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.

“Year two is important to prove that (Big Omaha’s) initial success wasn’t just a fluke,” Davidson said following the event. “Big Omaha is our ‘baby;’ we are constantly looking at it from the angle of how to improve, and are already jotting down notes for how to improve 2011. If we can spark one new idea, or inspire one person to build something new, we will have done our job.”

Jeff Slobotski (right) and Dusty Davidson (left) kick-off Big Omaha 2010 - Photo credit Geoff Johnson, Malone and Co

Including attendees, SPN staff, Big Omaha volunteers, members of the press and the speakers themselves, some 550 individuals trekked to the two-day entrepreneurial mecca, soaking up the genius of the event’s guests of honor and doing a little schmoozing as well. This year’s conference showered its audience with tips and insight on everything from buffing up employee morale to guerrilla marketing. On the latter topic, David Hauser of Grasshopper shared the tale of one of his company’s most successful PR blitzes: mailing chocolate-covered, deep-fried grasshoppers to members of the media in envelopes bearing no identifying information or return address. The result? The sort of exposure “you couldn’t pay for.”

“We were sitting in a room just talking, and someone asked ‘What can we send in the mail?’” Hauser told Nebraska Entrepreneur after his speech. “It progressed into what could we actually do with grasshoppers. Well, we thought, we could release grasshoppers in New York, but we might get arrested. Plus, you can’t send live ones in the mail, but if they’re dead, people might not look at them. Then we wondered, ‘What if we dip them in chocolate?’”

Other business gurus also turned out to instruct and inspire. Two favorites from Big Omaha 2009, Jason Fried from 37signals and Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV, returned for a second bout of educating attendees. In the passionate, almost frantic style that’s become his trademark, Vaynerchuk encouraged entrepreneurs to build businesses around the skills they actually

David Hauser, Grasshopper.com - Photo credit Geoff Johnson, Malone and Co

possessed, rather than those they wish they had. (Warning: Gary has a rather… explicit manner of getting his points across.) Scott Harrison from charity: water also made an appearance, captivating the masses with his story of transformation from a selfish night club promoter to the impetus behind an organization providing clean drinking water to thousands of suffering people throughout the third world. A collective effort by everyone involved with Big Omaha 2010 to raise $5,000 for a charity: water sponsored well yielded astounding results; donations reached that 5K benchmark by 9:30 a.m. on the event’s opening day.

All in all, the event galvanized entrepreneurs to not only snatch those goals within their reach, but to learn to stretch themselves and obtain the sort of success that seems impossible at first glance. Roger Fransecky, founder & CEO of the Apogee Group said it best during his Saturday morning speech:

“Living in a city most of my life, you forget about horizons. Horizons are not just a metaphor here. You can go outside and see forever. It’s so easy, when you live here, to take that view for granted. What’s happening in this state is all about horizons, about what’s next. I’ve found in this setting, and subsequently in this state, a place where great people can do great things.”

Be sure to check out From the Founders: The Big Omaha energy carries on

“Last year was our first year putting on Big Omaha,” said SPN co-founder Dusty Davidson. “We like to see the event as an extension of what we do with Silicon Prairie News, trying to get people excited about building companies or starting businesses or just going with their passions. To us, Big Omaha is the offline version of that goal.”

And one look at this year’s line-up of prominent speakers is evidence enough that sort of zeal won’t be wanting at Big Omaha 2010. Dennis Crowley, co-founder of the hotspot-hopping, city-exploring mobile phone application foursquare, and Scott Harrison, founder of charity: water (an organization providing clean drinking water to impoverished third world nations), will both be addressing the crowd.

“This year, we’re not focusing specifically on start-ups, but rather how do you just start something, whatever that might be? In Scott (Harrison’s) case, he’s got an amazing talk about how he was a nightclub promoter in New York City who got fed up with his life and became moved by the idea of helping bring water to places in the world that need it most,” Davidson said. “And then there’s Dennis (Crowley) from foursquare, which is gaining huge traction and getting lots and lots of buzz. Plus, he’s a young guy who started and built a company and already sold it to Google, and now he’s building another.”

