Accelerator Archives - Page 15 of 18

North Carolina Startup Accelerator: RevTech Labs Graduates Wednesday

When we were in Charlotte North Carolina for the 2012 Democratic National Convention we got to work out of Packard Place, a gigantic incubator for high growth potential startups in beautiful Uptown (read downtown but that’s what the natives call it), Charlotte North Carolina. Packard Place is home to two accelerators, one focusing on social entrepreneurship while the other one, RevTech Labs, is Charlotte’s first traditional co-hort based tech startup accelerator.

RevTech Labs announced the program back in May. The first class of 7 startups were able to move in the entire month of June and the program kicked off officially on July 2nd. The startups took a one week break (at least from the space) during the DNC when hundreds of bloggers moved into a temporary news room set up in the space.

The accelerator took some cues from other already established accelerators in their inaugural session. For starters, they required that every startup have a developer as a founder or a developer as a co-founder and present at the accelerator. Many accelerators in the past have allowed startups without developers to move into their programs. In some cases the startups spent much of their time in the accelerator either outsourcing development or dealing with the headaches of managing outsourced developers.

RevTech Labs also housed mentor startups in the same space. MailVu and DealCloud were two of the startups selected to mentor those in the cohort. They were able to secure space in the accelerator in exchange for helping their fellow startups.

Wednesday the seven startups in the first class will show off what they’ve been working on throughout the summer. Not only that but Packard Place, and RevTech Labs have partnered with the NC region of the Startup America Partnership, Startup NC, to host a startup expo alongside demo day. Another 10-20 local NC startups will get to exhibit during the three hour event Wednesday afternoon from 2-5pm.

Investors, entrepreneurs and potential customers will hear pitches from these 7 startups:

Viddlz

Welcome to the local community marketplace for scrumptious food. Our viddles (food) are prepared and grown by your neighbors, the bakers, farmers and artisans living virtually next door. Charlotte is the first stop and the Viddlrs (local bakers) provide homemade, beautiful baked goods. Viddlz makes it simple and economical for quality food providers to start or grow a great food business.

Dataset/IO

Dataset/IO provides beautiful, simple and powerful data solutions for the Capital Markets. Our solutions offer the ability to manage enterprise data quickly and easily – scaling on demand – while placing the control firmly back in the hands of our data team.

Spatially

Spatially is developing a better interface for product search in today’s touch-driven world. The technology uses [a technique known as] faceted search and displays search results in a highly interactive 2D interface.

DogDashGame

Dog Dash represents a new genre in mobile gaming by introducing a 3D-audio only concept. Users will have to utilize their auditory skills to navigate them through oncoming traffic and away from the pursuing cops. Head phones are required for the true 3D-audio experience and the game is expected to launch on the iPhone this summer.

The Torch

The Torch helps you plan for the unplanned. The Torch is an online and mobile application that makes it easy to organize your “What if?” plan and share it with the people closest to you, so they will know what to do in an emergency.

Flavma Inc.

Flavma Inc. revolutionizes pharmacy software. We’ve built the first Medicare Part D Plan Finder for the iPad. Currently, we are working with Independent Pharmacies to improve their processes and quality of patient care using modern technology.

Autopilot

Autopilot allows you to book a vetted, professional driver on demand when you can’t, shouldn’t, or simply don’t want to drive your own vehicle. You can reserve a driver with the push of a button, track their arrival, and enjoy the benefits of automated, cashless payments all from your mobile device.

The demo day event will be held at Packard Place and if you would like an event you can email them here

Linkage:

DC Entrepreneur: Sarah Ware Makes Her Markerly Over 2800 Miles For 500 Startups

Sarah Ware’s mobile office set up in Littleton CO on the way to 500 startups

Nearly two weeks ago the woman behind Washington DC startup Markerly and her gal pal Megan set out on an epic journey. These two twenty something women set on a cross country road trip only rivaled by Thelma and Louise. Except this was 2012, and Ware managed to work throughout the entire trip.

In between camp sites, horseback riding, boating, hiking, and picture taking, Ware was constantly working to prepare her social highlighting startup for the real journey which begins soon in Mountain View California.

Ware and Markerly join a nice sizable handful of startups from the Washington DC area that have caught the eye of Dave McClure and his 500 startups.

While we’re preparing another epic journey of our own to cover a bunch of accelerator demo days from accelerators that have been working all summer long, McClure and the 500 startups fall 2012 class are just starting to arrive. They’re wiping the last bit of sleep out of their eyes and preparing for five months of intense bootcamp style work on their startups.

It may no even be fair o call what they do at 500 startups “boot camp style” some of the startups that have completed McClure’s rigorous program have likened it more to “startup hazing” with a much bigger pay off.

Ware is no stranger to unusually long work days as the 25 year old has managed to graduate from Georgetown, work at DC’s prominent startup, Living Social, and then battle her way through the mine fields of launching her own startup. She’s even had imitators come out of the woodwork already and those who have accused her of imitating.

We’ve tried a few of the highlighting applications out there and nothing is as easy to use or easy to share as Markerly.

As she gears up for 500 startups it’s easy to see why she and her friend decided to drive it across the country. There’s no more rest for the next five months. We will be checking in with Ware periodically over the next 5 months while she’s in the top secret 500 lair crushing it.

