Dot Product

Every month, the RPI Incubator Center, in conjunction with regional economic development interests, hosts the Venture BPlan Series. It’s an opportunity to hear new ventures pitch their business plans and raise capital in front of a panel of venture capitalists, lawyers and business experts. This morning, two companies presented their plans: Nurse Documents and EventGnosis.

Nurse Documents value proposition is to streamline the process of traveling nurses changing assignments. Apparently, there are roughly 70,000 traveling nurses in the US, who change assignments (ie: hospitals, clinics, etc) 2.5 times per year on average. Each time they change assignments, they have to provide a considerable volume of paperwork for certification purposes, and everyone’s paperwork is different. Nurse Documents will use a standardized form that contains all the information found on the independent forms, and will take care of the certification process instead of the hiring company. Their revenue model collects fees from the hiring companies, and give a kickback to the nurses in exchange for using the service rather than filling out the forms every time. The value is derived from time (and hence staffing) savings of skipping the certification and form verification process every time a nurse changes jobs.

One of the better questions from the panel addressed the issue of substitution: why wouldn’t a nurse simply take her forms to Kinkos? This question proved to be a bit embarrasing, because the presenter (COO Jamie Sowder) had to call his Dad (who is also the CEO) up front to eventually answer the question. Not a good sign. It definitely undermined his authority to speak on behalf of the company.

The second company, EventGnosis, did much better, though their case was less compelling. Their value proposition is to look at events within a network domain and to correlate that information into a pattern that differentiates normal from potentially threatening network activity. Their revenue model license and royalty revenues from selling the technology to OEMs who wish to integrate it into their products. While this sort of technology is badly needed for the network adminstrator that is beseiged by hackers, spammers and potential disgruntled employees, I think there are many ways to skin this cat, and there are companies already providing services in this space. In addition, it was unclear what barriers to entry and intellectual property protection they could erect. It will be interesting to see if they end up with funding… they were looking for $1 - $2 million.