Tent Revival at the 5th Annual Rice Alliance IT and Web 2.0 Venture Forum – Part I

 

“I feel like I’m at a Tent Revival.”  These are the words (paraphrasing) that Brad Burke had to say after listening to Blair Garrou, Marc Nathan, Josh Tabin and myself talk at the end of the Rice Alliance IT and Web 2.0 Venture forum about the exciting things that we see happening within Houston’s startup community.  The main message that Josh and I were trying to get across was that based on what we are seeing through StartupHouston and through events such as Rice Alliance’s venture forum, we see proof that Houston has a viable (and growing) startup community.  The next steps are to continue to get more people involved (technical, entrepreneurial, capital) to get us to the next level.  We invited everyone there (over 300+ attendees), as we invite you also, to continue to get involved through events such as OpenCoffee Club, Refresh Houston, BarCamp, NetSquared, Air Houston, and the myriad of other technical meetup groups to keep things in high gear.  That being said, here are some of the other great things that I saw and heard at the forum.

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  • SpendView did not have the best presentation at the forum, but they are the company that piqued my interest the most.  The social personal finance sector is white hot right now and to find a company like this in Houston is I think fantastic.  SpendView is similar to Mint, which just recently came out of private beta and recently won TechCrunch’s top company award in their TechCrunch Top 40 contest, and Yodlee which provides the backend to MS Money’s and Bank of America’s online offers, and beats other companies like Quicken and Microsoft to the punch of easily accessing and categorizing all of of your finances in an online app.  According to founder Nikhil Roy, SpendView offers some additional features that Mint doesn’t such as the ability to create custom categories and to show expenses in the form of interactive tag clouds and dynamic charts to help you identify trends in your spending habits.  Looking for more great things to come out of SpendView in the near future and hopefully a more in-depth interview soon.
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  • If there was anyone who I think stole the show this year, it had to be Laura Mayes and Sk-rt.  I saw Laura busily polishing up her pitch in the halls, but you would have thought she had given her speech a thousand times before because she had a very rousing pitch and used some very impressive statistics (both about her target market and her site’s metrics) that got everyone in the audience interested in a hurry.  Her pitch eventually won her company a place in the Top 10 Most promising companies awards. Laura has also been behind some of other interesting startup efforts in Houston (she suggested the original concept for TipDish ) and I had the privilege of interviewing her at StartupWeekend Houston.  You can see the interview here to learn more about how Sk-rt got started.

 

• Stay tuned for more of my thoughts in Part II