CabCents Brings The Priceline Model To Ground Transportation

Atlanta startup CabCents is bringing the name your price, Priceline model to ground transportation. Whether you need a sedan service, van service, ride to the airport or ride around town, using CabCents you name the service you need, and the price you want to pay and BOOM you’ve got a driver.

Not only that, but CabCents has a thorough screening process to insure that you’re getting a quality driver and you should have nothing to be afraid of.

There are several customer and driver protections built into the entire web based CabCents experience. A customer goes to the website CabCents.com and fills out an easy to understand driver request form.

Once they’ve completed the form, the request is broadcast to CabCents’ network of thoroughly screened drivers. The drivers can decide if they want to “bid” on the job by responding positively to the request. From there the customer can see pictures of the drivers and their vehicles, that responded positively to the request.

Once the customer picks a driver the entire payment is collected in full from the customer. The payment is essentially held in escrow until 24 hours after the job is completed, giving the customer ample time to notify CabCents of any problems. Provided the customer doesn’t report any problems the driver is paid.

We got a chance to talk to the CabCents team. Check out the interview below.

Shimi The Dancing Robot From Atlanta Startup Tovbot Debuts At CES 2013

You’ve always wanted a dancing, djing companion robot for our iPhone right? Well if you did you’re in luck. A group of entrepreneurs hailing from Georgia Tech, IDC in Israel and MIT Media Lab formed a company called Tovbot and have now introduced their first product to the world, and it’s name is Shimi.

Tovbot says they specialize in social, expressive, connected robots and Shimi definitely speaks to that mantra.

“Shimi is a robotic musical companion. He’s like your personal DJ, the guy that knows how to keep a party going and always knows what you want to hear next” Tovbot says on their website.

While companies have been trying to make robots interact with music for quite sometime it seems like Tovbot has really nailed that goal. The robot also doesn’t feel like some cheap piece of crap that’s going to have howling, treble filled speakers. The sound that comes out of Shimi is pleasant, although we didn’t get to hear it that loud.

Check out the video below from our interview at Eureka Park at CES 2013:

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Draw Something Meets Twitter With New Social Startup Didlr: CES 2013

We met a very interesting, and fun, app startup from the UK and Atlanta Georgia at Eureka Park. The startup, called Didlr, essentially combines Draw Something and Twitter for a fun new way to socialize and interact with people across the globe.

Users download the app to their smartphone or tablet, on just about every platform commercially available. After the app is downloaded you go through the normal social networking notions like creating a profile and inviting your friends. Once you’re all set up you can get to Didling.

A Didl is using your creativity through drawings and creating pictures rather than through words. As they tell us in the interview below, 140 characters is a lot more limiting than creating pictures. Didlr allows you to be as creative as you like, or can be.

Thousands of people have already flocked to the service and see it as having a little more meaning than playing the once uber popular Draw Something.

Like Twitter you can follow friends, or Didlr’s whose pictures you like. Also, the more popular a Didl is the longer it stays on the front page of the app.

Creatively speaking Didlr has included a good sized color pallete and various brush tools for any artist.

Check out our our cofounder and CEO, Nick Tippmann’s interview video below.

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Atlanta Startup: CloudSherpas Announces $40 Million Dollar Raise

CloudSherpas, an Atlanta based startup has announced a VC raise of $40 million dollars as well as an acquisition of CloudTrigger, a consulting company that specializes in Salesforce.

TechCrunch describes CloudSherpas as a “cloud brokerage”. The company is a reseller of Google Apps and services as well as Salesforce products. They also consult on everything cloud.

But their own intellectual property also puts them in a category by themselves. CloudSherpas has a treasure trove of their own proprietary extensions as well as those stemming from their acquisitions.

TechCrunch is quick to point out that CloudSherpas is themselves a product of a merger. Back in March they merged with New York company GlobalOne. At that time they received a $20 million dollar investment from Columbia Capital, who had previously invested $15 million in GlobalOne.

This $40 million dollar round was led by GreenSpring Associates and brought their total vc funding to $62.6 million. Columbia Capital and Delta-V Capital joined in the new round. Australia-based Queensland Investment Corporation, an institutional investment manager, also participated.

CloudSherpas reportedly employs 350 people and plans to have a head count of 500 in the coming year.

