The Southeast TC Meetup Tour Is On Like Donkey Kong (But With Comfort Food Instead Of Bananas)

And we’re off.

The Southeast meetup tour is officially a go. We’ll be hitting up Savannah, Atlanta, Raleigh, Charlotte and Greenville on a quest to uncover hidden technological gems that may or may not get pitched with a southern drawl. I’m from Texas, which is a different kind of “south” but I’m jazzed all the same.

If you plan on attending, you should expect lots of beer, lots of geeks, lots of pitches, and a helluva good time. That’s the only way we know how to do things here.

The idea is that we keep it as informal as possible, lots of food and booze and happy conversation about the state of the industry, the state of your startup, and the state of gay rights legislation for good measure. So it makes no difference if you’ve been around for six years and have X million users or if you’re just now getting into brainstorming mode. In either case you should learn something invaluable and have a damn good time while you’re at it.

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for — a look at our wonderful sponsors:

Honda has long viewed itself as a mobility company, focused on creating new value for its customers and society through innovations developed from the initiative and original thinking of Honda associates around the world. The willingness to pursue new dreams for the customer, which Honda expresses as “The Power of Dreams,” has been at the core of the company’s success and comes not only from new ideas but also from the determination of Honda associates to make these ideas come true for the customer. By creating new value for its customers — and by focusing on areas of critical social concern, such as the environment — Honda hopes to gain recognition throughout the world as a company that society wants to exist.

Savannah:

Rails Machine is a full-service web operations and hosting company. We’re a small team of experienced, dedicated, and focused people who have a genuine interest in technology and enjoy working with and giving back to the Ruby on Rails community. We founded Rails Machine in 2006 to create the ultimate hosting environment for Rails applications.

Atlanta:

Total Server Solutions was founded in 2005 with the goal of providing unsurpassed support and technical services to the web hosting community. Over the years, Total Server Solutions has grown to offer some of the finest colocation facilities in the world as well as fully managed dedicated server offerings, custom solutions, and cloud computing services.

Thumb Friendly helps local businesses and national brands acquire new customers with powerful mobile marketing strategies. With web access at their fingertips, mobile users are ready to learn, ready to interact, and ready to buy; but a mobile optimized website is only the beginning. Our m360 Strategy Plan is a complete management program proven to drive new visitors to your site, retain them with a great user experience, and convert them into revenue generating customers. Our solution tracks and records visitor engagement through a sophisticated monitoring program. The real power behind m360 is our consultative approach to building a mobile marketing strategy. We provide detailed reports and analysis of your campaign’s performance which we use to refine your strategy to its optimal state. No contracts, just results!

Yovia is a People Engine – a technology that monetizes social media. Yovia enables individuals and businesses to spread the word® profitably and organically throughout Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and Google+.

PrivateDocs is the first enterprise social network with a core emphasis of document management and collaboration among internal teams, personal and business relationships. Secure, fast and beautiful- PrivateDocs is the next generation of business collaboration. Come share with us- we’re Awesome!

Atlanta Capital is an SEC registered investment advisory firm that specializes in managing high quality stock and bond portfolios on behalf of institutional and individual investors. For over 40 years, Atlanta Capital has remained dedicated to a single investment philosophy which has been successfully executed over a variety of market conditions. Today, our philosophy is consistently applied across a broad range of traditional equity and fixed income investment strategies. We believe the experience and stability of our investment professionals are the hallmarks of our organization.

Levitate Media develops video for the tech market. We help companies explain their offerings more effectively through animation, 3D, motion graphics, live video capture, testimonials, and more. Our productions help simplify complex ideas and are viewed on websites, during sales presentations, at trade shows, and anywhere else video can be played.

The StartupChicks mission is to build a world-wide community of like-minded female founders, to educate, coach and mentor entrepreneurs to help accelerate their businesses, and to inspire aspiring female entrepreneurs to take the leap.

The Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) is a startup accelerator that helps technology entrepreneurs in Georgia launch and build successful companies. Founded in 1980, ATDC has helped create millions of dollars in tax revenues by graduating more than 130 companies, which together have raised over a billion dollars in outside financing. Headquartered in Atlanta’s Technology Square, ATDC serves as the hub for technology entrepreneurship in Georgia. ATDC provides business incubation and acceleration services to hundreds of startups through coaching, connecting and community. Membership is open to all technology startup companies in Georgia, from those at the earliest conception stage to revenue generating, venture-fundable companies.


