Okay, so maybe you’ve seen the pictures and saw our press release for the big event in North Dakota called North Plains Inventors Congress. But what’s this about Marketplace for Entrepreneurs??

We were confused two as to the significance of the two events taking place back to back on January 15 and 16th. So we’ll try and break it down into it’s simplest form.

The North Plains Inventors Congress, aka NPIC, was put on by Neustel Law Firm. The NPIC is really two things 1) an invention contest and 2) a 4 hour educational seminar on everything related to inventions and ideas.

Since our site, IdeaTango, is based on some pretty sweet patent-pending software, we actually participated in the Invention Contest. However, since the whole purpose of the show is to promote growth in North Dakota, we figured we didn’t stand a chance and participated just for the practice. Roughly 30 inventors competed and the big winner of the $2500 grand prize was actually someone we interviewed. We’ll have that video up later. This guy had created what looks like a golf cart that floats so people could go ice fishing and not worry about the ice breaking since it also floats.

The 4-hour seminar talked about all the important topics like patents, market research, public relations, financing inventions, and more. We’ll have some video and audio in our education section for the different seminars.

Now Marketplace for Entrepreneurs is a much larger part of the show, which promotes all kinds of new business and innovation, not just inventing. There were people with agricultural services, candle makers, business plan contestants, and 100 other small business and service providers. They also had roughly 100 classes for people looking to start their own business, or get their business on the right track.

The exhibition part of the show was only January 16th from 9-5pm. Although the booths were almost free $25, I probably wouldn’t exhibit there if I was an inventor because there were not any manufacturers or quality service providers walking around. Of course if you’re in the upper midwest area, I’d recommend going just for the contest or the helpful seminars.

From the weather side, yes it was friggin’ cold. I haven’t seen that cold of weather since I worked in Russia. My nostrils would freeze shut just walking from the car to the hotel entrance. Just as you would do in any cold weather, we just layered and layered and layered!

Other things of interest, we interviewed Senator Kent Conrad from North Dakota and Michael Neustel who put on the NPIC. Of course we have lots of pictures with locals wearing our light bulb hat, check out our photo gallery. If you were at the show, by all means chip in your thoughts about the show.

Although not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of ways to raise money, business plan competitions are how some inventors and entrepreneurs have funded the startup stage of their company. And these contests aren’t just for college students anymore. In fact I read an article the other day, how more and more non-student business plan contests help potential investors sort the good investments from the bad.

If you’re a student, the biggest competition is the University of Texas’ Moot Corp competition, where students from around the country compete for hundreds of thousands of dollars of prizes + the chance to meet investors.

Microsoft did their own small business plan contest and were giving away $100,000 last year. If you’re a non-student and in Texas, I’ve heard of the Research Valley Partnership contest. Just in some quick google searches I saw the state of Wisconsin has it’s own business plan contest.

So if you think you have a good product or idea, have time to invest in writing a contest-worthy business plan, and would love to present your business to investors, then give these contests a second look.

Well, the title says it all. Today we walked away with the top honor given at the Rice Alliance Information Technology & Web 2.0 Investor Forum. Essentially the investor audience voted us one of the “Most Promising” companies.

Our award is largely in part to Lisa Lloyd, who gave a fantastic elevator pitch to a crowd of 300 at Rice University, in Houston, TX.

Not to put all the spotlight on ourselves, several other innovative companies also walked away with the award. Notable standouts were opmom.com, a social networking website that connects and organizes Moms. Another good presenter was podcastready.com, a service that simplifies creating, listening, and subscribing to podcasts. Typically Apple has dominated this space, but podcastready is hoping to simplify the podcast process even further.



The headline speaker was Jeff Henley, Chairman of Oracle. Here are some notes from the talk (we’ll have an audio link up here tomorrow).

• Worked with successful entrepreneurs i.e. Larry Ellison
• Oracle has $5B cash flow
• Larry didn’t want to dilute, wanted control
• Software can do it with little capital.

Steps for successful startup
-Need a good idea
-Need smart people, don’t forget to look overseas
-Work hard & fast

• Google monetized existing technology
• Bill Gates bought IP
• Larry Ellison borrowed (legally) ideas
• Oracle wants niches or way to scale up
• No VC Oracle fund anymore

You can find more notes from the event in my Inventing Blog. Or listen to some recordings from the event. For more information, check out the Houston Startup Blog at www.startuphouston.com.

Happy Startup-ing!

Bryan Daigle