Posts Tagged ‘Brightwhistle’
Friday, August 10th, 2012
 Greg Foster – CEO, co-founder, BrightWhistle BrightWhistle Inc., a first-in-class social patient acquisition platform provider, has raised $2.05 million in Series A funding, led by Huntsville based Eastside Partners, Atlanta-based Hamilton Ventures, Atlanta angel investor Paul Iaffaldano and prominent healthcare technology focused angel investors Fred Goad and G.T. Laborde.
The company also landed several new clients including Piedmont Healthcare, Duke Raleigh Hospital and Dekalb Medical.
BrightWhistle presented at TechMedia’s 5th annual Southeast Venture Conference in 2011. The TechJournal is a TechMedia company.
The only HIPAA-compliant, healthcare-focused Facebook Ads API partner, the company will use the funding to advance the continued development of its comprehensive solution designed to empower hospitals’ efforts to engage and acquire new patients through search and social media.
“We are thrilled to have all of our investors back in this round, along with the addition of two healthcare industry veterans, Fred Goad and G.T. Laborde,” said BrightWhistle co-founder and CEO Greg Foster.
“We have spent the last year building a world class solution, establishing strong client relationships with some of the leading hospitals in the US, and building powerful case studies that demonstrate our solution’s capacity to significantly increase return on health care marketing budgets.”
“The fact that we were able to raise more than twice the amount of capital than we originally intended is a testament to what we are building,” said Chad Mallory, co-founder and COO, BrightWhistle
“A continual development cycle keeps our platform delivering optimal results for our clients, and having additional resources to invest enables us to accelerate our product roadmap.”
First-to-market solution
“BrightWhistle is first-to-market with a solution designed to empower the health care marketer’s social and digital media strategy. Everyone in the industry is capable of benefitting from its implementation – health care providers seeking to engage and acquire new patients, payers seeking to add customers, and other institutions focused on meeting Stage 1 and 2 Meaningful Use objectives,” said Emerson Fann, Managing Partner of Eastside Partners.
“We are excited to increase our investment in a venture that is fundamentally changing the methods employed by healthcare marketers across the country and around the world.”
Tags: Atlanta, Brightwhistle, Fred Goad, funding, G.T. Laborde, Greg Foster, SEVC
Posted in IT, Money, social media, Startups, venture capital report | No Comments »
Monday, March 26th, 2012
 The Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) today announced the Top 10 Innovative Technology Companies in Georgia.
These companies were singled out from the Top 40 Innovative Technology Companies announced earlier this month for showing the highest degree of innovation, the broadest scope and financial impact of their innovations and the greatest effect of such innovation in promoting Georgia’s technology industry throughout the U.S. and globally.
The 2012 Top 10 Innovative Companies are:
- · AirWatch, a leader in enterprise-grade mobile device management, mobile application management and mobile content management solutions designed to simplify mobility.
- · Brightwhistle, a first-in-class digital patient acquisition solution provider to hospitals and large physician practices.
- · First Data, a global leader in electronic commerce and payment processing.
- · Innovolt, a leader in comprehensive electronics power protection and management, is the first to bridge the gap between the power protection and asset service markets. The company’s technology allows equipment to last longer by keeping it safe from common power grid disturbances that negatively impact electronics performance and lifespan.
- · NexTraq, the value leader of GPS fleet tracking and vehicle management solutions.
- · Podponics, a company that converts used shipping containers into modular controlled-environment growth pods to enable the growth of fresh produce in urban centers.
- · Proximus Mobility is a location based proximity marketing software company, delivers relevant content to consumers’ mobile devices at the point of purchase, regardless of phone type and without an app.
- · Red Bag Solutions Inc., a company that offers patented technology and equipment for the on-site processing of regulated medical waste.
- · SalesLoft, is a sales technology company that helps B2B organizations speed up their revenue cycles and close more deals by automating sales research, ranking prospects on likeliness to buy, and generating new leads through data analytics.
