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Happy Tuesday!
Gmail users: We’ve noticed some recent deliverability issues with your accounts. Could you please add GrepBeat to your contacts list (you’ll find this option by clicking on three-dot “more” menu while inside this email) or, short of that, check your “Promotions” tab to see if we’ve landed there? TIA!
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When you’re driving along listening to a podcast, do you ever find yourself wishing you could save a particularly interesting snippet, even adding a verbal note so you can come back to it later and/or share it with others? Good news: Raleigh-based EX-IQ has released an app, NoteCast, which will enable you to do just that. NoteCast joins the company’s previous product, Note, which provides similar hands-free functionality for audiobooks as part of the company’s emphasis on life-long learners.
EX-IQ is led by CEO Chris Donohoe, a 21-year Army veteran who doesn’t lack for confidence—he told our Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez that within four years he predicts EX-IQ will buy one of the world’s three largest companies. Read our full story to find out which one and to make your own judgment on whether, or how firmly, his tongue is planted in his cheek.
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The life-long learners that EX-IQ are targeting have to start somewhere, and for most of us that’s in school. That’s where Raleigh’s Lea(R)n and its LearnPlatform for K-12 and higher-ed educators comes in. (We’re especially heartened that youngsters will lea(r)n the funky punctuation essential to proper startup names.) The company’s CEO, Karl Rectanus, is the latest to be subjected to the six hard-hitting questions of The Download from Brooks Malone. Karl covers everything from the importance of diversity—in both his company’s workforce and target markets—to sushi. Read it here.
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Since we keep going earlier in the educational timeline, this seems like a great place to note Durham’s Centervention, a videogame startup that just landed a $750K federal grant to develop a game to help teach kindergarteners and first-graders social and emotional skills. That might be even more valuable than the key lesson I learned in kindergarten: how to nap successfully even when surrounded by other people.
This isn’t Centervention CEO Tim Huntley’s first rodeo; he founded Ganymede Software with some fellow former IBM colleagues and sold it for $171M nearly two decades ago. TBJ has the full story.
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CED ain’t just for conferences. Late last week, CED officially released its 2018 Innovators Report, which tracks the state’s entrepreneurial activity. Download it here. Some headlines: 1) the state’s startups raised a record $2.75B in 2018, and even if you toss out Epic Games’ $1.25B financing (the largest single deal since CED began tracking such things) total funding was still up comfortably over the past few years; 2) the vast majority of the action—both in terms of total dollars and number of deals—was in the Triangle, especially in Durham (Morrisville’s Epic aside), after Charlotte had accounted for nearly 50% of the total venture dollars in 2017.
WRAL TechWire has a two-part interview—here’s Part I and Part II—on the report with CED’s Jay Bigelow, who we’ve been told is a big GrepBeat fan and, we wager, has us listed in his Gmail contacts. We say: Be like Jay! (Really, that’s just solid all-purpose life advice.)
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Lea(R)n’s Karl Rectanus isn’t the only Triangle leader striving for diversity in tech, of course. The “Diverse Leaders in Tech: Our Career Stories” event that will be held on Wednesday, May 15, at HQ Raleigh will be a valuable addition to the ongoing conversation and efforts. Tech execs from diverse backgrounds at Spreedly, Cloudbees, Red Hat, SAS and Lenovo will talk about their experiences. Bonus: free drinks. Get all the info here.
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Yesterday, we heard someone (OK, it was GrepBeat Godfather Joe Colopy) use the expression “the proof is in the pudding.” You've likely heard it before in the context of startups, meaning something like, “The results will ultimately reveal how good the company’s original idea and execution were.” That got me wondering about the origin of the phrase. It turns out that the original saying was, “The proof of the pudding is in the eating,” which frankly makes more sense. For context, know that the phrase originated somewhere between 1400-1600, and for “pudding,” think “meat products stuffed in a sausage-like casing” rather than Bill Cosby. (Actually, don't think about Bill Cosby at all.)
Given that meat in that era had a nasty tendency to be contaminated, the thought was that you couldn’t really know if the pudding was any good—i.e. if the meat had turned—unless and until you ate it. Basically, the “proof” would be whether you got sick or not. Evidently those royal food tasters weren’t there just to detect poison. And now you know that when it comes to etymology, the devil is in the details. (Oh man, now I have to look that up too...)
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Because too much news is never enough
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