Linkage:

Find CloudSherpas on the web here

Source: TC

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Atlanta: Points Of Light, Starbucks & Village Capital Announce Social Startup Accelerator

Points of light, the world’s largest organization dedicated to volunteer service along with Village Capital have teamed up to launch a social entrepreneurship focused startup accelerator in Atlanta.

10 social startup teams have been selected and are coming together this week in Atlanta for an intense 12 week accelerator bootcamp. The 12 startups will receive access to mentoring, education, peer support and networking. Along with that each team has received a $10,000 seed investment. At the end of the session, the 10 startups will choose two startups from their peer group to receive additional $50,000 investments to help bring their startups to life.

The 10 startups kicking off the accelerator’s first class are:

AltruHelp (Boston) is building a software solution and online community to increase volunteerism and millennial civic engagement.
Bould (Denver) connects students with the real-world experience necessary for green careers.
CareerVillage (Boston) helps working professionals provide career information and advice directly to students.
Generation Citizen (New York) empowers young people to become engaged and effective citizens.
GivKwik (San Francisco) is a social, mobile and web platform that inspires impulse philanthropy.
HopeMob (New York) unites strangers to rally behind people with pressing needs.
Moneythink (Chicago) makes financial literacy relevant and fun for urban 11^th and 12^th graders.
MyMaryland (Silver Spring, Md.) is democracy’s first 24/7 online town hall.
Smallknot (New York) is a community crowd-funding platform for small business.
UBELONG (Washington, D.C.) provides high-impact, affordable international volunteering opportunities.

PwC Charitable Foundation and the Starbucks Foundation are also supporting the socially driven accelerator.

“Supporting productive and disruptive innovators in the research and design of sustainable, scalable programs that drive charitable endeavors is an important part of our giving philosophy,” said Chris Simmons, president, PwC Charitable Foundation, Inc. “We congratulate the 10 start-ups selected for the accelerator and look forward to seeing their individual plans to catalyze social change through innovation in the areas of education and humanitarianism.”

“At Starbucks, we believe strongly in the power of the entrepreneur and the opportunity for businesses to be the catalyst for change in their communities,” said Adam Brotman, chief digital officer, Starbucks. “We are honored to support this program and look forward the success of these ventures.”

“Entrepreneurs are bringing new thinking and innovative business models to the critical work of helping others,” said Ayesha Khanna, president of Points of Light’s Civic Incubator. “We are pleased to help these 10 promising teams successfully launch civic ventures to drive social good in communities across the country.”

“Over the next three months, these enterprises will get the best support and the toughest criticism they’ve ever received from their peers,” said Ross Baird, executive director of Village Capital. “We’ll focus on everything from customer validation to board-building to fundraising to financials, and we expect that the collaboration of these amazingly talented people will be a force multiplier for their success.”

Linkage:

Find out about Points of Light here

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Interview With Atlanta Startup StockClout A Communications & Social Media Platform For Public Companies And Investors

Investors have a lot of tools out there to do research on companies both public and private. There are tools like Bloomberg, Hoover and other mega research sites for companies. One of the problems with these sites though, is that they all stopped at different points in the current digital evolution. They also don’t factor in tools that business professionals in 2012 use, like social media.

That’s why Tony Golden, a seasoned Wall Street stock professional, came up with StockClout. Golden is no Wall Street wannabe, he spent 15 years with firms like Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns and Smith Barney, back before the big investment banks went belly up. Golden has spent the last 17 years as the CEO and Founder of a successful investor relations firm in Atlanta. It’s this experience dealing with investors and helping them find information that led to the creation of StockClout.

Through StockClout you can create your own free profile and then add your portfolio companies to it. StockClout will do the rest bringing you the most up to date information on the public companies you have your money in. You’ll get updates from traditional sources and social media as well.

StockClout is free for anyone to use and sign up for. Golden says that StockClout actually gives their users the most precious commodity back, and that of course is “time”. StockClout cuts out hours of research and provides everything to you in easy to read updates, and it’s all free.

We got a chance to talk to Golden about StockClout. Check out the interview below.

Atlanta Startup Vir2o Sharing Everything In Real Time Improves In Person Relationships

Atlanta startup Vir2o, promises to be a whole new social experience. That’s quite a lofty statement, but after checking them out and talking with them, if executed correctly it will work.

Vir20 shares just about everything there is to share in real time, which improves actual in person relationships. You can go shopping with your friends on Vir2o. You can go to the movies with your friends on Vir2o. You can share photos with your friends on Vir2o. You can listen to and share music on Vir2o.

