Tech Meetup#4 - Heath Ahrens of iSpeech and George Abraham of Rhodium Strategies

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We are honored to have keynote speaker Heath Ahrens, founder and CEO of iSpeech, a text-to-speech (TTS) and speech recognition (ASR), join us for Madison Tech Meetup #4 on Tuesday, June 11th. Ahrens pioneered DriveSafe.ly, an award winning mobile app downloaded over 30 million times. DriveSafe.ly won the 2010 Mashable Award for Best Mobile App. The leading distracted driving application has been written up in major tech blogs such as TechCrunch and VentureBeat and featured on CNN CNET, ABC, and FOX. More recently, Ahrens launched iSpeech’s SDK, enabling developers to integrate TTS and Speech recognition into their apps, with over 20k developers signed up today. To date, iSpeech apps have received over 25 million downloads. Some of iSpeech’s customers include Pearson, Evernote, Honda, deCarta and BlackBerry.

Ahrens was named to NJBIZ’s “40 under 40” and has spoken about speech technology and distracted driving at SpeechTEK, CTIA and TEDx. He gave the keynote address at the NJTC Regional Commercialization Conference and participates regularly in various panel discussions. Ahrens continues to grow iSpeech, delivering human quality speech and recognition to developers and businesses through simple APIs and SDKs. The iSpeech Cloud has been used over a billion times. Bringing speech everywhere through partnerships with developers and Fortune companies, iSpeech’s mission remains: “Speech-enable the Web and the world.”

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Also speaking at this meetup is George Abraham, founder of Rhodium Strategies LLC, a boutique strategy advisory and consulting company working with emerging growth technology companies and the investors who support those companies. Rhodium services include strategy and growth consulting, strategic/M&A advice, fundraising strategy advisory services, independent valuations, and outsourced diligence. Clients include VC backed companies, VC funds and high growth technology companies.

Prior to founding Rhodium, George served as a Managing Director at the technology investment bank Collins Stewart (formerly C.E. Unterberg, Towbin) in New York City. At Collins Stewart, he ran private placements for emerging growth technology companies targeting the VC and PE community.

George co-founded the venture capital fund SAS Investors ( http://www.sasinvestors.com ) in January 2001. SAS was exclusively backed by other VC funds including Rho Capital, Canaan Partners and Sevin Rosen Funds. At SAS he led investments in Tacit Networks (acquired by Packeteer); Textronics (acquired by Adidas); Hydroglobe (acquired by Graver Technologies), Protonex (LSE: PTX.L) and Reactive NanoTechnologies (acquired by Indium Corporation). He has over 20 years experience in private equity, venture capital, finance, M&A and entrepreneurial activities including starting and managing Ajax Capital, a family investment office with substantial private equity activities.

Agenda:

6:30 to 7:15 Pizza & Networking (Thank you to Ken Kaplan from the law firm of Kaplan, Williams & Graffeo, LLC for sponsoring the food and beverages)

7:15 to 7:20 Updates

7:20 to 7:25 Audience/Member Announcements and Requests

7:25 to 7:35 Startup/Q&A Presentation:Nis Frome, COO of Hublished (www.hublished.com) - Hublished is a community for businesses to share, explore, and curate webinars, eBooks, and podcasts. Discover better.

7:35 to 8:05 Keynote speaker #1: Heath Ahrens, founder and CEO of iSpeech

8:05 to 8:35 Keynote speaker #2: George Abraham, founder of Rhodium Strategies LLC

8:35 to 9:00 Networking

After 9:00 Drinks at local bar