Cincinnati Archives - Page 6 of 6

Cincinnati Startup: Tracour To Call Bull Crap On Tech Rumors

Will the iPhone 5 have 4G? Is there a 7″ iPad in the works? Will the next Samsung Galaxy device support telepathy? Will the next Motorola Droid support teleporting? If you are a regular reader of tech blogs, (and stopping by here is probably a strong indicator that you are), then you’ve heard your share of tech rumor bullcrap.

A lot of sites rely on third parties that can’t give up all the juice for fear that they would lose their jobs. Other tech sites simply produce great looking documents using photoshop, and then some are too lazy to do any fact checking. Outside of that, every once in a while, legitimate “ninjas” or internal sources actually get something mixed up or a leak they have gets shelved.

Well have you ever tried to keep score?

Sites like The Verge, Engadget , Tech Crunch and Business Insider try and keep score on the hottest rumors about the hottest gadgets, all the while keeping people grounded in what they believe is the truth and what they believe is a little fiction.

Now, you guessed it, there’s an app for that.

Cincinnati based Tracour was first reported on by our friends at TNW. The premise is simple. The platform functions as a database of sorts then it collates technology rumors and attributes them to their respective authors. When it’s all said and done and it’s time for the rumor to come out, or the device to be released, Tracour keeps score of how correct the rumors actually were.

Brad Sams, the creator of NeoWin and Tracour has his work cut out for him. There are a lot more bloggers, analysts and journalists than there even were two years ago. Just think 18 months ago everyone at The Verge worked at Engadget, Mike Arrington was still pretending to be happy at AOL and there was no Pando Daily.

Tracour is actually a great tool for other blog authors and of course readers. In our days of publishing Thedroidguy while we produced a ton of fresh content everyday, we often went late on the “rumor dejour” because they hadn’t been vetted properly. Sometime it meant we missed a story and other times it meant we saved face by not publishing some ridiculous nonsense. TNW actually does a great job of not pushing the crap out but with Sams’ tool you’ll be able to visualize an author or websites credibility.

In a day and age when even the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have pulled the trigger on a loose lead, Tracour will be a welcome edition to the blogsphere, and of course for others that rely on their fake informants and photoshopped documents, their antics will now have a scorecard. Bravo Brad and Tracour!

Linkage:

Source: TNW

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Utah Startup: CrowdHall Moving To Cincinnati For The Brandery INTERVIEW

Imagine if you could mix a social network, reddit,crowdsourced answers and a town hall meeting into one platform that wasn’t an absolute train wreck. Now imagine if you could use that platform to host virtual conferences, discussions with elected officials, or even with your blog audience (yeah we can’t wait to try it). Now stop imagining because that’s what the founders of CrowdHall are doing.

The founders hail from “everywhere else” As you’ll see in the interview there we could credit this startup to Salt Lake City, San Diego, Washington DC and now Cincinnati, as CrowdHall was selected for the 2012 class at the Brandery.

At the Brandery CrowdHall will refine their product and make a go of a truly unique startup.

CrowdHall works like this:

Say you’re an active citizen and you noticed in your neighborhood all the playground equipment was getting old and dangerous. You would probably write city hall or call city hall and get back some kind of form response that says they’ll look into it. You may try again and get the same answer. Heck you could even go to the city hall meeting and get the same answer, they’ll look into it.

Now with CrowdHall you may be able to find your local City Councilman. You could ask the City Councilman about the playground equipment. Then you could tell your friends that you asked on CrowdHall and they could in turn, come and vote up your question. Now your Councilman sees that you have a very valid issue. He can answer you and all the other neighbors you recruited in a one on one way but in a public facing setting where the other could also comment.

Now if the Councilman agrees with you, he could help get the playground equipment issue resolved, voila!

This can also be used for bloggers to source questions in a similar way and discussion format, even rock stars, entertainers, business speakers, and just about anyone who has a “crowd” could benefit from CrowdHall.

