David Cummings, CEO of Hannon Hill & Shotput Ventures on top of the world in Buckhead, Atlanta

ATLANTA – All of the companies founded and incubated through Atlanta’s Shotput Ventures accelerator program will become members of the Georgia Tech Advanced Technology Development Center, says David Cummings, CEO and founder of Hannon Hill Corp., who also shepherds Shotput.

“We’re excited about all the Shotput companies becoming members of ATDC,” Cummings told us from his impressive 33rd floor offices in Atlanta’s Buckhead as traffic helicopters buzzed by at eye-level.

“Last year they were all spread out, which was a challenge. This way they’ll be more active participants in the tech community.”

Only one (Zeta) of last year’s crop of eight companies–seed-funded to the tune of $20,000 each and mentored by Shotput–is “on hold.”

Most of the rest are already generating revenue, he says, and many have already obtained angel funding.

The current crop of Shotput’s startups include: Looxii, which Cummings describes as “Google analytics meets social media.” (For TechJournal South’s profile of Looxii see: Looxii provides easy to use social monitoring tools.)

Shotput’s first set of firms

Event Hive, offers software to make conferences more engaging by allowing polling of the audience and real time audience chat.

Ninja Post updates message board and forum technology, which otherwise has not changed much since its inception. It enables real time conversations via the boards and forums.

Shout Now allows users to broadcast voice mail much as people now do email. You can record a message on a PC and have it sent to any number of cells phones or record audio Tweets or Facebook status updates.

Social Guides Cummings describes as “Twitter meets Yelp.” It lets users publish short reviews of restaurants and bars while there. “You might say about a restaurant, ‘Hey the fish is really good tonight, c’mon over,” Cummings suggests. The service ties in with Twitter.

Open Hatch is a site for open souce developers Cummings says is “Linked in meets open source.” It provides a way for open souce developers to centralize their work in one place. “It’s really useful for getting a job, offering a service, or showing expertise,” Cummings says.

Khush has developed what it’s founding CEO calls “Karoke in reverse,” a cell phone app that lets users sing into the phone and play back their voice with a choice of music backing.

Shotput presents its accelerator companies to the public in a Demo Day event that Cummings says will be able to host many more people this year.  You can see demo videos of the firms above here: Demo Day videos.

We’ll be profiling Khush, the Shotput/Hannon Hill corporate culture, and other Shotput Venture firms in upcoming editions of our sister publication TechView Atlanta, as well as on TechJournal South.

Shotput recently opened the application process for its next round of startups: Apply for the Shotput Ventures program.

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Related Stories:

• Looxii aims at providing easy to use social network monitoring tools
• Atlanta’s Looxii grabs $97,500 in funding
• DC-based LaunchBox Digital pops 8 new startups into the real world
• Internet Summit names innovative demo showcase companies
• Atlanta’s ATDC Startup Showcase set for May 24

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Tags: ATDC, Atlanta, David Cummings, Hannon Hill, Shotput Ventures