California Archives - Page 7 of 7

Two Startup Founders Selected To Attend The Kentucky Derby With Scott Case

Scott Case, Startup America, Kentucky Derby, Nibletz, Contest

Two lucky startup founders will join Startup America CEO Scott Case this weekend for the Kentucky Derby

The Startup America partnership recently held a video pitch challenge contest where member company founders could pitch for their chance to win a trip to the world famous Kentucky Derby. The derby is this weekend in Louisville Kentucky and kicks off the coveted Triple Crown of horse racing.

Once in Kentucky the two winners will enjoy spending time with the startup world’s most traveled man, Startup America CEO Scott Case. Ralph Acosta the founder of LA based SkuRun and Andrew Sell, the founder of Ocean NJ based HipCycle were chosen as the winners.

SkuRun delivers sales and marketing content to road warriors in real time. HipCycle offers upcycled home furnishings.

The tickets to the derby were provided by Nucleus: Kentucky’s Life Science and Innovation Center.

In addition to spending time with Scott Case, who was the founding CTO of Priceline.com, they will also spend some time with the Mayor of Louisville, Greg Fischer. The two winners will also participate in mentoring time with leading entrepreneurs.

The Startup America Partnership is an initiative of the Obama administration. They just recently added their 20th region. Startup Kentucky is just two weeks old. The most recent launch was Startup Indiana, last week.

Nibletz.com is a proud member of Startup America

Linkage:

For more information on Startup America visit here

Source: Bizjournals.com

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California Company Creates New Search Startup Called Gooey Search INTERVIEW

Google is the goto search for most of the people out there on the internet. Sure there is Bing and Yahoo (powered by Bing) that we use occasionally but we tend to default to Google. However, we’ve all noticed as Google grows bigger and bigger, and now especially after the implementation of Google+ in the search results, searching isn’t as accurate as it used to be.

Couple the accuracy issue with privacy concerns, and you may be looking for a new search engine. Privacy is a growing concern for many. While there is a novelty in searching for something and seeing like ads on the side bar, sometimes the ads get in the way and feel downright stalkerish.

All of those reasons are why San Luis Obispo, CA based company Visual Purple is bringing their Gooey Search product to market. GooeySearch is an app that compliments your Google experience. We got a chance to talk with GooeySearch for an interview here it is:

What is Gooey Search and Visual Purple

“Like most people, Google is our go-to search engine and we love the iPad.” Heinbockel says, “With the exception of PageRank, search has changed little compared to other technologies over the years and has yet to successfully venture beyond 10 blue links. That inspired us to optimize for the iPad our proven, professional-grade search technology for analysts and researchers, GisterPRO. Gooey makes search fun and brings a new dimension of accuracy, privacy, anonymity and content transparency to Google searches. We have set out to make an app for the iPad that will allow you to interact and explore Google results like never before.” The search app is slated to launch December 2012, pending full funding from Kickstarter supporters.

David Ostby and Ed Heinbockel were founding figures when Visual Purple. The Company has enjoyed being an industry leader in intelligent training simulations and technologies throughout the Virtual World, Embedded and Decision-Based training sectors. In 2011, Visual Purple publicly introduced GisterPRO, a Cloud-Powered Exploratory Search Tool that delivers precision, high-quality search results while often revealing unanticipated yet highly insightful concepts and relationships. The tool has been in continuous use since Fall 2010.

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San Diego Startup: TextaPet Is Picking Up Steam INTERVIEW

If you’re a pet lover you’re going to love this new innovative idea called TextaPet .It’s like a cross-breed (ya see what we did there) between Instagram, and Facebook for your pet.

TextaPet co-founder Matt Clevenger told Nibletz: “TextaPet is a fun, easy photo-sharing app for animal lovers. We created TextaPet to help make people’s relationship with the animals in their life even more meaningful and enjoyable. We also hope to use the technology to better connect new pet seekers with adoptable shelter pets! We see TextaPet saving thousands of precious lives each year.”

Sure there are plenty of ways to share your pet pics already but TexaPet is it’s own unique app and environment and it’s sure to be a huge hit with pet lovers. Although they haven’t released their user numbers, they’ve already created a good following on social media networks. They’ve amassed a following of 22,000 followers on Twitter already. Most of their reviews in the iTunes store echo the same thoughts, people have been waiting for an app like textapet.

Textapet’s other co-founder is Daniel Carpenter. The two met in their home town of Santa Cruz but they are in the process of relocating the company to San Diego. Both co-founders have entrepreneurial spirit in their blood and they both had started clothing lines in college.

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Chicago’s Lightbank Invests In Santa Monica Startup LifeCrowd

LifeCrowd is a Santa Monica based social startup that helps consumers participate in social events in their city. Lifecrowd users can browse activities ranging from a night full of board games, to rock climbing, band jamming, and wine tasting. They can then invite friends to join in the activities.

They’re different from other sites like Meetup. Meetup lets anyone create groups centered around one focus. LifeCrowd offers all kinds of singular events which strangers can join in on, and in effect be more social. LifeCrowd users create the events but LifeCrowd curates them to make sure only the best events show up.

This $5 million dollar round of financing was led by Chicago’s LightBank and included Bullpen Capital, Baroda Ventures and Prism VentureWorks. As part of the round Lightbank partner Paul Lee will join LifeCrowd’s board of directors. Lightbank is a venture firm formed by Groupon co-founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell.

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Interview: California Startup: Workers Count Giving Workers Everywhere A Voice

So I’m pretty sure everyone’s been there, you saw a cool job listed in the paper or maybe heard about some cool place to work right? Well then you start working and you realize that everyone is bitching about bad hours, cuts in pay, the boss is a jerk, or maybe you find the exact opposite and everything is great. Well a new California startup called WorkersCount is a resource that allows you to check that kind of thing out.

Co-Founder Myles Suer is in San Diego, he and co-founder Matt Weeks created WorkersCount which is a new mobile check in app that measures worker sentiment (how they feel about work) in the workplace. Weeks tells nibletz.com “It’s fun, safe, anonymous and empowering for workers at all levels. “. It’s a direct to consumer service.

Now let’s get something straight real quick this isn’t just a “bitching” service. They want users of WorkersCount to talk about the good and the bad. There are plenty of people out there who love their jobs and their perks. WorkersCount can be used to gauge a great employer and a not so great employer.

We got a chance to interview Weeks to find out all about WorkersCount and take a break from customer reward, loyalty and engagement startups, for at least a few minutes.

How did you come up with the idea?

We pivoted on this idea from another, more complicated idea we were working on. It hit us one day that the one pain workers have is that there is no real-time, consumer-provided information about what it’s like to work somewhere. It’s all monolithic by brand, yet today’s workers are hyper-connected via twitter, Facebook and LinkedIin… tons of information flies around, but it’s hard to sort the signal from the noise.

Briefly describe what you hope the end user will get out of the app/platform

By checking-in daily and engaging in the WorkersCount community, workers will be able to see where people just like them are thriving or struggling. They will be able to validate when their current role or company, warts and all, is the right place for them, or whether they need to start using the WorkersCount system to quietly start to sift and sort, compare and set alerts. All along the way they can see where their friends work and how those companies are comparing. The service is a fun and safe way to give “voice” to workers at all levels, and through the tweets, charts, indices and rankings we produce, they will be able to have real impact in driving accountability and a better workplace for themselves and others.

This is important to understand about our brand and our positioning: we work directly for consumers. This is not something that comes “down” to them from their employers. Thus we are accountable directly to users, not companies.

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