Tag Blog

Atlanta’s GRA/TAG business launch finalists named

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

http://www.techjournalsouth.com/news/article.html?item_id=7460
Tech Journal South

ATLANTA - The Georgia Research Alliance/Technology Association of Georgia (GRA/TAG) have named AccelerEyes, Band Metrics and TalentSoup as the finalists for the GRA/TAG Business Launch Competition.

The winner will be announced during the June 3, 2009 awards ceremony held at IBM’s Hillside Building at 8:00 a.m. Registration for the awards ceremony is currently open at https://www.123signup.com/event?id=znmng.

The TAG/GRA Business Launch Competition is designed to help a local startup technology company launch its business and has become one of largest competitions of its kind in the U.S.

The competition is GRA/TAG’s way of rewarding high-tech entrepreneurship and assuring a deserving Georgia startup company is primed for success.

The winner will receive $100,000 in cash and $200,000 in business and professional services. The three finalists for the GRA/TAG competition come from varied industries, including high-performance computing, music and advertising.

AccelerEyes was formed in June 2007 to deliver on its vision of creating and leading the movement towards “Personal Supercomputing.”

AccelerEyes brings a new level of supercomputing power to personal computers by delivering powerful software solutions to the high-performance computing (HPC) market.

Band Metrics analyzes, ranks and scores the overall popularity of a musician, band or song by aggregating and interpreting all relevant online content.

Through its patent-pending Popularity Profiling System ("PPS"), Band Metrics aggregates comprehensive information about bands and musicians from across the global Internet landscape, calculating and delivering results in an easy-to-use, analytical dashboard.

TalentSoup is an interactive service that provides a highly efficient matching engine to connect talent with advertising projects.

This year’s winner will be selected by a distinguished panel of judges which includes venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and seasoned executives. The 2009 judges panel includes:

Mark Barry, Venture Partner, OpenView Venture Partners;
Matthew Chagan, Vice President, Trident Capital;
Nelson Chu, Managing Partner, Kinetic Ventures;
Kevin Costello, President, Ariba Inc;
Tom Crotty, Managing Partner, Battery Ventures;
Roger Hurwitz, Partner, Fidelity Ventures;
Matt McConnell, CEO, Knowlagent.