Blecha established Sky Prosthetics in Benkelman, Neb., in 2005. While designing prosthetic and orthopedic devices for humans, Blecha realized these devices are important for animals as well. ACE Ortho Solutions was founded in 2009 to give animals the medical attention they deserve.

“It’s a new and upcoming field,” Blecha said. “The textbooks have been written on the human side but they haven’t on the animal side. The sky’s the limit at this point.”

About 200,000 dogs blow their ACL each year, according to Blecha. Many of these dogs however, are too old or weak to go through a painful surgery. With the newly designed stifle brace, similar to a knee brace in humans, these dogs can be given a better quality of life.

Dog Ankle Brace (Hock)

Blecha is also working on designing a hock brace, similar to an ankle brace in humans, and a carpal brace, similar to a wrist brace in humans. These braces are all custom made to fit dogs of all shapes and sizes. Blecha said he is currently working out the kinks and hopes to have these products on the market soon.

With certifications in both prosthetics and ortheopedics and training in biomechanics, Blecha thinks he has something that other companies don’t. He’s designed braces for dogs throughout the United States and globally in the United Kingdon, Canada, Romania, South Africa, Brazil and Australia. He described ACE Ortho Solutions as an innovative company, with cutting-edge ideas.

“We’re always looking for new and better ways to do things,” Blecha said.

On Nov. 18, Blecha participated in the Invest Nebraska East 2 West Competition. The creator of the winning business idea is given a $10,000 cash prize and the potential for an additional $50,000 investment.

Blecha submitted his idea to computerize fabrication techniques to use 3D modeling with a 3D scanner and printer. This helps him to make the creation process of prosthetics quicker and easier and also allows him to make an “off-the-shelf” version of different braces.

“One judge told me it was between me and the golf business to win,” Blecha said. “The golf business took home the hardware apparently (from the judge) because there are more golfers than pets that need braces.”

While Blecha went home empty-handed, he values the experience gained through competition.

“The networking was great for me to be able to meet all these people with young and fresh ideas,” Blecha said. “It energizes you to keep doing what you’re doing; you feed off of other people’s energy.”

Dog Wrist Brace (Carpal)

And that extra energy is exactly what Blecha needs to keep fighting. Facing numerous drawbacks and frustrations, he knows how difficult it can be to start a new business. He said because Benkelman is such a small, rural town most businesses are focused around agriculture. It was tough to get a bank to invest in a new company outside of this industry, Blecha said. It was also challenging to hire the right people and learn how to market to the public, Blecha said.

Despite difficulties, Blecha advises entrepreneurs to follow through on projects, no matter how challenging that may be.

“There’s always other resources out there; someone out there that will believe in you,” Blecha said. “If you fail, it’s because you quit looking for them.”

For more information, contact Ben Blecha, owner of Sky Prostethics and ACE Ortho Solutions at (866) 832-1269.

This post is from guest contributor Wade Sikkink:  After spending the first part of my professional life inside huge organizations (US Navy, Fortune 500 companies) I became interested in startups and entrepreneurship. I started dabbling in side business ventures while reading more and more about startups and the startup scene.  I’ve been involved in several business ventures, some modestly successful, some not so much and one that imploded leaving a huge crater. I’ve learned a lot along the way and want to share some of what I’ve learned.

It’s that time of year again. No, we’re not talking about holiday cheer and presents. Entrepreneurs in Nebraska always look forward to the annual Nebraska East 2 West Venture Competition hosted by Invest Nebraska. E2W is a one-of-a-kind statewide competition that features some of the most promising startups in the state. This year’s competition was held Nov. 18 at Talent Plus in Lincoln.

Although the competition doesn’t get much popular press, a good crop of six finalist companies were featured. This year’s finalists were chosen by a panel of six judges and featured a wide range of industries and stages. Companies submitted a business plan for the judges to review. The top six were invited to make a 15-minute pitch to the judges and answer questions for an additional 10 minutes.

This is a venture investment competition, so a little review on pitching is in order. Entrepreneurs usually are enamored with their product or service; however, potential investors are more interested in the business opportunity. In short, the focus needs to be on how the business will make money. Some of the companies had a handle on this. Some did not.

This might bring to mind the famous story of when legendary angel investor Ron Conway met with Larry Page and Sergey Brin to talk about their new search engine. They had no business and no clue how it would make money. But Conway was so impressed with the product that he invested and the rest, as they say, is history.

But most entrepreneurs are not Larry Page. They should stay focused on the business opportunity.

So, who were the finalists?

Pro-fit Performance Club Fitting, which has developed an innovative, patented software program for properly fitting golf clubs.

The Coloring Book Artist, which produces customized coloring books using the talents of Nebraska artists to celebrate life.

RestingSpot, which provides a unique combination of mobile and web technologies to connect the memories of loved ones who have died with the precise location of grave sites.

Ace Ortho Solutions, a custom manufacturer of orthopedic braces for dogs.

Agricultural Flaming Innovations, which develops flaming equipment for full-season organic weed control.

Mobile Truckr, which produces a mobile technology platform to handle document acquisition and transmission within the trucking industry.

Clearly, a wide range of industries were represented. The finalists ranged from ideas barely a month old to established companies with hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. They all also had different issues to solve in getting their businesses to grow. Some likely will face challenges scaling up to anything bigger than a hobby. Others don’t have a finalized plan for distribution. Another had a huge market opportunity, but no solid way to monetize it.

In the end, the judges seemed to go with the company that had a big market, a good way to monetize its product, established technology and a plan to scale. Pro-fit Performance Club Fitting was chosen as the winner for 2011. The company wins a $10,000 cash prize and the opportunity to negotiate with Invest Nebraska for a further $50,000 investment. This Lincoln-based business has an established technology that has been proven in the market. It is in the process of converting its Windows-based software to a web-based platform, which will allow the company to scale to golf pros nationwide relatively easy.

Attending the presentations is fun and gives you an up-close look at some of the up-and-coming companies in Nebraska.  As a bonus, there are opportunities to network and hob nob with the entrepreneurs when the competition is over. In the future, hopefully more people will learn about the event so a bigger audience can hear from another group of exciting new companies in Nebraska.

If you plan to enter, be sure and come with your sleeves rolled up. A tagline on Invest Nebraska’s website proclaims, “Competition is the whetstone of talent.” According to Dan Hoffman, of Invest Nebraska, Nebraskans have a long history of competition to draw on: competition in sports, competition in business and competition with the environment itself for early pioneers. “All businesses have to compete…we (Nebraskans) realize we have to compete to survive based on raw hard work and talent,” Hoffman said.

Hoffman added that Nebraska is a “beacon of light…we as a state are moving forward.” He said that whereas many state and international business arenas have fallen stagnant, Nebraska has maintained strong growth. Hoffman attributed this partially to the small population of the state, pointing out that with a population of about 1.8 million, most entrepreneurs are only two degrees of separation away from the business contacts that can help them jump forward.

Invest Nebraska wants to be one of those contacts. As a nonprofit venture development organization, Invest Nebraska helps supply advice and investment opportunities for budding businesses in the state. Besides the East 2 West competition, Invest Nebraska also hosts the yearly Hormel Business Competition in McCook, occurring this year on Nov. 4. The organization helps match businesses to angel funding, and is always available to advise with free and in-depth reviews of business plans.

Scott Kleeb, CEO of Energy Pioneer Solutions, was the winner of last year’s East 2 West Competition. Kleeb agreed with Hoffman about Nebraska’s unique potential to create conditions favorable for entrepreneurship.

“Vision and insight are deep within people in our state,” Kleeb said, adding that it took courage and vision among early settlers to “create something that simply wasn’t here before.” Kleeb said that Invest Nebraska is going to re-highlight the kind of things Nebraskans think about, and how those thoughts and ideas fit with the larger picture of international business. Kleeb believes in Nebraska as a place to start and grow businesses that have an impact beyond state borders.

About winning the competition in 2009, Jimmy Winter, founder of RockDex, said that Invest Nebraska’s equity investment “has been invaluable in providing us the resources we needed to develop our product and grow from a seed stage idea to a company with paying clients.” Winter also cited the assistance his company received from Invest Nebraska in arranging meetings with contacts who could help the business expand into social monitoring with VoterTide, the way RockDex monitors trends in the music industry.

Kleeb noted the assistance his company received from Invest Nebraska in making contacts, saying that participating in the East 2 West Venture Competition allowed Energy Pioneer Solutions access to “individuals who could help us grow, and relationships with towns and business leaders in and out of state.” He said that the 2010 competition put a spotlight not just on Energy Pioneer Solutions, but also on other homegrown businesses that deserved attention from investors.

The 2011 East 2 West Venture Competition will be held at Talent Plus in Lincoln. The deadline for entering the competition is Nov. 8. The competition is open to any new or existing business in Nebraska as well as businesses willing to relocate to Nebraska. The winning business will walk away with a cash prize of $10,000 and the potential for an additional $50,000 in investments.

