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Disruptive Business

Mike Slawson with Lumense

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Mike Slawson/Lumense

Mike Slawson co-founded Lumense in 2011 and serves as the company’s Chief Executive Officer. Mike has been instrumental in setting company strategy, securing intellectual property rights, raising capital, and building strategic partnerships.

Prior to Lumense, Mike was a co-founder of Qualtre, Inc., an ATDC company commercializing MEMS inertial sensors, where he served as CEO for almost three years. Since 1998 until 2010, Mike was also a partner at Alliance Technology Ventures, an Atlanta-based venture capital firm developing early-stage companies in information technology and life sciences. For much of his time at ATV, Mike was responsible for the information technology investment strategy. Mike either managed or assisted with the management of the firm’s successful investments in several companies, including SecureWorks, Novera, Telaxis, SyChip, Digital Furnace, Mindlever, and OmniGuide. Prior to joining ATV, Mike was a Kauffman Fellow at Chicago-based ARCH Venture Partners.

Mike has a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Vanderbilt, an MSEE from North Carolina State University, and an MBA from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Mike also held engineering and engineering management positions with Hewlett-Packard, Siemens, and Alcatel. He lives in Atlanta with his wife and children.

 

 

Today’s show is brought to you by Minerva Planning Group.

Prince Niyyar with Commdex Consulting and Gary Gross with Mercury Development

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Prince Niyyar/Commdex Consulting

Prince Niyyar is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Commdex Consulting, LLC. Since founding Commdex in 2001, Prince has led the company from a startup to a recognized national leader in wireless communications technology, with operations in over 18 states. Over the last four years, under his leadership, Commdex has grown over 1000%. Commdex was last year listed on Inc. Magazine’s Inc. 500 list of “Fastest growing private companies in the nation” and recognized with Atlanta Business Chronicle’s “Pacesetter Award”.

Prince earned his Masters degree in Engineering from the University of Cincinnati. He is a registered Professional Engineer and Certified Professional Manager. Prince is active in the industry and community, serving as a board member of Gwinnett Technical College and Greater North Fulton Chamber of Commerce. Prince was an invited guest on talk shows like “Thrive America” and “Business Leader Radio” and he frequently speaks at business conferences.

Business success has brought him numerous accolades. Prince was Greater North Fulton Chamber’s “Small Business Person of the Year” in 2009, and was honored with the “Pinnacle Award” by Gwinnett County in 2011.

Gary Gross/Mercury Development

Gary Gross is responsible for management of business development, sales, and strategic alliances. His role is to ensure that companies around the globe continue to look to Mercury Development for optimized mobile apps to help them achieve their corporate strategies. During his 20-year career, Gary has worked with technologies such as SaaS, ERP, CRM, and ASP. He has extensive experience with development and collaboration software, virtual events, IT security, and webcasting. He currently serves on the Board of the Mobility Society for the Technology Association of Georgia. When not working, Gary attends numerous charity events and hosts a radio talk show about non-profits.

 

 

Today’s show is brought to you by Minerva Planning Group.

 

Atlanta Gaming Development

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Co-hosts Micah Porter and Dana Barrett welcome the following to the studio to discuss Atlanta Gaming Development:

Jesse Lindsley/Thrust Interactive

The driving force behind Thrust Interactive, Jesse Lindsley, started his company in 2004 with the vision that games can change the world.

Jesse and his talented team have put Thrust on the map by creating and publishing independent game titles including hits like Button Men and Boomblastica. In addition, Thrust has released 100+ third party games for clients such as the NFL, Cartoon Network, Mercedes, TBS/TNT, American Cancer Society, Autotrader and more.

Jesse has become a leader in the Atlanta Game Development community, where he founded the Unity 3D Atlanta User Group, runs the IGDA–Atlanta chapter and hosts the monthly Atlanta Game Developer Meet-up. He is an active board member of the Indie Developer Guild, APPNATION Atlanta and Digitainment Georgia. His industry experience and expertise have awarded him regular speaking engagements all over the country.

Jesse holds a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Tennessee Tech and plays and captains a five-time ALTA AA1 City Championship team along with two USTA (5.5 & 5.0) National Championship teams. In his free time, Jesse can be found taking his three dogs and cat (Gooch, Parker, Buckley and Slim), tenants at Thrust’s studio, out for a stroll in the Inman Park neighborhood.

