Co-investor(s): Advanced Micro Devices
InContext Solutions is an award-winning Chicago-based technology and market research firm specializing in online 3-D environment simulations with applications in virtual store research, collaborative store planning, and e-commerce. The company’s research delivers highly accurate behavioral and attitudinal insights into shopper behavior, while its collaborative software tools allow companies and their partners to make more effective product and store planning, environment design and promotional business decisions.
OCA Ventures, New World Ventures, I2A
Power2Switch is a web-based solution that enables residential and commercial customers to comparison shop electricity suppliers. Customers are able to reduce their electricity costs and/or find suppliers providing “green” energy options. Additionally, Power2Switch uses electricity usage data collected from its customers to help them track their savings, understand their carbon footprint and optimize their energy use over time. The company currently provides services to electricity consumers in Illinois, allowing them to compare 14 electricity supplier options within a process that takes less than 10 minutes.
www.power2switch.com
Twitter
Blog
Co-investor(s): Lightbank
Cloudbot is a mobile and web application that is an efficient solution to having your personal data and relationships scattered around on different services. People rely on different applications to access the little bits of their lives saved in the cloud. Cloudbot empower users to search, manage, and command all of their services through one interface.
Co-investor(s): Leo Capital Holdings
Media Chaperone's Piggyback application provides parents with important information, parental controls and protection for their child's online learning and play. Parents can obtain, in real-time, an overview (through a parent's Facebook account) of how their children are navigating the web within online gaming environments, social networks, and virtual worlds—and can easily manage entertainment expenditures, add monies for tokens, credit for continued gaming, or even monitor online behavior.
www.mediachaperone.com
Twitter
Co-investor(s): Tugboat Ventures
HoneyApps is a company that has created an information security software platform for companies to consolidate all security vulnerability information, reporting and management into a single place.
www.honeyapps.com
Twitter
Blog
Co-investor(s): i2a Fund, David Cohen (Bullet Time Ventures)
Tap Me! introduces the "gameification" of advertising to ensure that advertising fits and adds value to the games that they are in. Tap Me's iComplishments platform is an easy-to-install API that sits on top of a game to provide this service.
Co-investor(s): Sandbox Ventures, New World Ventures, Kapor Capital, and Sam Yagan (OKCupid/SparkNotes)
Alltuition has made online tools for college families to understand the ins and outs of managing education debt. Alltuition will provide a simple, intuitive online financial aid planner for managing the entire financial aid process. From filling out the FAFSA to analyzing award letters to applying for additional grants and scholarships, Alltuition will be the web application where families can untangle and manage the tasks, forms, and advice in one place.
http://www.alltuition.com
Twitter
Co-investor(s): SpringMill Venture Partners, Indiana Seed Fund, StepStone Angels, and Queen City Angels
SonarMed is a medical device company commercializing technology to improve the placement and monitoring of breathing tubes, addressing a critical unmet medical need and a market worth over $2 billion worldwide.
Co-investor(s): Sandbox Ventures, OCA Ventures, 500 Start-ups (Dave McClure)
Fee Fighters online marketplace connects business owners and financial services providers. While eventually they will help business owners shop for all necessary financial products, they have started with credit card processing, because it is a significant industry with the most pent up customer dissatisfaction. Their online marketplace will make the financial services selection process easier for both the consumers and providers.
Co-investor(s): i2a Fund, Amicus Capital, Social Leverage LLC
YCharts is a financial research website that allows individual investors to use sophisticated analytical tools to do fundamental stock market analysis. These tools have traditionally only been able to be used by professional investors, due the quantity of financial data required.
Co-investor(s): Softtech VC, Zelkova Venture Capital, Maples Investments, FF Angel (Dave McClure), eonBusiness
ReTel Technologies is a developer of advanced analytics that help businesses optimize their security, operations and consumer experience through ongoing analysis of surveillance video.
ReTel’s unique system seamlessly augments computer vision with human auditing to uncover actionable insights previously unavailable at scale or low cost.
ReTel Blog:
http://reteltech.blogspot.com/
ReTel Twitter:
http://reteltech.blogspot.com/
Co-investor(s): Graycor Construction, Walsh Construction, Pepper Construction, W.E. O'Neil Construction, Bulley & Andrews Construction
GradeBeam.com is a communication network used by thousands of contractors throughout North America to facilitate communication and the exchange of critical information in the early stages of construction projects. GradeBeam’s tools allow general contractors to efficiently track vendor qualifications, share documents, communicate complex project details, coordinate proposals and access historical reports, all within a secure system.
UICO, Inc. develops and manufactures uniquely innovative custom user-interface solutions (UIs) for the appliance, medical, and industrial markets. Leveraging emerging user-interface technologies and systematically employing best practices in Human Factors / User Interaction Design, Industrial Design, Engineering, and manufacturing, UICO delivers fully-warranted UI solutions to its customers.
Shuffle Tech International, LLC is a manufacturing company that has developed a fully automatic playing card shuffler for use in casinos, tournaments, and home games. The Shuffle Tech 1000 is the first machine with the capability of truly emulating hand shuffling, the most reliable, transparent method of randomizing a deck of cards.
The company's product will begin shipping in February 2008.
Shuffletech was recently featured on CNBC. Click here to view the segment.