Technori Pitch – January 2012

Last Tuesday night I attended the January 2012 Technori pitch event where five new startups were pitching their companies and ideas to an auditorium packed with entrepreneurs, investors and tech enthusiasts. These pitch events are great networking opportunities to meet other people who share the same passion for entrepreneurship and new ventures. The five startups at last week’s event were: AttorneyFee.com, Phaxio, Moosejaw, Leap Year Project, and Georama. The two startups that really caught my attention were AttorneyFee.com and Leap Year Project.

AttorneyFee.com helps people find out the fair cost of legal work and they currently have a database of over 25,000 attorneys that list their fees. The unique aspect of the website is the ability to predict the price of any legal service in any location and the website also develops charts for you to see the distribution of attorney fees for your specific service and location. It seems to be a pretty well-funded startup, since they are ramping up with new hires and currently have over 20 million viewers a month, mostly through partnerships they have with other organizations and websites. There seem to be similar startups for the healthcare space in order to review different health services and procedures as well as doctors, but AttorneyFee.com claims to be the major player in the legal industry. Although I’ve never had the need for any legal services and hopefully won’t need to use the website to find any attorneys in the near future, it seems like a very valuable service for customers who might be overwhelmed with finding a local lawyer at a reasonable cost.

The other unique idea this month was a new non-profit organization called Leap Year Project. The goal of the organization is to convince individuals to take a risk this year in order to change their life, their community or the world for the better and share their experiences with the rest of the Leap Year Project community in order to inspire others to do the same. I think taking on this goal would be very rewarding for any individual, but my only suggestion is that it really shouldn’t be limited to just this year. This should be a goal that people should always have in their lives even if it is with smaller projects to help improve their lives and help the people around them. I still think it’s a great idea and I’ll be sure to read and follow the founder’s own Leap Year Project over the next few months.