Recap: WeSeed at FinovateStartup 2009

By Shannon Paul

A lot of people don’t know that WeSeed actually made its debut at last year’s Finovate event in New York City with a live demo performance of the site.

Earlier this week, I went with fellow WeSeed team members, Caitlin Rosberg and Brad Goldberg to represent WeSeed at Finovate once again, only this time the event was in San Francisco.

While Finovate may not be about investing in the stock market, the event is all about a different kind of investment. The people behind new startups in the financial sector go to Finovate to showcase their new companies to venture capital and other types of private investors in hopes of getting funding or having their product acquired by a larger company. Not to mention the fact that anyone who’s ever launched a startup invests a whole lot of time and energy in building and launching a brand new business.

For a complete list of companies in attendance at FinovateStartup 2009, check out this list compiled by Jim Bruene over at NetBanker.com. One thing you’ll notice if you look at this list is that the downturn in the economy is inspiring a lot of innovation. Many new companies are looking to create solutions that help individuals with personal finance and debt management.

Silver Tail Systems was voted to present in the afternoon and was selected as the Best in Show by those in attendance. Silver Tail provides a very sophisticated and detailed fraud prevention system that tracks suspicious behavior in a way that doesn’t disrupt activity for the end-user. One of my personal favorites of the show was Expensify, a website that aims to streamline and simplify the expense report process. Anyone who’s ever had to fill out an expense report for their job knows just how much fun that can be.

Although we didn’t do another live demo of WeSeed for the attendees, we had an exhibition space for people to get a one-on-one demonstration of the site and we were able to record a demonstration video for the event website that we’ll be sure to post here as soon as it’s available.

Maybe in a few years, one of the startups on display will be up for its first public offering and available for purchase on the stock market. Or, perhaps a publicly traded company will acquire one of the new technologies presented by one of the startups. These things don’t happen overnight, but we’ve got our eye on a few new things as a result of exploring the intersection of technology and finance at Finovate.

So, what do you think? How will new technology impact the economy and our ability to manage our own personal finances? If you were building the high-tech solution of the future, what financial problem would you aim to solve?

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