As you may or may not know, the Founder Showcase Pitch Competition is completely free. However, for many different reasons, it is not the right opportunity for some companies. For example, they may not meet the criteria (less than two years old and and less than $250,000 in funding), are not ready (no product to show), or simply do not apply on time (the application deadline was June 29th).
For these reasons, at the 9th Founder Showcase we created the Demo Table Competition to give more people an opportunity to pitch on stage. And, since the response has been so positive, at the 11th Founder Showcase we are taking it a step further with the new CrowdPitch Competition.
Anyone who attends the event has an opportunity to pitch on stage in front of hundreds of investors, founders, and press. Simply submit your best one-sentence pitch in the comments below. Then, through "Likes" in the comments and our judging, we will select the top pitch at 7pm PT on Tuesday, July 24th, and that company will get to speed pitch the Judging Panel and audience on stage at the 11th Founder Showcase on July 25th.
UPDATE:
After more than 30 people submitted one-sentence pitches, the winner is UpOut.com. Here is their winning one-sentence pitch;
Upout.com is developing an events discovery platform to help adventurous, social & young urbanites discover the coolest experiences in their city with both curated and personalized recommendations, as well as a location-based mobile app to find events near and now.
Congratulations to Sam Ho and Upout, who will get to speed pitch the crowd at tomorrow's event!
There were several great pitches, so this was a hard decision. Honorable mentions include;
Ittavi has developed a patent-pending child support expense management & bill payment system to address the conflict between 298 million parents exchanging $990 billion dollars annually.
Project Jarvis is developing a revolutionary virtual assistant platform designed to improve the quality of everyday life for senior citizens and the disabled by aiding them with daily tasks through artificial intelligence and home automation.
MY COMPANY, scrible, IS DEVELOPING freemium web and mobile apps that enable annotating, saving, sharing and organizing of webpages TO HELP students who do online research WITH a streamlined workflow so they don’t have to print articles or copy/paste into a doc and then manage a mess of paper or Web clippings.
AppLocal is developing a location-based app promotion platform to help you find apps to use now by predictive analysis of your location history and other app usage data.
Glass is an iPhone app to help consumers discover the latest clothing, shoes & accessories arriving at local stores around them via a "fashion discovery" layer built on top of Facebook and other social networks.
The 11th Founder Showcase event is tomorrow, Wednesday, July 25th in Mountain View, CA, and will feature Kevin Rose (Founder of Digg and Venture Partner at Google Ventures), Aaron Levie (Co-Founder & CEO of Box), and Hiten Shah (CEO of KISSmetrics) as speakers. We are expecting over 350 investors, founders, and press in attendance.
Get your tickets now before they sell out.
Thanks to everyone who participated, and if you need helping developing a strong one-sentence pitch for your company, we highly reccommend following the format and video explained below:
My company, __(insert name of company)__,
is developing __(a defined offering)__
to help __(a defined audience)__
__(solve a problem)__
with __(secret sauce)__.
Below is a short video from Adeo Ressi explaining the format:
