Showcasing the best of the Madison Region’s people, places and positive business climate, the Madison Region Economic Development Guide reinforces the area’s favorable quality of place while also targeting prospective residents, employees, businesses and visitors. The publication will be distributed by the Madison Region Economic Partnership as well as through key local businesses, trade shows, conferences and events throughout the year.

The Madison Region Economic Development website, businessclimate.com/madison-region will also feature fresh, new extended content, video, photo galleries and more.

The annual publication is a collaborative effort between the Madison Region Economic Partnership and Journal Communications, an award-winning custom publisher of community and specialty magazines with clients in more than 30 states.

For more information on becoming a part of the Madison Region Economic Development Guide, email sales@jnlcom.com or call (800) 333-8842 Ext. 292.

The publication will publish in Spring 2016.

Excerpted from Isthmus
By Aaron Conklin

The annual Games + Learning + Society Conference took place more than a month ago, but co-director Kurt Squire is still feeling giddy.

Maybe it was the standing ovation the event’s keynote speaker, legendary game developer Brenda Romero, got when she waxed poetic about the way forward for female game developers — and female game players — in the bombed-out wake of the ugly #Gamergate brouhaha that saw angry male gamers harassing female developers online. Maybe it was the several hundred academics and developers who converged on Madison to talk about their shared passion for games for learning.

Or maybe, just maybe, it’s the fact that the future of game development in Madison has never looked brighter than it does right now.

The question of whether Madison would become a national game development hub has been burbling for more than 15 years. Back in the early 2000s, it looked as though Madison would clone the success of Austin, Texas, with triple-A developers Raven Software and Human Head Studios leading the way. At the start of this decade, nimble local mobile developers like PerBlue (Parallel Kingdoms) and games for learning shops like Filament Games (iCivics) and Games Learning Society (GLS) — also one of the world’s oldest games-for-learning research programs, housed in the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery — seemed poised to take the city to another level. But while each of those players remains a successful and vibrant part of the current local landscape, there’s still something missing. To put it bluntly, Madison still lacks a defined game “scene.”

The catalyst to finally create one could be coming next week, when a significant and sizable part of Madison’s gaming community — potentially more than 25 companies, large and small — comes together with GLS and reps from groups like the national Entertainment Software Association (the gaming industry’s Washington, D.C., lobbying arm) and Madison Region Economic Partnership (MadREP) at a meetup that’s been staged to take advantage of this year’s Forward Festival, Madison’s annual tech and entrepreneurship conference (See story, page 9) .

“We want to get everyone in a room to talk about everything that’s here — what are the market opportunities?” says Michael Gay, MadREP’s senior vice president of economic development. “What we’re trying to do is build this cluster. It doesn’t exist — it hasn’t existed.”

The model Gay would like to see Madison’s gaming sector adopt is the same one deployed by Milwaukee’s Water Council, a hugely successful partnership between that city’s business and higher education constituencies that now includes more than 150 water technology companies and has raised the national profile of UW-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences.

What he’s talking about is making Madison a center of gaming excellence.

“We have very big national players here,” says Gay. “This is a very intriguing time to have this discussion.”

Around the same time Gay was discovering, through a MadREP-backed sector analysis of information technology, that Madison was rife with gaming companies that touched everything from cybersecurity to digital health care, Constance Steinkuehler, GLS co-director and Squire’s spouse, was having a different sort of personal epiphany.

Excerpted from The Capital Times
By Laurel White

Madison-based social media management company Shoutlet has been acquired by Spredfast, another major player in the social media management industry, for an undisclosed amount. The announcement was made this morning.

“This is really looked upon as two of the three or four largest social companies in the space forging an alliance to take over the space,” said David Prohaska, vice president of marketing at Shoutlet. “Strategically, it makes so much sense.”

Spredfast will keep the Shoutlet’s Madison offices operational — in fact, they plan to add jobs there, Prohaska said.

“Spredfast looks at Madison as a growth opportunity,” he said. “They will make an investment here in Madison. This office will grow.”

Prohaska said he didn’t know how many hires would be made in Madison, but said the new positions would be posted online “this afternoon.”

