At this week’s Leading in Local conference we continued to make our Future Stars program a new tradition and staple. From now on, we’ll be holding startup competitions in order to invite “new blood” into the atmosphere. This builds from the Future Stars program we launched last year.

This week we had 7 strong companies compete throughout the first few days of the show for audience votes. The “Future Stars Alley” that served as their home at the conference was a perfect arena to congregate and sniff out what’s happening in early-stage innovation. We would like to thank a previous winner of our future stars programs, PunchCard, for allowing us to use their application as the future stars alley “passport”.

The voting was extremely tight but four companies emerged as finalists. The actual session featured 7 four minute pitch-style presentations, commentary from industry expert, Rick Blair, and free beer for the guests and attendees.

It was a great time and CIAmedia emerged as the winner, based on audience votes. They get bragging rights, a nice trophy, free registration to an upcoming BIA/Kelsey preference and one hour of BIA/Kelsey analyst time for strategy development and positioning.

Special thanks to all competitors (listed below), our special guest judge, Rick Blair and voters. It was a lot of fun and we’ll continue to do it at each conference. Your feedback is also encouraged for how we improve it. We hope to see you in the audience (or on stage) for future competitions.

Winner
CIAmedia

Runners up
Place Full

SpinGo

Sharetown

Field of competitors

Moment Social

Perfect Audience

WhoDoYou