Smeal Alum and IdeaPitch Contestant Wins Funding for Startup Venture
AM Analytics, a social media and marketing intelligence startup founded by Smeal College of Business alumnus Alex Mann, has been accepted into the business incubator program of Berkeley Ventures, a California-based business accelerator.
Smeal Alum and IdeaPitch Contestant Wins Funding for Startup Venture
UNIVERSITY PARK, PA (October 23, 2009) – AM Analytics, a social media and marketing intelligence startup founded by Smeal College of Business alumnus Alex Mann, has been accepted into the business incubator program of Berkeley Ventures, a California-based business accelerator.
Mann graduated from Smeal in 2009 with a bachelor's degree in Finance and turned down several job offers to move to San Francisco to work on his startup venture. Prior to graduation, Mann entered his business idea in last year's IdeaPitch contest, sponsored by Smeal's Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship. IdeaPitch, now in its third year, is a business plan competition that equips its student competitors with the tools, skills, and resources necessary to successfully pitch their ideas to investors, while providing exposure to potential backers. Mann's team took second place in the second annual competition.
Now admitted to the Berkeley Ventures incubator program, the business accelerator will provide AM Analytics with seed money, office space, and legal aid for three months. The accelerator receives between 300 and 400 requests for startup funding, but only about 10 to 15 companies have been selected to receive assistance, according to The Daily Collegian.
AM Analytics is a software platform that aggregates information about a client's brand by tracking live conversation through media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook.
It creates an analysis of not only what is being said, but also what the catalyst is, why the user feels the way he/she does, where the users are from, and why it matters. The data is then used to generate a visual representation of the analysis through charts and graphs, which the client may use to recognize and track trends to allow for more targeted and efficient marketing.
"If you're in the fashion industry, for example, a lot of your strategy is going to be guessing at the next hot trends," Mann told Penn State in an interview while he was still a student. "If you guess right, you're going to be successful. If you guess wrong, you're going lose a lot of money on misdirected marketing.
"But what if the fashion industry could track trends before they tip into the mainstream?"
Through the service offered by AM Analytics, clients could see what their consumers are saying, where they are from, and what they are talking about for the season.
For more on AM Analytics, visit www.amanalytics.com.
REPORTERS & EDITORS: For more information, please contact Wyatt DuBois in the Smeal College of Business Media Relations Office at 814-863-3798 or wed112@psu.edu.
Penn State's Smeal College of Business offers highly ranked undergraduate, MBA, executive MBA, Ph.D., and executive education opportunities to more than 5,500 students at all levels. Featuring academic departments of accounting, finance, marketing, insurance and real estate, management, and supply chain and information systems, the college is also home to major research centers such as the Center for Supply Chain Research, the Institute for the Study of Business Markets, the Center for Digital Transformation, the Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Center for Global Business Studies, and the Center for the Management of Technological and Organizational Change.
