DC Archives - Page 10 of 10 - Serious Startups

New DC Accelerator Acceleprise Embracing Enterprise Tech Startups

Acceleprise is a new Washington DC based accelerator that is targeting new startups in the Enterprise space. TechCrunch recently said that Acceleprise wants to be the “500 startups for Entreprise”

Acceleprise has great DC based founders in Sean Glass, Allen Gannett and Collin Gutman. They also have some great mentors that include well known founders, executives, venture capitalists and experienced operators. Their mentor list includes Scott Case, head of Startup America, Katharine Weymouth CEO of Washington Post Media, Maria Thomas former CEO of Etsy, Sonny Ganguly CMO at wedding wire and many more.

Their website says they are “The Enterprise Technology Accelerator”. Enterprise was a natural sector to pursue, Glass told TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez that he started thinking about how he wanted to do his personal angel investing. He found while evaluating his portfolio that he had the most success with and was able to help the most in early stages, were all enterprise focused.

Washington DC is also the perfect location for an enterprise focused accelerator. Of course the federal government is the largest enterprise customer in the country. In their immediate surroundings you have most of the largest defense companies and contractors in the world. Accelleprise is also a quick 4 hour drive to New York City and not to far from Atlanta as well.

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Washington DC Ed-Tech Startup Learn Zillion Get’s $50,000 From U of M As Part of $2.4M Series A Round

Eric Westerndorf Co-Founder of Learn Zillion (photo: e. westerndorf via edtechdigest)

Washington DC based Ed-Tech startup LearnZillion has recently scored a $2.4 million dollar series A round. Participating in the round is the University of Michigan. Through U of M’s Social Venture Fund, $50,000 was contributed to this round.

So what does LearnZillion do?

They are creating a video library of some of the best lessons taught by “Super Teachers”, teachers who really cut through and engage students in learning at the middle and high school level. Teachers can create a playlist of these video lessons which come complete with a quiz at the end of the video session. This allows teachers and parents to immediately gauge the comprehension of the lesson.

Learn Zillion was founded by educator Eric Westerndorf who left has position as principal at the E.L Haynes Public Charter School in Washington DC to co-found LearnZillion with Alix Guerrier. While principal at Haynes Westerndorf implemented six-week improvement cycles. The frequent assessments helped the teachers gain insight and drive achievement however they also caused teacher anxiety. That’s when Westerndorf started implementing new resources like video lessons. Teacher’s would collaborate and share the lessons that worked best. That’s where LearnZillion was born.

Leesburg VA Based Startup: Time Razor Promises You’ll Never Miss Out

Time Razor, a Leesburg VA based startup just recently took their project out of stealth mode. The company is venture backed and puts a new spin on events, and time management. TimeRazor was founded by Barry White (no relation to the R&B singer), who has a mixed background mostly in real estate development. However in the hustle bustle world of the DC suburbs we’re sure a developer knows a thing or two about time management.

What TimeRazor ultimately does is cut out the noise from other similar event recommendation apps. Through their proprietary software and algorithms TimeRazor combs through over 300,000 events a day and serves up suggestions and updates for events that the user would actually like to attend. They call this technology the “distillery”.

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Rawporter Roadshow: We Talk With Ric Fleisher about Urgnt.ly And The DC Startup Scene

As the Rawporter Roadshow continues we got a few minutes to sit down with serial entrepreneur Ric Fleisher about his latest startup urgent.ly. Fleisher has had several successful exits and is proudly working on his current startup that came about out of necessity.

Fleisher found that as more and more location based service startups came out they were all focusing on what they believe people want. Urgnt.ly is a new kind of location based app that focuses on what people need.

As the story goes it was a Friday evening and Fleisher had just finished doing the dishes. Before he went to bed he set the dishwasher to run overnight. He was awakened Saturday morning by his son that told him there was water in the kitchen. Fleisher got dressed and went downstairs expecting to find a puddle of water. Instead he found that his entire kitchen and surrounding areas in his home had been completely flooded by a dishwasher that was still spewing water.

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DC Area Company: Cadre Looking To Change The Face Of The Network Mixer

I’ve been attending networking mixers for all of my adult life. In a previous life as a radio personality and then programmer I attended many conventions that had their own networking mixers as shoulder events. When I started founding my own businesses as “SMBs” before “Startups” were chic, I attended every chamber of commerce business after hours, every small business mixer, power breakfast and the like.

All of these events, and even the ones I regularly attend today for both of our sites, it amounts to a room full of people that get all clicked up into their circle of friends and the theme of the mixer is lost almost instantly as you walk through the door. Sometimes when you go to these things and try to be outgoing and meet new people, people look at you like you’re nuts.

I’ve recently started using discovery apps like Sonar, Glancee and Highlight to see if they would help in the networking mixer problem. In some ways they have but not by much. I’d find people I wanted to meet and they were already in deep conversations with the other people I wanted to meet about baseball, football or their latest deal.

