Chicago TechWeek Kicks Off With Screening Of Downloaded

Some consider Napster to be all about stealing music and pirating. Others consider Napster to be the pioneer for music services that are household names today like iTunes and Spotify.

Alex Winter calls it the story of one of Silicon Valley’s biggest failures and what it created. His new movie Downloaded chronicles the rise and fall of the first peer-to-peer file sharing service.

Last night 100 VIP’s, media, presenters, and entrepreneurs kicked off the Chicago Tech Week conference with networking, drinks, hor d’ouvres, and a viewing of Winter’s movie at the AMC theater in Downtown Chicago.

Originally, Winter wanted to do a dramatic movie, but he eventually decided a documentary would be more accurate. The film starts the Napster story when founders Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker were still teenagers. Winters went back several years and re-interviewed everyone that was involved.

Before the movie the audience got a look at the preview for Jobs, the new movie based on the legendary Steve Jobs, with Ashton Kutcher playing the main role. That too got big laughs from the audience of techies.

As for Downloaded, Winter has been showing the film at festivals and events. It was also shown during TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 back in May.

Napster paved the way for music consumption the way we have it today. Throughout the Q&A session Winter reminded the audience that what the record companies didn’t get was that Napster wasn’t about free, or stealing, as much as it was about convenience. That’s why Winter is an admitted Spotify user and never really caught onto iTunes or the more radio-style streaming services.

During the Q&A Winter talked about Lars Ulrich and his part of the Napster story. Metallica was very upset when one of their newest songs made its way to K-Rock before it was even finished. After some digging they found out that the track had been leaked via Napster. Metallica went through the trouble of identifying over 200,000 Napster users illegally sharing their songs and decided to print out the list and deliver it to Napster. It was an epic part of the movie.

Winter was asked if it was hard to get Ulrich to agree to the movie. He talked about how Ulrich was so upset about Napster, but for some reason praises Spotify.

Then the discussion turned to the very recent stories about Pandora and the lack of royalties artists are receiving. Earlier this week Pink Floyd and the band Cracker took to blogging about how they were seeing next to nothing in royalties from Pandora. Cracker’s front man David Lowry said publicly that for over 1,000,000 streams of their music, he received a whopping $17.

I asked Winter what he thought the perfect model would be.

“Well if I knew the answer I wouldn’t be here, I’d be on my yacht.”

He went on to explain his real answer. To him the perfect model would be for the labels to get back to cultivating artists like they did nearly 2 decades ago and embracing a model of technology that was convenient, easy, and instant. People would pay for that.

Check out the official Downloaded trailer here.

Chicago Tech Week started on Monday with events for the local tech community. The “TechWeek” conference kicks off this morning at 8am and has plenty of great speakers, startups, pitches, and parties. Stay tuned to Nibletz for up-to-the-minute coverage of all the best happenings.

Find more of our Chicago TechWeek coverage here.

Chicago Announces 2013 Moxie Award Winners

Built in Chicago held their second annual Moxie Awards on Thursday night at the swank Park West. Over 800 entrepreneurs, techies, and local dignitaries packed the ballroom for the awards, which highlight the city’s rapidly growing tech scene.

Chicago’s Mayor, Rahm Emanuel, who has been in the spotlight lately for his city’s climbing crime rate, took a break from the negative to highlight the positive. The event comes just a week before the national tech spotlight shines on Chicago Tech Week.

“The Chicago technology economy is vibrant and thriving,” said Mayor Emanuel, according to Built In Chicago. “The entrepreneurial spirit and innovation we see is creating jobs and opportunity now and will have an impact on the city for years to come. I look forward to working with all of these companies as they grow and evolve.”

Next week’s Tech Week event is expected to draw a crowd of a few thousand to Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, home to 1871. TechWeek will feature an exhibition area, several panels, and speakers including the creator of CRM, Mike Muhney, and the boisterous founder of MegaUpload, Kim Dotcom via video feed (Dotcom can not currently travel into the United States).

Here are the 2013 Moxie recipients, reported by Built In Chicago..

Best Consumer Web Startup: SpotHero

Best B2B Startup: Belly

Best Healthcare Startup: GiveForward

Best Education or Recruitment Startup: eSpark Learning

Mobile App of the Year: iAnnotate – Branchfire

Best Civic App: Chicago Bike Map App

Best Bootstrapped Startup: Branchfire

Best Startup Founders/Co-Founders: Marc Kiven, Mike Sands and Eric Lunt (BrightTag)

Best Service Provider: SurePayroll

Digital Agency of the Year: Rise Interactive

Mentor of the Year: Chuck Templeton (Impact Engine)

Investor of the Year: J.B. Pritzker (The Pritzker Group & New World Ventures)

Tech Woman of the Year: Shradha Agarwal (ContextMedia)

CTO of the Year: Harper Reed (Obama for America – 2012)

Best Beard: Jim Shea

Best Company Culture: Centro

Best Software Company: Sprout Social

Best Corporate Digital Innovation: Guaranteed Rate

Startup of the Year: Belly

Breakthrough Digital Company of the Year: Braintree

CEO of the Year: Mike Sands (BrightTag)

Nibletz is using Chicago startup Centup find out more here.