Blake Lewin/TransGaming

As President of TransGaming’s digital home division Blake Lewin brings an extensive background to the company, most recently as VP, Media and Entertainment Platforms for Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. (TBS, Inc.) Platform R&D Group. Blake is the inventor of GameTap, Turner’s first broadband entertainment network, and was responsible for its design and development. He was executive producer on Cyan Worlds’ Myst Online: URU Live and on TBS virtual worlds launched within Kaneva; has filed three patents for Turner on iTV and broadband systems; has led the production and management of web and interactive TV applications on various emerging platforms over the past 17 years; and has licensed and produced CD-ROMs and games such as Hell Cab,Dinotopia, The Pagemaster and Carl Sagan’s Murmurs of Earth.

Early in his career, Blake was a musician with a Bachelor of Arts degree in music composition, a minor in electronic music, and an associate’s degree in audio technology from Indiana University. Blake worked for inventor Emmett Chapman (The Chapman Stick), did transcriptions for artists such as Frank Zappa and Allan Holdsworth, and served as music coordinator for major motion pictures, including Thelma and Louise, Company Business, and Man In The Moon.

Alan Wilson/Tripwire Interactive LLC

Alan Wilson has worked in Oil, Defence and Finance sectors over a 30-year “serious” career, before moving over to the games industry. Alan has also been a military historian, mixing that with game design over the same period. This led to the “Red Orchestra” mod in 2003. When the team won the MSU contest, Alan supported the creation of Tripwire Interactive LLC along with the other key players in the original team. Alan worked on the design, budgeting and planning of the development of “Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41- 45”, as well as focussing on raising the required funding for the company to develop the game completely independently.

RO scored in the top 10% on Metacritic for 2006 (81) and has now sold over 600,000 units on PC worldwide. Tripwire launched the hit co-op zombie shooter, Killing Floor in 2009, which went to #1 on Steam and Red Orchestra 2: “Heroes of Stalingrad” in 2011. KF has now sold over 1.5m units on PC, making it one of the top 50 selling PC games of all time.

Tripwire has pioneered selling games digitally, alongside traditional retail routes to market, with great success. Additionally, Tripwire has got involved with other independent developers, publishing Zeno Clash, The Ball and Dwarfs!?, as well as mentoring and advising startups.

 

Today’s show is brought to you by Minerva Planning Group.

 

Jeff Hilimire with Engauge and Noah McNeely with Slingshot

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Jeff Hilimire/Engauge

Jeff Hilimire is a lifelong entrepreneur with a passion for digital marketing, technology and mentorship. His journey began in 1998, when, while still in college, he casually started a web-design company with his roommates. When business took off, Jeff realized they were on to something. So he dialed in, growing the new business—Spunlogic—one interactive experience at a time. Then, in 2007, after 10 years of consecutive growth, Engauge acquired Spunlogic. Today, Jeff is President and Chief Digital Officer, responsible for shaping the company’s vision and elevating agency innovation, which he does through a focused digital innovation practice and technology leadership. Jeff also remains an active force in the startup community, co-founding technology accelerator Shotput Ventures. He also serves on the boards of The Children’s Museum of Atlanta and Junior Achievement of Georgia.

Noah McNeely/Slingshot Product Development Group

Noah McNeely is one of the founders of Slingshot Product Development Group, and he lives and breathes innovation and new product businesses. Noah has spent over a decade in the trenches of real world product development, balancing tight budgets and narrow development schedules to create everything from toys to military equipment. He has spent much of his career helping to shape and guide a seemingly endless series of “good ideas” into successful product businesses.

Noah, in conjunction with his partners, was instrumental in building a more comprehensive type of product development organization that blends science, design, engineering, prototyping, and manufacturing into a single, powerful innovation engine.

As “Chief Troublemaker” for Slingshot, Noah has built a culture of collaboration, and embraces a business-centric approach of “get it done, get it right, get it to market!” He has consistently and successfully navigated the myriad challenges of new product development to launch real products for real people, and to launch them on time and on budget.

 

 

Today’s show is brought to you by Minerva Planning Group.

 

Ashish Mistry with BLH Venture Partners and Heath Hyneman with Hypepotamus

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Ashish Mistry/BLH Venture Partners

Ashish Mistry is Managing Partner with BLH Venture Partners. Ashish functions as an investor and adviser to young companies. His experience includes leadership roles with high-growth companies in the technology-enabled services, enterprise IT, e-commerce, and consumer markets.

Ashish spent two tours as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), working with start-ups across Georgia. He is active in non-profit organizations that foster entrepreneurship, including board positions with Venture Atlanta and the Atlanta CEO Council, as well as serving on committees with the Metro Atlanta Chamber. Ashish is a graduate of Emory University and resides with his wife and children in Atlanta.

