Joe Procopio is a serial entrepreneur and is the founder of ExitEvent. He is also currently the VP of Product Engineering for VC-backed startup Automated Insights. Joe writes about new and shiny things at TechJournal, News & Observer, WRAL TechWire, and other bylines, all of which can be found here. You can hit him on Google+
This morning, Automated Insights released SiteAi, a product that automatically and seamlessly combs through all of your website analytics data and emails you a daily or weekly report on your traffic -- the volume, the makeup, the sources, the changes, the trends, and any other nugget we can pull out of the muck. We take all of these insights, prioritize them, and send them to you in plain, pretty English.
I'm in charge of Product at Ai, and as such I'm compelled to come up with several new ways to use our platform that our potential customers aren't yet clamoring for. This is not as easy as it sounds, because our potential customers clamor for a lot -- from our sports and fantasy knowledge to our financial products to real estate and personal fitness.
These days, if you can dream it, it most likely has data, and we can mine that data and report on it in any format you want. We can make it read like it was written by Bill Simmons or Bill Shakespeare, and we can crank out personalized articles at the rate of (so far) up to 1,100 articles per second. --Read On
Update: Of course he won. Congratulations to Erik and the whole Mystery team.
I'm not gonna lie to you. As media-savvy as I like to believe I am, it still feels weird watching the promo video (below) and seeing my friend on a reality show. I've known Erik Myers, founder of Hillsborough's Mystery Brewing, for a little over 12 years, since before he moved from Boston to Durham, long before he decided to ditch his job as a network admin and turn what was essentially a hobby into a full-fledged, real-as-hell, building, employees, T-shirts-and-taproom brewery.
When I met him, he was just a really smart and funny kid who could write well and dug all the same kinds of things I did. I hired him to write for Intrepid Media, and a few years later he married his girlfriend and moved to North Carolina so she could get her doctorate at UNC.
One night in 2011, just as Erik was finishing up his paperwork to make Mystery legal, I explained the idea for ExitEvent and the Startup Social over beers at City Beverage, and he went all in. ExitEvent has served phenomenally good Mystery Brewing beer, for free, at each of our 18 Startup Socials. To hundreds of influential entrepreneurs and investors from across the country. Because dude had vision.
I should say this too. Erik was one of the first people I told about ExitEvent. Before he said he'd pour the beer, he told me he thought it was a great idea. Had he said otherwise, I may not have done it.
This Tuesday night, Mystery Brewing is one of the featured contestants on the CNBC reality show Crowd Rules, which each week features three small businesses that compete for a $50,000 prize. --Read On
It seems like ages ago when Justin Miller's dejaMi was getting booted from his basement, thanks to an overzealous neighbor and a City of Raleigh ordinance that went to the letter of the law. The local startup community came together to help him land at HUB Raleigh overnight, and from there, he's been on a tear.
But know this. Every time he calls me, I answer: "What did you get kicked out of now?"
That joke will never, ever get old.
It was even longer ago, July of 2011 to be exact, when Miller threw the impressive dejaFest to launch the original dejaMi app. Not a task taken lightly, it turned into a full-on 2-day music festival, taking up several venues in downtown Raleigh.
Not long after he relocated to the HUB, he and I were both at Startup Summit, where I was moderating a panel and he was pitching WedPics, the company he spun out of dejaMi and into the early but suddenly very frothy social-wedding-sharing space.
Watching his presentation, I knew at that point that WedPics was going to be successful, because Miller was going to beat everyone at the game. WedPics was going to be designed better, work better, and if he had to throw a WedFest to get it onto the public's radar, that was going to happen. --Read On
This morning, Automated Insights released SiteAi, a product that automatically and seamlessly combs through all of your website analytics data and emails you a daily or weekly report on your traffic -- the volume, the makeup, the sources, the changes, the trends, and any other nugget we can pull out of the muck. We take all of these insights, prioritize them, and send them to you in plain, pretty English. 
Update: Of course he won. Congratulations to Erik and the whole Mystery team.
It seems like ages ago when Justin Miller's dejaMi was getting booted from his basement, thanks to an overzealous neighbor and a City of Raleigh ordinance that went to the letter of the law. The local startup community came together to help him land at HUB Raleigh overnight, and from there, he's been on a tear.