Anytime an entrepreneur wants to create a new social network or new social media outlet it’s immediately compared to Facebook. When Facebook burst onto the college scene and then opened up their doors to anyone over 13, no one believed they would overtake Myspace, but they did.

In an interview we did with Vir2o’s Founder,Kayode Aladesuyi, he mentioned sharing a lot. When we think of sharing and social media we naturally think of Facebook. Spaulding explains how Vir20 is different than Facebook “…doesn’t necessarily enhance social interaction between people, especially if there is physical distance between them. We wanted to bridge the gap between people who live in different parts of the world and provide them with a real-time interactive tool to bring them closer together”

Since Vir20 is all about live sharing, in real time, they consider themselves a “Live Community” versus a social network.

Check out the rest of our interview with Spaulding below.

Atlanta Startup LaunchTable Launches Connect, Communicate, Collaborate

Back in May we got a chance to interview Atlanta based entrepreneur Ian Jones about his exciting new startup called LaunchTable. While there are several startups out there competing in the collaboration space, Jones has created LaunchTable to make it easier to not just collaborate but to communicate and connect as well.

Most of the other collaboration startups out there allow users to collaborate based on teams that they already have in place. Take Facebook Founder Dustin Muskovitz’s startup Asana. Asana is a great tool that allows users to collaborate in a way very similar to Google Wave. Of course with Asana you have the team in place already.

When you sign up for a user account at LaunchTable here, you immediately receive recommendations on other people that you should collaborate with. If the automagical recommendations don’t suit your needs you’re welcome to browse the entire community for the right match without limits.

Once you’ve synced up with a new team LaunchTable makes it easy to keep track of your projects. Everything is saved on your groups “Launch Table” to make it easier to continue working and collaborating. You can also send “LaunchMail” to your teammates ask questions and interact in their forums.

LaunchTable also baked in the collaboration platform that allows you to hold virtual meetings within your LaunchTable. As with everything else in LaunchTable your meetings are saved for later as well.

LaunchTable also wants to be a resource to entrepreneurs and startups around the globe. They’ve opened up their “blog” for any LaunchTable user to contribute their own content to the site.

“Launch Table is for anyone working on any project that could use the help of another individual or a multi-person team. We’ve heard from people seeking startup partnerships, business owners looking to converse on best practices, and even teachers wanting to know what works well in other classrooms. Launch Table tears down geographic and social barriers.” Jones told nibletz.com in an interview.

Whether you’re looking for startup co-founders, someone to do a school project with or a team to launch a community initiative, or really anything else that requires collaboration, check out LaunchTable.

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Georgia Startup: FameTube Hopes To Help The Truly Talented With Video Platform

Imagine if YouTube was stripped of all the wannabe’s, all the crappy singers and all the kids who’s parents don’t have the heart to tell them their voices sound like nails on a chalkboard. Imagine if YouTube actually showed the videos from up and coming stars that were truly talented. Well that’s the mission for Georgia startup FameTube.

FameTube’s founders Bryan Cornelius and Brad Buttimer hail from Atlanta and Savannah Georgia respectively. Both entrepreneurs love music, people, and media and bring great experience to the table.

Their new startup actually vets videos from people who claim to be artists and musicians and sometimes they don’t make the cut. Only those people who get past the FameTube team actually get their videos posted. As Cornelius explains in the interview below, once a video makes it onto FameTube artists are encouraged to drive traffic to the site. The community, outside of the artist and their friends and family are more inclined to check out the other artists and interact.

Check out our interview with this exciting startup from “everywhere else” here:

Atlanta Startups To Win In CTW Breakup

Earlier this summer Atlanta super angel, Sig Mosely came out of retirement. It was announced that he was joining forces with Palaniswamy Rajan to form the $25 million dollar CTW ventures fund. Mosely also participated in a $600,000 round led by Dallas Maverick’s owner and fellow super angel Mark Cuban, in Atlanta startup Badgy.. It’s unclear whether or not it was Mosely or CTW in that round.

Now, just two months after the start of CTW the partners, Mosely and Rajan are parting ways. They are divorcing over what the Atlanta Business Journal is equating to “irreconcilable differences.

Rajan prefers to go long tail on technology ventures.

“Raj much prefers to dig deep, deep, deep into the technology,” Mosley said to the Business Journal “That does not do anything for me.”