Heath Hyneman/Hypepotamus

HeathHyneman is a search marketer who provides his organizations roadmaps to product viability through agile product development practices. Heath has spent the past decade on enterprise-level ecommerce marketing technologies, with a focus on D2C commodity SKU search traffic generation and conversion optimization. He covered responsibilities for leading HM Wallace’s marketing and CMS efforts and setting the strategic direction of NationalBuilderSupply.com and its network of properties. He has recently opened up Hypepotamus, a co-working space in Midtown Atlanta focused on enabling consumer oriented digital startups within the Atlanta community. Prior to founding HM Wallace, he co-founded Celecast, broadcaster of live NCAA event audio through mobile devices.

Heath is an active member of a number of Atlanta’s professional communities including AiMA, SEMPO and Shop.org as well as offering his time to help local start-ups decipher and define their Search + Social Marketing strategies and development cycles.

Heath started off at Georgia Tech, duly transferred, and completed undergraduate studies at Samford University followed by an MBA from Georgia State University.


Today’s show is brought to you by Minerva Planning Group.

 

Ortez Gude with Corvado and Bart Newman with FLIR Integrated Systems

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Ortez Gude/Corvado

A Georgia native, Ortez Gude has served as Corvado’s chairman and CEO of Corvado since 2007. In this role he chairs the board of directors and is responsible for managing the company’s development, formulating and executing long-term strategies; and directing relationships with customers, employees, partners, investors and other stakeholders.

Prior to Corvado, Ortez served as Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President of Strategy & Development for GMG, a leading Atlanta-based construction consulting firm. During his service GMG was named the 6th fastest growing private company in Atlanta by the Atlanta Business Chronicle and was awarded prominent projects including the internationally recognized Center for Civil and Human Rights, a noise abatement contract for the world’s busiest airport, Hartsfield-Jackson International, and Metropolitan Atalnta Rapid Transit Authority among others.

Prior to GMG, Ortez was Vice President and Chief Information Officer for The Haskell Company, one of America’s leading Design-Build companies. At Haskell, he led a business-technology transformation that resulted in Haskell being named the construction industry’s most highly performing and innovative company in the US.

Prior to The Haskell Company, Ortez served in various technology leadership roles for Skanska AB, a $17 Billion Fortune Global 500 construction services firm. Ortez’s roles included Chief Technology Officer, Chief Information Officer for Beers Skanska, and General Manager of Skanska IT Solutions’ Hub Operation for North and South America. During his tenure, Ortez led Skanska to the top ranks of Information Week’s list of most innovative companies five consecutive years.

Ortez has been a featured speaker at business and technology conferences around the world.

Bart Newman/FLIR Integrated Systems

Bart Newman is a former U.S. Army officer, Iraq war veteran, and author of “Because of Baghdad: What a Father Would Say About Life, If He Didn’t Come Home to Say It.” The book has been featured in numerous media outlets including the Wall Street Journal Law Blog, Georgia Super Lawyers magazine, and The Atlanta Journal— Constitution. Bart and his family donate all book profits to the children of service members who died at war.

Bart speaks to churches, civic groups, and leadership organizations about the book and what he learned in Iraq. He has shared his message with audiences across Georgia and as far away as Canada.

Bart is the Director of Program Management for FLIR Integrated Systems. In this role, Bart leads two business units and is responsible for the execution and growth of U.S. Government programs. One such program is the Mobile Surveillance Capability initiative of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection. In this program, FLIR is responsible for providing surveillance technology to aid and protect Border Patrol Agents on the U.S. southwest border. As a result, Bart spent several weeks in 2012 on the border working with Border Patrol Agents and refining the technology FLIR will provide. FLIR’s contract with the Border Patrol has a total ceiling of $101,000,000.

Prior to joining FLIR, Bart was an attorney at Arnall Golden Gregory in Atlanta. As a member of the commercial real estate practice group, Bart represented numerous Georgia businesses in the negotiation and disposition of real estate transactions.

Bart received his B.A. (magna cum laude) from the University of Georgia; his Masters in Management, Economics, and International Relations from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland; and his J.D. (cum laude) from the University of Georgia School of Law. While an undergraduate, Bart served as UGA’s Student Government President and was a member of two SEC Championship Tennis Teams. During law school, Bart won the Eugene Talmadge Moot Court Championship (Best Oralist Award) and the Richard B. Russell Moot Court Championship (Jere Morehead Best Oralist Award).

