I attended the LivePitch event at the CU Law School this morning presented by FundingUniverse and TechStars, and figured I may as well share some of my notes on the companies pitching.

The angels panel consisted of David Cohen, David Brown, Jared Wandry, Bob Smartt, and Bill Treadwell

The presenters and their presentations along with some of my thoughts (none involving any actual due diligence other than today’s pitch and any prior knowledge I may have about the company) :

Livengood Engineering

• Problem: patient mobility in hospitals
• Solution: Wheeled cart that supports a patient’s medical monitoring devices, IV stand, and medical supplies that they can push around the hospital.
• Takes up same footprint as a typical IV stand
• Final version exists, is sleeker and modular
• Only product in category and concept promises many future products and markets such as military
• IP and patents exist - product isn’t just a cart on four wheels - must be made safe for patients to use.

My thoughts: Very useful device and well designed (footprint of IV stand is important and the modularity of the final product is a good idea) solves a problem that I personally have never thought much about, but now I realize has some major potential. I gave these guys the bulk of my monopoly money, even though medical field is not really my bailiwick. It just made sense and seemed like the best business model and opportunity.

Magic Home Entertainment

• Problem: Large music collections and physical music distribution issues in home make it difficult to be a music aficionado these days.
• Solution: MoodSeer is a whole house audio music distribution system targeted at high-end audio enthusiasts. Supports multiple zones and a main theater zone to give whole house distribution.
• Is wireless so no physical damage or modification of a residence required.
• Targets Connected home electronics market: 15B now, projected to be 85B by 2011
• Targeting high end audio enthusiast that already has typically 30-40K sunk into their audio components alone
• Competitors are Sonos (sold 50K units in first year and a half), Harmony (bought out by Logitech)

My thoughts: I was pretty excited to hear the MoodLogic pitch as I only found out about them a little bit ago through their pitch at CTEK Angels Live. Being really interested in the digital home / whole house audio, I wanted to see if this technology was something I should consider for personal use in my home. After talking to the founders, I realized this product 1. Can’t stream from auxiliary devices such as a TV or XM radio as it is specifically used for streaming digital music i.e. MP3, FLAC. 2. Does not support synchronized music throughout the home. This seems to be due to the lack of determinism of their wireless physical layer. It’s also something I tried to accomplish with the Slim Devices squeezeboxes, but worked only marginally at best.

For $10,000 per installation, and having the first two problems, I really wonder what I’d be getting for all this money. The Zon system in my house ran $4000 for four zones, and add a few SqueezeBoxen to stream the music and maybe you’re at $5000 tops. Yes, I ran a bunch of cat 5 to support the whole house audio / Ethernet network, but synchronized zones is in my opinion the main point of whole house audio, especially when your house isn’t all that big to start with! I’ll still continue to watch this company as I’m sure as development proceeds they’ll work out some of these deficiencies. Going the wireless route to stream synchronized music might require some implementation of determinism at the protocol level. I doubt 802.11n has that yet. And then you have to worry about scaling and interference, and probably a million other things. Yikes. Makes me want to go rip up my drywall and install some more Cat5.

Kerpoof

• Problem: Providing active entertainment for children
• Solution: Kerpoof, an Internet destination for kids.
• Provides an interactive and dynamic creative environment for kids to design artwork and scenes
• Allows you to create an outline rendered version that you can print out and let the kids color themselves (cool)
• Kerpoof sees the need as companies struggling to get their message out to kids.
• They make money through advertising, branded scenes, charge per use and per traffic/time spent on the scene.
• Parnership exists with Kidz magazine, have 5 paying customers and about 3 other similar competitors

My thoughts: Initially I was perturbed by the advertising supported business model on a concept that is targeting children. I’m not a fan of the current state of advertising everywhere, and I really don’t think kids need to be subject to it either. I spoke with Krista Marks, CEO and in addition to giving me a better feeling for the advertising aspect stressed Kerpoof as a means for active entertainment versus flash-based sites that are more passive, television-style. Their site, design, and implementation of the service is pretty slick, especially with the dynamic nature of the clip art collections and their effect on the scene renderings. Being able to create the instant coloring books pages is really nice as well.

Torii Medical

• Problem: Catheter securement targeting IV therapy
• Solution: Hydrogel based catheter securement device
• Saves in IV catheter restart costs (70% of IV theraputic cases require a restart)
• Saves in costs associated with infections due to catheters that come loose and breach the vessel wall, costs that run around $25,000 per incident, not withstanding emotional and physical trauma
• The device is easily applied, and is basically a hydrogel, which is normally used in burn patients, but with a reformulated stronger adhesive that can last up to four days per application.

My thoughts: Interesting concept and product and a pretty large market. The presenter mentioned on a number of occasions that they are rendering their competitor’s product obsolete, however I imagine their competitors will be quick to come up with a version of their own, so I wonder if they can sustain their advantage.

Chaperon

• Problem: Protecting your source code (software) from theft and piracy.
• Solution: Lock it down with the Chaperon system,
• Chaperon server is composed of open source software
• Server uses public key security technology to prevent copying the software repository, disables copy and print functions of development environment (IDE)
• Currently getting a lot of traction in the offshore software development outsourcing markets.
• Chaperon uses a pay-per-use subscription model - recurring revenue.
• Currently works with Eclipse IDE and netbeans

My thoughts: Kudos to Chaperon, leveraging open source to tackle this problem. I’m an open source advocate and believe there’s a lot of untapped potential in that space. As a software engineer by trade, I would more than likely refuse to work for a company that imposed a system like Chaperon on my development. 1. I believe it imposes additional constraints on the developer. 2. I can’t PRINT my source code every now and then for code reviews and debugging? Give me a break! Don’t make me look at the crappy (single) display most companies procure for their developers longer than I have to. 2.5 Currently limited to Eclipse IDE and netbeans. I’m a SlickEdit / TextPad / Emacs / vi fan, so I guess I have to throw those development environments away

3. I’m not really a fan of big configuration management and version control systems (Synergy, Clearcase - although Clearcase’s MVFS was really nice). Chaperon sounds similar to these. My experience is that it is very cumbersome to develop under these systems, and often requires a steep learning curve. Give me Subversion and TRAC, any day. 4. I question the operating policy and motives of companies that don’t trust their own developers. 5. How is Chaperon immune to a simple screen capture program, digital or video capture devices, simple pen and paper or things of that nature? I guess if a developer wants the code bad enough, There may be other non-technical ways to subvert the system (disclaimer: I haven’t done my due diligence in this department yet)

I will say that this system may be useful in protecting source code IP as companies leverage offshore / outsourced talent. But I guess as far as outsourcing to Bangalore goes, you get what you pay for, and Chaperon only increases the overhead costs (even if only to a minor extent) of those outsourcing activities.

The Winner Is

So those were the five companies that pitched at this event. Prizes were awarded to the audience and panel favorites. Prize award to each winner was a $500 cash contribution and $500 of in-kind legal services from Holme, Roberts & Owen, LLP. The audience picked Chaperon as their favorite (received $770 in total monopoly money), and the Panel chose Livengood Engineering’s “patient mobility cart.” All in all, it was a good event and a great selection of presenting companies.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.