There are six judges for this year’s East 2 West Competition: Gary Hamer, deputy director of the Nebraska Department of Economic Development; Scott Kleeb, 2010 East 2 West winner, of Hastings; Marcus Tooze, founder and CEO of GIS Workshop; Jeff Vaske of Charter Hill Partners; Kimberly Rath, president of Talent Plus; and Kent Knudsen, senior vice-president of investments for Mutual of Omaha and Invest Nebraska director.

Why does Invest Nebraska host competitions for and about Nebraska business? A direct quote from the Invest Nebraska website says it all: “Because we are confident that your success can be Nebraska’s success, and a community that encourages innovation, optimism and entrepreneurship is a community that will never stop thriving.”

For more information about Invest Nebraska, or the East 2 West Venture Competition, go to

http://www.investnebraska.com/access-to-capital/ne-new-venture-competitions/

Other links of interest:

http://www.energypioneersolutions.com

http://www.starherald.com/articles/2011/10/13/business/doc4e93afb5dfffe772666053.txt

http://rockdex.com/

Startup Weekend Omaha is back.  From Sept. 16-18, business people, creatives and developers will converge at the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Mammel Hall for a unique experience. The weekend is open to anyone with a business concept, or anyone who wants to collaborate with other entrepreneurs in a creative environment.

The weekend begins with business pitches on Friday evening. Attendees then form teams and spend the next 48 hours designing products and launching startups. The weekend culminates with business demonstrations on Sunday evening. According to Startup Weekend’s website,  36 percent of the businesses launched will still be going strong after three months and 80 percent of participants plan to continue working with their startup team after the weekend.

Startup Weekends are held in communities around the world. Omaha software developer Corey Spitzer brought the event to Omaha after attending a Startup Weekend in Kansas City. This will be the third Startup Weekend in Omaha. The weekend events give business dreamers the opportunity to build connections, collaborate with a creative team and get feedback from business mentors and investors.

“Startup Weekends mimic the constraints of experience in the real world,” said Grant Stanley, CEO of Contemporary Analysis and one of the organizers of the Omaha event. In a short amount of time and with limited resources, entrepreneurs can test their ideas and discover if they are viable.

Zaarly, a reverse Craigslist site that allows people to post goods or services they need and what they are willing to pay for them, was birthed at a Startup Weekend in Los Angeles last February. Founders Eric Koester and Ian Hunter built their prototype, won the Startup Weekend competition and impressed investors enough to secure funding. The site went live in March and processed more than $10,000 in transactions in its first 48 hours.

Spitzer and Stanley stress that you don’t have to have a business idea of your own to participate in Startup Weekend. You can come and be part of team that works on someone else’s project. At whatever level you participate, organizers say you will leave with inspiration and lots of new friends.

“You get to work together with people you don’t normally mix with,” Stanley said. ”Students, aspiring entrepreneurs and anyone who likes ideas should attend.”

Registration includes meals and all of the coffee you can drink.

“This year we had over 50 competitors from all over Nebraska.  We’ve had a good diversity of students and we’ve grown over last year, so were excited about that,” said Travis Pillen, graduate assistant for the Nebraska Center for Entrepreneurship.

Students used their presentation and communication skills to present their idea to panels of industry experts from across the state and received feedback to further develop their idea. According to organizers, the event has nearly doubled in terms of interest and spectators. It was estimated that 300 people attended this year’s competition.

Five winners each received $1000 to further pursue their idea.  The Nebraska Center for Entrepreneurship continues to work with students following the event.

“We continue to track the students as most of them are still in classes. We follow up with them and continue to provide any type of assistance they need,” Said Kathy Thornton, director of the Nebraska Center for Entrepreneurship.

Students who participated stressed the importance of the judges’ feedback in this process.

“All of the judges give insanely good criticism. It really helps you prepare for the real world,” said Tanner Odell, a junior enrolled in Lincoln Public Schools Entrepreneurship Focus Program.

Taylor Ford, a sophomore at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said, “This has been a valuable experience. I got some feedback and was able to make some connections with other entrepreneurs that could help me out in the future.”

