Hungry for Data - Inaugural Data Business DC Meetup

The inaugural DataBusiness DC (DBDC for short) meetup will be centered around productizing food-related data and will feature three DC-based startups.

6:30pm - Doors Open

6:30 - 7:00 pm - Food, Drinks, and Networking

7:00 - 7:05 pm - Welcome and Introduction - Sean Murphy

7:05 - 7:25 pm - Feastie - Valerie

7:25 - 7:30 pm - 30 Second Lightning Announcements

7:30 - 7:50 pm - Venga - Sam

7:50 - 7:55 pm - 30 Second Lightning Announcements

7:55 - 8:15 pm - Sentrana - Demetrios

8:05 - 8:10 pm - Closing Time

About Feastie ( http://www.feastie.com/ )

Social media advocacy campaigns are one of the most effective forms of marketing available today. But with an increasingly fragmented sphere of social media, how do companies know who is widely followed, influential, authentic, and receptive to promoting their products? Feastie Analytics lets companies see at a glance who is talking about their products, how much they're followed, how much their posts are shared, and whether or not they are interested in sponsored social media. Through our platform, companies can identify their ideal brand champions, engage them in a paid advocacy campaign, and measure the results.

Valerie Coffman

After earning a B.S. in Physics from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Cornell, Valerie spent five years at the National Institute of Science and Technology writing software for Materials Science research. She left N.I.S.T. in July 2011 to combine her talents for crunching numbers and programming with her love of cooking (and eating) great food by founding Feastie. She is also a graduate of the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School INNoVATE program and the Founder Institute.

About Venga ( http://govenga.com/ )

Venga revolutionizes the way restaurants connect with their customers. For the first time, restaurants can seamlessly track and analyze their customer's purchases, habits, preferences to improve the guest experience, power targeted marketing, and build true loyalty. Venga is used by international restaurant groups and backed by restaurant industry executives, celebrity chefs, and technology entrepreneurs.

Sam von Pollaro

Sam von Pollaro is the CEO of Venga, a CRM system for the restaurant industry. Previously, Sam was the founder of Petals for the People, a business that revolutionized the sale and distribution of fresh cut flowers, which he sold to a Battery Ventures portfolio company less than 15 months after launch. Prior, Sam was a Principal at Portfolio Logic Management, a private equity firm founded by Jeff Zients, currently President Obama’s Chief Performance Officer. Previously, Mr. von Pollaro was a Senior Analyst at Capital Guidance Corporation and an Analyst at the strategy consulting firm Dean & Company.

About Sentrana ( http://www.sentrana.com/ )

Sentrana provides companies with predictive analytics for better sales and marketing decisions. For the past five years, Sentrana has brought its capabilities to foodservice distribution generating optimal pricing and marketing recommendations covering tens of thousands of products and hundreds of thousands of restuarants on a daily basis. Through its enterprise application platform, MarketMover, Sentrana helps wholesale distributors and suppliers put the terabytes of data sitting in their existing systems to work with advanced analytics and a family of applications that deliver predictive insight at the moment of truth when the sale is being made.

Demetrios Kotsikopoulos

Demetrios Kotsikopoulos is the Chief Technology Officer at Sentrana where he leads the development of Sentrana's core technology platform and the operation of our SaaS infrastructure. Prior to joining Sentrana, he held positions as a strategy consultant at Bain and Company, a Director at Gartner, Inc., and a Senior Architect at Fort Point Partners. Demetri holds a B.A. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Cornell University.