As a graduate, Bart received the University of Georgia’s Blue Key Young Alumnus Award in 2007 and was named to the University of Georgia’s inaugural 40 Under 40 class in 2011. In October of 2012, Bart was also recognized by the Atlanta Business Chronicle as one of Atlanta’s Top 40 Under 40 for 2012.

Bart is also an active participant in nonprofit boards. He serves on the Board of Advisors for Souly Business, a retreat-based ministry founded in Georgia. He is also on the Board of Directors for the Georgia Delta Chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon and previously served on the Executive Committee of the UGA Alumni Association Board of Directors.

Finally, Bart is a devoted family man. He has been married to Julie, his Woodward Academy high school sweetheart, for over twelve years. They have four children: Kate (8), Luke (5), Lyla (4) and Elise (1). As a family, they attend Johnson Ferry Baptist Church where Bart coaches soccer and serves in the children’s ministry.

 

January Newsletter Article

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Ashish Mistry and Heath Hyneman Appear on Disruptive Business

On Friday December 14th, 2012, Lee Kantor and Stone Payton, co-hosts of Disruptive Business Radio on Business RadioX®, were joined by Ashish Mistry with BLH Venture Partners and Heath Hyneman withHypepotamus to talk about the challenges of online business and how their companies are disrupting the space.

Ashish Mistry is Managing Partner with BLH Venture Partners. Ashish functions as an investor and adviser to young companies. His experience includes leadership roles with high-growth companies in the technology-enabled services, enterprise IT, e-commerce, and consumer markets.

Ashish spent two tours as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), working with start-ups across Georgia. He is active in non-profit organizations that foster entrepreneurship, including board positions with Venture Atlanta and the Atlanta CEO Council, as well as serving on committees with the Metro Atlanta Chamber. Ashish is a graduate of Emory University and resides with his wife and children in Atlanta.

During the interview Ashish explained that in addition to his work with BLH Venture Partners, he also runs an e-commerce company. Though he admits that he may hold the businesses he invests in to a higher standard than his own, he says; “We use our portfolio company as a testing ground for a lot of the investments we make. By operating a business in the morning we’re much better at investing in the afternoon”.

Heath Hyneman is a search marketer who provides his organizations roadmaps to product viability through agile product development practices. Heath has spent the past decade on enterprise-level ecommerce marketing technologies, with a focus on D2C commodity SKU search traffic generation and conversion optimization. He covered responsibilities for leading HM Wallace’s marketing and CMS efforts and setting the strategic direction of NationalBuilderSupply.com and its network of properties. He has recently opened up Hypepotamus, a co-working space in Midtown Atlanta focused on enabling consumer oriented digital startups within the Atlanta community. Prior to founding HM Wallace, he co-founded Celecast, broadcaster of live NCAA event audio through mobile devices.

Heath is an active member of a number of Atlanta’s professional communities including AiMA, SEMPO and Shop.org as well as offering his time to help local start-ups decipher and define their Search + Social Marketing strategies and development cycles.

Heath started off at Georgia Tech, duly transferred, and completed undergraduate studies at Samford University followed by an MBA from Georgia State University.

During the interview Heath talked about how his attempt to get away from technology led him right back to it. He discussed how he realized that tools and resources he was creating for his online business could be leveraged for other e-commerce businesses.

To learn more about BLH Venture Partners, and Hypepotamus , listen to the complete interview on the Disruptive Business Radio page for Business RadioX®.

 

Radhika Subramanian with Emcien, Kobi Margolin with Clinigence and Jesse Lindsley with Thrust Interactive

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Radhika Subramanian/Emcien Corporation

Emcien CEO Radhika Subramanian is a serial entrepreneur with nearly 20 years of experience helping large, sophisticated organizations achieve competitive advantage through advanced analytics technologies. She co-founded Idmon Corp. in 1998, which was funded by Cordova Ventures and Imlay Investments. As President and CEO, Radhika worked with launch customers such as Delta Air Lines, Continental Airlines and South African Airways until the company’s acquisition by Swissair Group in 2001. Numerous associations have recognized Radhika for her achievements working with Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies. She is recognized as a Leading Woman in Technology by WIT, was a finalist for the Franz Edelman Prize in Excellence in Management Science, and more. A sought-after presenter and speaker, she is a regular contributor to Forbes.

Kobi Margolin/Clinigence

Kobi Margolin is with Clinigence, an innovative clinical analytics provider. Clinigence is partnering with innovative medical practices to facilitate and accelerate the healing of our broken healthcare system through collaborative innovation.