CentUp Comes to Nibletz, See What It Does

Have you ever read a great blog post and wished there was some way to show your support? Sure, you could leave a comment or tweet a link. That stuff’s great. But you know what content creators really need?

Cash. Just like the rest of us.

There’s been a slowly growing trend of micropayment companies in the last few years. The deal is that you, the reader, give a very small amount–even a few pennies–to your favorite bloggers or content companies when they create something you like. It’s another way of showing your gratitude and helping them stay in business. Win-win.

Now, though, Chicago company CentUp is upping the ante even more. Instead of transactions straight from consumer to content company, there’s a third party benefiting from your pennies: charities.

CentUp will take 10% of all donations, and the other 90% will be split evenly between 1 of 6 charities and the content provider. The charities include national nonprofits such as Love146 and The Fender Music Foundation. As the company grows, they plan to add more charities.

Nibletz is proud to be a CentUp publisher. Our button is right there at the top of each post. All you have to do is sign up with CentUp, then start clicking. Besides designating how much you want to give, you can also use the button to Tweet about your donation. It’s similar to a Facebook “like” button, but benefits a couple of great organizations.

For our part, we will use our portion to continue our Sneaker-Strapped Road Trip. This enables us to travel the country, get in the trenches with great startups, and talk to amazing investors. It’s also when we cover awesome events like SXSW and Southland, which starts tomorrow. In fact, the majority of our content (which we know you love!) comes from our Sneaker-Strapped Road Trip. Love Nibletz? Every little bit helps us continue to be the voice of startups everywhere else.

Window Shop Through Your Friends’ Lives With Chicago Startup flik

Chicago-based husband and wife team Chris and Tracy Hayes have launched flik, a new startup that promises to bring the best of Vine, Pinterest, and Yelp into one unique experience.

Using your iOS device’s camera, flik captures short video clips between 5-8 seconds. Then they are instantly shared across your social channels. But unlike Vine, the clips are full clips rather than snippets of video looped together. Flik is designed for users to create original content around the products and places they love. Nothing says review better than a quick video.

While the company is just now launching, flik had a very interesting set of beta testers. Hayes used his network of professional baseball players in both the minor leagues and Major League Baseball (MLB) and their wives to test out the new app. They all reportedly loved it.

Hayes has been a career baseball player since graduating college from Northwestern University. Hayes started his minor league career with the Burlington Bees, an A league affiliate of the Kansas City Royals in 2005. At age 29 in 2012 he played with the Long Island Ducks in the Atlantic League.

While other players talk shop, watch tape, and goof off while traveling, Hayes took it upon himself to learn how to code.

He handled all of the coding for flik, while the business operations, marketing, and “everything else” was done by Tracy. Tracy also attended Northwestern, but a few years earlier than her husband.

What does your company do?

flik is an iPhone app that allows users to upload short videos showing products and places they love.

Who are the founders, and what are their backgrounds?

The co-founders of flik are a married couple, Chris and Tracy Hayes. Chris is a professional baseball player who has a degree in Computer Science from Northwestern University who coded several web and iOS apps during his days as a ball player. He was the weirdo sitting at his locker, working on his computer in the clubhouse and on buses and planes. He is self-taught in iOS, but incredibly anal retentive when it comes to coding. His engineering brain is a nice complement to his wife, Tracy, who is much more of a big picture, out of the box thinker. Tracy also went to Northwestern, but she robbed the cradle a little bit, so they never met in college. Tracy has worked in Research & Information at McKinsey & Company and ran a successful consulting business before launching flik. Tracy and Chris equally came up with the idea for flik (but when asked separately, they would each tell you that they came up with the idea on their own and the other person had nothing to do with it), but Chris does all the coding, Tracy does everything else (including writing this Q&A … in the third person, of course).

Where are you based?

flik is based out of Chicago, but has been lucky enough to have a team of people all over the country (West Coast, Midwest and East Coast — with a special shout out to the app’s beta users in the South. Thanks y’all!).

What problem do you solve?

flik solves a problem for both consumers and for businesses. Oprah isn’t the only one who has a list of favorite things and, until flik, there hasn’t been an appropriate place for regular people to share the things they actually have and love with their social network. For businesses, there really hasn’t been a great way to get truthful, real-time feedback from their customers.

Why does it matter?