- · Velocity Medical Solutions , a company that represents the next generation of intelligent radiation treatment tools through a vendor-neutral platform gives clinicians a fully integrated record of all diagnostic, planning and delivery data, regardless of origin.
“The Top 10 awards are given to an elite group of companies whose products and solutions are not only changing their respective industries, they are also putting Georgia on the map as a state where technology innovation can thrive,” said Tino Mantella, president & CEO of TAG.
Tags: AirWatch, Brightwhistle, First Data, Georgia, Innovolt, NexTRaq, PodPonics, Proximus Mobility, REd Bag Solutions, SalesLoft, TAG, top ten technology companies 2012, Velocity Medical Solutions
Posted in Georgia, Internet/New Media, IT | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 13th, 2012
The Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) has named the Top 40 Innovative Technology Companies in Georgia.
These annual awards are presented to Georgia technology companies based on degree of innovation, the scope and financial impact of their innovations and effect of such innovation in promoting Georgia’s technology industry throughout the U.S. and globally.
“The Top 40 companies are shining examples of what makes Georgia a hotbed for innovation in technology,” said Tino Mantella, president & CEO of TAG.
“Georgia is home to more than 13,000 technology companies, so we applaud the 2012 Top 40 finalists for standing out as leaders in innovation and in Georgia’s technology community. These are the types of companies that will help Georgia become recognized as one of the top states in the nation for technology.”
The 2012 Top 40 Innovative companies are:
- · AirWatch
- · Aptidata Corporation
- · BrightWhistle
- · CodeGuard
- · CompliancePoint, Inc.
- · Concurrent Computer Corporation
- · Contact At Once! LLC
- · CorFire
- · CubeVibe
- · DataOceans, LLC
- · Digital Assent
- · eFortresses, Inc.
- · EyeLevel Interactive
- · First Data
- · FreebeePay, Inc.
- · Implantable Provider Group (IPG)
- · Innovolt
- · Kabbage, Inc.
- · Lancope
- · Mowgli
- · NCR
- · Neurotic Media
- · NextInput
- · NexTraq
- · Numerex
- · Patientco
- · Paymetric
- · Pindrop Security
- · PlayOn! Sports
- · Podponics
- · Proximus Mobility, LLC
- · rapidApp
- · Red Bag Solutions, Inc.
- · SalesLoft
- · ShopVisible
- · TerraGo Technologies
- · TripLingo
- · Velocity Medical Solutions, LLC
- · Vertical Acuity
- · Whiter Image
For more information about the Top 40 awards and the Georgia Technology Summit, visit http://www.tagonline.org/georgia-technology-summit.php .
Tags: AirWatch, Aptidata, Brightwhistle, CodeGuard, CompliancePoint, Concurrent Comptuer, Contact at Once, CorFire, CubeVibe, DataOceans, Digital Assent, eFortresses, EyeLevel Interactive, Firest Data, FreebeePay, Implantable Provider Group, Innovolt, Mowgli, NCR, Neurotic Meida, NextInput, NexTRaq, Numerex, Patientco, Paymetric, Pindrop Security, PlayON! Sports, PodPonics, Proximus Mobility, rapidApp, REd Bag Solutions, SalesLoft, Shop Visible, TAG, Technology Association of Georgia, TerraGo Technologies, Tino Mantella, top 40 Georgia Tech companies 2012, TripLingo, Velocity Medical, Verical Acuity, Whiter Image
Posted in Events, Georgia, Internet/New Media, IT, Startups | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 26th, 2011
Greg Foster - CEO, co-founder, BrightWhistle By Allan Maurer
ATLANTA – Successful technology entrepreneurs often start a new company with an innovative idea of interest to any number of verticals, from retailing to healthcare – but find a natural early fit in the marketplace. That’s what happened at BrightWhistle Inc., a first-in-class online customer and patient acquisition management platform provider, has raised $1.1 million in seed funding, led by Atlanta-based Hamilton Ventures.