The following winners were announced:
Beth Barmetler, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Kyle Powers, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Jason Kruse, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Ryan Cairns, Southeast Community College
Madison Gifford, Lincoln Public Schools Entrepreneurship Focus Program

Other news from the event:
Quick Pitch Competition awards five student entrepreneurs $1k (Video)
Idea to sale in 3 minutes

(Omaha – November 19, 2010) Invest Nebraska Corporation, a statewide venture development organization, hosted its East 2 West state competition Friday at The Old Mattress Factory Bar and Grill in Omaha. Six hopeful finalists competed for the chance to win a $50,000 equity investment, but only one went home with the prize.

After judges’ deliberation, Dan Hoffman, President of Invest Nebraska, announced that Energy Pioneer Solutions, presented by Scott Kleeb, had the most promising new venture. Kleeb has partnered with Jane Eckert and Julie McMahn to form the company in Hastings.

The aim of Energy Pioneer Solutions is to build a sustainable energy model, through its proprietary software, that explores conservation and untapped resources, saving families money, shaving peak usage for utilities, and leaving a stronger community for future generations.

“We’re honored by the recognition and confidence from Invest Nebraska”, stated Kleeb. “We’re most excited about the opportunity of not just the investment in our company, but also contractors and families for whom this investment will ultimately go by saving money through saving energy.”

Last year’s East 2 West winner was Jimmy Winter of Omaha, presenting his innovative company called RockDex (www.rockdex.com), a concept of collecting and analyzing data such as song plays, fan interactions, and online buzz about musical artists from several social networks.

Invest Nebraska held two regional competitions earlier this year in Scottsbluff and McCook and will hold a competition in York on December 2, 2010. For 2011, competitions are already planned for Lincoln and Peru. The statewide 2011 East 2 West Competition is slated to be held in Lincoln next November.

The New Venture Competitions are based on the premise and success of McCook’s annual Hormel Family Foundation’s Business Plan Competition in southwest Nebraska.

More information about regional competitions can be found at www.investnebraska.com.

CONTACT:
Susan Harris-Broomfield
(308) 340-0856
susan@investnebraska.com

Invest Nebraska Corporation advises and invests in companies and early stage business ideas in Nebraska. The organization supports and encourages angel investment and entrepreneurship in all areas of Nebraska, and provides networking opportunities for investors, entrepreneurs and service providers from all corners of the state.

Callahan presented the challenge in 2006 to David Graff, a student at the Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management at UNL working in the Husker’s media relations and sports information department.

When Graff and two other Raikes School students, John Wirtz and Brian Kaiser, showed Callahan a web-based prototype a month before spring football practice started, Callahan said he wanted it for that season.

“We couldn’t deliver on that, but that’s kind of when we woke up to ‘There’s definitely something here that could be a legitimate business,’” Graff said.

Like the founders of Allied Strategy, also Raikes School graduates, Agile Sports founders say factors including the Raikes School’s Design Studio projects and the way the school enables relationship-building played into the success of their startup.

Wirtz said the Raikes School’s Design Studio, where students get real-life software development and management experience, built leadership and communication skills that help graduates in any business setting, including entrepreneurship.

“It was a pretty incredible experience to get at age 22 or age 23, when you are managing two teams of six people, working on projects for IBM and Microsoft,” Wirtz said.

In addition, Wirtz and Graff both said time living, working and studying together at the Raikes School made starting a company together easier.

“You build up such a familiarity working with your classmates that it made the transition to the three of us starting a company a lot easier for us,” Graff said. “I mean, we had been working together for five years. We understood how one another worked. We understood what each other’s strengths and weaknesses were,” he said.

And, Allied Strategy had set a path Agile Sports could follow and build on.

Allied Strategy’s investor contributed funds to the Design Studio project for Agile Sports’ Virtual Playbook because the investor wanted to encourage Raikes School students’ entrepreneurship, said Colby Thomson, Allied Strategy’s chief executive officer.

In addition, when Graff, Wirtz, and Kaiser pooled funds for an office and to hire an intern, Agile Sports moved into the same office building where Allied Strategy was housed.

That space resulted not only in the collaborative startup atmosphere that became Turbine Flats, but also the kind of stories you tell your grandkids. The building’s tenants were hot in the summer and cold in the winter.

“Really, the breaking point was when Brian was writing code in his gloves and complaining about how tough it was to type,” Wirtz said.

While the two companies no longer share a building, their executives still meet to talk about business.

In 2006 and 2007, Graff, Agile Sports’ chief executive officer, Wirtz, chief operating officer, and Kaiser, chief technology officer, worked with UNL football coaches and staff to build out the product.