The video space is hot right now and users are craving purposeful videos that are also easy to create. There are a lot of really amazing apps out there that allow people to share aspirational things they love, but users aren’t posting their own stuff on those platforms because it can be intimidating to create professional-looking content. The awesome thing about flik is it’s not asking its users for artsy-fartsy, it’s looking for REAL. flik is an app for real people who use real stuff in their real lives and that’s what sets it apart. It’s a jeans and t-shirt kind of app — casual and laid-back, allowing people to connect through things they love and places they go. At the same time, flik is your favorite jeans and t-shirt kind of app — not some crappy t-shirt you got when you signed up for that airline rewards credit card. So the content on flik is real and its real-ness invites users to post original content, AND at the same time, it’s all cool stuff–stuff flik users love. Don’t care who you are, that matters, right there.

What are some of the milestones your startup has already reached?

The flik team has been lucky enough to beta launch within the Major League Baseball community of players and wives and get key feedback from people who travel a ton, have cool stuff, and are on social media all the time. flik’s users have viewed fliks over 20,000 times (the flik team thinks that’s pretty impressive for a small beta group!) and flik has just launched a pretty awesome new website and cool video. Also, within a day of our public announcement, we began receiving emails about being pre-approved to become Nigerian millionaires if we just send a small check to some random address. So, it looks like things are moving along smoothly.

What are your next milestones?

flik is looking to build out its website to be a fully functional web platform and release an Android version of the app as well as bring on a few pretty awesome fliksperts, (experts in a particular area) to share their favorite things. There may be a trip to Nigeria in there as well.

Where can people find out more?

flik’s new website is pretty awesome – the video is worth watching, especially the hair dryer who says, “Tell them how hot I get”. Here’s flik’s website: flikapp.com, our social media: @flikketyflik and facebook.com/flikapp.

When you say Jump, this Florida startup literally asks you, how high?

Crowdfunding For Charity Gone Wild With Chicago Startup VideoJuice

The latest innovative startup coming out of the windy city is a video startup focused on crowdfunding for charity. The company, called VideoJuice, is helping people raise money for their favorite charities through “challenges” or “stunts”.

With videojuice, if you’ve got an idea and a cause you can make a quick “video juice” video to encourage people to donate money on behalf of your cause. If you raise the money you set out to raise, you fulfill the challenge and your charity gets the money.

For example, Startup Grind Chicago organizer Tom Denison was one of the first to upload a “video juice” for his he wants to raise $1,000 for the Susan G Komen foundation. If he raises that money, through crowdfunding on the videojuice.co website, Denison will have to color his hair pink for a month.

Their hilarious promotional video shows people running in a Leukemia benefit in skin tight orange suits. Another one of the challenges in the video is a young man who picks up trash in a park wearing a french maid’s uniform.

Videojuice encourages users to be as creative and daring as possible. Presumably, the more interesting, or crazy, your stunt is the more likely it is to raise more money. There’s even a videojuice posted right now where the person who created has pledged to play golf in a dress and high heels if he can raise $1000 for the Jimmy V cancer foundation.

So what’s your cause and what are you willing to do for it? Head over to videojuice.co

VideoJuice and Startup Grind Chicago were major sponsors for our TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 Coverage.

Chicago Startup Project Travel Launches Peerfunding For Students For Educational Travel

It seems that more and more things we did as younger students are making their way to online platforms. Memphis startup Boosterville is disrupting the school fundraiser and bringing it online and to the mobile phone. Gradfly is helping students manage their online portfolio. Boston startup Abroad101 is the trip advisor for students studying abroad, and that’s just a few.

Now, a Chicago startup called ProjectTravel has launched their crowdfunding platform to the public.

ProjectTravel allows students that are going on educational trips to crowdfund that trip well beyond their tiny network of local family members who have been left holding the boot.

“We help students take an active role in affording their program when financial aid and scholarships aren’t enough,” said Jennifer Thomas, Project Travel Founder & CEO. “Financial barriers should not block a motivated person from having an educational travel experience.”

Project Travel partners with academic institutions, non-profit and third-party program providers to help more students and program participants go abroad, while directly advising them on how to successfully peer-fund and offering online international education resources. The fundraising platform launched its private beta in January 2013 and has been honing the online experience for travelers in preparation for its public launch. Taking advantage of current web design trends and online crowd-funding best practices, the platform offers a user-friendly way for Project Starters to connect with potential donors and supporters.

Thomas has just completed an extensive beta test of the platform and sure enough there is wide interest. Now the “peer funding” site is launched and anyone who is raising money and support for educational travel experience through a school or organization can use the platform. To Project Travel, educational travel includes: studying abroad, volunteering, interning, teaching, service language, language and cultural exchanges and much more.

Project Travel vets all of the applicants before their projects show up on the site but they’ve left the criteria incredibly open ended so almost anyone can take advantage of it that has a legitimate educational travel mission planned.

You can find out more about Project Travel here.

Check out this other recently launches Chicago travel startup BTSocial, the social network for business travelers.

Chicago’s Startup Community Announces New Founder’s Circle

Chicago is a special place for startups. Despite a crazy warped opinion from Pando Daily a while back, people have started to see Chicago’s thriving entrepreneurial and startup ecosystem for what it really is.

While the verdict is out on the actual success of Groupon, we can’t discount the story of it’s rise to fame and popularity from it’s downtown Chicago headquarters. Despite the fact that ousted CEO Andrew Mason is retreating to Silicon Valley, Groupon, like Belly and GrubHub are products of the Chicago startup ecosystem.

While Groupon, Belly, GrubHub, Lightbank, SimpleRelevance and others are names a lot of tech entrepreneurs from across the country know, what’s really amazing is the success that the 1871 incubator has had since it opened it’s doors. 1871 has housed 225 startup companies, creating 800 jobs. 1871 companies have generated $12.7 million dollars in revenue and drew $27.6 million in venture capital. Of course we can’t forget to mention that Chicago is home to one of the newest Techstars programs.

With this wild growth at just one address (albeit a gigantic one) in downtown Chicago, the entrepreneurial leaders in the city announced Wednesday the formation of Chicago Founder’s Circle (CFC). CFC is a new Peer-to-Peer Networking Group offered exclusively to Founders and CEOs of emerging growth companies in Chicago, with a focus on supporting and nurturing the expanding and vibrant emerging growth company community in the region.

CFC was founded by thought leaders actively involved in the emerging growth sector from a variety of different Chicago-focused organizations, including: DLA Piper, Lightbank, Northwestern University, Deloitte, Dignitas, NEA, and Silicon Valley Bank. CFC is structured as an annual group of 25-30 entrepreneurs who will be invited to participate in a series of four events that will offer them the opportunity to connect with one another and listen to prominent speakers. A fifth networking event will serve as a “graduation” type event that will bring together the current class and, in future renditions, alumni from previous CFC classes.

“We created the Chicago Founders Circle because of the amazing entrepreneurial talent that exists in Chicago,” said Greg Grossman, Partner at DLA Piper. “By connecting world-class mentors, advisors and investors with Chicago’s most successful entrepreneurs, we’ll have the opportunity to contribute to the local economy in a very profound way. The CFC leadership team is excited to use its collective knowledge and skills to foster the growth of these companies and help these entrepreneurs succeed.”

“There is a growing and burgeoning startup ecosystem that has been building in Chicago for a while now,” added Bill Pescatello, Principal at Lightbank. “Last year alone saw a record-breaking $391 million in funding awarded to 197 local startups, which confirms the need and opportunity for a peer-to-peer networking group in Chicago. Our hope is that CFC will become one of the anchors of Chicago’s start-up community for today’s industry leaders and the future generation of motivated, young power players.”

Here’s more Chicago startup coverage at nibletz.com The Voice of Startups Everywhere Else.

Chicago’s GrubHub And New York’s Seamless Merging To Dominate Food Ordering Market

Chicago based food ordering startup GrubHub and New York based food ordering startup Seamless have announced that the two companies will merge, pending regulatory approval.

GrubHub’s co-founder Matt Maloney will become the combined company’s CEO while Seamless’ CEO Jonathan Zabusky will serve as the new company’s President. A new name for the combined entity has not been announced. Both companies have said they don’t plan on reducing staff. GrubHub employs around 350 people while Seamless employs 300 people.

GrubHub hosted Startup America Regional Champion’s during last October’s Startup America Summit. During that event we enjoyed breakfast, a tour of the company’s new offices and keynote sessions by Maloney, Scott Case and later in the day Brad Keywell of Groupon and LightBank fame.

While rivals GrubHub and Seamless were responsible fora reported $875 million dollars in food sales to local restaurants bringing in over $100 million dollars in revenue.

“We have the luxury of having two amazing brands right now. Honestly, we don’t have plans to consolidate brands at this time,” Matt Maloney, CEO and co-founder of GrubHub, told ABC News. “We are looking to position ourselves as a combined unit within this massive industry.”

Maloney acknowledged that Seamless has a great iPad app. 30% of each company’s business is currently coming from mobile an area where Maloney sees the need for improvement with GrubHub. GrubHub offers in-restaurant tablet technology which could (and probably will) combine with the tablet offerings for Seamless.

The combined company will have a stable of over 500 cities and 20,000 local takeout locations.

The GrubHub Seamless merger lost some of it’s thunder once Yahoo announced the acquisition of Tumblr.

Shark Tank’s Daymond John Invests Time & Money In Chicago Startup Resultly

It’s gotta be exciting for Resultly founder Ilya Beyrak who just two months ago penned a blog post on the companies blog about what “I’m Out” means on the hit reality series Shark Tank. Now, Beyrak and the team at Resultly are celebrating bringing Fubu Founder and Shark Tank Shark, Daymond John on board as an investor.

More importantly though, John is excited about the product and part of his investment is a partnership where he will help the team grow their product that allows people to search for something and then get updated on it.

