California Archives - Page 4 of 7

L.A. Entrepreneur Launches Social Network Startup For Film Makers In Post Production

Unless you’re one of those award winning notorious film makers like say Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, or even Aaron Sorkin these days, it can be hard to find others to collaborate with, share feedback and share ideas. As L.A. entrepreneur Cosmo Scharf discovered, it’s even tougher at the post production level. That’s why he created Blosmo.

Scharf, a student at the University of Southern California, decided he wanted to start a social network for film makers. As he tells us in the interview below, after collaborating with his buddy Corey, they narrowed down the social network to those in post production.

Blosmo is as much a collaboration tool as it is a social network. Right now, independent film makers don’t have many avenues for feedback, ideas and suggestions. YouTube comments, when they aren’t spam, are immature and not very helpful. Even though Vimeo has a more professional audience, the comments aren’t very useful either.

Blosmo gives their community members access to a higher level of feedback from likeminded, professional or semi professional film makers. Comments on Blosmo are incentivized through a point system where users can actually receive prizes and rewards sponsored by film companies. The points also give film makers access to discounts on gear and equipment.

Check out our complete interview with Scharf below.

San Diego Startup Expeerience Crowdsourced Event Photos For Everyone

There are a few startups out there vying for the position to be the platform that allows people at an event to all upload photos from the same event. San Diego startup Expeerience is one of those companies.

Expeerience allows users to share videos and photos at events. When individual Expeerience users upload their photos at any particular event they are put together with all of the photos and videos from other users at the same event. Essentially, Expeerience is crowdsourcing photos and videos from their users at events, creating one big gallery of event photos.

With many of the other photo sharing apps available today people take photos and videos and upload them to their existing social networks. If they’re at a big event there’s a good chance time lines will be filled with similar photos. However, as co-founder Stephen Boyd explains in an interview with nibletz, after the event everyone goes their separate ways. Social networks begin filling with the next big event.

Expeerience keeps an ongoing record in a “collection” with all the photos from the same event that users can go back to over and over again. Expeerience users can also save event photos from other users. At a small event like a wedding, users can easily save the bouquet toss and dancing photos from other users. They can do the same thing at a football game for big plays and touch downs.

Boyd compares Expeerience to a “Pinterest style Twitter”.

Check out our interview with Boyd below.

California Startup: Bubbs Connects You To Charitable Products INTERVIEW

A new Orange County startup called Bubbs is looking to become the go-to place to find products that are being sold to benefit charities and causes across the globe. When you go to mybubbs.com you’ll see a familiar online mall experience, except in this case all the products are benefiting some kind of charity.

Bubbs is somewhat similar to DoGoodBuyUs, a New York startup that we covered back in June. The main difference is that DoGoodBuyUs connects products that were specifically made for charity whereas most of the Bubbs products are more traditional in nature but somehow proceeds are benefiting charity.

Red Beats By Dre headphones, where $5.00 of the purchase goes to AIDS research, can be found on Bubbs. An iPad case which gives a week’s worth of HIV medicine to someone living in Africa can also be found on the page. Clothing, food, other gadgets and even makeup with a purpose can be found on the mybubbs site. Now you can shop for charity in one spot rather than scouring the internet looking for charity kick backs, site by site.

We got a chance to talk to Atila Lotfi the founder of Bubbs, check out the interview below:

Santa Monica Startup: DocRun To Challenge Legal Zoom, And Do It Better?

If you were to hear a pitch from a legal startup that planned to offer do it yourself access to legal forms, you would immediately think of LegalZoom right? Who would enter into a space crowded by a giant like LegalZoom? That would be as asinine as pitching an online auction site for collectibles, clothing, accessories and every day junk right?

Well Santa Monica based startup DocRun is doing just that. Of course their position is that they’re going to do it better.

DocRun has positioned itself to become the site to go to when small companies, and even startups need legal documents that may otherwise cost them thousands of dollars. When a user goes to the site they can create highly customizable, attorney level legal documents by answering a handful of relevant questions.

