Here's an email update from Communiteach:

CommuniTeach has been making great progress since our selection as a Scalewell grantee. We now have over 1100 members in our two launch cities of Pittsburgh and Chicago who have used CommuniTeach to meet in person and learn a variety of skills such as yoga, photograph, web design, short story writing, and pool playing. We also helped organize Learnapalooza, a Chicago learning festival with 70 free workshops hosted in various Wicker Park venues. Additionally, we’ve made many improvements to make the http://communiteach.com platform more user-friendly. And more changes are on the way – we will be rolling out a new site design and some exciting new features to enable many more people to use CommuniTeach to learn and connect with their neighbors, coworkers, and friends.

 

A huge part of our success can be attributed to our participation in Scalewell.  The $1000 grant helped us bring on a developer to improve our sign-in process and incorporate some of the new features for our January upgrade. Even more valuable than the financial support, however, has been the incredible support and mentorship we’ve received. The Scalewell mentors, particularly Brian Leurssen, Chris Duesing, Jason Goodrich, and Jeff Siarto, have provided us with invaluable advice and connected us with other key Chicago entrepreneurial leaders at Excelerate Labs and the Knapp Center. It’s been a great experience so far, and we look forward to continue working with Scalewell in the future!

Here's an update from Michael Una and Unatronics:

Unatronics continues to move onwards and upwards step by step.

A few weeks ago I just sent an enormous check to China to pay for the first "real" mass-manufacturing run for the newly redesigned Beep-it optical theremin. Pretty soon I'll have the first 500 of these units and I have meetings scheduled with some of the big music instrument retailers to try and sell them on big orders.

Once I make that first big sale that'll be the big news item to report, but I can say that I have 100% confidence that it's going to happen with at least one, if not all the retailers I've got my eye on. And with my rock-solid manufacturer to support me, I can ship thousands of units within a month.

It's been a process shifting from hand-manufacturing to the remotely-managed manufacturing operation, so I've been taking my time a bit to make sure I get each step right. But this is definitely the right arrangement for me- very soon, all my products will be manufactured through this process and my time will be more free to focus on sales and R&D for new products.  I'm very excited with both the cost-per-unit and build quality of my products using this process. It's definitely a win on all fronts. I feel that I'm right on the cusp of Unatronics blasting off the launchpad in a big way.

Scale Well was a huge help in helping me get to this point. Learning how to take a bigger view of my operations and all the ways I could improve my approach was a real eye-opener. My Scale Well advisors have been fantastic, and everyone has been keen to keep in touch and provide ongoing perspective each step of the way. Additionally, the whole Scale Well process hooked me into a network of peers also working on their own business ideas, and I've received lots of helpful information by talking to them about the problems they're facing and how they work up solutions.

The ScaleWell team is happy to be a small part of Chicago's growing community of startups and hackers.  Lots of "doing" from area entrepreneurs is resulting in opportunities, momentum, and general awesomeness traditionally not associated with Chicago. Below are several recent announcements we feel are worth sharing.  

NowSpots Receives $250K from Knight News  

Brad Flora, the Chicago-based entrepreneur and journalist behind the Windy Citizen, recently received a $250K grant from the Knight News Challenge to create NowSpots (splash page).  The project surrounds building software to facilitate real-time local ads - a concept Brad has already implemented with success on the Windy Citizen (see the "sponsored news" box on the right sidebar).  Best of luck to Brad and feel free to help him celebrate tomorrow night at Black Rock Bar.  

Startup Weekend Invades Chicago (Again)

Chicago entrepreneur Chris Campbell - responsible for Lakeshore Branding and GreenWerks - is hosting an installment of Startup Weekend June 25-27 in Chicago's River North neighborhood.  Aside from the challenge of building a company in 54 hours - attendees will also learn from speakers such as Troy Henikoff of Excelerate and Mike Trotzke of SproutBox.    

SocialDevCamp Chicago 2010 Open for Registration

SocialDevCamp is two-days of development and strategy sessions surrounding the social web scheduled for August 14-15 at IIT.  The event features a hackathon, unconference, and how-to sessions from industry leaders. Keynote speakers currently include Chris Messina of Google and Andrew Mason of Groupon with more coming soon!  Disclosure: I co-organize this event with Tim Courtney.  

The Launch of MidVentures Launch    

New-venture consultancy Midventures recently announced a conference providing a platform for Midwestern companies to pitch, network, and demo.  Mark your calendars for September 28, 2010!  