Eastside Partners and other prominent angel investors also participated in the round. Jamie Hamilton, managing partner, Hamilton Ventures, and Emerson Fann, general partner, Eastside Partners, will join the company’s board of directors. Former Weather Channel and Disney executive and prominent Atlanta angel investor Paul Iaffaldano will also join the board.
BrightWhistle C0-founder Greg Foster, well-known in the Southeast venture and Internet communities, tells TechJournal South that in healthcare, “The need for more efficient patient acquisition is a big problem in a big industry. It’s just huge, trillions of dollars and one of those few mega industries where you can build a great scaled company. Our solution speaks to that industry.”
With several health care clients already realizing a significant ROI using the BrightWhistle solution, the company will use this investment to fuel continued growth in thehealth services sector as well as future expansion into multi-location businesses and marketing agencies. The funding will also help augment the engineering team in order to enhance the company’s platform.
“Current marketing automation tools help manage leads once they’ve entered the pipeline, but marketers continue to face intense pressure to fill the pipeline with new, highly qualified leads that actually convert into new customers,” said Foster, who is also CEO of BrightWhistle and entrepreneur-in-residence, Chrysalis Ventures.
“Leveraging quality, condition-specific content, BrightWhistle’s first-in-class platform reaches across various digital vectors – multiple-location and doctor-specific sites, social media sites via paid advertising, and customizable news-and-health information sites – in order to attract, target, qualify and convert new customers and patients. This approach represents a sea change in how marketers take control of the customer/patient acquisition process,” Foster said.
Foster explains that the BrightWhistle technology creates a “vibrant, localized presence with educational content wrapped in, increasing the likelihood they will be found by qualified patients.”Finding people searching for a particular medical service or treatment, then sending them down a pathway leading to the healthcare providers door is “a much more efficient way to generate conversions,” he said.
The system makes it possible to upload thousands of dynamic ads at a time, each with a local dynamic landing page online.”
Prior to BrightWhistle, Foster served on the management team of three successful start-ups, including Southern Direct, a company he founded and ultimately sold to Turner Broadcasting. He then served as vice president of corporate development at Turner, followed by a transition into venture capital.
“At the heart of our approach is a platform capable of generating and managing hyper-localized sites powered by high quality content that educates and informs prospective consumers,” said Chad Mallory, co-founder and CTO, BrightWhistle.
“When combined with our system that scales the targeting and conversion of prospects within search and social media platforms like Facebook, Google and LinkedIn, the complete solution serves as an end-to-end customer acquisition system.” Prior to BrightWhistle, Mallory was co-founder and CTO of Nexteppe, a company designed to serve the lead generation needs of the automotive marketplace.
“BrightWhistle’s pioneering approach to automating the online customer acquisition process combined with the business, technology and marketing expertise of the founders sets BrightWhistle apart from other digital marketing and advertising vendors,” said Jamie Hamilton, managing partner, Hamilton Ventures.
Foster also notes that BrightWhistle is one of only a handful of companies with “full rights and access to the Facebook advertising API.”
You can hear the voice of experience when Foster talks about how the company plans to proceed.
The company will stay focused on healthcare for the time being, Foster says, but “As you establish critical mass in one vertical and the cost of sales in that vertical diminishes, you can on to other verticals.”
Tags: Allan Maurer, Atlanta, Brightwhistle, Chad Mallory, Eastside Partners, Emerson Fann, Facebook ad API, Facebook advertising API vendor, financing, Greg Foster, Hamilton Ventures, Healthcare patient acquisition, Jamie Hamilton, lead generation, Paul Iaffaldano, Southern Direct, Turner Broadcasting, Weather Channel
Posted in Georgia, Internet/New Media, IT, Marketing, Money | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 15th, 2011
 By Allan Maurer
ATLANTA – Three major problems affect the ability of companies to generate new sales leads, says Greg Foster, co-founder of BrightWhistle. The new firm is intended to be “The sharp end of the stick in automated marketing,” Foster says.
This is Foster’s latest company. Foster is entrepreneur in residence at Chyrsalis Ventures. His experience includes founding or being part of the management team for three successful start-ups, and running corporate development for two public companies, including Turner Broadcasting.
He is on the board of the popular Internet satire site, The Onion, and Research Triangle-based StatSheet, which Foster says helped inspire founding of BrightWhistle because of its innovations in automation, and was a partner at Atlanta-based Noro-Moseley Partners.
BrightWhistle is one of 50 companies presenting to the more than 1,000 people expected at the fifth annual Southeast Venture Conference in Atlanta March 2-3. Foster tells us the company is in the process of raising a small round now that may close even before the event.
Generating really gualified leads
Founded in July last year, BrightWhistle started out when Foster and co-founder Chad Mallory started looking at ways to generate “Really well qualified leads” in a cost-effective way. “That’s the overarching question marketers deal with on a daily basis,” he says.
He sees three major problems with the way many marketers generate leads now. “Third-party lead generators are often pretty promiscuous,” he says. “They’ll sell a lead to you, to me and to three guys down the street. They’re also disloyal.”
By that he means that even if a company lands a prospect, the third-party lead generator might keep calling them to see if they’ll switch. Also, Foster adds, “There is not a lot of transparency on how their leads are created.”
The bolts come loose
The other approach: broad pay per click strategies with ads on Google and Facebook, has its own set of problems. “They may be able to build you a targeted ad, but they can’t put you somewhere with really compelling content once you click on the ad.”
Also, some digital marketers pay a lot of money to SEO consultants to push their corporate site up the ladder in natural rankings in Google, Bing and so on for certain key words or terms. Unfortunately, Foster notes, “No matter how hard you tighten the bolts down, they eventually come loose.”
He adds, “You may be getting good traffic and good conversions, but over time, they go down and you have to get the SEO consultant back in and pay him $500 an hour to get them back up.”
If money were no object…
So, Foster and his co-founder started asking people, “If money were no object, what kind of system would they create to help with all those issues?”
Foster says “We talked to a lot of different people and companies. They began with healthcare companies – which is BrightWhistle’s initial focus. “They have the greatest need for lead generation to find new patients.”
 Greg Foster Then, he says, “It dawned on us that if they had their druthers, they would want a system where they could create blogs that rank highly for natural search but would allow them to keep the leads generated exclusively for themselves.”
They would want the system flexible enough to take the same blog content and create customized landing pages for ads in Google or on Facebook. The increased relevancy of the pages they land on then produces increased conversion rates.
Already cashflow positive
They asked themselves, Foster says, “What if you could create multiple blogs, get them professionally written and published, manage all the SEO issues, and have the flexibility to create as many landing pages as desired, targeted at a very specific level – and all automated?
That’s the system BrightWhistle developed. “Essentially,” says Foster, “We’re taking something a digital marketer wouldn’t have time to do on their own and automating it.”
BrightWhistle doesn’t sell leads. It sells a software as a service platform, which users pay for based on the number of blogs or landing pages in the system at any given time.
“It’s time to insource lead generation,” he says.
BrightWhistle must be doing something right. The firm landed seven clients since November, but is taking a breather to raise money. “We’re already cashflow positive,” Foster says.
TechJournal South is a TechMedia company. TechMedia presents the annual conferences:
SoutheastVentureConference: www.seventure.org
Internet Summit: www.internetsummit.com
Digital East: www.digitaleast.com
Digital Summit: www.digitalsummit.com
Tags: Atlanta, blogs, Brightwhistle, Chysalis Ventures, Greg Foster, lead generation, Marketing, Noro Moseley Partners, pay per click, Southeast Venture Conference, The Onion
Posted in Events, Georgia, Internet/New Media, IT, Marketing | No Comments »
Monday, February 14th, 2011
By Allan Maurer
ATLANTA – Pandora, the popular make-your-own-stations Internet radio service, plans to launch a $100 million initial public offering of stock, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Reports say the offering is not expected for at least three months and the amount it plans to raise could change.
Joe Kennedy, president and CEO of Pandora, was a speaker at TechMedia’s 2009 Internet Summit in Raleigh, NC. TechMedia’s next event is the Southeast Venture Conference in Atlanta March 2-3, followed by its first Atlanta-based Digital Summit, May 16-18.
