Startup Factory, Internet Summit bring tech focus to Raleigh

North Carolina’s state capital is also the capital for the state’s startup and technology industry this week.

The Startup Factory presents its latest group of investment companies to potential backers today, and the Internet Summit kicks off its annual three-day run in Raleigh.

Bob Young, the founder of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) and Lulu.com, is among the speakers slated for The Startup Factory’s showcase of startup companies.

The event will be held on Nov. 12 from 10 a.m. to noon in conjunction with the Startup Summit, part of the Internet Summit. The showcase will be in the Fletcher Theater, within walking distance of the Internet Summit events at the Raleigh Convention Center.

Startups will share their product development and customer acquisition highlights.

The event is expected to draw more than 400 entrepreneurs, investors and technology gurus.

The presenting companies with summaries provided by TSF:

HomeWellness created building science-based software, which acts as an employee’s personal home concierge, helping them improve their homes’ comfort, energy efficiency, and indoor air quality. The employees reap the benefits of having a more sustainable and healthful home environment while their company aggregates the actions of its employees to polish its corporate sustainability profile.
Szl.it As the Internet continues to grow, and search technology continues to improve, the proliferation of data sources is actually making it harder and harder to decide where to spend our time. A host of news and infotainment curation services have emerged to try to help people with this problem. The expiration of Google Reader in July 2013 increased the tempo and scale of this need. The problem is, most of these tools require a lot of setup and are really created for power users. Only a small percentage of people who get their news from the Internet spend the time to set up RSS feeds and filters. Szl addresses these problems directly and solves them, while also adding a fun and toyetic interface that we expect will become addictive and will create a new category of methods for interfacing humans to the Internet.
4Soils seeks to engage the children of the mobile first generation with their faith in a new way. Their mission is:

To Bring the Bible to life for kids: Modernizing existing content and delivering it to this generation in an interactive and engaging way
Delivering Sunday to the everyday: Children can learn in community through the mobile devices they’re already using
Our target audience is any family of faith seeking quality children’s Bible content. US children spend on average 43 min/day on mobile devices, but much of it is on meaningless activities like launching birds and beating up cats. Between the ages of 4-14 is when 80% of people become Christian. There is nothing more important than instilling the right Biblical values in children early on.
The religion space has previously been slow at adopting technology. As a mobile first company, we seek to partner with Biblical and values based content providers to create a fun, engaging, and interactive experience for kids.

Brevado creates interactive timelines for project-based businesses. Users can layout milestones and various steps that help the client understand the process and what to expect. Clients stay in the loop with automatic progress notifications as items are completed, helping to manage expectations. Collaboration is also improved with features like file uploads, video embedding and assignable tasks.

Currently, small consulting businesses are trying to keep customers in the loop through phone calls and email, which take hours out of their day. Emails are lost in the inbox and archived away never to be seen again. With Brevado, everything relevant to a project is kept organized in a unique way that provides project context. This helps consulting companies improve their process and in effect delivering better more profitable projects.

Coursefork is a platform for educators to create, share, collaborate and get feedback on their course materials. The goal of our technology is to connect great Coursemakers with each other to create great materials and thus teach better courses. As similar platforms operate in software development, they hope to use that model inside the teaching market. In essence, Coursefork seeks to ignite viral teaching.

Rocketbolt solves the website marketing engagement problem by bridging the gap between getting traffic and getting traffic to engage in revenue-generating ways. The way they’re doing it is with the Internet’s first universal rewards network.

In less than a minute, any website can integrate with Rocketbolt’s gamification engine and start creating rewards for any kind of interaction — there’s no coding required! Once sites are connected to the Rocketbolt network, they can attract highly engaged users by offering rewards for whatever kinds of user engagement they need more of, including things like: watching videos, downloading apps, posting reviews, making purchases, and social media sharing. Rocketbolt enables websites the power to directly target — and increase — the kinds of engagement they need in order to be more successful.

Internet Summit

The Internet Summit, which showcase technology and tech firms from the Southeast and across the country, is set to highlight numerous emerging companies.

The companies are: