This week’s edition of 1 Million Cups featured pitches by a tech company that collects and analyzes data for organizations and another startup offering a cohesive platform for schools to better connect with the community.
BIME Analytics, named 2011 European Startup of the Year, was represented by CEO/co-founder Rachel Delacour from France and Jim Lysinger, the company’s vice president of North America, from Kansas City. The cloud-based BIME (Business Intelligence Made Easy) helps companies overwhelmed by the increasing volume and variety of data sources to gather and understand the information they want with greater speed and less expense.
“We as a society are creating a massive amount of data with wild acceleration,” Lysinger said, and BIME permits companies to more easily make data-driven decisions by efficiently connecting them to large data sets in the cloud.
In expanding from France to America, why did BIME choose Kansas City, as opposed to Silicon Valley?
“Northern California is hot, perhaps too hot …” Lysinger said. “We felt this was the place to be, above the noise.”
Delacour described herself as a “strong-willed woman” who persevered through what she called the initially slow and sometimes painful development of her idea for BIME, which today has 26 employees.
“My advice to entrepreneurs everywhere is: Don’t get mad, get moving,” Delacour said.
Jake Lisby of Dewsly discussed his company’s desktop and mobile platform for schools, and how it provides an improved sense of community by encouraging unified communication between students, parents, teachers, coaches, administrators and others involved in the educational process.
Instead of a parent having to scour several websites in order to adequately keep up with their child’s academic and extracurricular activities, the Dewsly platform gives its users a single place to create and share customized information in real time on preferred channels.
Lisby said that Dewsly users can sign up for a daily or weekly digest to “see all of the information when you want it and how you want.”
“We can change education with the community …” Lisby said. “And maybe if a community really became involved in education, more things would change.”