We interviewed Kennedy, who has been CEO of the company since 2005, prior to the 2009 event.
He told us that when innovation strikes in media, winners are those who see the unique possibilities of the new medium, not those trying to replicate existing media.
When it comes to Internet radio, says Kennedy, “Much of it simply took broadcast radio and transferred it to the net. Then we came along giving people the unique capability to personalize it.”
Pandora allows users to enter the name of a song, band, or performer to create his own radio stations themed similarly to them.
“So now, Internet radio is something different than broadcast radio. The challenge for everyone as new capabilities develop is how they can truly change the game rather than extending what came before.”
We’ve used Pandora for several years now and while it does have competitors in the space, it seems to be the best known. We use it even more now that we have a stand-alone Internet radio which includes Pandora (among other services) among its apps.
The digital media space is hot. Successful exits for venture-backed digital and social media firms with a strong user base are piling up. We spoke to Atlanta-based Greg Foster, a founder of BrightWhistle, a digital media specialist on the board of The Onion, another digital media firm in the news lately, and co-founder of online lead generation firm, BrightWhistle, which will present at TechMedia’s Southeast Venture Conference in Atlanta March 2-3. We asked Foster if all this digital media excitement is hype.
“Every market has the potential to be over-hyped,” he says. But he doesn’t think that’s true of the digital media space. “I think there is a simple explanation,” he says. “We’ve been going up this curve since 2006-2007, but the macro economic impact of the last few years had a huge effect. Now we’re taking up where we left off.”
In the intervening years, he notes, some of these companies “Continued to build business to a critical mass.” Now, he adds, there is a convergence of ad dollars flowing to the space, sophisticated targeting with Twitter and Facebook, the ability to use people to influence decisions, online reputation management. “All these things are creating enormous opportunities,” he says.
“The really big news for digital media companies is that the IPO market opened a bit.” That’s borne out by Pandora’s move toward an IPO, which follows the successful IPO of online content producer Demand Media last month, and LinkedIn Corp.’s filing for an IPO last week.
“That’s great news for the early stage market in digital media,” Foster says. “It compels buyers to spend more and drives up valuations. Buyers have to compete with the threat of a company going public. That’s where you want to be.”
That seems to be working already for established players.
AOL bought The Huffington Post for $325 million, Yahoo bought Associated Content, and the secondary market for shares in Twitter and Facebook seem almost over-heated. “We’ll continue to see big acquisitions,” says Foster.
Cool Iris funded
Another popular digital media firm, Cooliris, which has had more than 35 million downloads of its 3D wall, essentially a visual browser, has raised $9.6 million in third round funding from its existing investors.It is also launching a new service, LiveShare 1.2, a way to communicate online or mobile devices via live, shared photo streams.
They include: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, DAG Ventures, The Westly Group, and Deutsche Telekom’s T-Venture. It previously raised more than $20 million.
“With over 35 million downloads of our iconic Cooliris 3D Wall, we’ve established a good beachhead in media browsing, and now with our newest release of LiveShare we are transforming the group media sharing experience,” commented Soujanya Bhumkar, CEO and co-founder said.
Cooliris is a quick, fun way to see the latest videos and hottest photos and trending stories on the web, but we don’t use it as much as we do many other services. Its Gallery app for the Android mobile operating system and other visual browsing and sharing platforms may increase its popularity, though.
LiveShare is now available free on iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7, as well as at www.liveshare.com.
Email TJS Editor Allan Maurer: Allan at TechJournal South dot com.
Tags: Atlanta, Brightwhistle, Cooliris funded, digital media hype, Digital media on a roll, Greg Foster, Internet Summit, Joe Kennedy, NC, Pandora CEO, Pandora files for IPO, Raleigh, Southeast Venture Conference
Posted in Carolinas, Georgia, Internet/New Media, IPOs, IT, Marketing, Money, North Carolina | No Comments »
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