Pardot is a B2B cloud marketing automation software provider that increases revenue and maximizes efficiency for companies with multi-touch sales cycles. Pardot’s platform features CRM integration, email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring and ROI reporting to help marketing and sales teams work together to generate and qualify sales leads, shorten sales cycles, and demonstrate marketing accountability. Pardot offers affordable pricing for the SMB market.

Social Fortress is data security and information privacy reinvented. Backed by the people who originally invented it. For both the enterprise and the consumer.

Badgy delivers “SEO for Social” for major brands, increasing the reach of their content on Facebook and Twitter. It’s the fastest and most seamless way for a brand to operate a social loyalty program. Most recently, we’ve made it dead simple to get any Facebook app page using the extremely effective Facebook Timeline Actions.

CodeGuard provides automatic cloud website backup and restore built upon Amazon Web Services: WordPress, MySQL, and FTP/SFTP. Restore files or entire sites whenever your want, and be notified when content on the site changes. Launched May 2011 at TechCrunch Disrupt – NYC, CodeGuard received the Audience Choice Award. Since then over 4 billion files have been examined and they recently announced the closure of a 1.3M Series A financing.

Collectors are the best consumers…crazy and passionate. CollectorDASH gives collectors a community-based experience making collecting more fun and affordable. With an innovative and integrated solution, the CollectorDASH platform is set to disrupt this multi-billion dollar market.

In the growing e-commerce market, small and medium businesses with online stores often choose to drop-ship products direct from supplier to customer to compete with the big players. eCommHub is a drop shipping platform that integrates with your online store to automate inventory management and order fulfillment through a third-party, effectively allowing you to expand product offerings, route orders intelligently, and minimize backorders. With its easy setup process and pay as you grow™ pricing, eCommHub can serve smaller online retailers, allowing them to grow their business, increase their margin and improve customer retention.

Employees today are publishing and sharing their valuable product and process optimization ideas almost everywhere except where they are needed the most – inside their own companies. What we do at IdeaString is help companies capture the innovation and genius of their employees, customers and partners —then efficiently identify the best ideas so they can put them to work in their own business – instead of having to read about it on the internet, in the media or even from a direct competitor. IdeaString’s patent-pending technology puts the human spirit at the center of innovation – every employee’s unique talents and behaviors are intelligently leveraged to optimize the innovation process for richer, more creative Ideas that equals more valuable outcomes for business.

We’re fans of innovation and we’re completely sold on startups. It’s in iFusion‘s DNA. In addition to providing chief marketing officer counsel on a fractional basis, we also provide a full-range of marketing services to emerging growth companies. We’ve been in the trenches and understand the unique demands of taking a start up from idea to market. Ours is a customer-centric approach to marketing that raises awareness, nurtures leads and generates revenues.

TAG educates, promotes, influences and unites Georgia’s technology community to foster an innovative and connected marketplace that stimulates and enhances Georgia’s tech-based economy.

Raleigh-Durham

StrikeIron is the leader in Data-as-a-Service (DaaS), delivering data quality and communications solutions via our cloud platform IronCloud. We provide address verification, email verification, phone validation, phone append, SMS text messaging, and sales tax solutions to customers in a variety of markets. Our solutions are delivered as Web services that can be easily integrated into any application or system. Additionally, our solutions are pre-integrated into leading platforms like: Magento, Eloqua, Salesforce.com, Informatica, Oracle CRM On-Demand and more.

Charlotte

NexTable started with an idea to make reservations better and more affordable to our restaurant community. NexTable was founded by a group of dedicated entrepreneurs, restaurateurs and developers. Together with the assistance of local restaurateurs and mentors, we are committed to serving the restaurant industry by creating a revolutionary iPad real-time reservation, table management and marketing system that simply excels in value, innovation, features, and ease of use. Our objective is to liberate restaurants from using manual booking systems and costly competitors.

Virtual Race Bags provides a fully-integrated online platform for Event Directors to efficiently and cost-effectively deliver sponsor messages to event participants. Much more than a simple “virtual goody bag,” Virtual Race Bags delivers sponsor deals, offers and messages to event participants using an online platform that is customized for each event. In addition, through our network of events, national brands can reach over 1.5MM participants in 2012. Virtual Race Bags was founded in 2010 by a team seeking to leverage their professional experience in the Endurance industry and as Athletes to help significantly improve upon the iconic race bag.

Founded by a team of compassionate doctors, WeRx.org believes that all patients deserve the right to be fully informed about their healthcare. WeRx.org provides a community of caring advocates and patients a platform to share and compare the most up-to-date prescription drug costs between their local and online pharmacies. If you believe that every American deserves the right to have access to their needed medications, join us!