“Those are the sorts of stories we’d like to bring in and share it with the audience,” he added. “Those kinds of stories that are fantastic to share with a group of people who aren’t as familiar with these kinds of things.”

In addition to the impressive stable of a dozen industry-experienced orators speaking their mind at Big Omaha, two old favorites from last year’s event will be returning for an encore performance. Both Jason Fried and Gary Vaynerchuk, of 37signals and Wine Library respectively, were brought back by popular demand.

“In looking at some of the folks who had the greatest impact last year, both Fried and Vaynerchuk had two distinct styles of approaching business,” said SPN’s other co-founder, Jeff Slobotski. “We felt that, by bringing them back to Big Omaha for 2010, we could learn from what has changed in a year for both of these gentlemen’s businesses.”

Unfortunately, due to the event’s widespread appeal, tickets have long since sold out. However, anyone still hoping to attend can sign up for the Big Omaha 2010 waiting list. And if that doesn’t pan out, well, there’s always Big Omaha 2011.

“One of the best parts about Big Omaha isn’t even the speakers — it’s getting the right people in the room, that mix of investors and entrepreneurs, and seeing the kind of energy that comes out of that,” Davidson said. “The speakers are there to raise the energy level, and from there, you just see the crowd buzzing.”

Silicon Prairie News, a blog and event producer founded in Omaha in 2008, believes there’s a fine line between sharing your success stories and outright boasting. Furthermore, SPN is convinced Nebraska’s entrepreneurs are also aware of that intangible divide, and place their loyalties squarely on the side that inspires rather than alienates. Started after co-founder Jeff Slobotski toured the country’s urban centers and concurrent tech scenes, Silicon Prairie News seeks to celebrate Nebraska’s entrepreneurs and encourage others to follow their example.

“When Jeff came back to Nebraska, he knew entrepreneurs here were doing things similar to what was happening in bigger cities, but they were hidden under the woodwork or they were in their own worlds doing work,” said Dusty Davidson, SPN’s co-founder and current technical lead. “People in this region don’t really celebrate their successes the way people do other places. Here, it’s kind of heads down, kind of humble. SPN isn’t about boasting — it’s more about, ‘Hey I finally raised some money for my startup and I want to tell the world about it.’”

Realizing the value of telling entrepreneurs’ success stories — both to other entrepreneurs and to the community at large — SPN quickly set about cataloging Nebraska’s presumably nascent start-up culture. What Davidson and Slobotski quickly discovered, however, was that a vibrant entrepreneurial framework was already present in the state — it was simply sequestered from the public eye.

Dusty Davidson, Co-found of Silicon Prairie News, photo courtesy of Silicon Prairie News

“Three years ago, nobody mentioned ‘Omaha’ in the same sentence as ‘startups,’ and certainly not at the national level,” Davidson said. “We realized one reason there wasn’t a lot of discussion about entrepreneurship was because people who were interested looked around and didn’t see others doing it. So, our hypothesis was that if you build a community and showcase that entrepreneurs are out there, you help the the community grow as more people join the fold.”

Fresh off a new site design, SPN’s mission is twofold. First, to intertwine local entrepreneurs in a organic support network that bolsters the entire business community by connecting ideas with talent, and second, to promote the zenith of Nebraska’s entrepreneurial scene on the national stage. While the first goal is off to a great start, the second, more ambitious task will take some doing.

“Part of what we’re doing is just facilitating a discussion, just trying to put ‘startups’ and new ‘technology’ on people’s tongues when they’re talking about Omaha, because that isn’t really the case,” Davidson said. “How do you put Lincoln, Omaha, Iowa on the national radar? Right now, we’re trying to take some of the best success stories, use the best ideas, the best interviews, the best content that we have and push that out to a larger audience, really put us on the map.”

Big Omaha - May 13-15 2010

In the meantime, Silicon Prairie News is devoting its energies toward preparing for Big Omaha 2010, a summit that will attract business innovators and startup gurus from around the Midwest. As SPN’s traffic steadily improves, so does its resolve to inform the world of the entrepreneurial whirlwind blowing through the Great Plains.

“We’re really excited with where things are heading,” Davidson said. “We started the site to promote some of those people hanging out in the shadows, so to speak, and to get their stories told.”