Companies to Watch: Alten Energy, PerfectMIND, Calgoo Software

I enjoy the startup world again. For the past several weeks, I have been hard at work at trying to figure out my own business model and startup. Part of my business will be in consulting early-stage startup companies and entrepreneurs in building out their business and marketing systems. Some of my outsourced marketing and product management services are described on the Launchpoint.ca website.

One of the reasons why I’ve chosen to work within this target market, is that I find it fun. I mean truly exhilarating. Being exposed to the latest and greatest technologies and business models: what could be better than that.

A few of the companies that I’ve spent some time with over the past couple of weeks include Calgoo Software, PerfectMind, and Alten Energy.

I first came across Calgoo in October of 2006 when I had a few conversations with their founders. I actually wrote an unsolicited document for them way back then entitled, “How to get acquired by Google in 18 months”. It didn’t happen, but they have evolved nicely since then.

I mentioned PerfectMIND in an earlier post. The executive briefing that I attended was very enlightening. They have a very interesting technology and product that they’ve built. Once a market is defined for the product, it is one to watch. A truly disruptive innovation at work there.

Alten Energy is one that I take a little bit of pride in. I used to work with Michael Sommer at Marqui. Mike is one of Alten Energy’s founders and their VP Sales and Marketing. In their words,

ALTEN is developing technology to network distributed battery storage. As an integral component of the smart grid we will help reduce peak load for electricity through demand side management.

Why do I take pride in this? Well without officially saying it, I encouraged Mike to “explore his options” in the early days… that is, jump headfirst into the wonderful world of startup, giving up the day job [he just didn’t look like he was enjoying it, and he had a real passion for the new idea. Follow this one, it is going somewhere.

The Vancouver startup scene is alive and well. But what about suburbia? Hopefully, I can shift this ground a little bit over here as well.