Linkage:

Go start using Markerly here

Check out 500 here

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” and we want you here

Brandery Prepares For Demo Day 2012

We are one week away from seeing the 2012 class at The Brandery accelerator in Cincinnati. The Brandery is a top 10 accelerator and focuses on branding and marketing. They’ve attracted hundreds of applications from across the globe for each of their last three sessions.

While The Brandery follows a co-hort accelerator model, as well as the Global Accelerator model, what sets them apart is their focus on branding and marketing. Being situated in Cincinnati Ohio puts them at ground zero for one of the biggest branded companies in the world Proctor & Gamble (P&G). P&G’s influence can be found within the walls of the Brandery. General Manager, Mike Bott, came to the Brandery after a successful stint as brand manager for Olay and other P&G brands. P&G’s roots don’t stop there, Brandery Co-Founder Rob McDonald is the son of the current CEO at P&G Robert McDonald. The younger McDonald is a lawyer at Taft during the day though.

The Brandery pulls from other marketing resources as well. Take co-founder Dave Knox for instance, Knox is the Chief Marketing Officer at Rock Fish a digital agency with a laundry list of clients that are household names. PF Chiangs, Sam’s Club, Bunn, and White Cloud are just a few of the brands that trust RockFish for their creative needs.

The Brandery is a hard core accelerator. There’s no working part time and participating at The Brandery. We spent five days with The Brandery founders and the staff in Cincinnati’s Over The Rhine neighborhood earlier this summer. There was a constant swarm of activity in the bullpen where each startup has desk space and white boards. There was also class after class in The Brandery’s second floor class room. Folks come from all over the country to talk with The Brandery’s startups and even skype in for lectures.

Some of The Brandery’s startups from this class had pivoted by the time we went to visit in August, others have pivoted again as they got closer to demo day. Even startup evangelist Nick Tippmann found himself changing teams with less than two months to go. No matter what way you look at it, next week’s demo day is shaping up to be an eventful one.

“We’re pumped to showcase our companies on Demo Day. They have done a fantastic job leveraging the relationships and partnerships in Cincinnati and our broader national network to refine and validate their businesses. Its awesome that the Cincinnati and Brandery communities are working together to build something special” Bott told nibletz.com

From what we’ve heard on our visit to Cincinnati McDonald gets more and more excited every year. In addition to helping teams with legal issues, McDonald gets out in the community with the Brandery teams every chance he gets including festivals, events and even Reds games. The Brandery teams were also major parts of Startup Weekend Cincinnati over the summer. McDonald, Knox, Bott and many of the teams founders were on hand throughout the weekend to provide mentorship and guidance. In fact Austin Hackett, the founder of Crowd Hall (A 2012 Brandery Company) pitched his own startup on startup weekend, the one that actually looked most complete.

Accelerators are intense and sometimes a bit insane. Gut checks at an accelerator happen often and pivots are inevitable. Greg Svitak and Kurt Pettit from Cleveland Ohio entered The Brandery with a startup called Flock’d. The premise for the idea was good, they wanted to do “swarm” like deals at night clubs and bars. Pettit explained to us that the idea was abandoned because every municipality in the country has their own liquor advertising laws which made a nationwide app in that space all but impossible.

Svitak and Pettit regrouped and developed AndTix which is a ticket selling platform for major sporting events. Neither man is any stranger to startups. Pettit has been a designer that’s done startup work for years. Svitak was one of the organizers for the 2012 startup bus to SXSW. After wrestling with the ticketing idea for a little over a week, they regrouped again and plan to show off a great concept in ticketing next week.

26 year old Andy Zhang from Seattle Washington went into The Brandery with a concept called Fly Dutch which according to Angellist matched starutps and investors. Zhang, who is a trained lawyer among other things, actually pivoted FlyDutch into “woowhoo! online dating for the offline type”. His startup boasts no messaging, no surveys and no work. Could it be Pinterest for dating?

One of the teams we’ve seen as a standout since before this session at The Brandery started is Salt Lake City based CrowdHall. CrowdHall is a platform where celebrities, politicians, micro-celebrities, bloggers and others can communicate with their audience in a voting up and down question asking forum. Back in July they tested the platform with Bachelorette winner Jeff Holm. CrowdHall is the perfect platform for elections and online town hall meetings.

Co-Founder Jordan Menzel admitted that CrowdHall would be perfect for the Presidential Election, but the timing may be off. CrowdHall has stayed the course from entry to demo day and will reveal a polished, ready to go product that nestles nicely into it’s own space. We’re pretty sure that over the next few years and then again into the next election cycle CrowdHall will become a household name.

Our other standout team from this years session at The Brandery is Impulcity. We’ve covered Impulcity since before they were even selected for The Brandery. This Louisville startup is offering up a new way to find events in any area. They have hundreds of thousands of events organized and delivered into an app that has a slick and visually appealing UI and a feature set that includes the ability to share events, follow events, and add to an events wall.

CEO and Co-Founder Hunter Hammonds is putting his all into Impulcity. In July they had a full featured, working beta, in fact we were in the beta test. There really was nothing else like it available in any app store or market. Impulcity was able to find and recommend events based on location, likes and other algorithms and deliver them with great visuals and the information an end user needed to make a decision about what to do.

