I spent the morning and early afternoon of April 2 in the cavernous halls of the Pennsylvania Convention Center attending the AIIM Expo trade show. It is an enormous and rather depersonalizing space; I think they could have played a football game just within the Hewlett-Packard exhibit area. So in the evening I headed over to the Philly Startup Leaders
Entrepreneur Expo at the Science Center to find a lot of people packed into a small space, with each of the 50+ exhibitors having a table perhaps four feet long.
My definite preference was for the latter. There was an air of genuine enthusiasm and excitement, both on part of the attendees and the exhibitors. I was probably familiar with about half of the companies that where there, but came across some very promising relative newcomers. One that was particularly interesting to me was
RJMetrics, a provider of business intelligence tools for web-oriented businesses .
The two young partners, Jake Stein (a Penn Grad) and Robert J. Moore (Princeton), were working at a major VC firm and began developing the concept for their product after realizing the firm needed a better tool to monitor key performance metrics from their many web-based portfolio companies. After going out on their own, Stein and Moore developed a dashboard display system (
see demo) that collects and analyzes data from the database behind a website, and displays it on a series of charts and graphs that customers can dynamically manipulate and edit. Perhaps most significantly, the company also says its "software combs through thousands of analytical dimensions and extracts the key performance indicators that will drive growth in your business". How they do that I'm not quite sure, but I guess that's their secret. RJMetrics, based in Collingswood, NJ, started up last year, obtained its first few customers early this year. and has gotten this far on about $15,000 so far.
