Tech accelerator LaunchBox Digital is trotting out the first nine graduates of its summer startup program. After their first demo day in front of a group of potential investors at the Cooley Godward Kronish LLP office in Reston, Va., yesterday, the band of young entrepreneurs hustled to Silicon Valley to present their companies to VCs in Cooley's Palo Alto, Calif., digs.
I could only stick around for the first half of the presentations, but it was worth the trip. The enterpreneurs, most of which seemed to be in their mid-20s, were still polishing their presentations, but all in all they did a pretty good job, and the products they demonstrated all looked quite professional. It was also great to finally meet in person LaunchBox founder Julius Genachowski, formerly general counsel, head of business ops and a member of Barry Diller's office of the chairman at IAC/InterActiveCorp.
In spring, LaunchBox whittled down a stack of 250 applicants into the nine that presented today. They went through a 12-week program during which the LaunchBox team and its advisors honed and modified their business plans. LaunchBox invests $25,000 to $40,000 in exchange for a 6% to 8% stake. Genachowski said he was pleased with the results.
"If you create a destination for talent and creativity, they will come," Genachowski said, adding that this kind of program is especially helpful east of the Mississippi.
Here's a list of the nine startups that completed the accelerator program:
- BuzzHubb.com: A university social network startup that bills itself as "bringing the utility of next-gen Yahoo Groups to the mobile college student, but done in a creative, lightweight manner." BuzzHubb's founders are Satjot Sawhney and Ashish Kundra.
- Heekya.com: A social networking site that focuses on enabling multi-media storytelling and incorporates pictures, videos and blogging. The startup's founders are David Adewumi, Kwasi Nti, Rasvan Orendovici and Avner Ahmed.
- JamLegend.com: Essentially a free, online, multiplayer Guitar Hero game. Andrew Lee, who founded the company with Arjun Lall and Ryan Wilson, said they founded the company because "after we bought Guitar Hero, we were broke, we were bored and we were really, really frustrated." They plan to monetized the site through advertising, artist promotion and distribution services, and selling game widgets that artists could put on their MySpace pages.
- Koofers.com: An online repository of past university course exams and study guides. Founders Michael Rihani, Glynn LoPresti and Patrick Gartlan said that after a year of offering their serive at Virginia Tech, they had 60% penetration, 200,000 "koofers" available for students to peruse, and had become the third most popular site among students after MySpace and Facebook. They plan to expand to thirty other colleges this fall, and see monetization opportunities in advertising, textbook sales, job recruitment and e-books. Silicon Alley Insider
- Mpowerplayer.com: Founded by Michael Powers, the startup enables consumers to test out mobile phone games on a PC before purchasing them. It has already supported over 15 million demo plays, and is powers the mobile sites of Electronic Arts and Sprint.
- MyGameMug.com: The startup describes itself as the Match.com for online gaming, where gamers can find others with similar "gaming styles" and hook up with them to play. MyGameMug's founders are Raymond Lau and Erik Lau.
- Razume.com: A job search site that addresses the needs of 21-35 year olds, helping them develop professional resumes and get tips on perfecting it from the Razume community. Sam Blum, Kyle Stoneman and Ryan Geist founded the startup.
- ShareMeme.com: This site offers an intelligent platform to broadcast messages and invites to friends by automatically figuring out the best way to get the information to its destination, whether by email, SMS, Twitter or instant messaging. Of the five startups I got to see today, founders Ahson Wardak and Luc Castera's demo was the most clearly compelling. They used their service to poll fellow LaunchBox entrereneurs in the audience on how their presentation went. The majority responded that it didn't go well, but that amounted to a bit of friendly ribbing, most likely.
- Zadby.com: The company offers product placement services for online videos, using a network of established producers. Founder Tim McLaughlin and Beau Brewer ran the presentation. -- Olaf de Senerpont Domis
For more, see VentureBeat and Silicon Alley Insider
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Sean Greene, John McKinley and Julius Genachowski all delivered the goods to us this summer. We were lucky to have had a choice in which of the big three programs (Launchbox, YCombinator, and Techstars) we were going to be part of, and, here at the end of summer, we have zero regrets. We got good advice, and the other companies were a blast to work beside. Could the other programs have done as good of a job? We'll never know, but at this point, having gotten the help and support, we don't really care.