Impulcity may have been perfect to a lot of people’s standards however with just under a month to go Hammonds blew up the whole thing and started over from scratch. They took a lot of beta testers feedback and iterated to the product that will released next week.

The stylish Jay Finch came to Cincinnati and The Brandery from New York, with his offline-online crowdfunding hybrid, SockStock. The concept takes businesses in need of funding and allows patrons to micro-crowdfund projects at the businesses they frequent via Finch’s platform. Finch has already made inroads in Cincinnati with the Carol Ann and Ralph V Haile Jr /US Bank Foundation who are referring their creative entrepreneurs and artisans to SockStock to raise money for their own projects to grow their companies. Finch plans on staying in Cincinnati after demo day to further the SockStock platform.

We’re expecting great things from the 11 teams at The Brandery this year when demo day rolls around next week.

Linkage:

check out the Brandery here

Here’s our coverage of The Brandery

Startups everywhere else, need to be here

Baltimore Startups: Abell Foundation Looking For Next AccelerateBaltimore Class

The Abell Foundation is back again, teaming up with the Emerging Technology Center’s (ETC) in Baltimore Maryland. They’re looking for the best high growth potential startup businesses for the second class of AccelerateBaltimore. The Abell Foundation is backing AccelerateBaltimore with $150,000 in seed funding, to provide six new businesses with $25,000 each. The Baltimore Business Journal reports that this is a 50% increase in funding from last April’s class.

Emerging Technology Center’s CEO Deborah Tillett is hoping to attract national and even international startups to Baltimore’s growing technology hub.

“It’s about innovation in Baltimore,” Tillett said to the Business Journal. “We’ll open it up as far and as wide as we can to get a message out to make sure we get great quality companies.”

AccelerateBaltimore runs much like many other cohort based accelerator programs. In addition to the $25,000 in seed funding the six participating companies will also receive boot camp style intense training for thirteen weeks. They’ll also get free office space at one of the two ETC locations in either Johns Hopkins or Canton.

Both locations offer access to mentors, potential investors and other resources. However, the Canton location’s lease is up in September of next year. That won’t affect this next batch of startups going through the program. Tillett told the Business Journal last Thursday that no decision has been made as to whether or not they are renewing the lease at the Can Co building. The building also houses one of Baltimore’s most successful startups, the now publicly traded Millenial Media.

AccelerateBaltimore attracted some great startups in their first class, of them we’ve covered Kithly and NoBadGift.

Linkage

Apply to AccelerateBaltimore here

Source: Baltimore Business Journal

Something tells us you should come here

Interview With Kansas City Startup: Truckily Accelerating At Ark Challenge

Food Trucks are all the rage these days. Most metropolitan areas now have a plethora of delicious food available in converted bread trucks. If you’ve ever been to Austin Texas, especially during South By South West we’re sure you’ve seen some great food trucks. When we were in Chicago for Chicago Tech Week lunch was catered by a dozen delicious food trucks outside the Merchandise Mart.

Aside from big events though, finding your regular food truck can be a tough task, especially when you have a limited amount of time for lunch. Or perhaps you’re in the mood for food truck food but you’re not sure about the cuisine. Well mobile food truck apps are becoming just about as hot as the food trucks themselves. In fact, Pennsylvania startup TruckyLove has incorporated both a food trick finder and a social network surrounding food trucks.

With Kansas City startup Truckily, it’s a little more cut and dry, but the guys behind Truckily have taken into consideration the diner and the driver.

As is with most of the other apps being built in the space, Truckily provides a function that allows diners to locate their favorite food trucks by name, or cuisine. They can also do a generalized browse type function where they can see what food trucks are around them.

On the driver side Truckily provides a function that allows food truck owners to find the best spot to set up shop.

Truckily is based in Kansas City but they’re currently accelerating at the Ark Challenge accelerator in Arkansas.

We got a chance to talk with Derek Kean one of the two co-founders of Truckily. Check out that interview below.

7 Tips For Pitching At A Startup Accelerator Demo Day Everywhere Else

It’s Investor Day/Demo Day season across the country. We’ve got Brandery’s demo day in Cincinnati in two weeks on October 3rd. RevTech in Charlotte’s demo day is also October 3rd. MassChallenge has a class graduating soon, and so do many more.

Here at nibletz, the voice of startups “everywhere else” we attend a lot of demo days and we get asked for feedback by lot’s of startups. So here we’re going to show off some pitch videos from investor/demo days and share what we personally like to see. Of course take our advice however you’d like.

Product Product Product

Product is the most important thing at Demo Day, at least in my opinion. We’re going to go out on a limb here and assume that a business plan, pitch deck or wireframe is what brought you to the accelerator in the first place. Now you’ve completed a three month accelerator and received a decent amount of seed funding. I don’t care what the reason, you better have a product. The accelerator staff may blow smoke up your ass but if I personally had given you the seed money, and I don’t see a product, youre going to be cutting my grass for many years to come.

Enough on the startup lingo

The point of the three month accelerator was not to hear about minimum viable products, bandwidth, game changing, disruption or that you’re a change agent. I also don’t want to hear “at the end of the day”. Truth be told most investors know the buzzwords and it’s often times a BS alert in the pitch, either that or a crutch. So at the end of the day those investors are going to go home to their families without investing.

