As the tech industry evolves and matures, all sorts of new opportunities are created for entrepreneurs who see where existing technologies don’t meet a need or don’t go far enough to deliver what customers demand. If you listen to national shows like How I Built This or Freakonomics, you’re familiar with the type of wildly creative person who comes up with a great idea that at the outset might seem odd or impossible and doesn’t take “no” for an answer. Those kinds of ideas are not all born and incubated in Silicon Valley, some of them come from far flung outposts, like Baton Rouge: Meet Omnidek and Sellswipe, and their creators, Chris Jordan and D. Marcus Glasper.
Chris Jordan’s Omnidek is an all-in-one business platform geared toward the construction industry that consolidates all the apps a company needs to run its expense reports, payroll, project management and so on, and merges them onto a single system.
Chris got the idea for this platform when, after several years selling software to construction companies and realizing all the inefficiencies of having multiple software systems, he was watching a movie about the early years of Facebook s founding and thought ,”If this dude can make 80 billion I can make 1 billion.” He’s on the way.
SellSwipe – Not Born or Incubated in Silicon Valley
D Marcus Glasper is Vice President of Sellswipe, a homegrown app that allows its users to do a hyper local product search to find items and businesses in their own communities so that they can shop local and support the local economy. The app also provides a platform that connects users with their friends so they can see what their friends are buying, selling and recommending. It’s a social marketplace app in the truest sense of the word.
Out to Lunch Baton Rouge is recorded over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard.
Photos by Karry Hosford.
Find out more about the current state of Baton Rouge tech innovation here.