Rajan feels the same way about Mosely’s desire to invest in entrepreneurs. Mosely is more of a risk taker which is actually great for startups.

Both men will go there separate ways but that doesn’t mean Mosely is going back into retirement. Mosely is creating his own fund that will invest between $200,000 and $500,000 in entrepreneur lead startups.

Mosely is hoping that his fund will be a feeder fund for deal flow with larger firms like Menlo Park Ventures.

Prior to retiring a first time in 2010 Mosely had oversaw the investment in over 130 technology companies as the President of Imlay Investments.

Linkage:

Source: Atlanta Business Journal

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Startup Founders, Devs & Designers (aka Geeks Like Us) Love DragonCon, We’ll Be There

In our previous geekery, techie and mobile lives two of our favorite events to cover have been ComiCon and DragonCon. Let’s face it most startup founders, developers,designers, entrepreneurs and coders are really geeks at heart. If you haven’t been to DragonCon before it’s the ComiCon of the east coast and despite it’s size it still has that alluring feel of a convention that hasn’t sold out to big business.

If you’ve been to ComiCon in the last five years or so you’ll notice a huge amount of commercialism. The grass roots comic book and pop culture convention feel has drifted away. That’s not the case for the four day event held in Atlanta every year.

We’ve got an entire team that will be blogging, posting photos and broadcasting live on AOL and Slacker radio all weekend long to bring you all the delicious DragonCon action. We’re going to hit the best panels on the culture side and also some of the tracks that will undoubtedly provide great content and information for those of us building businesses.

DragonCon covers so many different parts of current culture it’s hard to believe they do it in just one weekend. Attendees will be able to mingle with celebrities from their favorite sci-fi programs, web programs, and even comic book heroes. There are tracks and panels on writing, art, comics, pop culture, gaming, sci fi, and even the Skeptics track which I personally love.

Heck last year there was a panel on WKRP in Cincinnati which Howard Hessman and Lonnie Anderson where there as the speakers.

This upcoming weekend will feature a decent break from our day to day startup coverage but we’re all going to go back to our roots as geeks, comic book readers, sci-fi lovers, Dr. Who fans, gamers and much much more. There’s a huge commonality between the DragonCon/ComiCon go-er and those of us in the startup world. Sure we were a little off as kids and teenagers but now we’re building products, software, and businesses.

So join us all weekend long for a great trip through DragonCon and if there’s something you want to see specifically email info@nibletz.com

For those of you familiar with our coverage of DragonCon and similar events on our other sites, this year we’ve got StoryMark an Atlanta startup on board as the the photo sponsor. That’s only fitting because DragonCon is in Atlana however we’re going to use their unique app to post a ton of photos in our social media channels and here at nibletz.com with audio clips. As the days get later and later though, please be aware that they serve alcohol by the bucket at this event.

StoryMark is a great photo app partner their app allows you to record a :30 second audio excerpt that gets embedded in the finished photo product. So now you don’t have to write out a long azz caption when you’re not sure what’s in the photo. It’s also perfect for families and loved ones to send great photos back and forth.

We like to kid with the founders of StoryMark and just point out that every photo sponsor we’ve had at DragonCon,ComiCon, NYCon and CES has gone on to get acquired (Instagram), AcquiHired (LightBox) or a huge investment (CoolIris).

So enjoy your weekend and make sure you bookmark nibletz.com for DragonCon coverage. Don’t worry we’ve also got some amazing startup stories this weekend. And, finally if you’re an Atlanta startup we are doing office hours in limited brunch time sessions if you want to meet up for that just email info@nibletz.com

Gwinnett Georgia Startup: 8Bit Receives $25,000 Founders Grant

8Bit is a wild gang of extremely talented and creative web publishing rockstars building a platform to give those web publishers without their creative fire access to an arsenal of great design. The Gwinnett Georgia based startup is the latest winner of the Gwinnett Innovation Park $25,000 Founders Grant.

While at first look you may get the impression that 8Bit is just another Word Press theme shop and those are about as common these days as Android developers, but when you dive through their site you’ll see that they’re super hero’s of the web publishing space and have compiled a bunch of great values that go into their work.

When you read their about page, creativity and urban,word pressing hipsterism seep out of your computer like a mocha latte seeping through the bottom of the Starbucks cup in your center console. If you read their blog and look at their actual work though, you’ll see they aren’t just a bunch of templates.