Statistics are as boring as your statistics class

I love startup pitches on investor day that use real world examples of problems and not a hodge podge of statistics and a boat load of slides to show them. Remember that you rattling off statistics is nothing more than you rattling off statistics. Use your key statistics in nice colorful charts, leave them up for a few seconds but I’m sure you have your pitch deck in an emailable file or better yet on slideshare. If someone is jonesing to see all your stats, follow up later. Don’t put anyone to sleep

Growing organically and virally in the first year and making revenue in the second year

This is absolutely NOT a viable go-to-market strategy. We, and of course investors, want to know where your revenue is going to come from, the first year. In fact they want to know where your revenue is going to come from tomorrow. I don’t care what you told yourself in the mirror this morning, chances are very high that you’re not the next Kevin Systrom.

Stealth Mode

If you’re a nibletz reader you know we hate stealth mode, it’s bull shit. Somebody else already has your idea, it’s about execution and product not about keeping secrets. Now at investor day/demo day all of your cards should be on the table. If you’ve got a video capturing app and more features coming that are in stealth mode, why aren’t they in the product now. Perhaps you should have spent less time playing foosball and more time working on the product.

You can’t listen if you don’t stop talking

Whether you’re in a Q&A session right after a pitch, or fielding questions at a booth or in the crowd after the event, you can’t listen if you don’t stop talking. A lot of people are going to tell you what a great job you did. Take those compliments in stride. But when it comes time to answer questions, answer them concisely, and quickly. If you don’t understand the question, let the person asking it know that, they’ll respect you more. If an investor asks you something and you don’t know the answer to it, tell them it’s a really good question, jot a note down and either research the answer on your iPhone or with your team and get back to them that night, or follow up. If you bullshit they’ll smell it.

Don’t forget personality.

There’s a good chance that you were picked for the accelerator not because your ticket selling app was going to take on Ticketmaster and Live Nation, but rather because the board liked you, or your personality. Don’t forget to interject some of that in your pitch.

And now a video…

This is Banyan, they won a $100,000 in the GigTank challenge which was an investor day challenge for the Gig Tank accelerator in Chattanooga. Here’s why I love this pitch.

– First off I’m not big into the product I’m not sure how big the market is. It’s a collaborative research tool, it’s a great concept but again there’s not a huge market and researcher’s aren’t the best at sharing. That’s not the point though. I thought Toni Gemayel had a great pitch.

– Banyan had a product. Banyan was up and running and had been thoroughly tested

– Gig Tank’s theme was literally “high bandwidth” startups. The accelerator was built around Chattanooga’s 1Gb fiber. Researchers who use Banyan have to transmit enormous amounts of data. Gemayel conceptualized this by saying if a researcher wanted to send 2 terrabytes of data from Stanford to the UK under traditional bandwidth constraints it would be quicker to get on a plane and fly there.

– Banyan offered several plans at making money immediately, not two years down the road.

– Finally, Gemayel had everyone laughing with a really small joke at the end of the presentation. Watch the video to see it.

Grow Utah Changes To Grow America Wants To Create 5M US Jobs Through Startups

Utah entrepreneur Alan E. Hall is a very successful business man. He is the founder and chairman of MarketStar and many other Utah based businesses. Hall is also rather philanthropic but rather than taking the easy route to philanthropy and contributing to the same few causes every year, he prides himself on teaching people to fish.

You know the old saying “Give a man a fish and you feed him for the day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for life”. For the past six years through one way or another Hall has been teaching people to fish by investing in startups and entrepreneurs with a goal to create jobs. How many jobs? He hopes that through his newest effort Grow Utah,now known as Grow America, to add 5 million us jobs.

Thestandard.net says that Hall’s idea to start helping people came years ago when an acquaintance of his lost his job. That guy ended up working 3 part time jobs, accounting, working at a convenience store and delivering newspapers. Hall had one of his company supervisors hire that man and Hall personally funded the man’s salary until he was properly trained.

“And it dawned on me how many other people are unemployed or underemployed,” Hall says. “As a private citizen, I can give of my own wealth to inspire entrepreneurs to get up and running with their ideas, and jobs will be created. They will hire people.”

Grow America started out last year as Grow Utah. Hall kicked in $250,000 worth of awards and services that was divided between 9 startups. Grow America is working on one more session strictly based in Utah and then Hall plans to take the Grow America concept nationwide in April.

“The goal is to do everything we can, not just in Utah but around the country. In January, the prizes will be worth half a million dollars in cash and services.

Hall plans to grow and create 5 million US jobs within the next five years. For the nationwide rollout Grow America has enlisted corporate sponsors, Zion’s Bank, Comcast, Kunzler Law Group and the Utah Jazz.

Linkage:

For more info go here

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more startup stories from “everywhere else”

If you’re a startup, entrepreneur or VC, you want to be here

Memphis Startup: HandMinder Aims To Restore Hand Movement In Stroke Victims

There are some incredible startups coming out of Memphis Tennessee and HandMinder is one of them. Handminder was part of the first class at the ZeroTo510 accelerator. Zeroto510 is the first cohort based medical device accelerator and was a joint venture between Memphis BioWorks and Seed Hatchery, the local tech startup accelerator.

HandMinder was founded by Dr. Yu Liu, MD,Phd, Randall J Nelson PhD,John M Denton, Technical Advisor & CoFounder, James Bell who currently serves as the company’s CEO.