As the CrowdHall team prepares to move to Cincinnati next week for this session of the Brandery, we got a chance to talk with Jordan Menzel, Co-Founder and COO of CrowdHall. Check that interview out, after the break
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Cincinnati’s The Brandery Announces 2012 Startup Class, And It Starts Young

Earlier we reported on Louisville Kentucky startup Impulcity and the fact that they would be headed up to Cincinnati for this years class at the Brandery. The Brandery is a marketing focused Cincinnati incubator. All of the companies selected to participate in the 2012 session receive $20,000 in seed capital and will participate in a 14 week program that includes free office space, mentoring, working with some of the top marketing and advertising people in the country and access to venture capitalists.

To date the Brandery has graduated 14 startups since 2010. This year’s class is 11 startups deep and the ages of these entrepreneurs range from 17 years old to 45. It’s a mix of Cincinnati based startups, to startups from across the US. However the Brandery received applications from over 40 different countries and received twice as many applications as the previous two years combined.

Enterchange reports that Rujul Zaparde is the youngest in the class at 17. His co-founders in their New Jersey based startup FlazCar are Shri Ganeshram and Kevin Petrovic, both of whom are just 18 themselves. Details were stealthily as to what they would be working on however Laura Baverman of Enterchange reports that these three high school buddies started a non profit that’s built 50 wells in India serving 80,000 residents. One word: Impressive.

At 45, Vinay Murthy is the oldest member of the class. Murthy left a position at Google where he helped develop Adsense, Adwords and also worked on YouTube among other things. His startup, with co-founder Vikram Venkataraghavan is called 360pager, and again there’s word on exactly what they are doing.

Here’s the full list of startups in this years class as reported by Enterchange at Cincinnati.com:

Brooklyn, NY: Off Track Planet, Freddie Pikovsky, 29, and Anna Starostinetskaya, 29.

Chicago: Ontract, Julian Miller, 31, and Matt Duch, 26.

Cincinnati: Modulus, Charlie Key, 28, Brandon Cannaday, 28, and Richard Key, 24, (moving back home from Tucson).

Cincinnati: VouchedFor, Michael Bergman, 33, David Volker, 31, Bree Bergman, 31, Stephen Hartz, 34.

Cleveland: Flock’d, Greg Svitak, 37, and Kurt Pettit, 34. According to its website, Flock’d is a mobile application that lets groups check-in at bars and request rewards from the bars’ owners or managers.

Louisville: Impulcity, Hunter Hammonds, 21, and Austin Cameron, 22. They’ve already received some press in Louisville for a plan to use data from a person’s social media presence to recommend events and venues that fit his or her interests.

New York: Socstock, Jay Finch, 26, and Angelo Stracquatanio, 25. Its website describes an online platform that helps small businesses raise capital from their community of supporters, in return for future goods and services at the business.

New Jersey: FlazCar, Rujul Zaparde, 17, Shri Ganeshram, 18, and Kevin Petrovic, 18.

Salt Lake City: CrowdHall, Austin Hackett, 27, Jordan Menzel, 27, and Nick Wientge, 34, of San Diego (and Cincinnati native). A website for the company calls it a free online platform that lets high-profile people respond to public discourse and lets crowds more effectively communicate with those high-profile people.

San Francisco: 360Pager, Vinay Murthy, 45, and Vikram Venkataraghavan, 36.

Seattle: FlyDutch, Andy Zhang, 26, George Lin, 26, and Sean Wen, 27. According to a profile on AngelList, a site that matches startups and investors, FlyDutch helps online daters meet in person faster, safer and more casually.

The Brandery has a team of over 55 mentors with top notch business and startup experience. The list includes Mike Bott, the General Manager of The Brandery; Lucas Watson, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at YouTube; and Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO of Living Social.

Powerhouse VC firms including Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital and Polaris also have mentors participating. This is actually one of the strongest teams of mentors we’ve seen at an incubator “everywhere else”.

The program officially starts July 2 and will end with a Demo Day set for October 3rd when all 11 teams will show off their startups.

Linkage:

Source: Enterchange at Cincinnati.com

For more information visit brandery.org

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Louisville Startup: Implucity Headed To Cincinnati Incubator, The Brandery

Louisville startup Implucity is headed to a 14 week accelerator program in Cincinnati called The Brandery. Along with a 14 week incubation period, office space and mentorship Implucity will receive $20,000 in seed capital.

