HearPlanet was one of the top ten companies chosen to pitch at JuicePitcher. 

 Thumbtack won the grand prize in the JuicePitcher competition.

Tim Musgrove - CEO , TextDigger, Inc.

Speaking about the $30,000 Babson Innovation Challenge.

 

"We were looking for a platform that could provide various forms of documents to be uploaded to make the experience more user friendly for our contestants, judges, and our administrators. Vator.tv’s platform streamlined all contestant downloads to one location and made it easier than anticipated for our judges to be able to view entries and determine finalists from different locations across the country. Additionally, it provided a platform for contestants to submit various informational documents of their business idea such as a PowerPoint,  an excel sheet with financials, or a video presentation. From an administrative standpoint Vator.tv couldn’t have been easier to work with. They were always available and willing to guide us thru the process of initial set-up to the day the competition concluded and winners were announced. We look forward to using Vator.tv for the 2009 Babson Innovation Competition!”

 

Daniel Gay

Head of Competitions: Babson College

 

Click here to see the competition page

    

Shobeir Shobeiri

Business Relationship Manager, Plug and Play Tech Center

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 7 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Thumbtack (www.Thumbtack.com), the trusted online marketplace for local services, was awarded the Gold Medal at last night's inaugural Juice Pitcher event by an open ballot of the almost 300 investors, founders, and members of the media in attendance. Hosted by TheFunded.com (www.TheFunded.com), the resource for entrepreneurs, and Vator.tv (www.Vator.tv), the place for emerging companies to showcase and market themselves, the Juice Pitcher showcased 10 promising early-stage companies who were selected by their peers on the three-week Juice Pitcher Competition (http://vator.tv/competition/show/vatortv-and-thefundedcoms-juice-pitcher). In total, the competition attracted 132 companies and over 3,000 votes.

 Let’s say you have an idea for a startup. How do you begin the process of finding cofounders and employees, creating a corporation, handing investors, growing the company, etc.? There are lots of details about building a startyp that are usually a mystery to the newly initiated founder. Usually you have to learn this stuff on the job, making mistakes along the way.

But not anymore. Last night I saw a 45 minute presentation by Mint CEO Aaron Patzer at a startup competition event called Juice Pitcher on the Microsoft campus. The event, which is put on by TheFunded and Vator.tv, put a handful of new startups on stage to show their stuff and compete for a top prize. Between pitches, Patzer took the stage and told the story of Mint, in detail. His company just sold for $170 million to Intuit.

Patzer takes the audience (and now you) from the beginning of Mint, and gives some incredibly useful device. He talks about the early days of Mint, where he lived on $30,000/yr and hired engineers at just a little more salary by offering them significant equity. He also says that, as a rule of thumb, every engineer in a pre-revenue startup adds $500,000 in valuation. Every business guy lowers the valuation by $250,000, he half jokingly quipped. In its earliest days, Mint was burning $150,000/year, he says, for 2 founders and 1 engineer/contractor.

 Patzer also spoke about financial modeling, keeping costs low throughout the life cycle of the company, and Mint’s revenue model. He also gives suggested goals and milestones for each successive funding round. One interesting fact – today Mint, which is free, generates $30/year/user from various offers and value added services.

There are lots of additional details, including, for example, various hidden costs in financings (mostly legal).

If you are a startup founder, you’ll want to bookmark this and refer back to it. It’s absolute gold.

 

Vator.tv, the "YouTube for start-ups" has a new feature going live on Tuesday morning that lets companies post short updates to their Vator.tv-hosted information pages. Similar to Twitter, the messages are limited to just a few hundred characters and other Vator users are simply able to follow a company to keep tabs on what it's doing.

Companies with access can post new updates anytime they'd like, and interact directly with users who can reply in the threaded commented section below each item. Vator has borrowed a page from Facebook in letting users get notified of any changes companies have made, be it edits or additions to the company pages.

Vator.tv, the site best-known for allowing entrepreneurs to record “elevator pitch” videos, has been testing a new way for entrepreneurs to promote their companies — a micro-blogging news feed.