A shocking 15 million people suffer from strokes across the globe. 12.5 million of those people survive and of those 12.5 million, 60% of them have some form of hand dysfunction after the stroke.

The devices that are currently on the market today that help rehab stroke victims’ hands deal with the problem from a total physiological perspective. The devices today allow functionality but not learned functionality. They provide localized muscular exercise but not brain function.

The HandMinder device, which fits like a glove, restores the neurological connection between the hand and the brain. The loss of hand movement in a stroke victim is a neurological problem, not just a physiological problem. By reprogramming the stroke victims brain to hand function, HandMinder closes the natural physiological loop.

Unlike other devices that address this issue, HandMinder is a take home product that allows stroke victims to rehabilitate their hands as often as they would like without having to take up extra time in their rehab clinics. It also allows them to continue their therapy while traveling, being outside and living somewhat normal lives.

When designing the HandMinder product, the team at HandMinder talked with stroke victims and their families. Because strokes are more prevalent in older patients, Handminder even talked with grandparents and grandchildren who were concerned with the way some of the medical devices looked. A lot of other devices used for this purpose, seemed somewhat scary to grandchildren which was a real concern for older patients. Handminder, while still a medical device, “looks cool”.

HandMinder presented at the ZeroTo510 demo day last month to a crowd of investors. They are currently working on their third prototype and plan to start field testing the device shortly.

Linkage:

For more info visit handminder.com

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more startup stories from “everywhere else”

No one covers high growth startups in the SouthEast like nibletz, more here.

Memphis Startup Accelerator ZeroTo510 Sets Record With Over 80% Follow On Funding In Less Than 30 Days

That headline is a true testament to the power of the cohort based ZeroTo510 startup accelerator in Memphis Tennessee. Five of the six startups in their recently graduated class received $100,000 or more in follow on funding from MB Ventures and Innova Memphis.

Four of the startups received follow on funding to continue acceleration of their businesses. Those four companies were:

BioNanovations has developed a device that uses bionanotechnology for rapid diagnosis of bacterial infection.
EcoSurg has developed an environmentally friendly alternative to traditional foam patient positioners used in surgeries.
Nanophthalmics has developed, through the use of nanotechnology, a surgical device to more effectively treat corneal abrasions.
Urova Medical has developed a minimally invasive treatment to address feminine stress urinary incontinence.

“In each case, we believe these four companies have shown the progress, the growth and proof-of-concept that were expected to move to the next phase of funding,” said Allan Daisley, director of innovation and sustainability initiatives for Memphis Bioworks Foundation and program director for ZeroTo510. “It is extremely rewarding to us as an organization, because the funding of four companies exceeds what we considered to be a measure of success when this program was launched.”

The fifth startup to receive follow on funding was Restore Medical. Restore Medical wowed the audience when Co-Founder Shawn Fynn announced during their presentation that they had already secured a purchase order valued at $3.75 million dollars pending 510k approval. In the case of Restore Medical, they decided to skip the acceleration investment and went directly to a Series A round. MB Ventures and Innova Memphis are leading that Series A round with an undisclosed investment, assumed to be more than the $100,000 Restore Medical would have received with the acceleration funds.

Handminder, a startup that has developed a rehabilitation device for people who have suffered a stroke, to regain use of their hands, did not receive follow on funding.

With an 80% success rate, by the standard of “follow on funding” Zeroto510 is the most successful accelerator in Tennessee.

Zeroto510 is a joint venture between Memphis Bioworks with cohort based accelerator programming provided by SeedHatchery a product of LaunchYourCity.

LaunchYourCity CEO & President Eric Matthews said: “The results speak for themselves. 35 companies have entered our incubators because of our efforts. EmergeMemphis has a waiting list for the first time. We have invested time and money in 12 promising startup technologies at our research institutions, two of which have started up as new companies. Over 20 companies have received pre-seed capital of $50,000 or less. Of those 8 have received follow-on capital of $100,000 or greater.”.

In addition to Zeroto510 and SeedHatchery LaunchYourCity has a sister program for independent filmmakers called “FuelFilm”. Also the local music incubator, The Memphis Music Foundation, has replicated some of the LaunchYourCity programming into their music resource offerings.

Linkage:

Check out LaunchYourCity at LaunchYourCity.com

Zeroto510 site is here

Nobody covers the Southeast like we do, more here

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else”

Nibletz Is At The DNC And We’re Using Nashville Startup: KiWi

The Obama Administration continued to pave the way for Startups all over the country with the creation of Startup America, the passing of the JOBSAct and many other initiatives that have been it in place to help entrepreneurs and startup founders across America.

Thats why it’s our honor to cover the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte North Carolina. We’ll be partnering with Startup America and the guys at StartpRockon.com to bring you guys everything there is about Startups at what’s sure to be one of the best DNC’s of our time.

We’ve got some great access to bring the best coverage for Startups across America.

We’ll be representing one of the best states “everywhere else” for Startups and entrepreneurs and that is Nibletz home state, the great state of Tennessee. Not only that but starting Tuesday we’ll be using one of the exciting new startups that just graduated from JumpStart Foundry’s 2012 class, KiWi,

We got off to a rough start with KiWi after their founder ad libbed at the end of his presentation. Since then KiWi and it’s co-founder Jayme Hoffman has come highly recommended by Michael Burcham, Vic Gatto and Marcus Whitney,

Hoffman and his team couldn’t catch a break after demo day as they’ve been working tirelessly since then to make sure we’ve got something great to use at the Democratic National Convention.

