What would your company do with a cool $100,000 in winnings from a business competition? We have our priorities straight here at Blue Matador and immediately invested in a propane-powered space heater for the benefit of our basement-dwelling startup employees in the winter.
All joking aside (though we really did buy a space heater), Blue Matador’s 2nd-place win at the third-annual Start Madness startup competition, sponsored by Silicon Valley Bank and in conjunction with Silicon Slopes, gives us the go-ahead to build Lumberjack’s predictive alerts feature and develop our robust smart agent.
Our employees now have heat to last us through the bleak Utah winter months this year, compliments of Kickstart Seed Fund and EPIC Ventures.
Here’s what we’re going to do with all that (remaining) investment:
Predictive Alerts for Proactive Production Monitoring
Predictive alerts are the future for central log management. Behind every site is a group of people working to keep it running. But when those guys run Lumberjack on their servers, they are protected with predictive alerts that proactively notify admins when applications and systems start behaving in unhealthy ways. We think this new feature will be an indispensable feature for system administrators, site reliability engineers, and all others that take part in an on-call rotation.
Smart Agent Makes Lumberjack the Easiest Predictive Alerts Platform
Lumberjack’s agent is getting smarter. Our agent is already a smart addition to your servers’ software. The Lumberjack agent collects logs and sends it to our servers in the cloud to aggregate them and make them searchable, making the root of your server’s symptoms more easily diagnosable.
About Start Madness and Blue Matador
The Start Madness competition, now in its third year, began as a Silicon Slopes competition designed to give startups that edge needed to make a difference in their business plans. Some 160 startups applied for the gig, with 36 semi-finalists selected by preliminary judges to present to Kickstart Seed Fund and EPIC Ventures associates. Of the semi-finalists, 6 finalists presented at the actual Start Madness event, each vying for a grab at $200,000 for first place, $100,000 for second, or 12-months of premium office space for the “audience choice” winner.
MarketDial, a Salt Lake City-based software company that specializes in simple A/B testing of real-world decisions snagged first place at the event. Meanwhile, Homie, headquartered in Draper, Utah, landed the “audience choice award” for its innovative business model that cuts out realtors and their fees from the real estate process.
Blue Matador’s success in the Start Madness competition signals our dedication to the monitoring space. Watch us grow here at the Blue Matador blog by signing up for our newsletter in the footer below.
At the third-annual Start Madness Competition hosted at Silicon Slopes, Blue Matador CEO and founder Matthew Barlocker introduced the company and embarrassingly misrepresented co-founder Mark Siebert’s name to be “Mike.”
