Last Night, the party kicked off with awesome vegan treats and brew at Secret Penguin and @WhatCheer.  WhatCheer is behind http://www.iliveinomaha.com and Secret Penguin develops some pretty interesting youth branding building off their expertise in youth skateboard culture.

Shortly after stuffing myself with tech talk, beer and vegan eats, the party moved to SlowDown, a trendy Indy venue next door where GaryVee recorded a live video broadcast of his Wine Library TV. The dude is hilarious.

Check out the Ustream clip:

Again, kudos to the BigOmaha Team! My cheer to you:

I ended up posting to other websites.  I’ll be interested to see if @kcstar actually publishes my classified ad or not. I’m also interested to see if I actually get an email from either business after sending one to them.

Fail!  So, I sent five tweets to their accounts thinking someone would be manning the @kcstar or @kansascitystar account….perhaps some one at the KC Star is paying attention to their customer base on the web…..FAIL again.  No one.  I called, nada!  Please, let me give you $108!  Video:

KC Star Please Let Me Give You Money from Dan Melton on Vimeo.

StartFest: March 12th Boulevard Brewery 6pm http://startpath.eventbrite.com

Startup Weekend Kansas City April 24-26th: http://kansascity.startupweekend.com

Big Omaha May 7th and 8th http://www.bigomaha.com

BarCamp Kansas City June-ish http://barcampkc.wordpress.com

I’ve been getting into KIVA quite a lot lately.  Being a fan of micro-lending already, this website gives me even more power to change the world, $1 at a time.

I was always annoyed at those classroom/college/etc campaigns to save some sort of country.  It always felt fishy, giving money to some white person who drives a benz who ‘champions’ overseas causes.  It just felt dirty to me as a kid.

Kiva is really cool, because you can loan directly to entrepeneurs over seas, rather than through some agency who gives it to another agency who gives…etc etc.  In increments of $25, I’m building up a social change fund to lend to Middle East business people…I’m concentrating on the Middle East b/c we’ve (Americans) really screwed that area up.

Start your own fund, check it out at http://www.kiva.org

The event is great for startups and investors alike. For startups, you get 3 minutes on stage to pitch your concept, brand, whatever, for funding, user-adoption, potential partners or job hunters. If you can’t say it in the 3 minutes, your business sux anyway.  It’s great prep to hone your message in just a few points. As an entrepreneur, the event was the perfect shot in the arm, free of service providers (love you guys, but stay out of the bull pen)..no insurance sales people (except for the startups in the space), no financial experts and no commercial brokers.

For investors, they love it.  51 companies present in 3 mins, giving quick insight into who they are,/what they’re up to..totally avoiding the coffee/hour long/waste-of-my-time conversation when they find out you just have a logo (vaporware), no customers (adoption-less) or worse, are a total idiot.

We presented on ShoutNow, and true to form, I got everyone laughing in the first 30 seconds…which is a personal goal of mine every presentation. Yes! You can check out the clip below with our presentation.  So what did I learn (if anything?) from the event?

After 51 pitches, here are three of my thoughts (please feel free to skip):

• Be comfortable. If you can’t talk about your idea with passion in a comfortable (not a million mile a minute chat), don’t present…find someone else too or find another idea (or practice in front of your grandma?).  Too many companies fell flat b/c they were so damn up tight, or talking to fast….i think one guy took two breaths the whole time…he literally looked like he would pass out.
• $1 billion? In 3 minutes, who the hell cares if you have a $1 or $1 billion opp…talk about the problem or solution, not how much money you’ll make…that’s for later, when u get invited to do a 10 minute pitch…plus, we know you made that s*$t up in 3 mins.  I remember the $15 billion slide, but not the product, company or problem…I remember every company who talked about the problem/product in a conversational way.
• Twitter Idiots At these events, everyone is twittering now…including angels and vc’s.  As soon as you get off stage, respond to people’s tweets about your stuff.
• Stop the Buzz Words. If I hear pipeline sales Saas all in the same phrase with interoperability, SOA or business intelligence, I’ll scream, lol.  Everyone uses them, but does anyone really know what they mean?

Props to Fuzzy Logic (the special toy bear guy), Lizzer (the embeddable plugin), Elf Island (the tweener quest game with a social impact), 40billion (40 entrepreneurs asking 40 friends/fam for money), Rank’Em (voting up/down music catalogue by fans who know the artists), WomBeat (business listing service with 1 million listing in Florida), and Southeastern Safety (gps enabled device to save worker’s lives when they fall off the electric pole)…great presentations/demos/explanations.

The night ended at Nelson Mullins Law Firm, a beautiful place, on a highrise, in the middle of Atlanta, with views reaching to Florida. Pretty swanky…check out the views in the videos below (uploading right now, I’ll post after it encodes).

Thanks @sanjay (pronounced sunjay) for the recruitment via twitter…and the invite to apply for ShotPut ventures…totally looking forward to hang in Atlanta and build some great applications.  I hope StartupRiot gets syndicated to other cities…especially ones with communities about the size of Atlanta that need the valley-style pitch events.