If you are an early-stage investor looking for fresh deals in Atlanta, or an early-stage entrepreneur seeking capital in Atlanta, I recommend you check out Whit Blakely’s monthly meeting at The Ritz Carlton in Buckhead. Called “The Ritz Group”, meetings are held monthly. This event has actually been going on for over 20 years!

In prior incarnations, it was a typical networking event. Mostly service providers looking to push their wares. Whit is turning it into more of a networking event between early stage entrepreneurs and investors (or at least, that is the goal). It is also free – a welcome shift from many networking events here in Atlanta. Kudos to Whit for continuing to push this event and supporting entrepreneurs.

I attended this past meeting, and I definitely noticed a slight shift in the audience from past sessions. But we need more early-stage folks in the room. There are still some service providers patrolling the room looking for leads, and there were a few later stage private equity guys in the room, but it is evolving.

Space is limited, unfortunately, but if you are interested in attending the next meeting, contact Whit Blakely via email at “whitb AT cmresources.net”.

Cheers.

Atlanta’s MFG.com, the world’s largest online marketplace within the manufacturing space, today soft-launched their new project: MFGX.com. In essence, it is MFG’s attempt to leverage to social media (specifically wikis, forums, ads, and jobs), to offer a value add to their customers and users.

I’ve written on the issues of B2B marketplaces and online communities before (here and here), and I’m glad to see MFG moving in that direction. This will be a very interesting experiment for them.

I really like the fact that they decided to brand it “adjacent” to their marketplace site (MFG.com), rather than making it part of the marketplace site itself. This will provide a nice way to offer some free tools to non-marketplace participants as well, and hopefully serve to drive new subscription traffic into their crown jewel at MFG.com over time.

There isn’t much content up there yet – but this will change in the short-term I am sure.
Cheers.