DocRun isn’t your run of the mill startup though. The company’s founder is Jennifer Reuting a nationally known expert on small business and corporate structuring. She is the author of the book “Limited Liability Companies For Dummies”.

This is also not her first foray into web platforms for small businesses. Reuting created InCorp.com the third largest registered agent service provider in the country and MyLLC.com a business entity formation service. Reuting has baked patent pending “artificial intelligence” into DocRun. This technology trumps LegalZoom’s one size fits all legal document service.

We got a chance to interview DocRun check out the interview below.

Going On A Cruise? Make Sure You Bring Along UCLA Startup Ship Mate

Ship Mate, a startup incubated at UCLA’s startup incubator program, wants to be your cruise companion. Over half a million people have already downloaded the app that gives you all the information that you need to know before, during and after your cruise.

Jan and Mike Jirout, the two brothers behind Ship Mate have stocked their app to the hilt. It’s literally a one stop mobile destination for everything involving a cruise.

They’ve found that most users are downloading the app about a month before their cruise sets sail. In the pre cruise period Ship Mate is great for checking out rendezvous points and finding activities to participate in while on the cruise. You can also plan out your dining and see in advance ship maps and other resources that you didn’t even think of.

When it’s time to board your cruise ship Ship Mate has ship maps, ship information and even access to deck cams so you can see the action going on around you. There’s also photo galleries and social aspects like cruise chat that will allow you to chat with other users on and off your ship.

The Ship Mate app doesn’t stop after the cruise stops though. You can add more photos to the photo galleries, rate your cruise experience, rate locations and continue chatting about your cruise with others who have gone on cruises. People seem to love Ship Mate as they’ve already done over half a billion cross platform downloads and they’re seeing over 70,000 daily users.

We got a chance to talk with Mike Jirout about Ship Mate, check out the interview below:

Silicon Valley Startup: Sooligan Moves To Arkansas To Help Strangers INTERVIEW

Startups flock in droves from their home city to Silicon Valley. It’s like the pilgrimage that actors and actresses make to Hollywood and models make to New York (some startups too). It’s not often that you hear of a startup moving from Silicon Valley to “everywhere else” to grow.

Back in June we brought you the story of the vitamin and supplement subscription box startup, Bulu Box. The husband and wife team behind Bulu Box moved from Silicon Valley to Lincoln Nebraska to grow their startup. Paul and Stephanie Jarrett were able to get an investment from the Nebraska Angels. They decided to pack things up and move to Nebraska, not only because of the investment but because costs would be more manageable there.

Today we’ve found Sooligan. Sooligan is a social discovery startup for the things around you. The idea behind the startup is that whether you’re traveling to a new city or your’re moving their, you can use Sooligan to crowdsource expert advice from the best experts, the locals.

Sooligan has rolled a few concepts into one big idea. They submitted the idea to the Ark Challenge accelerator in Fayetteville Arkansas and we’re accepted.

The two female founders from Sooligan, Nikka Umil and Natasha Malaihollo have relocated their headquarters to Fayetteville and plan on staying there after the accelerator program is over. Umil told nibletz.com why they decided to relocate to Arkansas and then stay there:

“I think everyone already knows about Berkeley! It is minutes away from Silicon Valley, and is a hub for the country’s best and brightest. This makes moving to Fayetteville, Arkansas (where we are currently based) quite shocking and a bit unexpected. We had NO clue whatsoever that this place had a booming startup scene/culture. We were very surprised by what we found once we started researching the area. Not ony is it home to the biggest Forbes 500 and 1000 companies, but it is also home to great up-and-coming startups like TTAGG, MobileFWD, Acumen Brands and more. Initiatives like the Ark Challenge and The Iceberg are also testaments to the growing startup culture in the area.”

Umil found a laundry list of accolades for their new home:

· Forbes named Fayetteville, Arkansas, a Best Place for Businesses and Careers.

