One of the reasons we set up the Citrix Startup Accelerator was to explore what’s coming next by working with cool, inspirational entrepreneurs. This talk exposes some of our thinking around investments in four mobile oriented startups, and uses them as jumping off points to talk about emerging mobile trends. (Recorded at Citrix Synergy last week.)

Let’s peek into the crystal ball.

 

 

Last week we also held Startup.Synergy – our startup focused track at Citrix Synergy. The highlight from this track was the selection of two new companies to receive $100K each in Citrix Startup Accelerator investment. These were selected from five amazing Startup.Synergy finalists. The event had a keynote from Martin Duursma, pitches from 10 current Citrix Startup Accelerator portfolio companies, and a revealing investor panel. There will be video available of all of these shortly so please stay tuned.

It was quite a day at Startup.Synergy yesterday that ended in high drama.  As we polled the judges for their vote for the $100k investment, after five great presentations, it became evident we might be heading for a tie.  When the last vote came up, indeed, we had a tie vote on our hands.  So we went to the audience for their popular vote and…tie.

So we have added two new companies to the Startup Accelerator roster and it goes without saying they were very excited.  Great job and congratulations to ScriptRock and AppEnsure. (See VentureBeat story here: Citrix makes surprise $100K awards to ScriptRock and AppEnsure)

The other startups did a bang up job too Hey Maya, CumuLogic and BuildAR. Thank you to the judging panel for mixing it up yesterday, giving great feedback, and picking our winners.

• • Ramu Arunachalam - Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
  • Paul Weinstein - Partner, Azure Capital
  • Frank Artale - Partner, Ignition Capital
  • Carl Showalter -  Partner, Opus Capital
  • Jonathan Siegel -Principal, Right Ventures
  • Jason Calacanis- CEO, Mahalo.com
  • Martin Duursma - VP and GM, Citrix Labs
  • Kumar Goswami - VP, Citrix (former CEO of Kaviza)
  • Jesse Lipson – VP, Citrix (former CEO of ShareFile)
  • Chris Fleck - VP of Mobility Solutions, Citrix
  • Andy Cohen - VP of Corporate Development, Citrix
  • Matt Marshall – Founder, Venturebeat

 

This coming week at Startup.Synergy, we are going to take some time to examine the startup ecosystem which includes corporate investment, venture capital, seed investment and, of course, the entrepreneurs who make the whole system turn. In fact, we’ll have 15 entrepreneurs from all over the world on stage this Wednesday.  While it is interesting and instructive to look at the big picture of the quickly changing dynamics in the startup ecosystem, the real focus should remain with the entrepreneurs and their teams.  Recently there was a blog post with a opinion that, “The incubators weren’t ‘training chefs’ at all. The entrepreneurs were the spaghetti”.  While that might be true of some programs, it not the case with ours.  We spend a lot of time with our entrepreneurs as they work to validate their business models.

On Wednesday, at Startup.Synergy, the stage will be theirs as they showcase their solutions after 6-12 months in the Citrix Startup Accelerator.  The ten are:

Click here for Citrix Startup Accelerator – Company synopses in a one page document

Search, manage and protect your personal online content

Primadesk helps users search, manage and protect all their online content in one place. There is a big shift underway with personal content. Documents, email and photos have moved from PCs and personal devices to a broad range of cloud environments, creating a painful content management problem for users.  Primadesk solves this problem elegantly. We support more than 25 top web based applications such as Google apps, Facebook, Dropbox, Box, Flickr, and Twitter. Users can drag and drop content from one service to another, search across personal online content and protect content by backing it up to Primadesk servers.

Click here to see Primadesk CEO Srinivasa (Venky) Venkataraman describe their solution.

True to life virtual meetings

One World Virtual is a new collaborative meeting platform in immersive 3D.   No avatars or cartoonish looks, but aimed at replicating real world meeting environments and business behavior through photo-realistic looking rooms – offices, conference rooms, lobbies, content management rooms – all equipped with embedded video, audio or text capabilities.  Within this real-world looking environment, users will be able to share and store data and employ common apps (i.e. Word, PowerPoint, Excel, others) just as they would in their real world business environments.  The goal is a destination so compelling that OWV’s online and mobile users will want to be present on OWV continuously during the business day — and after business hours.

 

 

One touch instant access to the most relevant information

Core Mobile Networks brings large screen context to mobile devices by providing one-touch instant access to most relevant information. The most relevant information is obtained after correlation of multiple sources from Enterprise, Cloud and Social Networks and made instantly available on mobile devices. The enterprise users can now use the iPhone, iPads and other smartphones and tablets in the same way as accessing multiple applications in different windows on PCs and laptops.

 

 

Digital Media Sensing at Cloud Scale

Graymatics organizes rich media data over the Internet, networked video systems & proprietary media sources using a highly scalable contextual digital media processing platform.