Greenville:

Umatch combines cutting edge technology, proven research and retention principles, and dynamic machine learning into a proactive, holistic approach to improving enrollment yields, student retention rates, and graduation rates.

NEXT is an economic development program of the Greenville Chamber uniquely focused on the growth and attraction of early-stage knowledge-based companies in Greenville, South Carolina.

The Iron Yard provides innovation, education, coworking, mentorship, capital, and events for the technology and design communities.

The Upstate Carolina Angel Network, LLC (UCAN) is a group of accredited investors located in Upstate South Carolina who invest in and support start-up and early-stage, high-growth businesses in the Southeastern United States. Since its inception in 2008, UCAN has invested more than $5.6 million in 22 companies.

The mission of the Arthur M. Spiro Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership is to support educational, research and outreach programs that promote entrepreneurial activity and economic development of the region, state and nation. The focus is on wealth creation through entrepreneurial activity.

Dealer Ignition is the fastest, easiest, most effective way for brands and dealers to market online.

Servosity’s Mission is to: Deliver Mission-Critical Backup and Disaster Recovery to MSPs and IT Resellers in a way that makes their brain do the happy-dance.

Mailprotector provides a suite of SaaS based email security and management solutions to over 3,000 organizations across six continents.

Foxfire specializes in Warehouse Management Software solutions and services. Our warehousing software is available as Level 1: Inventory Management, Level 2: WMS Express, and Level 3: WMS Enterprise. Foxfire warehousing software is ideal for start-up to mid-sized warehouses that want to optimize production and processes. Foxfire WMS provides the flexibility to use the system as is or to configure to exact specifications.

RAP Index is a key contacts software service, developed by advocacy experts for advocacy professionals, that uses a patent-pending scoring process to decisively identify and measure the Relationships, Advocability and Political Capital of an organization’s stakeholders, to find their key contacts and activate their best messengers. RAP Index is an indispensable service that helps organizations Know Who They Know℠ from the Capital to Main Street.

Fusion Web Clinic is the smartest Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system in therapy. It is the first and only system that automatically keeps track of daily, required tasks for each staff member, and graphs patient progress. Fusion allows you to work smarter, not harder.

Vigilix helps companies improve the value of their technical support services through PCI validated proactive monitoring and remote access. Currently over 20,000 systems are supported by companies using Vigilix’s POS Monitoring & Management solution.

ProActive Technology delivers dynamic solutions to help clients identify what data is necessary for improved business performance and then to develop the most efficient software for that purpose. Specializations include SharePoint Development, Custom Programming, and Database Management. ProActive provides fully-managed, worry-free custom software development that’s sensitive to your budget, schedule, and business model.

Loc Engine: You are here. They are there. Let’s share. Real-time tracking and location management.

tribr is taking the hassle out getting together with a group of your friends. More fun with your tribe, and less hassle!

Pathwright is a platform for creating, teaching, and selling beautiful online courses.

Eleos Technologies is on a mission to eradicate fax machines from the face of the earth. Our cloud- based mobile platform enables businesses to capture documents and photos from remote workers and customers.

If you’re still looking to RSVP, hit up one of the links below.

Savannah is happening on July 6th at the offices of The Creative Coast, 15 West York Street. It’s going to be a smaller crowd, I suspect, but considering we found Vinylmint at the Norfolk mini-meetup, I’m excited to see what Savannah has to offer. You can RSVP here.

Special thanks to Packard Place for hosting the event.

The Creative Coast is a non-profit organization supported by The City of Savannah and SEDA. We exist to nurture the members of our community engaged in creative or innovative endeavors and to cultivate an environment in which they can thrive.

Atlanta is happening on July 9. We’re holding it at Sweetwater Brewery

You can RSVP here.

Raleigh-Durham is happening on July 10th at the Tyler’s Taproom in the American Tobacco Historic District. We will be taking over most of the restaurant and garden so roll on over. You can RSVP here.

Special thanks to the fellows at GBW Strategies who helped us organize the event.

GBW Strategies is a new era, Triangle-based public relations and marketing firm serving clients such as Facebook and the Cherokee Challenge.

Charlotte is happening on July 11th. We are still looking for a location although we’ll finalize it by Monday. You can RSVP here.

Special thanks to Packard Place for hosting the event.

Packard Place is the hub for entrepreneurship and innovation in Charlotte. Our mission is to develop fast-growth businesses and the professional community to drive them.

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