Image courtesy of Famousbloggers.net

This week, the Technology Association of Georgia hosted a panel session on equity crowdfunding in Georgia at the Atlanta Tech Village. The session, moderated by Knox Massey, featured Georgia Secretary of State Brian P. Kemp as one of its panelists and it is his office that oversees the Invest Georgia Exemption.

The Invest Georgia Exemption enables participation in equity crowdfunding by unaccredited investors and has been legal for more than a year, but it has only recently been the topic of much buzz no doubt due to the passing of the Invest Georgia legislation.

While the Invest Georgia Exemption and the Invest Georgia legislation share similar names, they are unrelated. Massey provides a detailed explanation of the differences between the two and the basis of the Invest Georgia Exemption here.  Sterling Funder, a platform in which startups can post their equity-based crowdfunding projects, outlines the rules around this new funding mechanism here. Currently Novita Care and ATDC company cMECompete are the only two projects listed on the site.

Georgia is one of only two states [Kansas is the other state] to legalize equity-based crowdfunding.

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The overarching goal of a public relations campaign is to build reputation – creating positive buzz, which impacts people, partners and profit…  “the three P’s.”  PR optimizes your reputation, making you a preferred job prospect for sharp new employees. Reputation also attracts prospective business partners to explore the unique benefits of joining forces with you, and of course it primes your sales funnel.

For example, inventor George Yu of Variable Technologies implemented a media outreach campaign for his NODE sensor shortly before Christmas, hoping to push holiday sales for a brand new product. The campaign led to George discussing his revolutionary NODE device with the world’s most influential tech media at the New York Times, Wired, Popular Mechanics and CBS News. NODE earned a spot in David Pogue’s coveted 2012 Holiday Tech Gift guide in Forbes. How did this exposure help? NODE earned over one million tier-one and tech media impressions… and brought in significant holiday sales. Soon after, we helped NODE score again at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas with a guerilla PR campaign that brought them recognition as CNN Money’s “best gadget at CES.” Sales continue and George is closing his first round of funding.

Read: “NODE Inventor Brings Tricorder-Style Device to the Masses”

So how can basic public relations help you? A press tour may not be the first step, but to know, you have to think about a combination of media traction, in-person exposure and peer recognition.

We use a basic methodology to help companies think through their first steps and options. It’s called Triple A Industry Leadership Methodology. Think about what each of these Three A’s means for you:

• Awareness through media coverage, interviews, bylines, blogs and social media
• Access to your audience via speaking opportunities, conferences and trade shows
• Awards,  bringing recognition from industry peers which often generate support, alliances and opportunities

Watch: “How Great Small Companies Use Technology to Drive Growth”

An effective awareness campaign involves connecting with media outlets that are appropriate and applicable for your message – to build awareness in multiple media channels, including TV news, news blogs, social media pages and trade magazines. It’s exciting to see the results.

For example, Ecologix, an Alpharetta-based frac water company, was recently featured along with oil industry giants Halliburton and Schlumberger, in a Wall Street Journal article. Within 24 hours, Ecologix’ website registered a 30% spike in visits, a 600% increase in referrals, a 400% increase in video viewership, and 200% bump in blog traffic and more. (You can read the details here from their marketing manager, Chris). They received dozens of inquiries about investment opportunities, trade shows, etc., and quickly began to move some of their new equipment line, which had previously gone unsold.

Ecologix’ experience confirms that the right stories in the right publications can generate leads, attract the right people, and produce new opportunities.

First, consider your opportunities and develop a PR “road map”. We’ll explore some tactics for this in part two.

Variable Technologies and Ecologix are Write2Market clients. ________________________________________________________

As founder and CEO of Write2Market, Lisa Calhoun’s passion is crafting powerful reputations for industry leaders.

In the past year, Lisa won a Gold Stevie Award for Female Entrepreneur of the Year and was honored by Business Leader Magazine as one of Atlanta’s Top 25 Entrepreneurs “One to Watch.”

Contact Lisa via Twitter at @Lisa_Calhoun or @Write2Market.

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Image courtesy of Jordan & Skala Engineers

As we enter the second quarter of 2013, we are reflecting on the growth and future of the Athens startup community.   Having launched our initiative to promote the community toward the end of 2011, we spent 2012 building and connecting the community through events, meetups, classes and low cost office space.  During the second half of 2012, we focused heavily on building our mentor network and accelerating the growth of early stage companies in the region.