KiWi is like Instagram except instead of photos you are taking short videos. The UI is extreme

As for Demo Day, Hoffman had said that he would be looking for term sheets in Nashville for thirty days. It came off to me that he was giving Nashville an ultimatum, give us a term sheet in 30days or we’re leaving. That was far from the case. Hoffman was trying to convey that things have been moving so fast for the KiWi team that an opportunity for local investors to get in at the ground level may not exist in 30 days. Of course we may speed that process along this week.ly user friendly. Filter selection is topnotch and from capture to share, the experience is fast and fluid. It’s actually not nearly as clunky as SocialCam.

We’re looking forward to the next few days here in Charlotte representing our home team: LaunchMemphis,LaunchYourCity,Launch Tennessee and Startup Tennessee.

Startup Demo Day Month In Tennessee The Good, The Bad, The NSFW

August is just about over and “Demo Day Month” in the great state of Tennessee concluded last Thursday at JumpStart Foundry’s Demo Day in Nashville. It was a month that Vice President Gore should be proud of afterall nothing says innovation like inventing the internet.

Overall it was an impressive month for innovators in Tennessee. Tennessee has nine regional accelerators and groups like Launch Tennessee are paramount in keeping the statewide ecosystem flourishing and the accelerator leaders connected with each other.

“Demo Day Month” kicked off in Chattanooga Tennessee with the graduation of the GigTank. The GigTank was in its first year and actually included two simultaneous classes; entrepreneurs and students. The entrepreneurs group accelerated at Colab in downtown Chattanooga while the students accelerated at the Lamp Post Group’s offices. The classes came together on Thursday August 9th to show off their startups.

Out of all three demo days Chattanooga had the most pizzazz. They really did a great job of setting up a bunch of entrepreneurial networking events on Wednesday evening all over town. Thursday’s Demo Day event was one to be reckoned with, professional lighting, big signage, and a simulcast on the local PBS channel all helped set the stage for some great demos.

To top that off, unlike the other two demo days, Chattanooga’s GigTank featured a $100,000 cash prize for the top voted startup in the entrepreneur class (Banyan) and a $50,000 prize for the top student startup (Babel Sushi).

Chattanooga merged traditional southern hospitality with blazing fast internet. The blazing fast internet was the reason it was called “GigTank”. Chattanooga was the first city in the United States to offer 1 GB ethernet to the home and office within a 600 square mile area.

The bad: We found out late Wednesday night that the startups would actually pitch in front of the judges first thing Thursday morning and again on Thursday afternoon in front of the people. We went around in circles about it and I even spent some time with Colab Director Shelddon Grizzle, who had come up with the idea for the double pitching. Regardless of the reasoning I didn’t like it and once I knew it was happening it detracted from my view of the actual presentations.

The other downside to GigTank is that we saw a lot of slides, a lot of presentations and a lot of business plans. Unfortunately we didn’t see nearly enough working demo products. Also most of the startups said they would build scale organically and virally over the next year and make money in year two. This isn’t a practical path to scale in a market outside Silicon Valley or New York. I felt that go to market strategies needed improvement.

The NSFW: Check out this story about the first startup that presented at GigTank.

The following week we moved on to Memphis Tennessee and the Zeroto510 accelerator Demo Day. Zeroto510 is a cohort based accelerator based on medical devices. It’s a joint venture between Memphis Bioworks and Seed Hatchery.

The ZeroTo510 Demo Day was very academic in nature and top-notch professional. You could tell that all of the startups had worked extremely hard on their presentations. One of the biggest challenges that ZeroTo510 startups overcame was actually “dumbing” their presentations down so that the public and investors without medical backgrounds could understand. Luckily all of the startups were able to do that.

The startups that we really liked at ZeroTo510 Demo Day were Bionanovations and Restore Medical.

Restore Medical offers a new system for cleaning and sterilizing surgical instruments. Their system is vital as we head into Obama Care in 2014 because it helps reduce cost, but more importantly it’s more effective in the sterilization process which will drive down hospital born infection numbers. This couldn’t come at a better time. In 2014 hospitals will need to publicize and keep down their hospital born infection numbers in order to get reimbursement on the millions of extra patients that will be seeking hospital care.

One of the biggest moments at ZeroTo510’s Demo Day was when onstage Restore Medical co-founder Shawn Flynn revealed on stage that they already had a $3.75 million dollar purchase order pending their 510k approval from the FDA.

BioNanovations is the first pre-culture bacterial infection diagnosis platform. There were some shocking facts about hospitals in co-founder and CEO Charleson Bell’s presentation that echo why we like this startup so much and why it will also be crucial going into 2014.

There was no NSFW in the Zeroto510 Demo Day however the bad was definitely Urova Medical. This wet behind the ears team of entrepreneurs had great technology and did a fair job of presenting they just didn’t have the same vigor that the rest of the startups had. They immediately left Memphis to go back home and it appeared that the young student founders of Urova simply participated in the program to get $50,000 for “summer camp”. Just calling it like I see it.

