I attended the Council for Entrepreneurial Development’s (CED) Venture 2009 conference this week. The conference invites entrepreneurs in the technology and biotech spheres to make pitches to investors. I threw on my best tan slacks (one of two pairs of dress pants that fit) and headed down to Pinehurst, NC, to survey the situation, since it was in my neck of the woods.
I tweeted the whole event. The entire stream is here, but I’ll give you a few highlights.
Chris Hughes, cofounder of Facebook, was one of the keynote speakers. It was very amusing to see many well-dressed middle-aged people with a lot of money lining up to speak to the 25-year-old after the conference. I met Chris and told him about smallwander.com. He said it was a good idea, and appeared to have a sincere look in his eye.
John Stumpf, CEO of Wells Fargo and regular guy from Minnesota, gave a speech that was probably very similar to the one he gave internally to his company after they merged with North Carolina’s Wachovia. To paraphrase, “We’re a regular community bank, our two companies are complementary, America is going to come out of this crisis, eventually…”
John Denniston, green investor, had a very good presentation. He had a slide that showed that our country has 350% more debt than our GDP. That is way worse than it was during the Great Depression. Other take-home: now is the time to invest in green technology.
Erskine Bowles, President of UNC, had the most down-home speech of the presenters. The take-home message with him was that staff cuts are coming to UNC faculty. He talked a lot about the state and country needing to move to a knowledge-based economy, but everybody seems to know that by now. However, he rightly asserts that we need to make NC the go-to state for innovation.
I sat in on the presentation for the new tech companies. A couple highlights:
PocketGear puts their mobile applications store on all non-Apple smartphones. In excess of 30,000 programmers have already written apps for them.
From a travel perspective, Nadev Gur of Worldmate talked about how his company will serve biz travelers on mobile devices. He said that travel is the largest e-commerce “vertical.” You will be able to book itineraries and manage changes in real time while you are traveling. Information, such as cancellations, are pushed to your phone.
From a smallwander perspective, it would be good to get an app together for mobile devices, apple or non-apple, to search for smallwander towns and amenities while traveling. As far as seeking an investor at this point, I am open to ideas.