Agile Sports followed Allied Strategy’s lead winning business plan competitions as a source for funds.  Agile Sports’ list of wins includes:

• - Semifinalist, 2007 Global Moot Corp Competition; $2,000
• - Winner, second annual Nebraska Business Plan Competition (predecessor to Invest Nebraska’s East 2 West Nebraska Venture Competition) winner; $25, 000
• - Grand prize, Venture Challenge 2007 in San Diego, California; $15,000 cash and $15,000 in consulting services
• - First place, graduate division, Nebraska Center for Entrepreneurship-hosted New Ventures World Competition; $15,000
• - First runner-up, Big 12 New Venture Championship; $3,000
• - First place, graduate division, eighth annual UNL Venture Plan Championship; $1,000

“So in total we won more than $60,000 in cash that allowed us to continue to bootstrap and the three of us to eat ramen, to pay our interns, and to slowly increase that intern staff,” Wirtz said.

In early 2007, Agile Sports hired its first full-time employee, now their Hudl product manager. And, they began pursuing a first round of investment funding.

Wirtz said Agile Sports signed the UNL football program as its first paying client before the funding round closed.

“We were really proud of the fact that our first beta customer was also a paying customer,” Wirtz said.

The Raikes School’s namesake, Jeff Raikes, became one of the company’s investors along with an acquaintance of his and Nebraskan angel investors. Raikes is chief executive officer of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, formerly a division president for Microsoft, and a Nebraska native.

“(Jeff Raikes) is not only our lead investor but also just a huge mentor for us from the beginning,” Wirtz said.

The New York Jets were the first professional team to sign up for Agile Sports’ Hudl Pro product, which works with teams’ existing high-end video systems.

In the spring of 2008, Agile Sports began adapting the Hudl Pro system so high schools could use it with only a laptop and camera.

“Our engineering team did an amazing job, and by the end of July, we had an end-to-end video capture all the way through to online video analysis system rolled out to about 11 pilot partners,” Wirtz said.

Agile Sports designed Hudl for any sport and priced it so small programs can afford it. More than 1300 programs, mostly football and basketball teams, but also a bowling and an ultimate Frisbee team, use Hudl today.

The company recently completed a second round of funding. This year, Agile Sports achieved profitability and expects seven figures in revenue, Graff said.

And, as a Lincoln Journal Star article reported, recent deals mean that Hudl Pro clients now include seven of the Bowl Championship Series conference teams. A total of 13 programs, including three professional, now use Hudl Pro.

Agile Sports has 18 full-time employees and three interns. More than 60 percent of the full-time employees were Raikes School students.

The company has not only retained Nebraskans for employment but even brought one back from Austin, Texas. However, Wirtz and Graff both said young people leaving the state for a few years is okay, and more than okay if they bring back valuable experience.

“I think one of the key success factors we want to be looking at is how many are coming back within four to five years,” Wirtz said.

Thomson of Allied Strategy said he hopes other Raikes School students see entrepreneurship as feasible.

“I think it’s sort of inherent that kids in college have dreams and ambitions and ideas,” Thomson said. “I think the thing that it takes is making them feel it’s practical,” he said.

Recent Press and recognition

The startup stories of two Lincoln companies that raised significant outside capital demonstrate the ways the Raikes School fosters entrepreneurial development. Formerly known as the J.D. Edwards Program, the school not only blends computer science and business management education, but also aims to integrate entrepreneurial concepts and examples throughout the curriculum.

“The vision is that we don’t teach entrepreneurship as a senior elective,” said David Keck, Ph.D., director of and professor for the Raikes School. “We are continuously building the entrepreneurial perspective into everything we do from the ground up, without distracting us from also doing accredited, rigorous, scholarly work, but we do encourage students to take entrepreneurship elective courses.”

As an example of this integration of entrepreneurial topics, Keck said in his finance class he has deemphasized bond capital calculations and emphasized equity venture capital calculations like pre- and post-investment value, related risk and return and the number of shares issued to the venture capitalists.

The stories of Allied Strategy and Agile Sports demonstrate an ongoing collaborative relationship between the companies and the school. The school provided a setting, education and tools that fostered startups capable of attracting significant capital. In turn, the companies’ founders, all graduates of the program, give the school feedback on how to improve entrepreneurial education, serve as mentors for students and have hired Raikes School students and graduates as interns and employees.

Founders of both Allied Strategy and Agile Sports say the close relationships they formed at the school with students of similar interests and abilities were important to their companies’ formation.