Nashville’s Jumpstart Foundry has had some practice at this. They’re definitely the veteran accelerator out of the bunch and it shows. Co-Founder and Managing Director Marcus Whitney is a serial entrepreneur himself. In addition to overseeing the day-to-day at JumpStart Foundry he is also a co-founder and the CTO of startup MoonToast a social media/network management platform with a top shelf list of clients.

The theme about Whitney was echoed over and over again throughout Jumpstart’s Demo Day, and that is he’s a pull no punches take no crap kind of guy. In fact, together with Solidus Partner and Jumpstart Foundry co-founder Vic Gatto, they ran such a tight program that three startups called it quits before demo day.

The venue for the Jumpstart Foundry demo day was great, it was open, and they did a great job with lighting and ambience. The presentations showed that the startups had been working hard on refining their message for the public and potential investors. All of the presenters did a great job of talking more and relying on slides less. When slides went up on the screen they were very graphic and very easy to understand.

The entire class had great presentations. Whitney and Baker Donelson Emerging Technologies Lead Chris Sloan (also a mentor at JSF) both agreed that the most improved startup was PhotoRankr. Sloan and Whitney both commented that if any startup in this years JSF class showed what an accelerator does it was PhotoRankr.

PhotoRankr definitely topped our list of favorites at the JumpStart Foundry Demo Day. We also really liked The Skillery and their off-line workshops platform that empowers small business owners to teach classes on subjects they actually know and love.

We can’t report on JSF Demo Day without mentioning EverMind either. EverMind is a consumer monitoring system for the elderly. It works as easily as installing a “Clapper” you simply take the plug-in modules to your elderly loved ones home and hook them up to the coffee maker, television, lamp, toaster or other small electronics and it monitors their daily routine. When your loved one deviates from the routine you’re notified and you can check on them. The system gives them independence and piece of mind. It helps that it was also founded by a group of folks from Griffin Technologies, a Nashville company that makes some of the most widely known iPhone, iPad and Android accessories.

As for the NSFW, it wasn’t really NSFW it was more just ugly. The startup we liked the least at JSF was by a landslide KiWi, first off there are hundreds of other short form video services out there, can anyone say SocialCam. But the thing that drove us to even point this out was that at the end of the micromachine-man-esque presentation the founder of Kiwi actually said he would look for term sheets in Nashville for 30 days and then go somewhere else. Seemed like an F-U to the hard work that Whitney, Gatto and the entire crew at Jumpstart Foundry Demo Day put on.

It was also great that folks from Memphis like Biowork’s Allan Daisley and a>m ventures Patrick Woods were right there with us at all three demo days to support Chattanooga, Memphis and Nashville as parts of a whole “Tennessee”, the Nashville guys.. not so much.

Linkage:

More Demo Day Coverage Here

Nibletz is the voice of startups everywhere else

Boston TechStars Fall Session Kicks Off With 13 Startups

Fresh off the heels of a top 10 finish in the annual Kellogg accelerator rankings, TechStars Boston fall program is underway. TechStars Katie Rae made the official announcement via the TechStars blog yesterday.

This is the first time they’ve run a second class in the same year at their Boston location. Competition is tough in the north east for both the startups and the accelerators. Although they didn’t make it in the top 15 rankings startups in the north east also look to the MassChallenge program to hone their entrepreneurial skills.

We were actually very pleased that two startups we’ve covered here at nibletz.com made the TechStars cut. Boston based athlete to private coach connection platform, CoachUp has made it into the fall class. Michigan based FetchNotes , an incredibly easy to use, feature packed note taking app has also made it into this fall class.

TechStars is credited with just about writing the program for most of the cohort based startup accelerators across the country. Many of the other cohort based accelerators like Cincinnati’s Brandery , Greenville’s Iron Yard Labs , and even Nashville’s Jumpstart Foundry are part of the Global Accelerator Network. The Global Accelerator Network is an offshoot of TechStars, that for a short period of time, was called the TechStars Network.

Here is the entire list of all 13 startups from TechStars.com

BetterFit Technologies provides personalized medicine for everyone. betterfit.com

BookingMarkets lets small and large web sites connect travelers with unique places to stay around the world. bookingmarkets.com

CoachUp helps athletes achieve their full potential by connecting them with private coaches. coachup.com

At Fashion Project you can shop daily designer deals and clean out your closet for your favorite cause. fashionproject.com

Fetchnotes makes it easy to stay on top of what’s going on in your life and communicate with the people that matter to you. fetchnotes.com

ImpulseSave makes saving your money as easy and gratifying as spending it. impulsesave.com

Med2Bed connects hospitals and post-acute care facilities to improve patient outcomes. med-2-bed.com

NBD uses unique surface chemistry to harvest water from humidity. nbdnano.com

Ovuline helps couples conceive faster. ovuline.com

Saverr helps consumers save together. Connecting online and offline shopping. saverrapp.com

Wymsee is operating in stealth. wymsee.com

Zepppelin helps small businesses see what’s happening in their company by connecting their cloud applications and team in one place. zepppelin.com

Linkage:

Check out TechStars here

Source

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else”

Nashville Startup: PhotoRankr Captures The Essence Of Jumpstart Foundry

Now in their third year the cohort based startup accelerator Jumpstart Foundry, in Nashville Tennessee has ironed out a lot of kinks. We got a chance to spend some time with Marcus Whitney a co-founder at Jumstart Foundry, who also serves as the accelerator’s Managing Director. Through each of the last three cohorts Whitney has spent the most day to day time with all of the classes.

