Hurry and Register Today for the Rice Alliance I.T. and Web 2.0 Venture Forum

Hurry and Register Now for the Rice Alliance I.T. and Web 2.0 Venture Forum, taking place this Thursday, Dec. 10th!    StartupHouston will be also be there LiveBlogging the Event!

7^th Annual Rice Alliance Information Technology and Web 2.0 Venture Forum
Event Date: December 10, 2009
Registration: 8:00 am Program: 9:00 am – 5:00 pm Company Showcase: 5:00 pm
Location: Jones Graduate School of Business, McNair Hall, Rice University
Early Registration Deadline: Monday, December 7, 2009

To register and for more information: Click Here
To view the full agenda – Click Here
Early Registration Deadline:  TODAY, Monday, December 7 at 5:00 pm

First 400 attendees will receive copies of the book: 1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire by Texas-billionaire Sam Wyly, courtesy of Trailblazer Capital.

Learn about ChaCha, which may be the next Internet homerun, like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.  ChaCha is the fastest growing website in 2009.   ChaCha has answered over 300 million mobile text questions in the last two years.    ChaCha’s marketing platform provides advertisers with a way to engage millions of young adults and teens on their mobile phones.  Advertisers include Walmart, AT&T, ABC Family, Palm, P&G, IKEA, J&J, Coca Cola, and Paramount.

Register now to attend the largest Information Technology and Web 2.0 venture capital forum in the Southwest. We’re excited to bring you the best IT and Web 2.0 Venture Forum yet!

Hear from 13 leading venture capitalists from Texas to Silicon Valley, including Garage Technology Ventures (founded by Guy Kawasaki) and others.

Learn about the latest trends in Web 2.0, including the latest role that Web 2.0 and social networking will play at the enterprise level.  Meet 55 of the most promising early-stage I.T and Web 2.0 companies that have been hand-picked to present and showcase their new ventures.

Keynote Speakers:

Scott Jones
Serial Entrepreneur, Inventor, Pioneer – voicemail and internet music services
Founder and CEO, ChaCha

Scott Jones founded ChaCha, a revolutionary new Mobile Answers service that allows anyone with virtually any mobile phone to ask a question and receive the answer as a text message in just a few minutes.   Over 300 million questions have been answered since ChaCha launched it mobile service in January 2008.

At age 25, he co-founded and helped lead Boston Technology as its Chief Scientist and Chairman, where he developed the massively scalable, easy-to-use voicemail system now used by over a billion people around the world.

As founding CEO at Gracenote, he assembled the team and key technologies to dominate the world of music identification and discovery, which was sold to Sony in 2008 for $260 million.  Gracenote services are being accessed globally, tens of billions of times per year, by applications such as Apple’s iTunes.

Leighton Read
Partner, Alloy Ventures
Founder and Chairman, Seriosity
Successful Entrepreneur, Inventor, and Investor

In 2004, Leighton Read, M.D. founded Seriosity, a software company that applies online multiplayer gaming principles to enhance the way that corporations work in order to improve productivity, teamwork, leadership and results.  Seriosity’s software products and services apply these principles at the enterprise level to align personal and corporate goals and deliver breakthrough results.   Leighton is the co-author of the book: Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete with Bryon Reeves from Stanford.

Leighton was a General Partner in Alloy Ventures from 2001-2007, a Silicon Valley venture capital fund with over $1 billion under management. Before joining Alloy, he spent 14 years as a successful entrepreneur and investor.  He founded several successful companies including Aviron, best known for developing FluMist, later acquired by MedImmune.

Henry H. Wong
Venture Partner, Garage Technology Ventures LLC

Henry Wong has been a prolific and successful entrepreneur, executive, and venture investor in Silicon Valley for over 25 years.  Garage Technology Ventures is a seed- and early-stage venture capital firm that was founded by Guy Kawasaki as Garage.com in 1997.

Henry is the founder of Diamond TechVentures, and was a venture partner at Crystal Ventures, where he was actively involved with companies including SMIC, LGC Wireless, Infinera, and Exavio. Previously, Henry was a successful serial entrepreneur.  He co-founded and led more than five successful start-up companies, including SS8 Technology and CNet Technology.


Venture Capital/Investor Panelists include:
Andrew Clark – Houston Angel Network
Chris Eckerman – Covera Ventures
Eric Engineer – Sevin Rosen Funds
Morgan Flagler – Silverton Partners
Joel Fontenot – Trailblazer Capital
Aziz Gilani – DFJ Mercury
Seth Harward – Frontier Capital
Rocky Mountain – Daylight Partners
Brian Smith – S3 Ventures
Aruna Viswanathan – Aegis Capital Group

Business Plan Presentation Companies:
InView Technology Corporation – innovative advances in high-performance imaging products
Kimbia - powerful, online, fundraising tools
RecycleMatch - developing an online market for transforming commercial waste into value
SmartVault Corporation – integrates the power of QuickBooks^® with the convenience of the Internet to provide a powerful document management solution.
YouData – online ad solution that connects advertisers with specifically targeted and relevant online users.

Elevator Pitch Companies:

Cost to attend:
$75: non-members and members of the general public (early registration: Dec. 7 deadline)
No charge: 2009-2010 Rice Alliance Members and full-time Rice faculty/staff/students
$85: Walk-up Registration

Membership: Current members of the Rice Alliance can attend this Forum and other events throughout the year at no cost.  Individual membership is $175.  To join as a member, you can email, call, or join online: click here.
Membership runs through June 30, 2010.