“Kim Kardashian sent a tweet last year stating how she keeps checking eBay for a pair of shoes everyday that’s sold out,” Beyrak said, . “If even Kim can’t find a pair of shoes and keeps repeatedly checking online, imagine how many others suffer the same fate,”

Resultly provides users with a mobile app to stay on top of all their interests. Tapping into the web’s largest ecommerce, travel, news, and social sites lets Resultly bring users items exactly matching their interest the second they hit the web. Resultly aims to eliminate the need for users to continue checking the Internet for updates on the things they care most about.

“When I first tried Resultly, I was blown away by the product in the first couple seconds of playing with it. It easily solves one of the biggest problems with search in a way that all of the big competitors aren’t addressing,” said John. “It was hard not to get excited about the product and additional value that I could bring.” Resultly realized there was a real world problem of users repeating search behavior online to get the freshest content: the need for constantly checking if something has been added or updated online. Thru its service, once a specific interest is added to a users’ account, Resultly stays on the lookout for things matching that interest automatically. Users then receive detailed alerts to their mobile device with the key information around those items. Products receive key information like images, price, color, and condition, while Job alerts show salary, location, and position.

John invested in Resultly throgh his “shark branding” investment arm. Sharkbranding scours the country to find interesting startups and companies that would compliment John’s current portfolio of companies or that would make great partners. We met SharkBranding’s, Jared Nixon, at the GigTank Investor Day in Chattanooga Tennessee last August.

Shark Tank’s Mark Cuban leads $1 million dollar round for Florida startup.

Chicago Startup BTSocial Launches The Social Network For Business Travelers

At Chicago Techweek 2012 we met Tim Hines the founder of BT Social. BT Social is “The Business Traveler’s Social Meeting Place”. It’s geared towards business travelers that travel a lot. Whether they travel by plane,train or automobile, as long as they stay in hotels and “travel” this is a place for them.

Think about that George Clooney Movie Up In The Air, where Clooney plays the role of a man who travels all over the country firing people. He lives a very disconnected life, he is rarely home and then meets a woman who travels just about as much as him. They spend the night they meet each other comparing loyalty cards and loyalty status for airlines and hotels.

Although it’s just a movie there are people out there in the world that travel as much as Clooney does in the movie.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could make travel buddies. You could find out if one of your travel buddies is in the hotel lounge that you’re staying at or maybe picking up a bite down the road. You could share travel itineraries with friends a lot and get alerts when you and one of your travel buddies is in the same city/state as you.

Well now you can as BTSocial has finally launched to the public.

The BTSocial team is solving the traveler’s problem of drinking alone at hotel bars or reading the same tired newspapers during airport layovers. The new app puts the power of networking in the hands of business travelers while on their trips. “Business travelers can now find current friends and colleagues and meet new ones through the app,” said Tim Hines, President. “The app is for business travelers looking to get out of their hotel rooms and create a social experience by meeting other travelers in real life,” he continued.

Built for the mobile web, the BTSocial Travel App is accessible on web-enabled phones, tablets and traditional web browsers. “We built a responsive app so that it works on any device business travelers prefer,” said Karl Jackson, CTO. “All of our features, including check-ins, function on any device. Plus users can avoid the clutter of a multitude of apps on their devices,” Karl continued.

The app’s features are what really set it apart from other travel tools. Users can check-in to any location around the world, whether it is a specific venue or an entire city. Once checked-in, users are visible to other users within the vicinity. “Checking-in is our way of raising your hand and saying ‘Hi. I’m here and I’d like to network,’” said Hines. “Check-ins are what truly drive the social experience of the app.”

Users can also use the Trips feature to plan to network during their travel downtime. Unlike other travel apps, it doesn’t ask for your itinerary, but focuses on the gaps of time during trips. When users create a trip, they can enter gaps like layovers or time between meetings to meet other travelers. The Trips feature also allows users to see other travelers that share similar gaps of time to entice meeting up.

The most unique feature of the app is Socials, where users can plan their own social events during their trips. Whether hanging out in the hotel bar or airport lounge, users can create a Meetup using the simple feature and invite other travelers. In addition, the events are visible to users that check-in in the vicinity.

In addition to the social features, users can also store their loyalty account numbers to avoid carrying those pesky cards. That’s not all, BTSocial even packed in a stats tracker so users can see how active they are on the app.

For more information on the BTSocial Travel App and to access it today, visit app.BTSocial.com.

Check out this Chicago startup that’s caught first lady Michelle Obama’s eye.

If You Lose It, Chicago Startup Crowdfynd Wants To Help You Find It

Lost and found is pretty boring and in a lot of respects, un-effective says Pinaki Saha CTO and co-founder of Chicago startup Crowdfynd. Currently, the traditional vehicles for lost and found are not nearly as effective as they could be using the broad scope and reach of the internet.

Unfortunately too many of us know the ritual of printing out signs for a lost dog or cat and stapling them to every tree and lamp post in the neighborhood. We also know too well that losing something of value can prove fruitless unless you happen to stumble upon some very honest people. In other cases, items that some people have lost are extremely valuable to them, and could be perceived as junk to others.

