1. Rocket City Perk
A Newsletter Highlighting the Perks For and By Small Businesses in
The Rocket City and Surrounding Area.

2. Advertisering and Sponsoring
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Full Page Table of Contents
“The thing about Endings is that Beginnings
are full of Possibilities”
Positive Motion and Art Acknowledgement 1
Small Business News and Events 2
Business Lead Focus...... 4
Classifieds....................... 5
Advertisering and Sponsoring
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Positive Motion A positive thought, phrase or concept to help shape your approach
from day to day
The art on the cover is provided by Christina Wegman of Christina Wegman Fine Art.
Illustrating an iconic scene from . This owner-run small business is one of the prized
downtown shops that has grown out of the Clinton Row Project. Characterized by its
bright and cheerful interior and its equally cheery owner and art, the gallery is open six
days a week. Focusing on prints and originals, customers can also commission portraits
of their pets, family, landscapes or even full murals. Pricing can be found at the shop
and at http://christinawegman.blogspot.com/2012/09/pricing-and-commissions.
html.
With her work gracing the walls of not just galleries, but local favorites like Sam and
Greg’s, her works ranging from abstracts with a modern tilt and portraits with a tra-ditional
base and creative twists blend together our Rocket City’s mix of varying back-grounds.
While she may not have been native born, having traveled not just across the
country but also Canada and Europe, she has been part of the art community here
since 2007. After completing her degree in German at the Rocket City’s own Univer-sity
of Alabama Huntsville she has become as much a native of the area through her
depiction of the people, places and views that are so unique to it.

3. Small Business News and Events,
SBN&E A calendar and update about Special Events that went on and on the Horizon
This Past Month:
11/6 - 6th Annual Entreprenuer Round Table- Featuring Michael, Mike, J.
Durrant from Pinnacle Solutions and Kristy McQuire from Victory Solu-tions
11/13 - Alabama A&M Innovation Day-A joint effort between A&M, Tus-kegee,
SBDA and Monsanto.
11/18 - Merger and Acquistion Workshop with Steve Hall and Associates
11/19 - Rocket City HR’s Lunch and Learn
11/20 - Will This Fly?- A Startup Pitch Competition with investors and
competitors from all over the area. More in feature section.
Coming this Month:
12/1 Pitch 101- At Hudson Alpha kicks back into swing
12/4 The Vibe Downtown Christmas Party- A great way to kick off the hol-idays
12/12 Huntsville Open Tech - HOT Coffee is back from the first holiday
break
If there are any events I have left out just send me a mes-sage
and I’ll be glad to add you or put in the last month.
Business Lead Focus
An Interview on a Company or Event thats helping to Shape the Small Business
Environment
The lights go up. Spread from the left to right sides the
audience sees the contestants. Spread up in front a set
of four chairs are on each side. The occupants of the
chairs coming from all over the area with one purpose,
to give money to some lucky people. The large win-dows
on three sides filter in the light of the city. The
room echoes with voices of investors, entrepreneurs,
volunteers and others who serve a valuable and integral
part of the small business environment and that night they are there to pick the
best entrepreneur with the best business. All set in the beautiful facilities of the
Design Lab out at Lincoln Mills, meanwhile across the hall Startup Village was
still in full swing up until the official competition began.
The name of this evident, “Will This Fly?” is the first ever for the Huntsville
area, a startup pitch competitions and fundraiser. Not content to simply be a
night of pitches, food, beverages and networking, for those on the VIP level
there were tours of Hudson Alpha, Al.com and Lowe Mill, with transportation
provided by the Huntsville Trolley, as well as lunch at Al.com where Al.com
provided Jimmy John’s. After the tours the VIPS were paired off for a special
VIP Professional Speed Mentoring program, where professionals had a chance
to chat in a more private setting about various matters and questions. Mean-while
some of those not chosen for the formal competition were set up in Start-up
Village to demonstrate, illustrate and hopefully catch the eye of customer
and investor alike. In the end it brought in over $10K to help build and support
the small businesses with Rocket Hatch, a 501(c)3 non-profit, that over the
course of this event had roughly 31 sponsors and partners, over 30 volunteers
and more than 200 attendees that donated cash or goods to make this a success-ful
event

