Edmundo Braverman is a New Orleans expat currently residing in Paris and writing regularly for Wall Street Oasis. He and I chat it up on the twitters pretty regularly and a few weeks ago he notified me he was going to be in town and wanted to check out the scene at Launch Pad (SBN Headquarters).
Eddie usually writes about finance, trading, and other Wall Street tidbits, but he took a bit of a break from that this week to highlight the rise in entrepreneurship in New Orleans. Specifically, he wrote about Launch Pad Ignition and three of the Ignition companies: Lawyerfy, Giftmeo, and Connect for a Cause.
Here are excerpts from the four posts that made the home page of Wall Street Oasis:
Fire on the Bayou
I’m changing things up a bit this week. I’m devoting the entire week to start-ups, specifically those operating out of the Launch Pad in New Orleans. Most of you know I was back there a couple weeks ago. What you may not have known is that I was there to do more than drink whiskey, eat fried food, and shoot guns (though I certainly did all three of those things in mass quantities). I’d been hearing about a tech start-up explosion in New Orleans for a couple years now, and I wanted to see if it was for real.
I’m happy to report that Silicon Bayou is very much for real… [Read More]
Lawyerfy: Connecting Clients and Attorneys
I’ve been sued a fair number of times over the years. To me it’s just the cost of doing business – you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. But in each of those experiences, the least pleasant aspect was dealing with my own lawyer. My lawyer is expensive and has a knack for making me feel like a small fish in a big pond. I hesitate to even pick up the phone to call her for an update because I know a 15-minute conversation is going to cost me $125.
I now know I’m not the only one who feels this way. And I now know that it’s a problem for my lawyer, too… [Read More]
Giftmeo: Group Gifting Made Easy
There’s no question that Facebook is the biggest thing to hit the Internet in the last five years. With that type of hyper-adoption, it was only natural for folks to try to tag along and turn a buck. Unfortunately this usually translated into nuisance social gaming apps from companies like Zynga, who is already planning a secondary offering in order to keep insiders from jumping ship after having gone public a mere three months ago.
So you can imagine my relief when I found a company in New Orleans that leverages the power of Facebook and other social media to a useful and practical end. The company is called Giftmeo and it is launching into the “crowd-gifting” space… [Read More]
Connect for a Cause: Give to Charity and Get Valuable Face Time
How many of you just know you could get the job you want on Wall Street at your dream firm if you could just get your resumé in the right person’s hands and get a one-on-one interview with him so you could convince him you’re the man for the job? What would you give for an hour-long one-on-one lunch meeting with the one guy who could hire you on the spot?
This final installment in my Launchpad IGNITION series features a company that might just be able to arrange that meeting for you.
Connect for a Cause at its most basic is an online auction site much like eBay. Unlike eBay, however, they’re not auctioning off old bicycles, comic books, or pirated software… [Read More]