Sure there is a lost and found section on Craigslist but even the most regular of Craigslist users don’t check that section everyday. So why not create an app for that.

That’s what Crowdfynd is all about. It’s a social platform and community using the crowd to help locate the things you lose or find. It can also be used for crime reporting.

How it works.

Using your iPhone or Android device you can report things you’ve lost or found. You can upload pictures of the lost item if you have them, or pictures of where you think you may have lost an item. You can also upload pictures of things you find. Crowdfynd connects the finders and the losers to make a match and get things back to where they belong.

Saha says that Crowdfynd offers social, local, mobile and 3.0 components to make it stick. They also have a reward platform as well. People who lose items can offer a reward and collect it through the system insuring the safe return of the item. Saha has found people are offering rewards in the hundreds of dollars. He says that cat owners are offering rewards in the thousands of dollars.

They also have an offline hybrid where someone who loses something can print out signs to hang up in the neighborhood that directs them back to their Crowdfynd page.

People are chiming in because there’s a “Goodwill” factor about helping people. Crowdfynd is also hoping to partner with businesses too like cab companies, airports, hotels and restaurants where people are known to lose things. They hope by building up their network that they can be the one destination for people who lose and find things.

In order to do this though, Crowdfynd is going to need to build tremendous scale, very quickly. Saha says they’re prepared for that and have a lot of money they are going to invest in marketing and getting the name out there. They plan on unveiling the service in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco to compliment their first market, and their home market, Chicago.

Check out our video interview with Saha below and for more information visit crowdfynd.com

You can find more of our startup coverage from TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 here.

Techstars Chicago Reveals First Class!

Techstars Chicago revealed their first class today. Back in February Techstars announced that Excelerate Labs the Chicago based accelerator that operates out of the 1871 space was becoming TechStars Chicago. They began taking applications at that time and announced the first cohort on Thursday.

This first official “Techstars Chicago” class will start May 28th and end on August 28th. TechStars Chicago participants will receive a round of seed funding, work space, an intense startup curriculum and mentorship from one of the best accelerator mentor networks in the world.

As with all the Techstars classes there is a wide range of startups across SoLoMo, healthcare, big data, analytics and even fitness.

Here is a complete list of the 10 startups that made it into the first Chicago cohort, as originally posted on the Techstars blog.

CaptureProof – The platform through which patients can securely and easily share photos and videos with their doctors.

HIPOM – A cloud-based solution that gives parents total control of the Internet access on all devices in the home.

Nexercise – A mobile app that makes fitness fun through the use of friendly competition, smart alerts and real rewards.

Pathful – A Web analytics platform that captures every visitor interaction with every element on a website automatically, making it easier for marketers and designers to understand visitor behavior.

Peoplematics – A cloud-based search platform that unlocks the data users store in the cloud with intuitive search and sharing across applications.

Project Fixup – A digital matchmaker that fixes people up on fun one-on-one dates.

SimpleRelevance – An analytics-driven email marketing platform that provides customized digital communication for every customer and every message.

SocialCrunch – The marketing data provider presents a new way to unlock the most provocative human insights for brands and their agencies.

Sqord, Inc. – The fitness platform that makes healthy, active play more fun for kids by allowing them to compete and earn points for everyday activities.

TradingView – A browser-based community for investors and traders to share and discuss their ideas.

Check out these other startup accelerator stories.

Chicago Startup Birdfeud Is Building Debates (Feuds) Around Brands [interview]

It’s no secret that debates that fill up a comment section on any blog, tech site, journal or review site, provide a very high level engagement. Not only are the debaters engaging but more and more viewers hone in on the best debates and watch them grow.

A Chicago startup, called Birdfeud is taking advantage of that instinctive behavior, and turning it in such a way that brands and agency’s benefit from the engagement. The company is targeting any brand that wants to target users with high engagement topics. In essence they are marketing brands in a very deliberate way that appears absolutely non deliberate.

It seems to be a method that’s creating success for the Chicago startup based at 1871.

All of the founders previously worked together at Spartz Media, a social media agency that served over 160 million pageviews per month. It was there that they observed first hand how arguments, debates and feuds sparked engagement that was off the richter scale.

Now, through their own startup, users can join into hot button discussions and debate while simultaneously being exposed and engaging with brands. While the concept may seem unorthodox in the social media space, when you take a look back at what they’re doing it’s actually genius.

We got a chance to interview Andrew Parnell, co-founder and CEO of Birdfeud. Check out the interview below.

What is BirdFeud?

Birdfeud is a social marketing company with a B2B focus. Our products help brands and agencies connect with and engage end users.

In layman’s terms, how does it work? (In other words how would you explain it to your grandmother)

A lot of people use social networks like Facebook and Twitter. They discuss, argue with each other, and have passionate conversations about all sorts of different topics, including brands and companies. We let those brands and companies gain value from these conversations by bringing the conversation to their web site while still maintaining the social element.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

The founders previously worked at Spartz Media, where we cut our teeth on social media and the internet startup climate. We helped grow the business to 25 employees serving 160 million pageviews per month to an engaged audience of millions.

