App Archives - Page 9 of 9 - Serious Startups

North Carolina Startup: Mobile Foods To Tackle Tracking The Food Truck

The mobile food vending space is growing ten fold every year. According to the National Restaurant Association there are some 15.6 million Americans that eat at mobile food vendors already. Mobile food vending has exploded in the last five years, no longer are we talking about just hot dog carts, food trucks have become the in-thing these days.

According to research prepared in Mobile Foods’ presentation for the Duke Startup Challenge session that just ended there are somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 mobile food vendors in the US. There are 20,000 in Austin, Dallas, Houston and Los Angeles County alone.

One of the tricky parts with your favorite food truck is finding out where it is on any given day. Now if you have a regular truck that you eat at you probably know where they are going to be, maybe they post their schedule on the truck, online or have some kind of email list that you can subscribe to. Mobile Foods hopes to solve the Food Truck location problem for you.

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Chicago Startup: Iconicast’s “Smurks” Puts The Heart In The Machine

How can you share that smile on your face through digital and mobile? How often have you misinterpreted the context of a text message because you didn’t know how the other person was feeling. Does that LOL mean laugh out loud, that’s really funny. Or does that LOL mean laugh out loud you’re really stupid?

Iconicast, a Chicago Startup, co-founder Pat Burns took the stage at DEMO in Santa Clara CA last week and talked about the three stooges movie he just saw. He gave the example of talking with a friend who asked how the movie was. In his presentation he pointed out that if the friend was in front of him the look on his face would tell the complete story.

That’s what smirks is all about. Now when you first look at Smurks, the new app by Iconicast, it may appear to be a 2012 take on the emoticon. However, the gesture based app is an extension of human emotion. Swiping up shows off a happy face, swiping down sad. Left and right offer equally as polarizing emotions via the app. In fact there are many different faces that you can make.

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Denver Startup: Forkly Giving Foodspotting & Nosh A Run For The Money

Forkly is of course a food based mobile app. It’s the brain child of Brightkite alumni Brady Becker and Martin May, so they went into Forkly seasoned startup founders. Back in September 2010 Becker and May left Brightkite. As TechCrunch reported at the time they left a farewell note at Brightkite and rumors started surfacing that they were starting something called Forkly.

Forkly was in stealth mode. Back then there was just a splash page that said “We are Forkly”.

A year later Forkly was revealed. Forkly was a food and restaurant discovery engine of sorts. By the time Forkly launched last summer the food recommendation app space was filling up. The two most well known competitors are FoodSpotting and Nosh. Foodspotting is more visual while Nosh uses both ratings and photos. Forkly does both.

Some tech pundits weren’t too sure about Forkly. Becker and May were experienced at startups but Brightkite, a location based discovery app, was a little too early on the scene. The fear with Forkly was that it may have been too late. That didn’t prove to be the case.

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Toronto Startup: Quimby Technolgies Creates Self Destructing Mobile Messaging

Have you ever been in a relationship and maybe sent a naughty message or two, possibly with a picture? Did you live to regret that message when you broke up with that person? Now we’re not talking about kids or teenagers and sexting here, real adults do this kind of thing, especially those that travel a lot. Maybe you had a really rip roaring night at the club and sent a bunch of photos to your posse, perhaps you wanted them to live the moment with you, but not on Monday morning back at the office. What about this, have you ever had an idea you may have wanted to share with some somewhat trusted colleagues, but just enough so they could grasp the idea, not steal it down the road?

If you’ve ever found yourself in one of those scenarios or millions of other similar types of situations than you’d be happy to know that Heather Burns and her Quimby Technologies, a Toronto Startup, has created a self destructing messaging platform. Burns teamed up with Alkarrim (Alex) Nasser of BNotions, to create Quimby Technologies and Quimby the self destructing messenger app.

Now Burns is pretty sharp, she is well aware that there are some people who are going to shout out at the rooftops why this is a bad idea. The same kind of people that can’t get over the fact that Craigslist or Zaarly exist, and in our exclusive interview we asked her about just those types.

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Canadian Startup: Wantser Is the Canadian Version Of Pinterest For Wants

Pinterest has caught on like wild fire. We’ve run several stories about Pinterest and it’s crazy valuations. We’ve heard lately that their active users have gone down however it’s still extremely hot. With Pinterest you can “pin” pictures on the internet. It’s been highly adopted by women who pin everything from the latest fashions, to art projects, home interior decorating ideas and even fashion.

Imagine if you will, pinning the things you want and then having access to the ways to get those things. If you see a fancy new purse on Pinterest instead of pinning it, you “want” it. Well that’s the idea behind Canadian startup Wantster.

CEO Ky Joseph and Chris Edelman a Canadian radio sales executive, started Wantster to do just that. You can simply download the Wantster “want” button to your browser, the same way some do with Pinterest, and when you see something you want, “want it”. With Wantster’s mobile app you can take a picture of something you want for later and put it in your “want” list.

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NY Startup GiddyUp Launches Social Mobile App For Short Term Planning

GiddyUp Co-Founder Elliott Goldwater asks a very relevant question these days, of the last 10 social apps that you downloaded how many do you still use right now. So I did an inventory. I’ve downloaded 36 apps that fit in the social mobile space. Here are the ones that I still use, at least in some kind of moderation: Hootsuite (all the time), Facebook (all the time), Instagram (quite frequently), Path (moderately), Pinterest (minimally), Sonar (moderately), Glancee (moderately), Trover (a little more than moderately). I’ve dumped countless others including Highlight.

So why bother with another social mobile app. Well as Goldwater points out, Giddy Up is a social mobile app in the truest form. The app allows you to plan and attend events and then communicate through the app using your actual friends regular contact info, novel huh.

Event hosts must sign up for Giddy Up however their friends don’t have to. While Giddy Up has integration with Facebook, and Twitter (with Privacy Controls) the foundation for the event is built upon actual contacts in your contact list. The user creates an RSVPable event.

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New York Startup: Wendr Wins $25,000 Partnership With AB InBev For Mobile App Idea

(photo: adage.com)

Wendr is a new mobile social app that launched in February at the onset of Social Media week in New York. It has many of the same characteristics of the Ft.Lauderdale startup we profiled yesterday called MyNyte. In trying out both apps MyNyte has a more personal feeling to it. However Wendr is hoping to lend their technology to AB InBev (Anheiser Busch) the makers of Budweiser.

The two month old startup won a $25,000 partnership with the beverage giant in Manhattan Wednesday as part of Ad Age’s Digital Conference. The hackathon was called “Brand Hack” and the wet behind the ears CEO Sam Zises blew away the competition, not necessarily with the app itself but with his total package.

Ad Age’s Jason DelRay report that not only did Zises bring his customized app called “Buds By Budweiser” but he engaged the crowd at one point doing a wardrobe change on stage from his Wendr hat to a hat that was already emblazoned with a “Buds By Budweiser” logo. This is the kind of thing that gets investors and contest judges engaged with the people presenting as much as the idea itself. A point echoed by Fubu founder and ABC Shark Tank Shark Daymond John in a recent Google+ Hangout Townhall meeting with high school students studying business.

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