“Never underestimate putting all those people in the same place and having them get to know each other,” said Colby Thomson, co-founder and chief executive officer of Allied Strategy.

The Raikes School’s setup primes the pump for such relationships to develop. Honors students with interests in business and technology leadership sleep, eat, study, attend classes and work under one roof at the Kauffman Academic Residential Center, modeled after Oxford University’s residential colleges.

In addition, founders of both companies say a unique feature of Raikes School education, Design Studio, was a key component in their businesses’ growth and development.  Design Studio enables juniors and seniors at the Raikes School to work as technologists and business managers on real-world software development projects.

Milestone celebration

For Allied Strategy, the idea for their main offering occurred after the students who would become the company’s founders participated in a Design Studio project with Mutual of Omaha their junior year. Working with the company helped the students understand problems in the insurance industry. Thomson and Allied Strategy’s other founders, Jeff Runyan, Allied Strategy’s chief operating officer, and Britton Nielsen, the company’s chief information officer, realized they could create a solution for some of these industry-wide problems.

“You never really have the ability to be confronted with that unless you see inside of a system, and say ‘Wow, there are huge opportunities here,’” Thomson said.

Companies who want to contract Design Studio projects pay a fee to the Raikes School for the work. Since students aren’t paid for Design Studio work and projects are considered “work-for-hire,” the University of Nebraska-Lincoln doesn’t maintain rights to intellectual property students create, which is an incentive for companies offering students these experiences.

In 2003, while the founders were still students, they decided to contract a Design Studio project with the Raikes School to work on their ideas for Allied Strategy.

In addition, the founders took a business plan writing class available to all UNL students that resulted in an award-winning plan for their company. In 2004, they won the undergraduate division of the Nebraska Center for Entrepreneurship’s New Ventures World Competition, earning a $7,500 prize. Their team was the first Nebraska winner in the competition’s 18-year history.

They also won prizes in Colorado State University’s Venture Adventure competition and were finalists in the NU Venture Capital Competition round, notable since they were still undergraduates.

In 2004, while working on MBAs at the Raikes School, they contracted another Design Studio project.

In 2006 when the founders graduated, Allied Strategy began full-time operations. The company started out in a shared low-rent building with ISoft Data Systems, Agile Sports, and other startups until some of the businesses moved into Turbine Flats, an office space with a collaborative atmosphere where Thomson is the co-founder and vice president of its board of directors.

Allied Strategy group photo

Their first two Allied Strategy hires after the founders came from the Raikes School, and they contracted a third Design Studio project in 2007.

Today Allied Strategy has about 20 full-time employees and plans to hire several more this quarter.  Eight of their current employees were Raikes School students.

Runyan said the ability to hire developers from the Raikes School was one of their top reasons for staying in Lincoln.

Alumni activities provide another win-win for the school and local Raikes School graduate-founded companies. The founders mentor students and speak at the school regularly. As alumni they can attend small closed sessions with Design Studio speakers, which have included Bill Gates, Tom Osborne, Jeff Raikes, and Twitter co-founder Evan Williams.

Allied Strategy’s mission is to improve the insurance experience for consumers, an issue Thomson is passionate about after watching his mother deal with insurance concerns arising from health issues and a house fire. Their first product, SEMCAT, helps insurance agents compare prices of insurance offerings and enables them to interact with consumers on the Web. SEMCAT is now used by thousands of insurance agents in the United States and European Union and supports more than 250 U.S. insurance companies. The team is planning several new products to assist consumers, and releases new features on a weekly basis.

In an email, Thomson said the company received unsolicited acquisition offers shortly before reaching profitability last year.

In addition to the Raikes School, Turbine Flats and the Nebraska Center for Entrepreneurship, Thomson said entrepreneurial resources helpful to Allied Strategy include the Kauffman Foundation, the Entrepreneur’s Exchange in Kansas City and Big Omaha/Silicon Prairie News.

In a future post, Nebraska Entrepreneur will examine the history of Agile Sports and its relationship to the Raikes School.

Their software application tracks data like band mention and song plays on social media sites and other Internet venues, including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and music blogs. RockDex compiles, analyzes and presents the data so that musicians, managers, record labels, publicists, booking agents and others in the music industry can use it when making marketing decisions.

For example, last summer one band and their manager used RockDex data to settle a disagreement with their record label over what song they should budget a video for, said Jimmy Winter, RockDex’s creator.

“We showed them the marketing data, and all at once the manager says, ‘Wait, wait, what’s that?’” Winter said.