In the first quarter of 2013, we held our annual Open House, attended by 200+ community members with 12 companies on demo, traveled with 5 Athens based startups to Startup Riot and are holding our semi-annual campus Talk Tech meet & greet to showcase over 20 local tech companies that are hiring students.   UGA’s Next Top Entrepreneur contest has whittled down over 50 companies to a final 5 competing for a $100,000 investment at the end of March.   The community is excited for Thinc. at UGA, a celebration of entrepreneurship capped by TEDxUGA, the launch of StartUp Gauntlet, and the final Next Top Entrepreneur pitches.

Momentum is on our side in Athens, but we have a long way to go.  We are dedicated to building a strong startup culture that will benefit not only the city, but the broader state and region.  We have a phenomenal creative resource with the University of Georgia being located in downtown Athens.  As the community continues to grow, we are focused on a few short and long term initiatives.  The most important for 2013 are: (1) continuing to grow Athens based companies, (2) solidifying connections with Atlanta based partners and (3) identifying continued sources of funding for early stage companies.

We tell our most compelling story through the success of existing companies.  We have founders in Athens that have sold companies for millions of dollars and built big businesses.  We have others that have built successful companies and continue to run them.  We even have founders that have failed.  The main focus of Four Athens is identifying the best ways to serve and help these companies grow through connections to mentors, money, customers and talent.

One of our intermediate goals is to create better connectivity to the Atlanta startup community.  Athens is an excellent place to spark and build a company, but it has limitations, including its talent pool and physical infrastructure, that will hinder growth of truly large companies.  In order to build huge businesses, startups will most likely have to move away once they have achieved a certain size.  Atlanta is the obvious pipeline to funnel rapidly growing companies.  Better connectivity with the Atlanta scene now will ease the transition as Athens’ based companies scale.

Enough has been written on the struggles of startup capital, so we are focused on finding solutions.  Short term, we are working hard to encourage more angel investors in the region.  This includes running our own angel fund, holding educational seminars in connection with established angels and educating entrepreneurs.   A more sophisticated dialogue between angels and entrepreneurs will lend itself to more trust, better connectivity and an increase in deals.  Instead of the frequently adversarial relationship that tends to exist, we are working to create a mutually beneficial environment.

Georgia’s startup community is in an exciting growth phase.   With recent, high profile exits, new investment funds and new initiates launching, we are excited to watch the growth of the community.  Surrounding the Atlanta core, Georgia has a fantastic startup resource in its smaller cities like Savannah, Augusta and Athens.  We’re excited to contribute to the growth of Georgia as a startup hub.

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The America Invents Act (AIA) introduces significant changes into the U.S. patent system.  Among the most controversial of these changes is the switch from a first-to-invent system to a first-to-file system, which took place on March 16, 2013.  However, the AIA does not provide a clean break with the past, as the new 35 U.S.C. § 102(b) provides exceptions which remove some prior disclosures from the prior art realm.  The exceptions include a one year grace period for inventor disclosures before filing.  It is important to understand how the grace period works and to what extent it can be relied upon to protect your clients.  The one year grace period under the new law is NOT as robust as the one year grace period under the previous law.

The AIA’s 35 U.S.C. § 102(b) provides that certain disclosures shall not be prior art.  A disclosure made by the inventor one year or less before the application filing date is not prior art.  For example, if an inventor or joint inventor publishes a paper or demonstrates a product less than one year before filing a patent application based on the paper or product, the grace period applies and the disclosure is not prior art.  Similarly, a third party disclosure one year or less before the filing date is not prior art if the applicant can demonstrate that the subject matter of the disclosure was directly or indirectly obtained from the inventor.  In the case where the inventor discloses subject matter less than one year before the filing date, and a third party subsequently discloses the same subject matter obtained from the inventor before the filing date, the third party disclosure is not prior art.  At first glance, the grace period appears quite similar to the current law.

However, there are some pitfalls that make it risky to rely on the new one year grace period.  With regard to third party disclosures, the exceptions apply only to disclosure of the SAME subject matter as was obtained from the inventor.  Conversely, the exceptions do NOT apply to variations of the subject matter.  For example, an inventor could disclose subject matter and, before the inventor files a patent application related to the disclosure, a third party could disclose subject matter that builds on the inventor’s disclosure or otherwise modifies it in some way.  Now, the third party’s disclosure can be prior art for an obviousness rejection against the subsequent application of the inventor.  The inventor cannot rely on the date of invention to overcome prior art in a first-to-file system.

Clearly, patent prosecution strategies have to take this problem into account.  Seeking a patent before publication is more important than ever.  If an inventor publishes before seeking a patent, a patent application must be filed as soon as possible.  The invention date can no longer be relied on for priority.  Of course, the application still must contain a written description of the invention that enables a person of ordinary skill in the art to make and use the invention.  Because it is the inventors who provide the information that makes this level of description possible, inventors need to be engaged at every step of the application writing process and understand the importance of full and prompt disclosure.

