FOR IMMEDIATE CATCH AND RELEASE
CHARLESTON, SC (JAN-APRIL 2017)

Atop a concrete picnic table shaded by the drawbridge at the Wappoo Cut boat landing, Patrick Bryant and John Osborne announced their picks for Harbor Entrepreneur Center Cohort 7. Even the spectacle of inexperienced Ohioans attempting to pull their Bayliners out of the water during an uncooperative mean tide couldn’t dilute the batchelor-uncle-watching-his-niece’s-first-dance-recital suspense.

While most of the appointees met with criticism, sparking protests, others were politely acknowledged with a golf-clap and blank stares.

The first pick, Jyve, a live music booking tool that allows venues to ignore college jam bands without saying no to their faces, sparked a protest outside the Music Farm which drew a number of celebrities from the local scene. Protests started down on the corner, spilling out into the street.

“It’s a slippery slope” said Darius Rucker, one of the lead protesters.  “If a bunch of frat brothers can’t get noticed jamming out, they’ll have to resort to sexually suggestive names for their albums. “You used to pay a nickel and tap your feet,” Rucker continued, “but now you have to give a cut to Jyve.”

Corner Office, another startup in the recruiting sector, a favorite among the sea-level crowd, struck discord with the opposition, who felt that several of the employees involved, particularly a “world’s best boss” coffee-mug-toting middle-manager, were out of touch with reality. Criticism centered around the series’a’jumping the shark after Pam and Jim got married.

Heavily criticized for bringing the term manscaping into public discourse during their campaign, middle-school teachers have come out in opposition to iScape’s appointment to the cohort, citing a classroom-wide giggle epidemic. We can only hope that they have no plans to develop augmented reality.

In perhaps a more forward-looking pick, CostProjections provides future medical cost calculations to ambulance-chasers.  In a partnership with Über, they have recently filed a patent for a self-ligating car.

Falling afoul of major holiday supporters, Turnkey was started under false pretense when its founder asked his mom to spot him some cash a few days before Thanksgiving.  In an interview with Silicon Harbor Magazine, the mom was reported to have said, “I thought it seemed expensive, but I just assumed he was going to Whole Foods.”

PT on Demand was initially planned as a Prank-as-a-Service (PaaS) play for ordering a PT cruisers to pick up one’s friends in front of upscale peninsula restaurants.  After hipsters embraced the service ironically, they pivoted to a counseling and rehabilitation service for American Ninja warrior losers. Sad!

Perhaps the most controversial pick is Citibotio. Charges of nepotism have been leveled at the co-founders, one of which is also co-founder of the Harbor Entrepreneur Center, while another is Silicon Harbor’s very own neighbor-kid-who-knows-about-computers.  At any rate, Citibotio’s mission to connect citizens with their local governments through Facebook and Twitter may be late to the party, considering the White House’s recently announced plans to license their patent pending artificially intelligent policy-setting tweet-bot introduced during the 2016 campaign.

And finally, Modal Biotech was announced as a potentially toxic pick, what with their blue-green algae and all.  As long as they don’t get involved in shrimp-farming, we’ll leave them alone.

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