Implucity is a mobile app that allows users to discover events, purchase tickets, invite friends to events and send photos. Co-founder Hunter Hammonds told the Business Journal that there were plenty of times that he wanted to go out but didn’t know what to do, Implucity solves that problem.

“We’re not trying to be a social network at all,” Hammonds said. “It’s not about who I am. It’s about what I’ve been doing.”

There are several apps in the exact same space, during their time at The Brandery they are going to really need to work on refining their secret sauce.

According to Hammonds and co-founder Austin Cameron, they’ve raised under $250,000 so far, and hope to raise over $2 million after their session at The Brandery. Right now their secret sauce relies on the fact that Implucity isn’t a social network, it’s focused on the singular user to find events to do and then share.

“I think that’s something we can hit because the user experience is awesome,” Hammonds said. “It’s just a cool product for you to use. It’s not a social network so we don’t rely on your friends. We just rely on you wanting to do something.”

Linkage:

Check out Implucity here

Source: Business Journal

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Startups Cincinnati: UpTech Accelerator Announces Inaugural Class Of 8 Startups

Cincinnati area, UpTech is a rather new accelerator. It was formed in January of 2012 and they’ve been working diligently over the past 5 months to build their business, their space and solidify their inaugural round of startups. Each of the 8 startups selected will receive an investment of $100,000, along with mentorship, support services and research assistance from Northern Kentucky University.

“We are thrilled to finally announce to our region UpTech’s first round of winners,” said Bill Scheyer, President of Vision 2015 and an UpTech co-founder. “Our ultimate goal is to fund 50 of the best and brightest early-stage informatics companies from the United States and abroad. These eight companies will complement the foundation of a growing informatics cluster in our region, an important business sector in a 21st-century economy.”

The contest was judged by a panel of business analysts, executives and investment experts from companies like CBS, Dell, Proctor & Gamble and more.

Some of the ideas the selected startup companies are working with are untapped markets.

7 Moose games, founded by Brett Carter and Susie D. Roth, specializes in the gamification of complex and sometimes dangerous business training simulations. For example they may produce vide game style training modules for the public safety sector that could include fire safety, or even hostage negotiations. They also have had interest from oil and gas companies that can’t provide real world training on some of the more risky aspects of their industries.

Our goal is to use game engine technology to create extremely effective simulations which illustrate inherently complicated and/or dangerous subjects,” the company said in its UpTech application. “Oil and gas, public service and health, armed forces and game industry professionals are a few examples of the industries which have expressed interest in our products.”

Citilogics, founded by Jim Uber and Stu Hopper, is developing realtime data fusion software for water utilities. Their software will help reduce energy costs, reduce water leakage, improve service reliability and the quality of tap water.

Founder Jim Uber has had twenty years of experience in the water industry including developing water security software and a multi-species water quality simulation package.

“We develop models, analytics and software that help our clients better operate and manage their large-scale urban water infrastructure investments, and deliver a wide range of services from complex engineering and data analyses, to full functional software custom software solutions,” the company said in its UpTech application. “Our current focus is data fusion software that will revolutionize efficiency and effectiveness in the water industry by reducing energy costs, controlling leakage, improving service reliability and enhancing water quality.”

More after the break
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Cincinnati Based Startup: SimpleRegistry Raises $150k To Ramp Up Registry For Everything

With Spring in full swing and May and June just ahead of us, wedding season is also in full bloom. We’re sure that means that while many of you are perusing tech sites like nibletz.com you’re also checking out gift registries, signing up for wedding sites and taking the telxon to Target’s aisles. Well STOP!

SimpleRegistry, a Cincinnati based startup has a solution for registries for everything. Whether you need a wedding registry, baby registry, honeymoon registry or heck you just want a bunch of gifts, you can use SimpleRegistry’s tool to create your registry and than take monetary gifts to get the things that you want.

The startup was founded by Brandon Warner, Chris Kolik and Tony Alexander. Alexander got the idea for SimpleRegistry after he launched his first registry related startup called “Traveler’s Joy” with a focus on creating honeymoon registries.

More after the break
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