The data showed the song the manager and band wanted for the video was suddenly organically rising in popularity. The manager sent a screen shot of the RockDex data to the record label and the label agreed to use that song.

RockDex, part of Beyond Measure, LLC, has received attention both locally and nationally for its innovative market research capabilities for the music industry. In March, RockDex was one of five companies winning the SoundCtrl FlashFWD campaign at the SWSX Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. According to SoundCtrl’s Web site, the award recognized companies that use scalable, community oriented, commercially viable and innovative technology to promote the music industry.

In November 2009, RockDex won Invest Nebraska’s East 2 West Nebraska Venture Competition, which earned the company a $50,000 equity investment from Invest Nebraska.

How did Winter, a young man originally from Gretna, Nebraska, start a company reaching the music industry, with its power players on the coasts and in larger cities? While still in high school, Winter caught the attention of a company called Fastmusic.com in New York City. When Winter had technical difficulties ordering four punk rock CDs from the new Fastmusic.com’s Web site, he emailed the company with possible solutions to the online ordering issues.

“And it kind of fixed the problem. So me, being 17 years old, I just called them up every couple days … I just kept talking to them and eventually they offered me a job. I was really lucky, in the right place at the right time. Story of my life,” Winter said with a laugh.

He worked remotely for Fastmusic.com during his senior year of high school. The company flew him to New York ever month or two, and he spent most of the summer of 2000 there, he said.

Winter later developed Music Arsenal, a contact relationship manager (CRM) application for Drive-Thru Records, retaining the rights to it so he could market it to other labels and bands. With investments from family and friends, Winter developed and sold the Music Arsenal for several years, traveling to music industry conferences across the country.

Winter said he was thinking about ways to make Music Arsenal better when he came up with the idea for RockDex. His original concept was for a site that would send Web traffic to Music Arsenal.

“And then I went down to SXSW last year,” Winter said, “You know, banging the Music Arsenal drum like I have for the past four years before that, and people were saying, ‘Music Arsenal, that’s cool. Tell us more about RockDex.’”

People quickly grasped how RockDex could meet their business needs, Winter said.

“Music Arsenal never made a ton of money. But everything I learned there I can now apply to RockDex,” he said.

RockDex’s merger in 2009 with Kansas City-based Locker Partners, a social-media, marketing and music management company whose employees have years of music industry experience, put the action to the analytics. RockDex analyzes the data for subscribers and provides marketing suggestions. For example, RockDex might encourage band members to tweet to fans living near an upcoming concert location.

“We’re really big into not just giving our clients a big pile of data,” Winter said. “It’s nice and it’s pretty but it’s not going to do anybody any good. We want to make sure the data makes financial sense, you know. We don’t want you paying for this if you’re not going to use it or understand it. So we work with the labels and artist about how to make sense of what the numbers mean.”

RockDex not only provides broad baseline data to let a band or label know how they are doing, but also gives them “deeper” data than competitors provide, Winter said. RockDex collects samples of what people are saying on Facebook or Twitter, and what links are being shared.

By looking at a snapshot of data, Winter said, RockDex can give subscribers not only numbers, like how many fans were gained on a given day, but also deep data like what people actually said about the band that day. “What were the key words people were using? Was it ‘video?’ Was it ‘Rolling Stones article?’ Was it ‘new single’ or ‘new song?’ And then that gives you a much broader picture and a deeper understanding of those numbers,” he said.

Winter said talking to others with experience helped prepare him to be an entrepreneur.

“I’ve had a lot of advice from some really smart people,” Winter said. A representative from SCORE, a nonprofit business counseling organization, helped him with his winning RockDex business plan, and he’s received advice from Ken Moreano, director of the Scott Technology Center, where RockDex is a virtual incubator company. In addition, Silicon Prairie News has been supportive, he said.

“Before Silicon Prairie News, I never knew there were any really cool Web startups in Omaha,” he said.

The RockDex Pro application has been available as a private beta for a little over a year, but Winter said to watch for their public launch soon.

On

Located in the same building as the Southeast Community College (SCC) Entrepreneurship Center, the Lincoln Public Schools (LPS) Entrepreneurship Focus Program enables high school students to create plans individually for their own small businesses and in teams for Junior Achievement businesses. Simultaneously, the program uses entrepreneurship as a focus of English, math, social studies, marketing, economics, technology and human behavior classes. In math, for example, students might work on their businesses’ financials; in social studies, students might research demographics impacting their businesses. In the afternoon, students go to their home high schools across Lincoln to take additional classes.

