Venture Forum at ChampionsGate

The Florida Venture Forum (http://www.floridaventureforum.org) has selected 18 Florida companies to present at the 19^th annual Florida Venture Capital Conference, to be held at the Omni ChampionsGate on Feb. 2-3, 2010. Registration to attend is still open on the website a twww.floridaventureforum.org. The 18 presenting companies, some of Florida’s best early-stage prospects for equity financing, will make 12-minute presentations to an audience of venture capitalists, private equity investors, angel investors, investment bankers, financial intermediaries, service providers and entrepreneurs.Following are the Central Florida companies selected to present:

Alinean (http://www.alinean.com), Orlando: is the leading developer of value-based interactive demand-generation and sales tools – driving sales and marketing effectiveness by empowering B2B solution providers to better prove and improve the value of solutions to frugal prospects and customers. Alinean fundamentally changes the way that B2B solution providers engage with prospects, with SaaS delivered interactive tools that revolutionize corporate web site interactions and sales presentations / proposals from antiquated feature/function/price selling, to customer focused value engagements - automating opportunity discovery, goal / solution alignment and return on investment (ROI) quantification. Customers include HP, IBM, Microsoft, EMC, Dell, Intel, AT&T, Siemens, Unisys, Thomson Reuters, NetApp, Citrix, Juniper Networks, VMware, Symantec, BlueCoat, Novell, Cisco, Oracle, Sybase, and CA.

Eden Spine, LLC (http://www.edenspine.com), Lake Mary: is a privately held organization developing, manufacturing and selling in the U.S. and abroad a portfolio of new generation spinal technologies, either proprietary or licensed. Eden’s technologies are designed to address the full range of spine care. First, its proprietary less invasive non-fusion technologies have been developed to improve clinical outcomes in the most cost effective manner at each stage of the degenerative disc disease cascade. Second, the company’s fusion portfolio addresses the majority of today’s market needs. Eden Spine is strategically positioned for today and tomorrow’s spinal market, as revenues are shifting toward early stage non-fusion treatments.

Grooveshark/Escape Media Group (http://www.listen.grooveshark.com), Gainesville: puts the world's music library at the fingertips of anyone, anywhere. With a mission of providing a digital music service appealing to consumers while compensating artists and rightsholders fairly, Grooveshark represents a paradigm shift in the way music is consumed. By allowing users to unlimitedly stream the tunes they want on demand, Grooveshark attracts users away from illegal piracy--then offers data analytics, advertising and promotional opportunities, and revenue sharing to those who make the music. The result is a music site useful to everyone involved in the emergent music ecosystem.

IZEA, Inc. (http://www.izea.com), Orlando: is a social media marketing company and the world leader in sponsored conversations. They operate a network of more than 350,000 social media publishers and 30,000 advertisers around the globe. IZEA created the sponsored conversation space in 2006 and has initiated nearly 1M sponsored conversations to date. Sponsored conversations is a technique where brands provide compensation to online social media publishers for posting original content about a product, service or website on their online space. Social media can be an incredibly powerful marketing channel providing multiple layers of conversation for an advertiser. IZEA leverages influencers in social media to deliver campaigns that are measurable, scalable and pervasive.

PatientPoint (http://www.patientpointkiosk.com), Orlando: PatientPoint is a transformational health care IT & revenue cycle management company which deploys comprehensive patient facing & physician practice technology solutions to decrease health care costs and generate revenue opportunities from healthcare providers, payers such as Express Scripts & Blue Cross Blue Shield, and pharmaceutical drug manufacturers such as Eli Lilly & Novartis. PatientPoint Kiosk is a patient self registration terminal similar to an airline check in kiosk but in tablet form which is installed in medical practice waiting rooms across the United States at no cost to physician practices with seamless integration to their EMR/EHR/PM systems. Unlike any technology, by partnering with the physician, we decrease patient wait times, increase patient collections, reduce billing costs, free up physician & staff resources, decrease office overhead, empower patients, save patients money on their medications, improve medication adherence/compliance, improve patient outcomes, contain health care costs, and prevent adverse events by alerting physicians and patients of dangerous interactions and gaps in care at the point of care in real time. PatientPoint’s proprietary & protected IP enables the generation of proven revenue streams while benefiting our partners, investors and all members in the health care value chain.