Last Wednesday, Awesome Inc attended the second Forge Lexington event at Silvacola Farm, hosted by Lyle Hannah and his wife. For those who are not familiar with Forge Lexington, it is a networking event designed to bring together investors and entrepreneurs in the Lexington area.

The Silvacola Farm provided a nice relaxed setting to enjoy cocktails, excellent food, and priceless networking time with some of the most accomplished and esteemed individuals in the Bluegrass. The Forge community is represented by a wide diversity of individuals ranging from first time business owners to seasoned professionals.

Networking and great food aside, Forge invites a guest speaker to each event to give a brief talk about their achievements in business. For this event, Drew Curtis the founder of Fark.com was invited to speak. Curtis is the author of the Amazon bestseller, It's Not News, It's FARK: How Mass Media Tries to Pass off Crap as News.

Fark.com is a news aggregator and an edited social networking news site. According to the site, it receives 2,000 or so news submissions daily from its readership. The site was the first indie blogs to earn one million dollars a year in profit. Curtis has been featured in Business 2.0 and similar publications highlighting his success and accomplishments.

Despite the huge success of Fark.com, Curtis to this day lives and runs his business from Lexington, Ky. Curtis explained the cost benefit of living and working in Lexington versus relocating to the Valley or similar communities. Drew explained the importance of the community and its relaxed culture that surrounds business startups. He talked about the absence of this notion to "hurry up and fail" so that you can move on to your next venture. The culture in the Bluegrass allows you to take your time and grow your business at a much more relaxed pace.

Curtis went on to explain that Lexington really isn't as disconnected as people claim. If he were to receive a call at 7:30 one evening he could realistically be on the West Coast by the next morning for a meeting. The low cost of living in Lexington allows him to expand at a much greater rate for significantly less money.

Overall, one can conclude that the Bluegrass is a great place to start and maintain a business. The low cost of living and demand for innovative jobs allow entrepreneurs to expand their businesses and prosper much quicker than in most other regions of the country.

Forge Lexington truly is a unique gathering of entrepreneurs, investors, innovators, thought leaders and supporters of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. I urge any entrepreneurs or investors reading this blog to attend the next Forge event to discover its true value and worth.

Launching a brand is just like taking a leap of faith. No matter how much time you spend talking about how great it is going to be and the benefits for every one in the world, the brand still has to launch. I attend a church locally where my lead pastor has said we are in the year of the jump, meaning our church is going to grow fast with a new building addition.  So a friend of mine (NateFX) and I followed that lead and coined the term jump off for launching a brand with a tag line of might as well jump (set to the Van Hallen song of the same name).

Nate and I came up with that on a phone call at about 10 pm in the middle of March and are now launching our first brand together.  Through launching this brand we are actually launching a new business idea.  This means there is beta testing and all the rest. It is a real fun time and a great time of anticipation for the success of this brand and business.

Take a look at this video page and see what a brand is doing with nothing but volunteers on the team and a paid person leading the charge.  Anything can be done if you take a leap of faith.... might as well jump. :-)

http://www.vimeo.com/qpza

http://www.vimeo.com/qcc

As fate would have it, I've found myself without quality air conditioning on a day when such an amenity is quite necessary. Gazing around the coffee house currently sheltering me from heat-induced migraines and an endless battle with perspiration, I've become quite fascinated with each of the faces illuminated by laptop screens and smart phones. Essentially the entire customer base is bridged to the outside world by a technological medium, and each of us is vigorously using our respective bridge for some unique (or not so unique) purpose. While some may consider this accessibility a plague to humanity, those of us that cradle our electronic devices like newborn children have learned to appreciate the possibilities presented by the rapid advancements in technology seen throughout recent years. In order to keep the innovation flowing, it's imperative that brilliant, new ideas be nurtured and given the opportunity to flourish. Last week, the Awesome Inc. team traveled to Boulder, Colorado to learn more about an organization that is doing just that.

From the TechStars website:

TechStars is a mentorship-driven seed stage investment fund. Each year we run a summer-long program in Boulder, Colorado and Cambridge, Massachusetts. We're very selective - each year hundreds of companies apply to the program and we only take about ten per city. These companies get up to $18,000 in seed funding, a summer of intensive top-notch mentorship, and the chance to pitch to angel investors and venture capitalists at the end of the summer.

In summary, TechStars accepts twenty companies out of roughly five-hundred applicants and provides those companies with seed funding and mentorship during a three-month summer bootcamp. After an intensive preparation, each company pitches its idea to investors and venture capitalists in an attempt to raise the funding necessary to make its aspirations a reality. In past years, the organization has aided projects like IntenseDebate, Socialthing!, Brightkite, and Gyminee obtain the knowledge and resources necessary to take their projects to the level that they are at today. We had the pleasure of sitting through this year's pitch day to see some of the up-and-coming projects designed to take the world by storm. Here is the list of companies that presented. ReTel Technologies helps stores and restaurants optimize their operations and customer experiece. ReTel's system analyzes in-store security camera feeds to uncover, analyze, and report on metrics and trends that directly impact the bottom line. Everlater makes it simple to document and remember travel experiences in a beautiful format. We enable easy sharing with family and friends by connecting to all major social networks and printing scrapbooks, postcards, and photo albums. Finally, we connect people with better travel ideas and information through exploring friends travel experiences. TimZon is the easiest way to share visual feedback. By combining audio, video, whiteboard and screen capture it enables companies to establish high quality engagement with their customers while lowering support costs. Take Comics is an end to end solution aiming to bring comics into the digital age just like iTunes has done for music and video. Take Comics creates pixel perfect content on a range of devices with focus on profitability for the publishers and readability for the users. Next Big Sound measures the growth and popularity of bands across the major web properties and sells actionable insights around tat data to band managers and industry professionals. Vanilla is open source forum software that is used to power discussions on more than 300,000 sites across the web today. With the releases of the new and improved Vanilla 2, we will now be offering a hosted solution as well. Send Grid is an email service that solves the problems faced by companies sending transactonal outbound email. Simply by using Send Grid instead of their current outbound email servers, companies experience greatly improved deliverability and scaliability while cutting costs and saving time. Spry is insight into software projects. By monitoring all the tools and services used to develop software and analyzing the data in real-time, Spry enables clear and consistent communication throughout the team. This helps managers and developers make better decisions throughout the process thereby reducing the likelihood of failure and delay. Mailana brings your real social network to life - the people you communicate with on a regular basis. By understanding your strong relationships across multiple communication channels, Mailana lets you share what realy matters with the people who really matter. Rezora is the only Software-as-a-Service email marketing platform specifically designed for the real estate industry. We enable brokerages and their agents to focus their expertise on what they do best: helping their consumers buy and sell real estate. Out of those ideas presented, my favorites were Next Big Sound, Take Comics, Spry, and ReTel, but I find each of the ten to be highly useful to its targeted audience. I hope to see each of these projects thrive within the next few years and pave the way for future innovations. Keep doing what you're doing, TechStars! The world needs more organizations like you! Stay tuned for the second part of the recap detailing everything that I learned from this experience and Boulder, in general!

The Awesome Inc iPhone app released to the app store on August 19th. Search keyword "awesomeinc" and download it for free. The app features:
- news/blog feed
- calendar of events
- Awesomecast
- Registration for the Awesome Community - sign up now to get details on what this will be in the future.

*** updates coming soon! ***