Andrew Parnell (CEO) has a background in business administration, consulting, and project management. Working at the Acquity Group he advised companies like General Motors and the New York Philharmonic.

Andrew Weber (Director of Technology) has a deep development and technical architecture background, heading up the development team at his previous business as well as running the Midwest Sports Car Club.

Vladimir Jornitski (Director of Information) has an educational background in economics and an operational background in project management at Thomson Reuters, data analysis, and research management.

Henry Vasquez (Director of Marketing) has a background in operations and political science, and is the Vice President of Operations at Spartz Media.

Where are you based?

We’re based out of the startup coworking space 1871 in Chicago, IL.

What’s the startup scene/culture like where you’re based?

Through enthusiastic public and private development Chicago is advancing itself substantially as a startup center. Working at 1871 allows us to be in the locus of activity for this development, meeting a lot of people working in adjacent or similar problem spaces that we can learn from and help out in turn.

How did you come up with the idea for BirdFeud?

We’ve been working in both the social space and with companies and brands for some time. Initially, we began by looking at the current limitations of social networks like Twitter from a user perspective- difficulty seeing the best content, lack of managing ongoing conversations- and then unified it with our understanding of the limitations of social media from a brand management perspective, following on from conversations that we had with companies having difficulty getting social to work for them.

How did you come up with the name?

Birdfeud’s name was settled on fairly quickly as a catchy conflation of the ideas of debating and group participation that are core to the use of the tool.

What problem does BirdFeud solve?

Companies and brands, even those with a strong social focus, have trouble actually making social media generate value for their business. Follower counts grow but most of the audience that brands reach never come back, and certainly don’t engage with the brand on a consistent basis. Birdfeud solves this problem by engaging end users in topics relevant to both their interests and the brand that gets the ball rolling on the conversation.

What’s your secret sauce?

Birdfeud leverages the open access Twitter and Facebook APIs to embed social content (Twitter tweets and Facebook posts) into an embeddable iframe. This allows for a business or brand to embed that social content, algorithmically sort it, and manage it, right on their website. The conversation will continue in social channels- with links pointing back to the website, Facebook page, or other promotional vehicle for the brand.

Are you bootstrapped or funded?

Birdfeud is currently on bootstrapped funding, although we’re currently looking to raise about $200,000 for a round of funding. We’d be more than happy to talk to any potential investors for part or all of our funding request; let us know at parnell@birdfeud.com .

What are some milestones you’ve achieved?

August 2012: We had a fully functional beta of Birdfeud live on our website, http://www.birdfeud.com/ .

September 2012: We started onboarding ‘case study’ clients to prove out the ability to engage users.

February 2013: We ‘go to market’ to start finding paying clients.

Present Day: We have 4 signed contracts for paying clients and are beginning conversations with enterprise level customers for larger campaigns.

What’s your next milestone?

We’re looking to have 10 paying clients launched by the end of March and are currently on pace to do so. Past that, we’re looking to be a profitable company by EOY 2013 with 50+ paying clients on-boarded.

What’s one challenge you’ve overcome in the startup process?

We initially began with a more B2C focus: “let’s fix what we don’t like about social media.” Pivoting to our current B2B focus was a choice that took us out of the realm of areas that we were, with our business experience, fully familiar with. In the end we had to make an analysis of what the best opportunity for our product was and what the correct alignment was between our solution and the actual problems out there in the market. A rational examination and the willingness to potentially venture into a business own paid off, with our business now much more clearly milestoned.

Who are some of your mentors and business role models?

We’ve been able to draw upon a fantastic support and advice network while building our business out in Chicago. David Culver at VentureSHOT has given us invaluable advice for getting the business sustainable and taking it to market. We’ve also been able to draw upon the experience of other mentors like Robert Jordan of InterimCEO, Corey Angst at Notre Dame University, Mike Moyer, Jay Lindgren, and Kevin Willer.

What’s next for BirdFeud?

As stated above, we’re currently in the sales phase for Birdfeud, really proving the model out with clients across our target range (from bloggers to small businesses to larger enterprise clients). We’ll continue to garner data and feedback from clients as we look to develop the tool further. We’re also looking towards our current funding round to really be able to scale the model out and reach more agencies and enterprise clients at the top end.

Where can people find out more?

There’s a lot of information about Birdfeud available at our website, http://www.birdfeud.com . Those interested in contacting us as potential clients can also look at http://www.birdfeud.com/partners or email our CEO at parnell@birdfeud.com . Finally, Birdfeud can (of course) be found on Twitter: @birdfeud .

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Chicago Reviews Startup G2Crowd Taking On Gartner Not Yelp

The Chicago based team behind Big Machines, a company that specializes in cloud based product configuration, and sold to Vista Equity Partners and JMI Equity at a valuation of more than $100 million dollars is back. This time they’ve attacked a problem that IT professionals and companies around the world are having every day; finding great reviews on software.

