Gustavus Alumni Profiles
Phil Hotchkiss
Phil Hotchkiss '91 is making news again. When we last took notice, the Twin Cities entrepreneur had just sold his startup venture, BigCharts, to San Francisco-based MarketWatch.com in a deal valued at $166 million in cash and stock. He took a yearlong sabbatical, got married, had two children, and, as he says, "smelled the roses."
Now he's back in the game with Talkingpoint, a new way of gathering market data and delivering it to retailers. His track record and new venture landed him feature coverage in Dave Beal's "Business Beat" column in the Oct. 22 St. Paul Pioneer Press.
BigCharts' focus was on creating, packaging, and selling stock market charts, graphs, and other economic data for distribution over the Internet. Talkingpoint is aimed at retail businesses. Hotchkiss didn't actually start the company-it was incorporated two years ago as iCount by a wireless business developer-but he has transformed it, adding hardware and software and "rebranding" it through a name change and promotional concepts designed to boost the data-gathering process. At this time, it has only four full-time employees and its first product is only now moving into the testing stage. But observers of the Twin Cities business scene are predicting a great future.
The most tangible feature of Talkingpoint's system is a 10-inch screen displaying a wireless link in real time to software and a data center. Customers in stores or restaurants can answer brief surveys by touching the screen: What did they like or dislike about the service? Why did they come? Will they return? Were the prices fair and competitive? Talkingpoint then will collect the data and present it to retail executives using easy-to-read visuals that resemble the graphics that Hotchkiss developed for BigCharts.
Talkingpoint is currently wrapping up an effort to raise its first round of capital. Hotchkiss anticipates more than $2 million in sales by the end of 2004 and a positive cash flow by mid-2005.
