Tag Archive for ‘ATDC’

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What To Say About Evoca?

Published on January 29, 2008 in Startups and Technology. 1 Comment

I had an interesting call with the CEO of Evoca, Murem Sharpe (that’s her in the photo to the left holding the phone), about what they’re doing a few weeks ago. If you recall I previously wrote about ATDC companies that didn’t drive their own public awareness. One of the companies that does seem to own their public persona is Evoca. They have a nice looking site as well as an updated blog (although the last entry right now is dated December 28, 2007).

The reason it has taken me so long to write about Evoca is first, there has been a lot of good stories to write about but second, I needed to figure out what I thought of their business. In a nutshell, Evoca lets clients convert audio into an embeddable online audio clip. Nothing spectacular, right? Well, their hook is that you use a regular phone to do it. So the idea is that usage is vastly simplified since most everyone knows how to use their phone or cellphone to make a phone call.

Evoca has some interesting client wins including the Discovery Channel and has even been used by President Bill Clinton. But I’m really struggling to see how I could use this service myself. Maybe it’s because I’m not a Skype user (Evoca provides free call recording on Skype). Or maybe it’s because I would often rather chat on IM, email, or in person rather than on my cell phone (I was recently called a Luddite by a friend because I don’t do mobile email - I just like to say that I rock it old school). Judging by the list of recent Evoca recordings it seems like a lot of folks use Evoca in other countries. Maybe we just don’t get “it” in the U.S.

The competition in this space is pretty fierce. There are a lot of companies doing telecommunication related stuff including Grand Central (acquired by Google), Jangl, Jott, Yap, and Jajah. Not to say that any of these companies is directly competitive but it wouldn’t take much for one company to bleed over to another. For example, Grand Central already allows users to embed voice mail messages they receive onto a web page.

Evoca has built their system to be highly scalable and I noticed that they were serving content off of the Amazon S3 service which I talked about before in relation to JungleDisk. Murem also told me that they are using the open source Asterisk project as their platform through which phone calls get convert into audio files.

Evoca is a virtual company with people spread in multiple states. Murem told me that there are about twelve active employees and the company was founded in July 2005. The company has been completely bootstrapped over this time with no outside funding.

I’ll keep an eye on this one to see how it evolves and if I can figure out a way I can use the technology. I still haven’t figured that part out yet. Maybe I need to get a technologically current cell phone first. Nah…

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Shining Some Light on Suniva

Published on January 18, 2008 in Startups and Venture Capital. 0 Comments

I just saw a news article out from ATDC on Suniva
(more some other time on how I’m using an RSS feed to track their non-RSS news). The parts that really jumped out at me were these (emphasis is mine):

“The initial line will produce between $75 and $100 million in revenue, so we’ll scale very quickly. We’ll be profitable by year two.”

and

Suniva currently has seven employees but expects that number to grow exponentially to 1,000 in five years. Baumstark is banking on ATDC to help catapult Suniva to the next level.

Holy cow. If that’s true or even if they hit anywhere near the revenue and employee growth rates, they’ve definitely got a winner on their hands. I haven’t looked at their technology (haven’t been asked to nor have I asked them for an opportunity to) so I don’t really know if their claims are accurate but I can’t believe that NEA would have given them money if they weren’t onto something. You can read all about solar cell efficiency here.

What is funny about this news actually is another piece of news that came out yesterday as well. Apparently 10 local power co-ops are petitioning to build a new coal fired plant. Wow. Talk about the left hand not talking to the right. Suniva isn’t the only energy technology company that we’ve got in Georgia but yet the local power players still go to the old standby - coal.

One cautionary note though. Any organization that grows from a few people to 1,000 in a few years is going to go through some cultural growth pains. I hope the folks at Suniva manage this situation well because the wrong kind of culture can doom a startup just as much as not enough funding.

Okay, So Maybe It Isn’t That Bad

Published on January 17, 2008 in Events and Venture Capital. 0 Comments

Okay, so I take back some of what I’ve said. I dug into the legislative agenda coming from Governor Purdue (thanks to Georgia Legislative Watch for the file). In terms of the venture capital fund, this is what it says:

Create the Georgia Research Alliance venture capital initiative: add $5M to $5M of existing funds to create the GRA venture capital fund that will be attached to ATDC under the Board of Regents. This fund will help technology that is developed in our research universities become commercialized. In exchange for investing in these companies, Georgia will receive equity in the company. The $10M of state dollars will be matched by $30M of private dollars to create a total of $40M venture capital fund.

So the first good thing I see here is the fact that the money will be attached to ATDC. Thank goodness. ATDC has been around for quite some time but lately they’ve revved up their engine and been doing a lot of good things and supporting a lot of great events.

The only bummer that remains is that if you aren’t doing a technology coming out of a research university (so that would be Georgia Tech, Georgia State, UGA, and probably a few others) then this pool of money is out of reach for you. The description doesn’t limit to just life sciences which I thought might be the case based on Governor Perdue’s remarks.

The other interesting thing in the agenda is this tidbit:

Promote Georgia as an internationally known Bioscience hub: $375,000 to fund the state of Georgia sponsorship of BIO 2009, the global event for biotechnology, with an anticipated attendance of more than 20,000.

Well, that’s pretty interesting. I found the local site for the conference (May 17-20, 2009). I’m assuming the official site will go up at some point. This year’s conference is in San Diego (June 17-20, 2008). I don’t know ifthis will really help spur any more innovative development in Georgia but it will help expose the innovation happening here to the rest of the world and expose people here to innovation happening elsewhere. That alone will be a win.

TAG/ATDC Entrepreneurs Society Meeting on January 10, 2007

Published on January 10, 2008 in Asides and Startups. 0 Comments

Given the time and location of the latest meeting for the TAG/ATDC Entrepreneurs Society, I didn’t make the event. Fortunately both Lance Weatherby and Josh Watts have done posts on the events. Like I mentioned before, if you’re a startup looking for a business plan competition to enter, you should look at the one discussed at this meeting.

Event: TAG/ATDC Entrepreneurs Society Meeting

Published on January 7, 2008 in Events. 3 Comments

Cindy Cheatham posted a quick item about a meeting this Thursday down at ATDC so I thought I’d mention it here too. This event is to discuss the previous winners of the GRA/TAG Business Launch competition and for those interested in applying this year to see what they need to do to win.

Preliminary entries are due by February 18, 2008. Final entries are due by April 15, 2008. Note that if you win the competition and take the cash component ($100k), you’ll be required to keep your company in Georgia for three years or repay the money plus an 8% penalty (!). So make sure you’re going to stay in Georgia if you apply for this competition. I don’t see this as a big issue especially since overhead costs are so low in Georgia but some investors may want you to move and this could be a future deal breaker. It probably isn’t, but just make sure you give it some thought.

Overall this could be a pretty good deal. The prize money is given as a grant. That means no dilution for you. The services (which haven’t been detailed) could be useful but I suspect the cash is the most helpful.

The only other warning I would give is that the judges for this competition haven’t been listed yet. Obviously there are some people who you’d want to avoid and I’d say if they were judging, you shouldn’t even apply. And if you’ve already presented your plan and gotten shot down by people who are on the judging panel, you might be better served by spending your time elsewhere. Not only are your chances for success highly limited but someone who has soured on you may sour other people on the panel and spoil your chances to raise money outside of the competition.

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