I’m not sure if this feature adds much to services that are already out there. After all, any company can publish its own blog; if it wants to send out shorter updates it can sign up for an account on micro-blogging site Twitter. Vator’s “Company Updates” feed falls somewhere between the two models. It looks like messages are limited to a 280 characters, which is twice as long as the maximum length of a message in Twitter, but much shorter than most blog posts. Vator users can “follow” companies, as in Twitter, and see all the updates aggregated on a single page, but you comment on each message as if it were a normal blog post.

 

 

 

Vator.tv, a social media site for entrepreneurs, announced a micro-blogging service for startups today that allows these companies to update their followers about the latest developments at their companies. This micro-blogging service works similar to Twitter, though the character limit has been raised from 140 to 280. Currently, only ten companies are using this feature during the alpha program, as Vator.tv was worried about potential scalability issues. These ten companies are Occipital, Nimbuzz, Blippr, Indaba Music, Crispy Gamer, Wize, Ignighter, Famplosion, Vayyoo, and Buzzd. Vator.tv expects to roll out a larger beta program within the next month.

 

With the departures of former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and former Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz, there has risen a new crop of accomplished female CEOs...

Fueling the growing ranks of C-level executives (CEO, chief operating officer, chief information officer ) are more engineering and computer science graduates. The number of female engineering graduates in 2005, the last year for which statistics are available, was nearly 13,200, up 8% from 2000. The number of female computer-science college graduates rose 7%, to 11,235, in the same time frame, according to the National Science Foundation.

Tech start-up networking site Vator.tv may be getting its content into college classrooms.

Vator.tv has signed a deal with ProQuest, a company that creates microfilm presentations for educational institutions. ProQuest will send out some of Vator.tv’s interviews with entrepreneurs to various universities around America. The interviews focus on starting and managing online businesses and handling the accompanying funding concerns.

 

 

The Internet offers plenty of resources as well. Social-networking sites for entrepreneurs, such as ClubENetwork.com, Vator.tv, Entrepreneur.Meetup.com and PartnerUp.com, allow people to swap business ideas and provide feedback to each other.

               Vator.tv must have made its own successful elevator pitch. Venture capital company Venture Farm has invested in the start-up, which helps other start-ups make presentations to potential investors via online video.The amount was not disclosed in a statement released Tuesday by Venture Farm. Vator was founded by former MarketWatch reporter Bambi Francisco. Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder, and Richard Rosenblatt, MySpace's former chairman, are among Vator's earlier investors.

Video has been touted as the next great online marketing vehicle, and  interviews with experts will likely be a big a significant part of the mix...

Vator.tv is another site driven largely by the interview process, including shows that rate startups looking for venture capital. It is engaging and a great audience builder.

VentureBeat is partnering with Vator.tv to help judge an entrepreneur pitch competition for best "new media" start-up.

The winner gets to fly down to meet with the mergers and acquisitions team at investment company, Demand Media, as well meet Demand's CEO Richard Rosenblatt. Since launching mid-November, 61 companies have participated; we've got a month to go.
The winner will also get blog exposure with profiles on VentureBeat,
Mashable and Andy Plesser's Beet.TV. Vator has a leaderboard featuring the
leading contestants so far. We list the top-ten below. Of the leaders we
haven't covered, Mixmonsta is worth a look.

Entrepreneurs might learn a lot from watching “American Idol.”

At an Elevator Pitch Roundtable put on by VC Taskforce recently in Palo Alto, about a dozen entrepreneurs got 90 seconds to pitch their idea to a panel of top Silicon Valley venture capitalists. They were asked to perform much like they would on the Fox television show: Get to the point, show stage presence, and know your material cold. And please, don’t ham it up or try to score brownie points.

The nature of the content is different. Videos can be shorter, and there's more focus on the depth of the dialog than television, which prioritizes inane imagery and broad appeal. For example, Vator.tv features lively in-depth discussions on innovations without the glitz or silly banter of TV's talking heads.