This type of program is rare, said Deb Payne, program developer for business/marketing at Lincoln Public Schools and a teacher in the program.

“People come here from all over the country to take a look at us and see how we are doing,” she said.

The program can point to successes that include academic achievement, young leaders, business competition winners and emerging small-business owners.

In February 2010, two LPS Entrepreneurship Focus Program students, Tanner O’Dell and DeVante King, each won $1,000 at the 1^st Annual Make It Happen Student Quick Pitch competition in the Skybox Suites of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Memorial Stadium.

King pitched his idea for customizable athletic wrist bands called “U-Bands” in front of judges, business people, students and other community members in an evening session. The next morning, he spoke on a student panel about the LPS Entrepreneurship Focus Program in front of about 400 people at the Nebraska Summit on Entrepreneurship.

“It was a lot of preparing but it was a good experience, I think,” King said. “I feel a lot more confident after doing both of those things.”

Kandace Freeman, another LPS Entrepreneurship Focus Program student, also spoke on the panel at the Nebraska Summit on Entrepreneurship. This year, she led a public relations project with another student. The group of eight students wrote a business plan for marketing the LPS Entrepreneurship Focus Program and presented the plan at the Nebraska state meeting of DECA, an international organization of marketing students.

“We didn’t make it to finals,” she said, “but we were pretty proud of ourselves. It really helped the program.”

The students’ public relations efforts, which included radio and newspaper interviews, gained eight new students the following semester. Freeman said the group hopes to raise the total enrollment from the current 45 students to 65 next fall.

Freeman, a graduating senior, plans to study social science education at Doane College in Crete to prepare for a career as a history teacher.

“Before I came here there was no way I could get up and stand in front of people and talk,” she said.

O’Dell, a sophomore, won the Quick Pitch contest with his idea for a “Chef’s Table” restaurant, where dinner is a surprise. He said he wants to start this business in the future and may attend culinary school or business school after high school. Now he is writing small business and marketing plans for a business he wants to start while he’s still in high school. He has reserved domain names for a Web site and Twitter and Facebook profiles for the business. He is preparing to present his idea to civic and business groups in a search for funding.

“I actually just got my logo finished yesterday,” he said.

O’Dell said the LPS Entrepreneurship Focus Program allows students to focus on their passions, encourages students to think “out of the box” and guides students to create businesses they can take out in the real world.

“I get to come here and share all of my ideas, and it’s just overall a better atmosphere for the way I learn personally,” he said.

In addition to attending events like the Quick Pitch competition, the Nebraska Summit on Entrepreneurship, UNL’s engineering week and SCC’s Business Expo, students learn from and network with local business community members. The SCC Entrepreneurship Center Business Incubator is located in the same building, so students visit businesses downstairs and business owners give presentations to students upstairs. In addition, the incubator has three spots for high school student businesses.

This year for an economics class, students tracked the Lincoln Haymarket Arena project, following the news, listening to speakers, and talking to business people in the Haymarket.

Based on their research, students created a display board representing the types of businesses they thought should be in the Haymarket, importing businesses and services that could come from other countries. At the end of the semester, students gave presentations about their research and ideas. Representatives of the Lincoln Chamber of Commerce attended the presentations, asking and answering questions.

Facilitating this type of interaction between the students and the business community is key to the program, Payne said.

“We are all about real world experiences,” Payne said.

Payne said the idea for the LPS Entrepreneurship Focus Program had been percolating among high school marketing teachers in Lincoln for a number of years.  However, it was discussions among the Krieger Family Foundation, Lincoln Public Schools, and other business leaders that started the ball rolling in the spring of 2005.  A committee of people from the business community, Lincoln Public Schools, Southeast Community College and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln began discussions and found ways to partner, launching the program four years ago. One benefit of the partnership includes the dual credit students can receive for some of the LPS Entrepreneurship Focus Program classes at Southeast Community College.  Some of the Southeast Community College credits can then transfer to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

This semester, two student groups created businesses for Junior Achievement projects, one selling “Inspiration T’s” and another selling advertisement space on stress-reliever footballs they handed out at the UNL Spring Games. For both projects, students handled logistics and permissions, developed financial reports, and bought and sold stock in the companies. Both companies were profitable; after selling the stocks, the stock owners – the students—walked away with money in their pockets. However, both groups chose to donate a portion of the proceeds to local charities. One of the groups chose to donate 50 percent of their proceeds.

“They are very generous kids,” Payne said.