A press release about the acquisition said, “As part of the integration, Shoutlet’s Madison, Wisconsin headquarters and staff, which supports global customers like Best Buy, Four Seasons, and Lowe’s, will become Spredfast’s newest development center.”

According to VentureBeat, the combined forces of Shoutlet and Spredfast will boast almost 600 employees and more than 1,000 customers, including brands, agencies and media companies. Spredfast is based in Austin.

Shoutlet, which was founded in 2010, raised $24 in equity funding and completed a $5 million debt round earlier this year.

Shoutlet has been noted as part of Madison’s ‘cool’ startup scene — something the Spredfast acquisition will only bolster, according to Prohaska.

“It’ll just enhance our culture — their values are so aligned with ours,” he said.

Read the full article.

Excerpted from Xconomy Wisconsin
By Jeff Engel

Healthcare, agriculture, and manufacturing remain the bread and butter of the private sector in Madison, WI, and the surrounding region, but healthcare IT has arguably become the area’s most buzz-worthy industry.

Today, Xconomy is adding to the conversation about healthtech’s ascent in the local economy. A new analysis of data gathered by the Madison Region Economic Partnership (MadREP) found that there are at least 43 healthtech companies in Dane County employing around 10,000 people. (The list may not be comprehensive, so e-mail us if we missed any companies.)

The data primarily come from business database ReferenceUSA. Xconomy supplemented MadREP’s research with additional information and used it all to create a detailed list (see bottom of this story) and a map of the area’s healthtech companies that can be viewed by clicking here. (Disclosure: MadREP is an Xconomy underwriter, but our coverage is determined independently by our editors.)

The research reinforces the popular narrative of Madison’s healthtech scene from the past few years. The gist is that fast-growing Epic Systems undoubtedly remains the anchor of the local sector, but more healthtech companies are constantly popping up (some either directly or indirectly because of Epic’s presence) and are building solid, if not yet gargantuan, businesses here.

Epic, the 36-year-old electronic health records giant, employs between 5,000 and 9,999 people on the outskirts of Madison, according to MadREP research. The wide range is a result of the way ReferenceUSA tracks and groups companies of different sizes. Recent news reports have pegged Epic’s current employee count at 8,000.

Take Epic out of the equation, and Madison still has at least 1,500 people, and perhaps as many as 5,000, working in healthtech. Those aren’t huge numbers, but they’re encouraging to observers like Michael Gay, MadREP’s senior vice president of economic development, who has closely watched the local healthtech cluster pick up steam in recent years. “To be honest with you, the list is impressive considering that really all of this has happened in the last decade, or a lot of it has,” he says.

Epic, despite being the proverbial matriarch of Madison healthtech, has experienced its most explosive growth in the past several years as it has capitalized on the federally subsidized shift from paper to digitized medical records. Meanwhile, 30 of the 43 companies on our list were founded within the last 10 years—21 of those since 2010, by Xconomy’s count.

The investment mix for Wisconsin Investment Partners (WIP), a Madison-based angel group that is the most active in the state, started to shift toward more healthtech companies around 2011, co-manager Andy Shrago says. WIP has invested in four companies on our list, plus at least one other healthtech company that’s not on the list because it’s based outside the region.

Those deals have come amidst a rise in healthcare IT companies nationwide, as entrepreneurs try to use software to make healthcare “better, faster, cheaper,” as Shrago puts it.

Healthtech has “definitely become a bigger part of the portfolio,” Shrago says. “It’s not so much that we have changed what we invest in, it’s that the market has changed what we’re seeing.” That includes “a lot of interesting ideas” coming out of Madison’s “strong” healthtech cluster, Shrago says.

Some of the biggest bets placed on Madison healthtech companies include more than $38 million in venture capital for Nordic Consulting Partners, $23 million raised by Propeller Health, and about $14.4 million for Wicab.

The biggest catalysts for the local scene, Shrago says, are Epic, which recruits lots of young, talented people to the area, many of whom quit after a few years and sometimes decide to create their own healthtech startups in Madison; a well-respected computer science program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and the entrepreneurial culture that Madison has developed.

“This is a sector where you can choose to be anywhere, and these companies choose to be here,” Gay says.

Read the full article.