Four Business NAIJAGALS Earn The Chance To Win $25,000 At This Year's ESSENCE Festival

The 20th anniversary ESSENCE Festival is gearing up to be one for the books!

The three-day event will not only offer the best in music and entertainment, but ESSENCE Festival, in conjunction with PowerMoves.NOLA and Chevron, will also give four business women a chance to win $25,000 in the first ever Chevron Power Moves Pitch Session. Held at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans on Saturday, July 5 four women finalists will pitch their respective endeavors to a panel of investors to demonstrate why their business is sustainable and profitable.

Meet the finalists:

Cheryl Contee, Co-Founder 
Website- Attentive.ly

Attentive.ly helps businesses turn existing customers into their #1 acquisition channel. How it works: Your Customers + Email-Social Match + Enterprise Listening + Marketing Automation = Rocketed Marketing ROI. The Attentively dashboard quickly reveals the “influencers” on an email list, what topics are trending among that key audience, and who is talking about the brand (or competitors). Monitor customer behavior across the social web to identify upsell opportunities or power a loyalty program. Social marketing automation tools let our customers trigger multi-channel communications (email, social, ads) to just the right customer at just the right time.
Cheryl Contee, cofounder of Attentively, has over 15 years of award-winning interactive expertise. Both Huffington Post & Black Enterprise have named her as a Top Female Founder in Tech to Follow on Twitter and she was one of Fast Company's 2010 Most Influential Women in Tech.

Find her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter.

Delali Kpodzo, Co-Founder- We Are Onyx

Founder Delali Kpodzo came up with the idea for We Are Onyx after her stylist had to cancel an appointment at the last minute. After having to resort to the Internet for answers on how to wash her naturally tightly-coiled hair, Kpodzo and her friend, Myriam Bocobza, were struck with an idea: create a central place online for African American women to get information and advice about their hair. We Are Onyx, an online beauty retailer that combines a monthly beauty box subscription with a full range e-commerce product offering, was born.

Find We Are Onyx on Facebook and follow them on Twitter.

Boomie Odumade, Vice President of Engineering for Nexercise.

Boomie Odumade worked on several large-scale technology applications in the government sector before making the jump to the exercise industry. Thanks to her experience with and passion for technology, Boomie possesses the skills necessary to help her in her role as the Vice President of Engineering for Nexercise. Nexercise is an app, which utilizes motivational games and activities to lead users to a more consistent lifestyle, while allowing them to have fun in the process. Users keep track of their daily exercises using the app’s activity log and eventually turn good actions into habits.

Nichelle McCall, Creator- Bold Guidance

After realizing the average high school student applies to nine different colleges, sometimes completing upwards of 100 different tasks during the application process, Nichelle McCall decided to take on the task of streamlining college applications. She created Bold Guidance, a mobile app to help with organization and time management. Bold Guidance provides a one stop shop for completing applications. It has a database of more than 1,000 schools, with a simple checklist of all their application requirements. It even allows parents and high school counselors to check out their progress, all with a few clicks of their smartphone.

Find them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter

All the festivities will take place on Saturday, July 5 in New Orleans at the 2014 ESSENCE Festival.

See you there!