Sports Web Site Wins Venture Group’s PitchFest

The San Diego Venture Group today named TheSportsTV.com as the winner of its ninth annual “PitchFest” business plan competition. The startup, which was awarded $20,000, was among three finalists that made presentations to 280 people who attended the venture group’s annual meeting on Dec. 3.

TheSportsTV.com is a Web site that enables amateur athletes to post video and other information for coaches, college recruiters and professional scouts.

The competition was open to any Southern California-based startup that had raised less than $2.5 million in venture capital funding. A screening committee winnowed the field to 10 semi-finalists, who presented their business plans to a panel of venture capital judges in November. The panel selected two other startups as finalists: BidMyAtoZ.com, an online platform for bidding on household services; and LifeModeler Inc., which creates computerized models for orthopedic procedures.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.