourcing market. Zirtual currently connects busy people with quality virtual assistants through a hands on 3 week recruitment process, which ends in presenting the customer with a virtual assistant specifically tailored to their needs.

Stiefelwunder GmbH

Ecommerce / Retail in Berlin

My company Stiefelwunder is an e-commerce shop which specializes in ladies boots which are designed and produced in Europe and available in 20 different calf sizes. So far ignored by the shoe industry 40-50% of all women globally aren't able to find a fashionable and fitting pair of boots. http://goo.gl/UGZPT The market size for Germany as launch market equals 1,5 billion EUR. Our boots are named after goddesses as they look like them and this is how we will treat employees and clients.

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