· Fast Company recently named Fayetteville, AR as one of the “9 cities you wouldn’t think are hubs for tech startups” http://www.entrepreneur.com/slideshow/224504

· Travel + Leisure named Bentonville, Arkansas, one of the hottest travel destinations for 2012.

· The region, relatively insulated from the macroeconomy, offers a high quality of life and low cost of living.

· Northwest Arkansas is home to Fortune 500 and 1000 companies, as well as thousands of their big-brand suppliers.

· In 2011, Arkansas was cited by CNBC as having the lowest overall cost of doing business in the nation.

· The Kauffman Foundation ranks Arkansas as the 15th most entrepreneurial state in 2011 in the current issue of its annual report, the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity. The calculated index for Arkansas is at 0.34%, which means there are 340 entrepreneurs per 100,000 adults per month in the Natural State.

· The nation is seeing progress, innovation clusters and cultural revival in the Midwest and American South.

· Northwest Arkansas is the sixth fastest growing region in the country, surrounded by the beautiful Ozark Mountains.

· The Northwest Arkansas MSA has grown 35% since 2000 and now numbers more than 463,000 residents—the fastest growing population in Middle America.

· Northwest Arkansas is a hub at the center of a regional market including Dallas, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Kansas City, St. Louis, Little Rock, and Memphis metropolitan areas.

· Northwest Arkansas has a welcoming entrepreneurial culture with quick-start networking opportunities.

· Northwest Arkansas sees a high degree of philanthropic engagement from its citizenry, as well as creative and business communities.

· Northwest Arkansas has the most billionaires per capita than anywhere in the United States.

· As part of a regional strategic economic development plan, Northwest Arkansas has an intentional focus onnurturing mobile and Internet startups.

Below is the rest of our interview with Umil.

San Diego Startup: The Tip Network Is PayPal For Servers

Although restaurant and hospitality industry technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the years, one area where it still falls short is tipping. That’s where San Diego startup The Tip Network comes in.

With the economy the way it is these days restaurant owners and managers are mice-managing their shift schedules even more than they ever have before. Owners are managers are quick to make cuts to their wait staff the minute they can. This causes a major pain for servers. In a lot of restaurants servers either need to stick around after getting cut or at the end of their shift, come back at closing time or wait until the next day to reconcile their tips and tip out. This can be a major pain point for servers.

The Tip Network offers solutions for problems like that and other problems that plague proprietors of tip based businesses.

Tip Network is a cloud based tip management solution for independent and chain restaurants. We enable managers to easily track, allocate, and distribute tips digitally to their staffs Tip Network. Each staff member has their own unique Tip Network profile that allows them to (1) send money to any account, at any bank (2) send money to anyone in the network, (3) and many other things down the road .

Using the Tip Network, servers take ownership and management of their tips over, instantly. Now, from the comfort of their own home, or device they can tip out to support staff, move tips to their bank accounts even pay back loans to other servers. Like PayPal, with The Tip Network users get their own ID and can move their tips around anywhere in the network.

Founder Greg Crisci has first hand experience as a server and knows the pain that his startup hopes to solve. He’s busy these days looking for integration partners and preparing the implementation of his new tipping alternative. He did take a few minutes to talk to us though. Check out the interview below:

Interview With Mark Cuban Backed LA Startup: Mention Mobile

Shark Tank season 4 kicked off two weeks ago with Indiana University, Kelley School Of Business graduate Derek Pacque’ turning down a $200,000 investment offer from Dallas Maverick’s owner and billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban. Pacque’ turned down the investment because of the equity stake Cuban wanted in exchange.

That wasn’t the case with Mention Mobile founder Ryan Ozonian. Ozonian took a one in a million shot and sent Cuban an email with a two year old blog post. According to Ozonian in just 8 minutes Cuban replied. That single email exchange led to Cuban investing $250,000 back this time last year. Cuban followed that investment up with another undisclosed investment in April of this year.