Current ScaleWell recipient Communiteach will be showcasing their knowledge of skills exchange in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood this Saturday, June 19th during Learnapalooza.  The day-long festival provides a series of FREE 45 - 90 minute classes on diverse topics such as self hypnotism, belly dancing, and introductory guitar.  A complete schedule of classes and the ability to reserve spots is available here.     

Thanks to overwhelming support from trustees and an abundance of exceptional applicants, we were able to select multiple companies for the second installment of ScaleWell! Chicago based WinkVid and the Chicago-Pittsburgh team of Communiteach will be working with trustees for the next three months, most likely rapidly increasing their already impressive awesome quotients.  We will be meeting individually with both teams in the coming weeks to establish near-term goals attainable through the combination of funding and mentorship. 

Updates on both companies will follow shortly, but feel free to explore the brief descriptions and links below to learn more about each company. ScaleWell remains a community project, so constructive comments are always welcome to help participating companies scale well. 

Communiteach is a peer-to-peer learning project from Chicagoan Sarah Press and Pittsburgh resident Ben Paul.  The project was founded on the premise "everyone knows dozens of cool tricks, skills, and bits of knowledge" that others are eager to learn.  Unlike many online peer-to-peer learning providers, Communiteach focuses on physical meetups between teachers and students instead of distance learning.

We look forward to helping both companies scale during the next few months!  Thanks again to supporters of community funding, with special nods to the following:  

• Sandbox Industries (awesome people and event space)
• Applicants (keep 'em coming)
• Trustees (we are always looking for more)
• The Internet (we love you)

We are hosting our second grant party on Tuesday, May 25th at Sandbox Industries in Chicago, IL.   Sandbox Industries - a Chicago based incubator and venture fund - is providing awesome space and a few beverages for the event.  The format is identical to the initial grant - one entrepreneur or team will receive a "no-strings attached" $1000 grant, mentorship, and office space.  ScaleWell trustees provide the funding, mentorship, and also select the recipient to make the program a complete community effort.  Participation continues to happen nationwide (and even internationally) but the events are located in Chicago along with the managing trustees. 

Since the initial grant,  we have been refining the process of facilitating a grant - all the emails, submissions, hacking, collections, and other fun items required to make ScaleWell function.  Also, we spent time connecting the first recipient, Michael Una, with trustees able to help launch his new product. Michael will be in attendance to demonstrate his new synthesizer and discuss how the $$ plus an instant-community of resources helped his company. 

Party Details: 

Tuesday, May 25th from 7pm - 9pm

Sandbox Industries: 213 N. Racine, Suite 102

Registration:  http://scalewelltwo.eventbrite.com

Here are 4 Reasons to Attend the Second ScaleWell Party in case you are still hesitant : 

1. You want to meet cool people on a Tuesday

2. You feel the need to play a synthesizer on a Tuesday

3. You have a business and want to learn more about ScaleWell 

4. You want to learn about cool projects on a Tuesday

Thanks and look forward to meeting you next Tuesday, May 25th- 

Sean, Ziad & Andy

• Awesomeness
• Efforts to support seed-stage companies
• People with thoughts surrounding micro-lending and micro-finance  
• Prolific Multi-Taskers
• Baristas
• Burritos
• Companies experimenting with social capital and currencies 

Come One Come All.  ScaleWell applications are open to fund your venture.

Get started on your application here.

ScaleWell has already awarded one grant, and is gearing up to fund a second.

If this is the first time you're finding out about ScaleWell, here is how it works:

We round up ten trustees to put in 100 dollars each.  The trustees then participate in a selection process to pick a grant recipient of 1000 dollars.

We think this is pretty awesome, and the response in the community has been fantastic 

There are a couple important things to note about ScaleWell.  

First of all, we do not take equity in your startup.  ScaleWell believes that social capital is the most important currency at this level of funding.

Second of all, this is about traction.  Competition for capital is extreme, and applying to ScaleWell is a great opportunity to gain momentum at a micro level.  If your startup is at the ideation stage, just completing our application will be a milestone.

So, enough talking, Start Applying.

Below is a prototype of Michael's new synthesizer aptly called "Bleep-It":

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Bleep-it prototype version 4 from Michael Una on Vimeo.

And here is something that is just awesome:

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Drumbot jam from Michael Una on Vimeo.