AlphaLab companies woo potential investors
-
Phil Anderson, CEO and co-founder of Levlr, presents his sales pitch and demonstration of his company's product Friday during Demo Day at AlphaLab.
Share with others:
Shorter wait times at restaurants. Coupon deals with a doughnut company. iPhone games for beer drinking.
Though the fruit trays were well-stocked Friday morning at the annual AlphaLab Demo Day, visitors may have left with stomachs rumbling. Many startups incubating with the Innovation Works program this year developed businesses that can help find food in faster, cheaper and high-tech ways.
Five companies made their pitches at the annual event, a 12-minute make-or-break moment to woo investors and find a future as they leave the nonprofit venture capital firm's program. Companies that presented have one month left in their 20 weeks as part of the AlphaLab program that allows tech startups to set up shop in office space on the South Side.
Take NoWait, for instance. The four-person team wants to replace those buzzing pagers at restaurants with an iPhone and iPad platform that lets the maître d' place customers in a digital queue and then send text messages to them when a table is open.
NoWait knows that a hungry customer is a captive audience, so the application allows businesses such as a wine maker to send coupons to the waiting customer's phone.
The system is already used in 10 area restaurants, such as the 17th Street Cafe on the South Side and Dinette in East Liberty.
Another AlphaLab company already doing business was OfferMint, which wants to monetize a company's social media outreach. The startup has more than 20 customers and has generated more than $30,000 in revenue by managing company coupons, discounts and deals online.
OfferMint chief executive and co-founder Vyom Bhuta said tie-ins with social media networks allow word to spread among friends and the online system allows companies to better track who is seeing the ads.
The national fervor over getting into the social marketing space was evident at the demonstrations, but so was the push toward the mobile technology seeing an astronomical rise as smart phones gain users.
First Published October 23, 2010 12:00 am