Mention Mobile is a social gaming company that already has a handful of titles under the belt utilizing the popular Facebook platform. Some of their titles include: Trivia Friends, Doodley, and Zombie Bash: Christmas Attack. Their about to launch a new game, partnering with Chillingo as the publisher, called Word Derby. They expect to get that game out to users later this fall. It will be the first asynchronous word game for Chillingo.

We got a chance to talk with Ozonian about what he and MentionMobile are doing in the interview below:

Los Angeles Startup: myRight Looking To Become the WebMD For Legal Issues INTERVIEW

When you’re not feeling well and have a definitive set of symptoms most people these days take to the internet. Even with health insurance, people seem to find it more convenient to consult with webMD or Dr. Google, before they waste their valuable time at the doctor’s office. WebMD is often credited as one of the big survivors of the first dot com bubble. The site, which has been around since the late 90’s, is a great place to get preliminary information.

While there are a variety of legal websites out there, there isn’t one that mimics what WebMD does. Sure there are a million places to find and complete legal forms, like Legal Zoom, but most of the websites out there for people to bounce legal questions off of, typically go right back to a lawyers office who will give you the information you need to know after a “free” consultation.

myRight is hoping to become the webMD of legal services. The Los Angeles based startup wants to be the preliminary go to place for people with legal questions. Some may even realize they don’t need to see a lawyer while others will jump on the phone with a lawyer right after their search of myRight.me.

Could Nikhil Jhunjhnuwala, Keval Amin and Michael Niu, the founders of myRight be onto something? Frank Monestere, the founder of LegalZoom thinks so. Monestere sits on myRight’s advisory board. To keep things legal myRight has two other lawyers on their advisory board too.

We got a chance to talk to Niu about myRight. Check out the interview below.

San Diego Startup: ScoreStream, CrowdSourced High School Scores

With the rise in online news sources and the decrease in old fashioned print journalists, most cities across the country don’t have a dedicated high school sports reporter. I remember back in the early 90’s growing up in the Baltimore area, the Sun and all the hyper local papers had one, if not a handful of full time reporters who’s beat it was to post the high school scores, details and results for track and field meets and anything that had to do with high school sports. As newspapers began cutting reporters, the high school beat drifted to the wayside.

There are a handful of high school sports sites on the internet but all of them seem to lack any decent box scores, or results from previous games. I remember looking up a high school score on the Sunday after a Friday opening game and it still hadn’t been updated.

This is the pain that Derrick Oien was looking to solve when he founded ScoreStream, a San Diego startup dedicated to high school sports.

ScoreStream can be found in the iOS app store and allows users to update high school sports teams in real time. From there they can post to Twitter, Facebook and ScoreStream’s own platform. ScoreStream encourages users who are actually at the game to post updates to that teams scores as the games go on. Oien has also baked a system into the backend of the website that uses GPS coordinates to tell if the person reporting the score is actually at the game.

“We have a data base of high schools, colors, mascots and longitude and latitude, so we know if a user is posting from a game,” Oien told UT San Diego. “What we do on the back end for media companies is we look at the scores coming in and we look at where the user is. So I can verify where they are.”

It’s the crowdsourcing part of ScoreStream that sets the new startup apart from sites like MaxPreps and SportsNgin. Those two sites are used to feed scores to other media outlets but rely on the school itself or a regional person to report a bulk of scores at one time.

ScoreStream has already inked it’s first media partner. San Diego’s XX1090-AM uses the service to supply their high school sports scores to their website.

Not bad for a startup launched this past April.

Linkage:

Check out ScoreStream here

Check out this interview at TechCocktail

Source: UT San Diego

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

New York Robotics Investment Firm Makes First Startup Investment: Double Robotics

A Y-Combinator graduate and California startup, Double Robotics, is the first startup to receive an investment from New York based Grishin Robotics. Grishin was started by Dimitry Grishin who’s been dubbed the “Russian Mark Zuckerberg” by the fine folks at BetaBeat and others.

