Apr 26, 2011On Apr. 8, 2011, the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship and the Robert H. Smith School of Business, both of which are part of the University of Maryland, sponsored a contest in which startup companies were given the opportunity to pitch venture capitalists (VCs) on the opportunity to invest in their business.
The pitches were delivered in 10 tweets or less via Twitter. And the winner was RFID Global Solution.
"Our pitch—and, likely more so, the RFID market opportunity—is attention-getting and compelling," says Diana Hage, RFID Global Solution's CEO. "More validation that the market is heating up."
One idea I considered for Journal LIVE! 2011 was a session in which companies would compete to provide elevator pitches for end users. A good elevator pitch is difficult to create. Jill Konrath talks about this in her book How to Sell to Big Companies, which I highly recommend to all RFID vendors (see Jill Konrath Discusses How to Sell RFID to Big Companies).
I asked Diana if I could include her tweets in my blog, and she said I could, though she left out two of them so that no one would misperceive RFID Global Solution as trying to raising funds for nonregistered securities via the Internet.
So with that caveat, here are the winning tweets:
• "RFID Global Solution, leading provider of data center and enterprise asset tracking solutions, Diana Hage, CEO, www.rfidgs.com"
• "Large enterprises spend billions annually on capital expenditures for IT assets, which are not effectively tracked or managed"
• "Our Visi-Trac solution provides real-time visibility to where assets are, saving inventory costs and total cost of ownership"
• "Massive addressable market for enterprise IT equipment est at $5B annually; a perfect storm of factors driving RFID interest"
• "CEO—IBM RFID Exec, Darden MBA; Team—Motorola, Matrics, Savi, Aether, 3 exits, 6x return, IPOs $33/sh, sales to Cisco, Symbol"
• "Competition: 1) Manual inventory: laborious, error-prone; 2) Barcode—must scan each item; 3) Network SW—only networked assets"
• "Sales and services partnerships with leading data center vendors—IBM, Imation, nlyte Software and communications clients"
• "We are in early expansion-stage, focused on accelerating product development and attracting more world-class talent"
Good stuff. I think more VCs will pay attention to this industry again as they realize that it has emerged from what Gartner calls the "trough of disillusionment."
Mark Roberti is the founder and editor of RFID Journal. If you would like to comment on this article, click on the link below. To read more of Mark's opinions, visit the RFID Journal Blog, the Editor's Note archive or RFID Connect.