Jesse Lindsley/Thrust Interactive Inc.

The driving force behind Thrust Interactive, Jesse Lindsley, started his company in 2004 with the vision that games can change the world.

Jesse and his talented team have put Thrust on the map by creating and publishing independent game titles including hits like Button Men and Boomblastica. In addition, Thrust has released 100+ third party games for clients such as the NFL, Cartoon Network, Mercedes, TBS/TNT, American Cancer Society, Autotrader and more.

Jesse has become a leader in the Atlanta Game Development community, where he founded the Unity 3D Atlanta User Group, runs the IGDA–Atlanta chapter and hosts the monthly Atlanta Game Developer Meet-up. He is an active board member of the Indie Developer Guild, APPNATION Atlanta and Digitainment Georgia. His industry experience and expertise have awarded him regular speaking engagements all over the country.

Jesse holds a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Tennessee Tech and plays and captains a five-time ALTA AA1 City Championship team along with two USTA (5.5 & 5.0) National Championship teams. In his free time, Jesse can be found taking his three dogs and cat (Gooch, Parker, Buckley and Slim), tenants at Thrust’s studio, out for a stroll in the Inman Park neighborhood.

 

 

Today’s show is brought to you by Minerva Planning Group.

 

Don Turner with Veloxiti and Randy Mitchell and Abraham Xiong with Plisten

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Don Turner/Veloxiti

With a passion for innovatively growing companies, Don Turner is a nationally recognized technology strategist and serial entrepreneur with experience in both the private and public sectors. His proven track record of successfully leading start-ups and multi-billion-dollar public corporations across a broad range of technology marketplaces spans two decades of turning around challenged companies, revitalizing established companies, and elevating organizations.

Veloxiti creates and delivers solutions that help people make better, faster and more comprehensive decisions. Grounded in two decades of battle-tested development for the military, the company is the first to bring to the commercial market easy and intuitive intelligent solutions. Veloxiti’s development environment allows a broader cross-section of professionals to create and deliver the best data-driven results.

Randy Mitchell and Abraham Xiong/Plisten

Randy J. Mitchell is the Founder and CEO of Plisten, a mobile app that helps consumers communicate with brands in an organized and curated way. He is also an alumnus of NewMe, a Silicon Valley-based Accelerator, sponsored by Google and Andreessen Horowitz. He has been featured on TechCrunch and is a contributing writer for BlackWeb 2.0. Randy currently resides in Atlanta, GA where he is an active member of the Tech Community.

 

 

 

Today’s show is brought to you by Minerva Planning Group.

 

Joe LeCompte with PMG and Gavin Spencer with Apparity, Inc.

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Joe LeCompte/PMG

Joe LeCompte is with PMG and is appearing on today’s show to discuss Enterprise Service Catalogs.  Large Enterprises are constantly looking for ways to drive efficiencies and reduce costs. To do this, departments often deploy software to help manage functions and processes. However, this approach only works when the request or task can be completed within that department.

The reality is that many business processes expand across multiple departments. Simple examples include onboarding a new employee or requesting an office move. These requests can involve IT, HR, Finance, Facilities, Security, etc. Challenges arise as different departments utilize different tools that are not integrated. As a result the requestor is often left wondering which departments to coordinate with and which software tools to use to complete the task at hand.

PMG’s Service Catalog solves this problem by providing a single interface for any type of request from any department. The end user always knows where to go to make an interdepartmental request and the process is automatically and seamlessly fulfilled. Because PMG integrates into existing tools at the individual department level, all departments continue to leverage existing investments WITHOUT disruption. Working smarter.

Gavin Spencer/Apparity, Inc.

Gavin Spencer is the CEO and a founder of Apparity, Inc. where he sets corporate strategy; manages marketing and sales; and guides product strategy of Apparity360, an innovative solution which provides industry organizations with the ability to manage and control spreadsheet processes at the enterprise level.

Gavin brings more than 25 years of senior leadership and technology development to his role at Apparity. During his career, Gavin has served in senior sales and business development roles at global technology companies such as Jacada, Global Software, Optio Software, FormScape, and Quality Software Products. He has created transformative consulting methodologies and built global enterprise solutions that streamlined corporate reporting across geographies and currencies. Gavin’s passion is for creating sophisticated technology solutions that deliver complex functionality and significant corporate value, but are simple and easy for end users to operate.

Gavin holds a B.A. in Social Sciences with Honors from Sunderland University in England.

 

 

 

Today’s show is brought to you by Minerva Planning Group.