Throughout the Jumpstart Foundry demo day the theme surrounding Whitney’s role was consistent. Whitney, while a great and likable guy, means business. He’s a serial entrepreneur himself who’s founded a handful of his own successful startups. That also means he knows the struggles first hand at what a founder and a founding team at a startup goes through. That’s why he’s one of the best possible people in Nashville to serve as Jumpstart Foundry’s Managing Director.

While a three month boot-camp style accelerator can be a fun and life enriching experience, Whitney is known for telling teams like it is and establishing the ground rules on day one. He’s also known for pushing entrepreneurs to their limit. As far as the program goes there’s no bs in the selection process. Whitney told us that they don’t take teams without a technologist. We’ve seen teams at accelerators all over the country who come with an idea guy, a business development guy and no developer or coder. Often these teams blow most of their seed money on outsourcing and barely have a product ready for demo day. One of the biggest things we noticed at Jumpstart Foundry’s demo day is that all seven teams had a product up and running. No wireframes, no mock ups, no business plans, every team had a working product you could go out on the internet and try right now.

We asked Whitney along with Baker Donelson’s Emerging Business Practice Chair, Chris Sloan, what team at the Jumpstart Foundry this year, was the most improved. They both unanimously and at the same exact time said PhotoRankr. In fact they both agreed that PhotoRankr captured the essence of what a cohort style accelerator program was all about.

Whitney talked about PhotoRankr’s day one pitch. Sloan, who is a pro-amateur photographer in his s

pare time recalled thatPhotoRankr’s pitch on day one included a slide show with no photos. Who does that? A photo platform slide show with no photos.

When Sloan introduced the PhotoRankr team on Thursday he spoke very proudly letting the audience know that not only was their pitch deck filled with photos, every photo in their slide show was procured from PhotoRankr.

So what is PhotoRankr, it’s an online community for photographers. It allows photographers to chat with one another, get advice, vote pictures up and down and the biggest part, it provides a platform to sell photos. As PhotoRankr co-founder Tyler Sniff pointed out in the presentation, the stock photo resources on the internet right now are relatively weak, most have had the same images for years and the ones with great photos are way too costly.

Now, someone looking for a photo for their website, book, magazine, movie or any other use can peruse the pages of PhotoRankr and find what they need. The photographers themselves set the prices for the photos, along with the licensing terms which typically means they will be fairly priced.

Sloan recently joined PhotoRankr and wasn’t sure what to expect. He had tried most of the other photo sharing services out there, but he was excited when he started receiving emails notifying him that people had liked his photos.

As for the team itself, they work and operate like a family. That could possibly be attributed to the fact that three of the four members of the founding team are actually brothers. Tyler serves as the company’s Head of Business Development. Their CEO is Jacob Sniff who will be graduating from Princeton this year. Their third brother Matthew Sniff serves as the company’s CEO. Noah Willard, a family friend, serves as the Creative Director.

Whitney said that one of the teams keys to success throughout the program was their reaction to criticism. Rather than being head strong and ego driven, the PhotoRankr team took every piece of criticism in stride, often asked questions about what their mentors were telling them, and then sought advice immediately after making changes.

From where we stand the biggest challenge for PhotoRankr is going to be exposing the features to the market place and what sets them apart from Flickr, Photo Bucket and that product formerly known as Picassa.

When you watch the pitch video below you’ll see what a great job PhotoRankr did during the Jumpstart Foundry program:

Linkage:

Check out Photorankr here

Check out Jumpstart Foundry Here

Nibletz is the voice of startups in the southeast and everywhere else

New York Startup Jamplify Presents At Jumpstart Foundry Demo Day

What do you get when you take a bunch of good ole Goldman Sachs financial guys from New York and throw them into an accelerator in Nashville Tennessee? You get a social media, hybrid, promotional, crowdsourcing platform called Jamplify. Now at the first glance of the description I just gave them you may think we’re dealing with another Vooza, no that’s not the case at all.

Jamplify’s finished product, that’s actually available now (what a novel idea building an actual product at an accelerator), you get the most logical promotional vehicle for bands, musicians, and bloggers that’s available to date.

Jamplify crowdsources people for promoting the bands that they love. Rather than crowdsourcing for actual capital Jamplify is crowdsourcing for social capital and human capital, and then there’s the payoff.

Jamplify is like the kickstarter for fan based, crowd based musical promotion. As a fan of a band or a promotional ambassador you can agree to promote a band or musician. Based on your social graph and the amount of people that you actually touch with the campaigns short, trackable url you will become eligible for prizes from the band or artist you’re promoting.

The most interesting promotional “reward” or “perk” to date has been from a hip hop band where the artist actually recorded the outgoing voicemail message for that Jamplifier’s personal voice mail. Cool huh?

If you’re lost, you really shouldn’t be, but it would be great to check out the pitch video from JumpStart Foundry’s demo day in Nashville below:

Linkage:

Get Jamplifying today here

Here’s more Demo Day Coverage

Nibletz is the voice of startups in the southeast and everywhere else.