Regarding Mike’s presentation at the upcoming TAG/ATDC Entrepreneur meeting - the correct date is March 6th, not the 5th!

Cheers.

Wow, what a rush. We had a great time the other night at our latest StartupLounge.com Capital Connections event.  It is absolutely amazing how the community has embraced this grassroots movement. We had 250-300 entrepreneurs and investors there at the peak of things. I’m still waiting to get the pics from the photographer, and as soon as I do, we’ll get a full recap posted.

Thanks to everyone who helps to make this a great event for early-stagers in the Southeast!

Cheers.

If you are an early-stage entrepreneur, and need help with your financial modeling, you can’t beat this deal.

Cheers.

I know that many of you (including me) have been trying to enjoy the holidays and relax a bit. However, I wanted to interrupt your holiday programming to let you know that for the past couple of months we’ve been heads down working on the next version of the StartupLounge.com site.

In short, we are putting the finishing touches on what will be an unbelievable online social platform and community. I don’t want to get into too many details right now, but it will go far beyond the simple blog and podcast that we have running currently. We’re really taking the whole thing to a completely different model.

Stay tuned …

Cheers.

PlayMotion has enjoyed a long relationship with Wheeler High School here in Atlanta. Wheeler has a great magnet program in mathematics, science, and technology. We have had great experiences using Wheeler students as interns over the past few years.

Yesterday, I received a terrible phone call from the Wheeler folks, letting us know that Sam Eisen, a talented young man who was interning here as a software developer and game designer, was tragically killed in a car accident on the way back to school from our office.

Sam was a bright young man, and was blessed with an enormous amount of raw talent. We were very excited to have him here. The world has been robbed of the many great contributions that I was convinced he was destined to offer to us all. Sam was a very affable kid, and seemed to have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. I quipped the other day about how amazingly more technologically savvy Sam and his generation are, coming right out of high school often already having familiarity with several different programming languages.

The atmosphere here at the office has been very somber since we heard the news. Our heart goes out to his family and friends.

Goodbye, Sam - you will be missed by many.

In just a few hours, I’ll board a plane with 3 or 4 others from our team to head from Atlanta to Los Angeles, where we’ll be participating in WIRED’s NextFest. We’ll be joining the PlayMotion advance party which is already on the ground getting everything setup.

This year, we’re demo’ing something very, very cool indeed. Flight of the Pegasus is a demo of our new crowd-based larger-than-life video gaming. Using no props, just your body, you and a group of friends will compete against each other as you fly a Pegasus up Mount Olympus on two large 16 foot tall screens. The course is complete with olive trees, greek architecture, and a screaming Zeus who is hell bent on teaching you to fly one of these things

On the other side of the event, we’ll have an identical setup, with another crowd of folks, and they will compete against the other group. Nothing like using your body to interact with others over distance (I’ll leave you to ponder the profoundness of that).

I’m terribly proud of our team. They’ve worked extremely hard over the past few months gearing up for this event. Couldn’t ask for a better bunch … from slinging code, constructing 3D models, and creating/integrating all the voiceover stuff, they really pushed themselves against a very tight timeline.

I’ll post some photos and video at some point. My schedule is booking up while I’m out there, but I may be able to pull some stuff together during the evenings. Otherwise, I’ll be sure to post some stuff when we get back next week.

At any rate, it should be a ton of fun. At last check, there will be around 60,000 people coming to the show. If you’re heading out to NextFest, stop by and see us! We’ll have one setup on the actual show floor, as well as another in the Lounge area.

Cheers.

After a couple of years spent casually tracking the company and several months of building a relationship with the team at PlayMotion!, I am thrilled about joining them officially as the company’s CEO (I actually joined quietly a few months ago.) I was honored by their invitation, and we wasted no time in focusing our efforts in on growing the business (with apologies to Mike Blake, “taking it to the next level“).

If you aren’t familiar with PlayMotion!, you probably aren’t alone. The company’s growth over the past few years has been steady, but fueled largely by word of mouth. However, our client list reads like a who’s who (Google, Nike, Atari, Red Bull, AT&T, NASA, Proctor & Gamble, Nokia’s Sugar Bowl, Playboy, WIRED, NBA All-Star Game, etc.) The company is now profitable and growing, and we’re expanding into Asia (which is also something I’m particularly excited about.) Others are talking about us as well.

Greg, Matt, and the rest of the team have done an amazing job of building a great vision engine and a strong full-body gaming platform. Our technology is incredibly captive (and viral), and the stuff we have in our skunkworks is absolutely mind blowing. We will continue to create exciting mini-games and other types of interactive experiences for our customers, but we are moving more and more towards creating fully immersive, 3D, full-body games.

Our web site, which admittedly is horribly out of date, and doesn’t really reflect where we are as a company, will be revamped soon.

I should point out that my new post won’t affect our collaborative efforts at StartupLounge.com. Our podcast and quarterly Capital Connections gatherings will continue. I have spent the past year and a half championing early-stage, fast-growth entrepreneurship in the Southeast, and that passion is still burning brighter than ever.

Cheers.