Companies that have presented at Venture Atlanta have closed over $65M
 
By Allan Maurer 
 
Venture Atlanta drew 630, its largest crowd ever, to the Georgia Aquarium and its Oceans Ballroom for its 2010 event Oct. 12-13. The attendance was up from 575 last year and 475 its first year.

 The Metro Chamber, TAG and CEO Council are the founding partners of VA and made this event happen. (left to right) Hans Gant, Metro Atlanta Chamber, Tino Mantella, Technology Assoc of Georgia, Michael Capellas (keynote speaker) CEO, VCE, David Hartnett, Metro Atlanta Chamber, Ashish Mistry, Atlanta CEO Council

On the heels of raising a bridge round of funding, Vertical Acuity is expanding
 
By Allan Maurer 
 
It’s a real piece of work to get visitors to look at more than the single piece of content that brings them to a web site. They often arrive after searching for a particular topic or story on Google or other search engines and depart after viewing what they sought.
 
Atlanta’s Vertical Acuity wants to help content providers change all that.
 
It says it has re-engineered content discovery to “unGoogle” the web for content providers.

Vertical Acuity Co-Founder Greg Freishtat

“Only in America”, says CEO after going from living off of an Exxon credit card to pulling in $4 million

By Allan Maurer 
 
ClearStar, Inc., a firm providing technology and services to companies that screen potential tenants and employees for their clients, has racked up 106 percent sales growth in the last three years, earning a spot on the Inc. 5000 list each year. Not bad, considering the economy was in the tank and employers were firing far more employees than they were hiring. Yet the small company made about $3.1 million last year and is on track to do $4 million this year.

Bob Vale in the kitchen of the ClearStar offices, a focal point for the family oriented company

People are getting back to building a business and selling things, says Georgia Tech’s Stephen Fleming

By Allan Maurer

The economic downturn hit Atlanta as hard as anywhere in the country, says Stephen Fleming, vice provost, Economic Development and Technology Ventures, and executive director of the Enterprise Innovation Institute at Georgia Tech.

Fleming has a diverse and relevant background to be helping Georgia Tech stimulate and nurture Atlanta startups. He has more than 14 years as a general partner in private equity and is currently a member of the Seraph Group‘s investment committee. Seraph invests in early stage firms.

Stephen Fleming, Executive Director of the Enterprise Innovation Institute at Georgia Tech

Nina Sawczuk took the helm at ATDC this month and wants to reach beyond core members

By Allan Maurer
 
Nina Sawczuk, 48, formerly assistant director of the Advanced Technology Development Center in Atlanta who took the helm this month as ATDC manager and director of Startup Services, says extending its programs beyond core suite members is a priority.

Nina Sawczuk, ATDC manager and director of Startup Services

Roswell startup hopes to speed to success by cutting web load time

By Allan Maurer
 
Internet users hate slow-loading Web sites. We all remember those slowly turning icons as all but the simplest pages crawled into view.
 
While it’s not the problem it once was when most people accessed the Internet via slow dial-up connections,  Zoompf founder Billy Hoffman says the performance of most sites is still suboptimal.

Zoompf founder Billy Hoffman

Atlanta’s Adility has put a standard retail marketing ploy in a technologically enhanced package.

By Allan Maurer
 
We all love getting a good deal. That’s why a handful of Internet companies such as Chicago-based Groupon and DC’s Living Social are scrambling to grab a piece of the potentially lucrative local deal business. Investors see it as a healthy space, too. About a month ago, they valued Groupon at about $1 billion in a $135 million financing. LivingSocial, which has been ramping up the number of cities where it offers its version of local bargains, raised a total of $49 million, all but $10 million of it in the first four months of 2010.

Both Groupon and LivingSocial and some others in the space are following something like a coupon model that requires them to build local sales forces to hit the phones and the street to put together the daily deals they offer. In Atlanta, Adility is taking a different approach.

Founded in 2009 by serial entrepreneur Thomas Cornelius, Adility is reinventing the gift or value card idea for the Internet age. Cornelius says the reason we’re seeing a shift of attention to the local markets is that “The local markets are much bigger than the national market.”

Thomas Cornelius, CEO/Founder, Adility, says the next few years are going to bring new tools to local marketing.

Atlanta’s Hannon Hill, pardot and Shotput Ventures share a company culture reminescent of the dot com days.

By Allan Maurer

A visit to the offices of Hannon Hill, pardot and Shotput Ventures on the 33rd floor of the One Atlanta Plaza building is likely to impress any potential customers, partners or employees. But what impressed us most was the unique flavor of the company culture.

Hannon Hill sells Web marketing software and a Web content managment system, Cascade Server, widely used by customers in education, government and non-profits, technology, and healthcare, among other businesses.

More than 130 colleges and universities use the Cascade Server as the content management tool for campus Web sites.

Founded in 2006, Pardot sells on-demand interactive marketing solutions.

Shotput Ventures launched its first class of eight startups with seed funding of about $25,000 each last year. The eight firms have all joined the Atlanta Technology Development Center.

David Cummings, CEO, president and founder of Hannon Hill and CEO and co-founder of pardot and co-founder of Shotput, is also an accomplished programmer who has written code for commercial applications in Ruby, Java, PHP, ASP, and Visual C++.

Cummings showed us around the Hannon Hill/pardot offices in April, and introduced us to a company culture that reminded us of the dot com boom years.

LaDiDa application from Atlanta’s Khush provides musical accompaniment for the rest of us
 
By Allan Maurer
 
Lot’s of us like to sing, but most of us confine our warbling to the shower or singing to the radio in the car. Now, however, thanks to a “reverse karaoke” application for the iPhone developed by Atlanta-based Khush, you can sing into your iPhone and play it back with the kinds of vocal effects that make professionals sound so hot.

Using artificial intelligence, the application, called LaDiDa, analyzes the voice of the person singing into the phone and plays it back with appropriate music.

Love to sing? There’s an app for that. Khush CEO Prerna Gupta sings into her iPhone demonstrating the LaDiDa application. 

Industry veterans poised to bring the variety of broadband Internet video to your home TV

By Allan Maurer
 
You feel like you’re on top of the world. When we visited Clearleap in the Tech Square Research Building in downtown Atlanta, CEO Braxton Jarrett and marketing manager Laney Woolfolk took to the roof of the building that is home to Atlanta Technology Development Center companies. We enjoyed a sunny spring view of the city spread before us, much as Clearleap sees the future of video spread before it.

Clearleap has a bright vision of a world with converged video and broadband Internet. Its technology expands the capabilities of traditional TV delivered by existing service providers, bringing the depth and variety of Internet video to home screens.

Clearleap CEO Braxton Jarrett and Laney Woolfolk marketing manager on the roof of the Tech Square Research Building in Atlanta.