Each of their themes is customizable to the hilt. If you’ve been using Word Press for years, like we have, and you’re still not sure what all the different appearance settings do, no worries 8Bit spells it out for you in their themes while keeping a semblance of classy elegance. In fact 8Bit is so well liked that Mashable and TNW have featured their themes.

8Bit also offers customer support, a novel idea compared to the idiots of douchebaggery we bout this template from.

Oh but we’re reporting about their cash.

“The Founders Grant Award is intended to give back to the entrepreneurial community by rewarding entrepreneurial excellence and helping deserving companies continue on their path to success,” said Leland Strange, local serial entrepreneur, investor and long time supporter of Atlanta technology innovators to the Gwinnett Business Journal.

“8BIT loves being a part of the Nspire program. It has helped us get even closer to our goal by providing space for us to work together as a team, as well as opportunities for us to network,” explains John Saddington, 8BIT co-founder. “We are honored to receive the Founders Grant and know that the money will help us continue on our path to creating the best online publishing solution.”

Linkage:

Go on you know you want to, check out 8Bit here

Source: GBJ

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Atlanta Startup: TRAINlete Enters Into The Athlete/Private Coach Market

Over the past two years there’s been an explosion in startups looking to connect people with other professional services that they may need. Just this year alone we’ve seen Florida startup Coach Crowd along with Boston startup Coach Up offer a connection market place for parents of student athletes to connect with private coaches.

Prior to this new wave of services on the internet, it’s been tough for athletes and their parents to connect to coaches. Often times they would have to go by word of mouth recommendation from their normal team coach, high school coach or fellow athlete. There was also the bulletin board at the local Y and even the supermarket. Now there are a variety of online social networks and marketplaces to connect athletes with coaches.

Coming out of the gate Atlanta startup Trainlete knew that the space was just starting up but heating up quick. Although the team started working on the idea 15 months ago they elected not to open up shop until they were truly ready.

Even as a non athlete I was able to find the features that stand out on Trainlete. First off, Trainlete doesn’t take cut of the transaction between athlete and coach. They’re working off other revenue models such as advertising and sponsorship.

Trainlete also offers the opportunity to talk to correspond with the coach directly on or off their network. While Trainlete is far from a non-profit or charity organization, co-founders Jeremy Clouse, Eric Blumenthal and Blake Sandberg put the safety of their athlete clients as a top priority. It’s also important to them to connect coaches and athletes because of the great life building that can be involved in coaching.

That’s why they open up direct connection avenues and allow payment to be exchanged directly between the two parties. With those two options as key competitive advantages they should have no trouble building their community quickly and with that growth and scaling comes other revenue opportunities.

We got a chance to talk with Blumenthal in the interview below:

Atlanta Startups Get More Resources In Startup Atlanta Organization

On Tuesday, the city of Atlanta Georgia’s economic development agency, Invest Atlanta, will announce a new startup resource for Atlanta’s growing entrepreneur and startup eco-system. The new startup program, designed to promote and increase entrepreneurship is called “Startup Atlanta”.

Startup Atlanta itself is not part of the Startup America Partnership, however a spokesperson from Startup America’s headquarters in Washington DC told nibletz on Friday that many of the same people involved with Startup Atlanta are also involved with the soon to launch StartupGA partnership region.

One of the backbones to the new Startup Atlanta initiative will be a website with an interactive platform that maps out the startup resources in the region including incubators, co-working spaces, accelerators and other valuable resources. The idea behind the site is to connect entrepreneurs and startups with the resources that they need as well as each other.

Atlanta has had some great startup news in recent weeks. Over 1300 entrepreneurs, founders, startups and venture capitalists poured into the Sweet Watery Brewery for a TechCrunch meet up.

Not less than a week later Atlanta startup Bad.gy announced a $600,000 round of funding led by Dallas Maverick’s owner and ABC Shark Tank Shark, Mark Cuban. Just yesterday Atlanta played host to the Art Of Launch, an event that saw 13 area startups compete in a 5 minute pitch contest for thousands of dollars in cash and prizes.

Startup Atlanta has attracted the attention of local dignitaries including Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, Director of the United States Patent and Trade Mark Office Dave Kappos and Georgia Tech President G.P. “Bud” Peterson. All of whom will be on hand for the Tuesday announcement.

Linkage:

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Source: Atlanta Business Chronicle

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