The investment into Double Robotics marks the first investment made by Grishin Robotics with more on the way. Grishin invested $250,000 into the startup.

Double Robotics has already sold 600 units ($1.2 million) of their first robotic product. The product, called Double, is a robot that puts an iPad on wheels and then gives you a mobile telecommunications device. Think that robot that Sheldon used on Big Bang Theory in the episode where he wanted Steve Wozniak’s autograph, but much more refined.

Grishin’s investment will be spent primarily on scaling, manufacturing and hiring for further development. Double Robotics plans on shipping the 600 pre-orders in the first part of 2013.

“We are thrilled to have Grishin Robotics and Dmitry Grishin, in particular, as our largest investor to date,” said David Cann, Co-founder of Double Robotics. “We read about the new investment firm and Dmitry’s experience in the field of robotics in June 2012 when the fund was announced. The timing was perfect, as we were just beginning the Y Combinator program with our prototype robot. After our public launch in August, we met with Grishin Robotics and were immediately impressed with their mission and deep knowledge of the robotics industry’s past mistakes and potential future. We look forward to working with Grishin Robotics in the years to come as we build our business.”

Grishin is the Chairman of the Board and CEO of Russian firm mail.ru who holds major investments in players like Facebook and Zynga. He became Chairman of mail.ru after global venture capitalist Yuri Milner stepped down. Grishin Robotics is Grishin’s own venture capital firm, which as you can tell from the name, invests in robotics startups.

“Investment in Double Robotics perfectly fits our strategy,” said Dmitry Grishin, founder of Grishin Robotics. “It is a consumer-oriented product with potential to fit a broad range of applications and has already generated strong consumer demand. It’s also important that the price of the product makes it accessible to the wide audience. In addition, the team has creative approach to design and is keen to build user-friendly products — both are very important focus areas for next-generation personal robotics companies. Double Robotics is well positioned to leverage the unique potential of the prominent telepresence robotics market. We have a great belief in Double Robotics team and its product.”

Linkage:

Check out Double Robotics Here

Check out Grishin Robotics Here

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Los Angeles Startup: Contur Launches To Turn Your Email Into Tasks!

When this pitch came across our editors box on Friday it was like Eureka. Los Angeles startup Contur has done something amazing with email. They’ve created a platform that beefs up the functionality of email, and the most important part of that, they’ve turned it into tasks.

When we have an idea for a longtail story or a feature story that requires more indepth reporting we typically add it to starred email and then set a reminder in the calendar to go back and work on it. The problem is the important starred email box fills up and the calendar does as well. This is hardly an effective process. Unfortunately with the volume of email we get, we sometimes get a reminder email from the startup we’re working with on the story.

If we could turn email into tasks, projects and add notes to them it would make our work flow go much better. Now thanks to Los Angeles startup Contur we can do that. The Contur app lets users treat any of their emails as tasks, organize them by projects, and add notes and non-email related tasks. Contur makes email more manageable and easier to put into context, manipulate, prioritize and search, moving users closer to “Inbox Zero.”

Contur CEO Justyna Wojick validates the fact that our current method of starring messages and making calendar entries is outdated at best.

“Contur is aimed at the 90 million knowledge workers and professionals in the United States who are experiencing email overload,” said Contur co-founder and CEO Wójcik said in a statement. “Contur takes email beyond such outdated tools as tags and priority inboxes, which have long lost their power to help users not only tackle the ever-growing volume of their incoming email, but to act on that volume as well.”

Monday-Friday we typically receive 300-500 email messages a day, making us power users by Contur standards. Contur was designed for power users and hopes to help get people to “inbox zero” something i haven’t seen in years.

“The demand is high for a solution like Contur to manage email inboxes; 500 people have already signed up on the Contur waitlist. In the United States alone, over a billion dollars are lost each year due to workers having to do necessary, but unproductive, tasks related to email, such as organizing them, keeping track of follow-ups, and other tasks. Contur will help recover some of that lost time and revenue,” added Wójcik.