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Rawporter Roadshow: We Talk With Venga At The Fort In DC

We’re still going strong on our Rawporter Roadshow stopping in and talking with tech companies and startups from “everywhere else”. We spend some good quality time at Fortified’s “The Fort” accelerator in DC. We already brought you our interview with NexGame and now we’re spending some time with Sam from Venga to talk about Venga and what it’s like to startup outside of Silicon Valley.

We actually felt like it was more important to spend more than just 3 hours in the nation’s capital to really get a feel for the scene. We also got to spend a lot of time with Kendrick and Carl from inthecapital who lent us some of the co-working space they were borrowing from canvas.co the largest co-working space provider in DC and a great friend of startups.

Check out the interview video above. We covered Venga earlier on here as well. If you like what we are doing we could sure use some gas money for the trip hit the donate button on the right side.

If you’re a startup from literally “everywhere else” send us an email at startup@nibletz.com and we’ll get you covered.

DC TechEd Startup Grade Ninja Revolutionizes Grading With ScanTron

Grade Ninja was born when Daniel Kleinman noticed that his sisters were spending their nice weekend days not going outside, jogging, shopping or even relaxing. His sisters are school teachers and they were constantly using up their free time grading Scantron sheets, something that ideally was supposed to be a fast process because it’s Scantron. That wasn’t the case and Kleinman wanted to do something about it.

Kleinman created an iPad app that uses the iPad’s camera to take a picture of the Scantron sheet and check it against a master. Kleinman, a self-taught Objective C programmer was able to refine the app so it has a margin of error of, at best, 1%. Things like how fast the sheet is fed and if the sheet is still perfectly in tact can swing the margin of error far greater when using a Scantron machine to grade.

I noticed it first with my sisters and my mom. Why are dedicated teachers spending so much time outside of school grading? Teachers spend about a day a week grading, roughly 8 hours. What if we could give this time back? This is why I created Grade Ninja. Kleinman told Carl Pierce of InTheCapital.com

In addition to freeing up teacher’s valuable free time Kleinman’s app will link back to gradebook apps making the grading process seemless and far more accurate than having to transpose anything. From their website:

GradeNinja can cut grading and recording time down to a fraction of what you spend now. Instantly scan multiple choice tests and input scores directly into your gradebook. Use the ultra fast grid to enter all your scores in a flash for any assignment types.

Kleinmann is sneakerstrapping this startup but we’re sure it’s going to become a hot commodity as TechEd continues its nationwide explosion. As for ScanTron grading, there are so many other issues our public schools need to work out before they make a move away from traditional ScanTron machine.

source: InTheCapital

DC Startup Profile: Next Game Because Nothing Is More Social Than Sports (Rawporter Roadshow)

We’re in the midst of the Rawporter Roadshow visiting with startups and checking out tech everywhere. While in DC we stopped at the Fort accelerator where we met with Next Game. NextGame thrives off the fact that nothing is more social than pick up sports. With Spring in full swing millions of people will be flocking to the local park, open fields, and gyms to participate in pickup sports and other activities, this is where Next Game fits in.

When you’re in grade school, high school and even college sports are a way of life for most people. They’re also a given all school levels have sanctioned sports, intramural sports and pick up games. When you’re living on a college campus you can look at your dorm room window and find a soccer game, frisbee golf, hacky sack, pickup basketball and more. Once you get out of college the drive and want to participate in pickup sports is still there but finding pick up sports or men’s or women’s leagues is for lack of a better word, a pain in the ass.

Often times, unless it’s a real established adult league, participating in sports is contingent on organization and follow through and no one seems to communicate well. NextGame handles that for you.

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DC Mayor Vincent Gray Makes Tax Changes To Attract Tech Companies & Startups

Washington DC Mayor Vincent Gray has announced some tax changes that are designed to keep the districts budding tech scene building to scale. The changes he outlined recently will be formally announced to the city council on April 17th.

The first tax change is that District residents who invest in technology companies or take on equity as part of their employment would be subject to a 3 percent capital gains tax that they hold on investments they hold for two years or longer.

Gray’s other tax plan for DC is to do away with the borders for the tax technology zones. As it stands now there are certain areas within the district where companies have no income tax for five years from the time they register with city offices. Gray has decided to make this a city wide tax break

“We want to make sure it’s as easy as possible for tech entrepreneurs and business people to set up their business in the city without worrying about which streets are in and which streets are out,” said David Zipper, the city’s director of business development and strategy.

These tax breaks are designed to grow the number of early stage investors who reside in the city. and encourage startups to remain after they cash in.

source: Washington Post

DC Start Up Venga Pivots To Add More Of The Restaurant In Their Restaurant App Business

Venga is a Washington DC start up that is part of The Fort accelerator based in the nation’s capital. When they came onto the scene they wanted to offer an app that was a little more upscale than Urban Spoon or Open Table. They were able to get their product launched and actually launched it simultaneously across iPhone, Android and Blackberry at the same time.

Restaurant apps have many avenues they can use to get off the ground. Although most avenues are very time consuming, the easiest way to a restaurant app is to draw from a location based API, crowd source reviews and voila. Well apparently that strategy didn’t set well with Sam von Pollaro or Winston Lord, the company’s founders. They actually went out to restaurants and got feedback for their app, what a novel idea.

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