 

 

Desktop Virtualization with 1/3 the server costs

GridCentric’s virtualization solution greatly reduces the number of servers required to support Enterprise Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) implementations. Gridcentric has pioneered Virtual Memory Streaming (VMS) technology, which dramatically reduces the amount of server memory required to maintain Virtual Desktop images. Reducing the amount of memory required means needing to deploy fewer servers to support your Virtual Desktop clients. So, large enterprises can take advantage of all the benefits

 

 

 

Enabling smart calls from smart-phones

drumbi allows callers to add a topic to a call (much like a tweet) to specifically cater to every individual conversation. Receivers using drumbi will know exactly why the caller is calling, how urgent the call is and where the call is being made from. After the call is finished, both users have the option of sharing what they’ve learned to their social graph, or to a personal email. This allows every user to keep track of of the calls that mean the most. Indeed, drumbi doesn’t stop there, they are reinventing the entire calling experience; they have a solution to eliminate the hour-long waits when calling businesses.

 

 

 

Instant productivity for relationship management

Handy Elephant is developing a productivity app for salespeople and recruiters who have to maintain a large number of relationships across multiple channels (e.g. Phone, SMS, Email, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook). Handy Elephant is like a Personal Assistant that tells users (1) who they need to follow up with, (2) when the best time is to get in touch, and (3) which channels will be most effective. The user experience is highly automated, seamless and proactive, so users can spend more time on generating business, and less time on managing contacts or data.

 

 

Your shared email memory

GrexIt helps people in a company easily create a corporate knowledge base out of their email. It helps programmers, managers, support and operations teams get important information and knowledge out of their email inboxes, and into a knowledge base very easily where it can be easily discovered by the right people in the company. Its like, well, a shared dropbox for your work email.

 

 

Email done right

Email is out of control. ZeroMail provides a premium web-based email solution that integrates email, social media, task management and a virtual assistant. With ZeroMail it’s easy to tame your inbox and be more effective in less time.

 



 

Reinventing batch processing for the cloud era

Iron.io is focused on building cloud infrastructure software. Our first product is SimpleWorker, a large scale background processing and scheduling system. Our second product is currently in development and will be released in beta soon.

 

 

 

 

 

When we started making investments last year, I had great curiosity and anticipation about how the first companies through our program would fare.  I must admit I’m a little surprised that the first  two companies out of the program hit it out of the park.  Last month, Nukona was acquired by Symantec and next week we’ll announce, at Startup.Synergy, that our second graduate has very successfully moved on.  I’m a big baseball fan so I realize we won’t be batting a 1.000 for ever but I’ll take for now! So please join us next Wednesday, May 9th at Moscone West in San Fransisco for Startup.Synergy.  The last hour of Startup.Synergy will be dedicated to short pitch presentations from each of the 5 finalist. The winner will get a $100k investment on the spot. Dr. Michael Harries will announce the 5 finalists in tomorrow’s blog.  So stay tuned and see you next week in San Francisco!  To attend Startup.Synergy please visit the Synergy registration site and use code 150WEDF for a special rate of $150 for a full day that includes Citrix CEO Mark Templeton’s conference keynote, an investor panel,  and the opportunity to hear the big news on from our portfolio companies.

 

Dr. Klaus Schauser and Frank Robinson

Dr. Klaus Schauser was a co-founder and CTO of Expertcity/CitrixOnline from 1999 through 2005 and was the visionary behind GoToMyPC, GoToAssist, and GoToMeeting. He led the teams responsible for building the products and their secure, reliable Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) infrastructure. As a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Klaus is a widely published research scientist with extensive experience developing scalable, highly parallel computing environments.

Frank Robinson founded Product & Market Development (ProductDevelopment.com) a firm that coaches companies to “Get it right the first time,” i.e. find and validate the right business model and MVP. Frank has over 30 years of experience in getting it right. An early client was Ed Iacobucci and Randy Wood, founders of Citrix in 1988. Klaus followed Frank’s guidance in morphing Expertcity into CitrixOnline. He has worked with hundreds of start-ups through the sponsorship of VCs.

Jonathan Siegel was good enough to be our first “Third Thursday” speaker in February 2012. Recommended for all aspiring entrepreneurs.

Jonathan Siegel is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor and advisor to many cloud companies. He is the founder of 4 Internet companies: ELC Technologies (acquired by PriceGrabber’s Kamran Pourzanjani), RightCart (acquired by Buy.com), RightScale, and RightSignature. In 2010, Jonathan joined Accel Partners London before returning to San Francisco in March 2011. He has been on Amazon’s Web Services customer advisory board since 2008 and is passionate about supporting founders of early stage tech start-ups.

Jonathan will discuss the entrepreneur spirit, learning from failures, and be available for a conversation on all things Cloud. Entrepreneurs go into business knowing there’s a high failure rate in front of them, but confident the statistics don’t apply. Tech-entrepreneurs are a special breed -part-artist part-businessman-. Knowing where their drive comes from gives insight into team building, growth strategies, and exits. Having had an abundant series of failures and an occasional success, Jonathan will share what’s he’s learned.

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