Provisional applications can be a useful tool for establishing an early filing date, but they do not provide an opportunity or excuse to rush.  Simply filing academic papers, white papers, inventor notes, or anything else that may be lying around does not necessarily provide protection.  A regular application based on a provisional application only gets the benefit of the provisional filing date if the provisional application provides enough information to enable a person of ordinary skill to make and use the invention.  Therefore, when filing a provisional application, the applicant needs to think about what will be claimed in the regular application.  The best way to approach this is to actually write claims and file them with the provisional application, although at minimum the subject matter of eventual claims must be understood.  Once this is done, the disclosure must be carefully examined to ensure that the claimed subject matter is fully described and enabled by the provisional application.

Patent owners have already lost protection as a result of inadequate provisional applications.  For example, in New Railhead Manufacturing v. Vermeer Manufacturing and Earth Tool Co., 289 F.3d 1290, 63 U.S.P.Q.2d 1843 (Fed. Cir. 2002), a patent claim required a drill bit with a bit body attached to an end of a sonde housing and a “unitary bit body being angled with respect to the sonde housing”.  The patent owner filed a provisional application and attempted to rely on that provisional application to establish a priority date.  However, the angled relationship of the bit body and sonde housing was not found in the provisional application.  As a result, the activities of the patent owner more than a year before the regular application but less than a year before the provisional application invalidated the claims of the regular application.  The lesson is clear.  The safe approach is to prepare a provisional application taking as much care as in preparing a regular application.

What had been a practical need to file first has become a legal need, but otherwise, much of pre-AIA practice continues forward.  As much as possible, inventors should be discouraged from premature publication.  Inventors should work with their attorneys to swiftly prepare and file fully enabling applications.  The transition to a first-to-file system can be relatively painless as long as best practices under our former first-to-invent system are followed and emphasized.

image by Rick Payette via Flickr

In Part One of our series, entitled Developing Online Content: Where to Start, we shared our ideas about how to start a content marketing strategy, recognizing that most marketers need help knowing what to say and how to generate enough content to keep their website and social media channels fresh and dynamic.

In Part Two of this series, we will explain how to integrate all of the ideas into an easy-to-implement content calendar to schedule and track your content publishing plans.

Develop a user-friendly calendar format

With the preliminary content brainstorming activities out of the way, it’s time now to turn your attention to the actual editorial calendar. There are many ways to format and lay out an editorial content calendar. However, a workable content calendar should include an annual look, in addition to content plans by month or quarter for the entire year. Seeing all of the content plans in one place will help you visualize ways to repurpose content and ensure consistency of company messages across all channels.

Be sure to plan for a variety of content types each month. For example, each quarter should have a category for general industry topics, customer-driven pieces, content that addresses a technology trend or issue that is topical, and information that is written specifically for an industry vertical of importance to your company. You should also consider having a range of content aimed at prospects in different stages in the buying cycle. Finally, one person should be appointed to manage the calendar to drive deadline dates, schedule resources, and avoid confusion among team members.

Add to your channel line-up

Incorporate all your traditional marketing touchpoints into the calendar: news releases, blogs, targeted emails, media pitches, bylined articles, industry briefs/whitepapers, etc. Also, start thinking how you can merchandise content across new channels―in addition to your website―where you may not have had a presence, through platforms such social media, videos or infographics.

Fill in the holes

At this point, you’ve plugged in what you know and what you have. Now it’s time to fill in the holes where editorial topics are lacking and brand-new content is needed. Evaluate resources ahead of time―both internal and external―to determine the feasibility of developing any new content from scratch.

Make for easy sharing and collaboration

Your content editorial calendar should be available for all team members to view, either in a shared document online (i.e. Google Drive or Dropbox) or saved somewhere on your company’s shared drive.

The content calendar should be a living, breathing document, giving you the flexibility to adapt to the changing needs of your company as well as those of your targeted audiences throughout the year. The important part is getting your content projects organized in a way that is easily understandable and manageable for you and your team. Click here to download a sample template that will help you begin to drive consistency and efficiency in your content marketing strategy. Content within the calendar is for demonstration purposes only and intended to provide an idea of how yours may look.

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About Carabiner Communications: Carabiner specializes in making big reputations for start-up and fast-growth B2B companies. We’re as adept at honing and focusing messages as we are at delivering them, weaving together multiple communications channels to every client’s advantage. Visit us at www.carabinerpr.com or email pbaron@carbinerpr.com.