4. The lucky chosen teams to present all gathered around early. Weld3D, a team
focusing on improving 3D Metal Printing with an emphasis on re-purposing
and rejuvenating existing CNC and similar systems, to allow increased accessi-bility
and affordability for small businesses were up first. Mechoptix, familiar to
some on Facebook, is a company focused on safety with a focus in the motorcy-cle
and automotive industry with their focus product Stoptix automatic braking
lamp. FusionMED is a small biomedical group who’s focus is developing and
manufacturing non-intrusive mechanical medical devices. Thread is a compa-ny
as much focused on the social aspect as the technological by developing an
intentional and contextual system to connect people, places and things through
meaningful, intentional and proximity based interactions. Skyblast Freight
blew many away with their concept of a system to launch cubesats via regularly
scheduled orbital launches through an eBay storefront. MedExcess, a company
ripe to come to the aid of overtaxed doctor’s offices, nurses hospitals and many
others in the medical field by offering real time overhead management via their
online brokerage system. NetRep as its name implies wants to make use of your
online and offline reputation to build trust and make the most out of your on-line
interactions to get you the most out of your online deals and interactions.
They faced off against the WTF HSV’s own sharks. Leading was the charge
Mike Bradshaw, the Executive and Entrepreneur in Residence of The Compa-ny
Lab in Chattanooga, TN, one of the same men who brought together their
area’s all-fiber gigabit network through their accelerator GIGTANK. Eric Mat-thews,
an old hand of the Memphis entrepreneurial ecosystem, and his efforts
led to the creation of Start Co. where serves as CEO of one of the region’s most
impressive venture development organization answered the call. Vic Gatto,
one of the powerhouses, with Jumpstart Foundry has since 2009 graduated 37
companies in the Nashville area raising over $15M in follow-on funding. Not
to be out done by any of the men on the team Tiffanie Robinson, co-founder
of The JumpFund, brought a focus of community and social entrepreneurship
even as she took time from her work as Director of Operations at Lamp Post
Group and WayPaver. Chris Taylor, also from Nashville brought with him the
heft of Fortnum Capital Partners and C-Tech, where he is Managing Partner
and CEO, respectively. Greg Sheek from AL Launchpad is no stranger to the
area as an overseer to start-up competitions all over the state and from being on
the board of the Alabama Aerospace Industry Association Board. Mark Spen-cer,
a Huntsville native who knows a few things about innovation revolution-ized
digital telephony in ‘99 with Asterisk and has continued to shape the small
business ecosystem with Digium and his new aviation software startup Avilu-tion.
Rounding things out is Matt Fowler another Huntsville native and serial
entrepreneur who wears many hats including co-founder, President and CEO
of Solid Earth as well as sitting as a board member of a number of local organi-zations
including one of the sponsors BizTech.
The pitches were fun and engaging with visuals that for some were clear and to
the point while others were more thought provoking and had some question-ing
the structure of things that they had been looking at for a while. The room
while beautiful did get a bit overwhelming due to the sound of the excited voic-es
of students, mentors, teachers, investors and entrepreneurs. The local flavors
provided by the food and beverage vendors reinforced the importance of the
event to the local businesses. After roughly fifteen minutes the results were
announced with Weld3D coming out the top winner and MechOptix coming in
a close second, winning the audience vote with checks awarded to both. After
that the judges themselves took the stage to present their accelerator programs
and initiatives, culminating in Daniel Tate, Antonio Montoya and Chris Tay-lor
taking the stage to announce the creation of the Rocket Hatch’s first startup
accelerator focused on Clean Tech, recruiting investors and partners now, with
startup recruitment in Spring 2015 and set to start accelerating the coming
Summer of 2015. Given the passion of these men and the rest of our ecosystem
one can only expect great things to be coming down the road.

5. Classifieds
At 10 cents a word Small Businesses and Startups can advertise their
openings and needs to one another.