Their video explains it best, you’re not going to ask a car dealer for his “honest opinion” on the vehicle you’re looking at. If you do, you’re going to get whatever it takes to sell the product. You’re not going to look to tech review magazines and online sites because they’re riddled with “product placement” and paid for reviews.

So G2Crowd decided to create a community of crowdsourced reviews from actual users. Today they have over 2500 members and 10,000 ratings on various software packages, mostly aimed at enterprise companies.

A company with 500-10,000 employees is looking at a pretty big capital expenditure when it comes to CRM software, or other productivity software. Licenses can run in the tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

G2Crowd offers users, or readers, a much more rounded picture of the products they may end up purchasing.

You would think that a startup like this was coming directly at Yelp, however TechCrunch reports that’s not the case at all. While serving the needs of software purchasers with reviews, they’ll also provide a paid for research service, much like Gartner and other companies like it. With their broad range of reviews, and user base they plan on offering these research reports at a much lower cost, like $99.

After their first successful exit with BigMachines, when CEO and co-founder Godard Abel launched G2Crowd they naturally decided to remain in Chicago. We talk with the G2Crowd team about Chicago’s startup scene and what they’re doing differently in the reviews space with G2Crowd. Check out the interview below:

What is your startup, what does it do?

G2 Crowd is a site for trusted reviews of business software. We are changing the game by creating a motivated community of real users sharing real reviews in real time so companies can select software in much the same way that we use reviews on Yelp or Amazon to pick a restaurant or hotel. New insights based on authentic reviews encourage informed decisions and collective learning; companies can use G2 Crowd to compare software and find the one that’s right for them based on the experiences of actual users.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

Godard Abel, cofounder/CEO

Matt Gorniak, cofounder/COO

Tim Handorf, cofounder/Products

Mark Myers, cofounder/Design

Mike Wheeler, cofounder/Engineering

The cofounders all worked together at another company, BigMachines, which was founded by Godard. After the successful sale of BigMachines, they were looking for a new project and started G2 Crowd. More info on the team can be found here.

What is the startup culture like in Chicago?

Overall, it’s enthusiastic and supportive. We know we’re not Silicon Valley or New York, but the startups here embrace the underdog role and make the best of it. There are lots of events and resources for entrepreneurs to connect with each other.

What problem does your startup solve?

The current approach to buying business technology is broken. Buyers spend too much time sifting through spin, reading outdated analyst reports, and sitting through endless meetings. After all this, buyers still lack the confidence in their choice of technology, and most projects fail to meet their expectations. Because most companies choose new systems only every few years, they lack the expertise to efficiently select the best software, and most have nowhere to turn for input from peers implementing similar systems for similar companies. Also, traditional technology analysts such as Gartner rely on a legacy model of highly paid experts publishing their opinions only every two years or so, with a focus on products from large vendors that are typically also clients of the same analysts. This process delays the emergence of more innovative solutions, and buyers might miss newer technologies that could be a better fit.

What is one challenge that you’ve overcome in the startup process?

The initial process of getting our site live. Putting together a site that we were ready to show off was a ton of work, but we also had to balance that with just getting something out there. It’s very tempting to wait until the site is as close to perfect as possible before standing it up, but it was important to us to approach this from the lean startup perspective and get something out there. Since the first version of our site went live, we’re continuously getting feedback and making changes and improvements based on what our users tell us.

What are some of the milestones your startup has achieved?

We now have nearly 2,500 users and more than 10,000 ratings and reviews of business software.

We decided on, pursued and launched our first product that would bring in revenue.

We’ve grown the team to 9 full-time employees.

What are your next milestones?

Our next milestones revolve around our premium research. We also always have goals with regard to the size of our user base and the number of reviews we have. We’re constantly focused on growing the community and gathering a critical mass of data.

Who are your mentors and role models?

We look to entrepreneurs like Richard Branson and Marc Benioff for inspiration on innovation and developing and sustaining a successful company. All of us have read Peak by Chip Conley and The Lean Startup by Eric Ries; in fact, those two are required reading for anyone who joins our team. The concepts in those books help shape our company.

What are some of the advantages/disadvantages growing your startup outside of Silicon Valley?

The startup environment here is so much more supportive than Silicon Valley. Instead of intense competition and scrutiny, startups here tend to work together and root for each other, which is encouraging. The Chicago area provides a large pool, and we also like being in the midst of thousands of companies that use business software and represent prospective customers and users of our site. There aren’t too many disadvantages, but one would be that most of the major tech events happen out there, so we have to travel to get to them.

What’s next for your startup?

We’ll be broadening our focus into other categories in addition to CRM. We’re also going to be rolling out more tools to help companies with the software selection process, and we’ll be exploring ways for our users to connect with each other and more directly share their expertise.

Where can people find out more?

People can head to www.g2crowd.com to find out more. Follow them on Twitter @G2Crowd.

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