Womens Entrepreneur Festival has a reunion

This past week, we threw a cocktail party/reunion for the Womens Entrepreneur Festival we had this past January.  What is pretty amazing about the people that came to the event and the cocktail party is the community that has been created around this event.  People meet-up regularly and the listserv is still very active.  Pretty impressive. 

What we did this evening is had 10 people present the companies they were launching.  We had quite a few people who wanted to present and narrowing it down was not easy.  I was impressed with each of these women and what they are doing.  It was really great to hear about each of them and then hearing everyone speak about each company afterward is probably the best part.

Here are the companies that presented in order:

Tereza Nemessanyi, Honestly Now.  Honestly Now takes a womans "personal panel" to her handheld asking the questions to her community about "should I?"

Susan Sandler, Care Trek.  An essential tool for organizing and managing the care of an aging parent.  This is definitely an area where a lot of new ideas are cropping up.  Susan and her team are on to something here.

Ellie Bastani and Christine Nguyen, Revival Retail.  A series of projects on how retail stores can revamp and revitalize through technology.  If you get your make-up redone, you generally go home with this piece of paper telling you how you can do it yourself.  Ends up, you can't.  How about if you could take home a small video to see how the make-up artist did your make-up and then you can play it on your handheld at home and eventually just reorder the make-up too.  This was a very smart idea.  It will be interesting to see where they take it.

Chery Heller, CommonWise.  A generative infrastructure that integrates working capital and aggregated purchasing services for worker owned businesses and social entrepreneurs.  The idea is to create a completely different model in this economy.  I am not doing a great job of describing this but this concept has worked tremendously well overseas.  Not so sure this model works in a country of capitalists. 

Christina Arnold, Prevent Human Trafficking.  Using the power of technology to thwart human trafficking which is one of the largest businesses in the world.  Very smart, very saavy.

Barbara Pantuso, Hey Neighbor.  A platform for local collaboration and consumption.  Think Facebook meets Craigslist, locally.  Smart idea. 

Sharleen Smith, Eggzy.net  A marketplace for home and community food producers.  Linked in meet Etsy for food producers.  There is a lot happening in this space as more of us are concerned about the carbon foot print and what we are eating.

Deidre Lord, the Megawatt Hour.  Subscription service for consumers to buy elecricty through them and actually be able to monitor their usage online.  Way ahead of the curve in this industry.

Krista Sande-Kerback and Meghan Doherty, 85 Broads.  85 Broads is an incredible network of women started by Janet Hanson years ago.  A global network of women worth looking into as they start to pivot into another bigger model.

All and all, great presentations, interesting business models.  A few to watch over the near year.