Contur launched out of Start Engine the LA based accelerator founded by Howard Marks one of the co-founders of Actvision.

We’re on the Contur waitlist and can’t wait to use it. Contur is compatible with pop email and also gmail, or Google apps mail so most business power users can use it.

Linkage:

Check out and sign up for Contur here

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Los Angeles Startup: Swagsy Turns The Swag Bag Into A Flash Sale Platform INTERVIEW

We’ve reported on a handful of good Los Angeles area startups that are leveraging the celebrity power in Los Angeles for their companies.

LA startup 12 Society is spearheaded by rapper Nas (Nasir Jones) and he’s called on many of his influential friends from the hip hop, music, sports and celebrity communities to launch a “birch box” subscription startup with gadgets, toys and cool tech stuff. The monthly subscription box is curated by the stars and quickly had everyone in Los Angeles talking.

We’ve also reported on MoonShark a mobile gaming startup that was built as a partnership between the Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and Qualcomm. MoonShark leverages CAA’s roster of A-List celebrities to endorse, and build mobile gaming products with and around. Their latest project, Verticus is a collaboration between them and comic book icon Stan Lee.

Today we’re talking with Los Angeles startup Swagsy. This is a new online shopping and flash sales platform where the items that they are selling have been curated by a panel of “influential tastemakers”. Swagsy Co-Founder Grant Cohen, likens Swagsy to a flash sales site for things you would often times find in swag bags at A-list events. That’s also where the idea came from, as well as the name.

Swagsy’s curators recommend the type items from the top brands. From there Swagsy negotiates flash sale offers with the brands and manufacturers themselves, then their A-list tastemakers take to social media to help promote the brand, the item and the website.

No startup has tried to use celebrity power to back a flash sales model so far.

We got a chance to talk to Cohen in the interview below.

Los Angeles Startup: Stan Lee Partners With Moon Shark For Mobile Games Startup

(photo uproxx.com)

Legendary comic book artist and creator Stan Lee has partnered with Moonshark for a new mobile gaming startup. We covered the launch of MoonShark in June, the joint venture startup between the Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and Qualcomm. When MoonShark launched, they announced that they would draw from the long list of CAA clients to collaborate on mobile startups. This venture with Stan Lee is one of those collaborations.

The CAA roster includes hundreds of the most well known celebrities. At launch, MoonShark is working with movie star and recording artist Jennifer Lopez. MoonShark has released their first game, Dance Pad, in a partnership with Lopez. The game is a finger dancing game reminiscent of dance dance revolution, except instead of using your feet and other body parts, players use their fingers to tap to the music. The game packs over 100 levels featuring a soundtrack with over 30 top artists.

“Moonshark was formed to connect uniquely talented artists with the best independent mobile developers to bring amazing ideas to life as mobile games,” said Matt Kozlov, CEO of Moonshark. “Our mission is to keep the Moonshark pipeline full of creative, addictive titles and give talent the means to share their creativity with fans on cutting edge mobile platforms.”

Lee’s Pow! Entertainment is teaming up with MoonShark to create a new mobile action/adventure game called Verticus. Mobile continues to attract more and more celebrities and entertainers. According to VentureBeat, mobile could be the largest position in the entertainment market.

“Working closely with Moonshark to build characters and storylines for a mobile game has been a new and uniquely satisfying experience for me,” said Stan Lee, the founder, chairman and chief creative officer at Pow Entertainment. “Making Verticus is a new way for me to connect with my fans and reach a whole new group of people through their mobile devices.”

“For us, there is no one more legendary than Stan Lee,” said Matt Kozlov, the chief executive officer of Moonshark, in an interview with GamesBeat. “This is a man beloved by multiple generations, and he has created … I don’t know whether Walt Disney counts … probably the most successful characters of all time. It’s kind of insane.”

Verticus is just the beginning for Lee’s collaboration with MoonShark. They may do a sequel to Verticus or adapt other Stan Lee characters for future games.

Check out the trailer video below:

Linkage: