The Highland City Club and dojo4 are teaming up to give a handful of local technology startups an opportunity to present to the club’s Investment Circle lunch this month. The startups will get a chance to tune their pitch and reach out to some potential local investors, and members of the club will see a side of Boulder they may not have seen before!
All of the startup participants have been selected for this event. If demand is strong, expect another event like it!
The event is on Thursday, March 24. Lunch is served at noon, presentations begin at 12:30 and end by 2pm. Please plan to stay for the whole event. Cost: $20.
You know you have an interesting product, when 7 year old son wants to come to work with you. I was talking with Jim Booth, VP of Business Development & Operations, of Orbotix as he described the excitement around their new product Sphero, a robotic ball you control with your Smartphone. Sphero will come with several free gaming apps and the company plans to open up its API for developers who want to write their own apps.
How did you come up with the idea? What is a Sphero?
Orbotix stated out as a Techstars company that was founded by Ian Bernstein and Adam Wilson, our co-founders. Ian Bernstein, our CTO and founder, is a non-traditionally trained robotist and he came up with the idea for Sphero one day while talking with Adam in the Tech Stars bunker. Ian in particular realized that we’ve got these incredibly powerful Smartphones we carry around everyday and said wouldn’t be cool if we harnessed their power to control everyday physical devices around us.
So Ian and Adam started by using different smartphones to control everyday devices such as garage doors, locks and motorcycles. But then they both hit upon the idea of creating a robotic ball, that could be used for different gaming apps that you control using your Smartphone. Think of it as a Segway inside of a spherical shell. Designing a robotic ball is actually something really difficult to achieve as the sensors needed to control the ball from the phone have only recently become available.
But one of the great things about Boulder and TechStars is not only did we emerge with an idea but also great mentors. Mark Tilden of WoWee continues to mentor Ian and Paul Berberian, our CEO, helped clarify our business direction.
How is a Sphero different than a remote control car?
The way Sphero behaves isn’t determined by the physical device, but by the software that is controlling it. So, unlike a remote control car that has basic controls, front and back, left and right a Sphero can roll right, left, and tilt. It has an infinite number of uses beyond gaming but that’s where a lot of the interest currently is.
There seems to be a lot of excitement and interest around this product? What’s been the biggest surprise since starting out?
The biggest revelation is how much people connect with and love this product. Prioro launching at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), we had not done a lot of marketing or PR, but we were fortunate in that we had a perfect storm of events – engineering progress, press interest and consumer interest – all of interest that really helped bring a lot of attention to Sphero.
At the CES event we were just amazed at the reaction from consumers, developers and buyers. It was just a great experience. The team had been working really hard and it all seemed to come together. We were thrilled with the level of interest.
Because of the excitement at CES, we are completely focused on getting Sphero retail-ready by late 2011. We’re fine-tuning the software, hardware, packaging – we want to create a great customer experience. We want people to be elated when they get their package from us. You know how when you receive a package, begin opening it up and are just thrilled by the experience – that’s what we want to create for our customers.
Any advice for new startups or someone working on a new idea?
There’s tons of advice and resources out there in the Boulder Community – Techstars, VCs and experienced mentors. These resources have provided an amazing support network for a number of local successful startups. So I encourage other startups to tap into the experience and resources that Boulder community has to offer. Beyond that, I tell other startups to focus all their efforts on the core aspects of their business and weed out all of noise. Then start executing. Quickly develop a prototype, bring people in and show them what you have so you get an idea of the level of interest and reaction.
Need a plumber? New to town and wondering about optometrists? Fidatto was designed to help you find a trusted service provider using your existing network of Facebook friends. Fidatto is a free Facebook application which allows you to find and recommend local service providers like plumbers, dentists, hair stylists, roofers, etc. Instead of browsing through hundreds of recommendations by people you don’t know in Yelp, craigslist or the Yellow Pages, you can see who your Facebook friends are using. Fiona Schlachter, who started Fidatto with 3 partners, had the idea after seeing so many of her Facebook friends ask for recommendations in a wall post and get dozens of responses. She thought a free app developed for Facebook would be a more efficient way to promote your favorite service providers and find new ones.
Fiona credits the amazing support of the Boulder startup community with giving her the experience and confidence to start Fidatto. She left her corporate life and spent about a year working with and attending events in the startup community (SnapImpact, Boulder Open Coffee Club, Girls in Tech, Boulder Denver New Tech, Ignite, Boco, Silicon Flatirons, and many more) and it felt like an entrepreneurial internship. She learned so much that she and her business partners decided to tackle what they saw as a significant opportunity to improve the word of mouth experience for Facebook users. The best part is that she is having more fun than expected.
Fidatto went live in June 2010 and is growing slowly as planned. This is a bootstrap effort and Fiona is the only full-time partner today. They want the tool to evolve in a manageable way and plan to introduce new features and functions as demand grows and the business becomes more mature. The long term goal is for Fidatto to be a part of your profile, like your education or current city, so that Facebook can enrich communities by promoting local service providers.
Allow me to introduce myself: My name is Warren Ng and I am one of Boulder’s newest entrepreneurs. Having just begun my entrepreneurial career, you might call me an entrepreneurial virgin. While my education and professional experiences have been peppered with elements of entrepreneurism, Napkin Labs is my first leap into the unknown associated with how to create a successful company. While the idea was very much there, the execution needed help and in the few short months that my business partner and I have dedicated to Napkin Labs, we’ve accomplished a great deal because of the camaraderie and support of the startup community in Boulder.
Immediately, in many of our preliminary conversations to suss out the viability of our business, a few names who have been pivotal to creating the startup community I’m writing about came up which include Brad Feld, Andrew Hyde, and David Cohen to name just a few. Through these contacts, we were quickly welcomed and assimilated into the diverse community of experienced entrepreneurs who approach business in a “pay it forward” sort of attitude. Each of the contacts we met with felt the need to help others as they had been helped early in their growing careers. These sort of interactions happened multiple times a day and has resulted in success at a pace that would have otherwise taken many more months if not years to arrive at had the community not lent the support to Napkin Labs as it has.
For the support received to date, thanks goes out to all! I look forward to the day that I too can pay it forward.
So what does all that mean. If you are considering taking the entrepreneurial plunge or have just done so never hesitate to reach out. Schedule as many meetings as you can to learn from those around you. Don’t be afraid to reach out to those you’ve never met. You will quickly find a welcome committee in response to your requests.
No longer should it be difficult to get time with VCs or advisors; remember it is you the entrepreneur that offers upside potential. It’s VCs like Brad Feld who get this and know that with some advising they can help. Thus programs like http://winterinthebunker.com/ where world class advising is offered for free and Entrepreneurs Unplugged where slice of life interviews are open to the public are popping up more and more across the entrepreneurial centers spread throughout the states.
The approach to entrepreneurism has been redefined and the barriers that have once prevented it have now dissolved due to the support of startups. How do you support startups?
More about the author: Warren Ng is the co-founder of Napkin Labs, a product innovation consultancy that utilizes a crowdsourced approach to innovation to enable breakthrough ideas to bubble up at the intersection of diverse thinking as consumers and experts in all fields. For more information about the author or Napkin Labs visit www.napkinlabs.com or follow on Twitter: @warrenng or @napkinlabs.
Boulder.me ambassador Tara Anderson and mommyblogger-about-town Aimee Giese are hosting three ‘Get Your Social Media On’ seminars starting this Thursday, October 22nd at Gordon Biersch in the Flatirons Mall. To snatch up some tickets all you have to do is click here and give them (very little) money.
Back by popular demand we are hosting another installation of Startup Drinks. Again we are partnering with our life-science brethren, the BioBeers crew, at Twisted Pine Brewing Company at 3201 Walnut Street in Boulder at 6:30pm. Please spread the word (email, Twitter, Facebook, phone, carrier pigeon). Looking forward to seeing you all there.
