nibletz.com Becomes The First Site To Integrate With 500 Startups “Markerly”

Markerly founder Sarah Ware has teamed up with nibletz.com as their beta guinea pig

We’ve covered Markerly pretty in depth over the past few months. Their rockstar woman founder, Sarah Ware, will even be a panelist at the upcoming “everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference” event in February.

When we first started reporting on Markerly it was a browser plugin that allowed you to very easily highlight, clip and share any content on any website. Markerly allows you to share to your social networks, email or even your own personal Markerly account so that you can have text later on, and the source information from that text.

We installed the browser plugin a few months back and would share content from nibletz.com and other startup focused online magazines periodically using the Markerly tool.

Well, last month Ware and her DC based startup got accepted into Dave McClure’s 500 startups program in Mountain View California. We have a pretty good relationship with Ware and we weren’t surprised when she called to tell us that just under two weeks into the program they were making a mini-pivot.

We won’t go too much into what that mini-pivot is, we have to save some of the suspense for the 500 startups demo day early next year. But we will tell you that Markerly is now integrated within nibletz.com.

All you have to do is select text like you would to copy and paste, anywhere, in any article within nibletz.com. Regardless of whether you have the browser plugin or not, once you select the text you want a hover button will appear above the text. At the moment the button allows you to share the extracted text to Twitter, Facebook or by email.

When you share your highlight, those who check it out on your social networks will be taken to our original story and they’ll even be able to see the highlighted text within the story.

Markerly is a great tool in that regard. I’m willing to bet on a daily basis someone shares a link with me either by email or instant message and with that link, minimal text. Well the problem arises when I’m sent a link to a 1000 word story. I don’t have time to read 1000 words just to get to what someone else wants me to see. Using Markerly I can see the text that someone wants me to see within the entire body of the story so I can grab the context at my leisure.

While we’ve seen some of our readers adopt the browser plugin Markerly product and share across Facebook and Twitter, the team at Markerly has made it insanely easy for anyone to capture the experience (you see what I did there).

Right now it works on any desktop/laptop/PC/Mac browser and hopefully down the road it will work on Mobile as well.

So go for it, try it, select some text in this story and see what happens.

Markerly is actually solving two problems for nibletz.com. The first is the sharing problem I described above an also the more traditional social sharing problem. We have share buttons at the bottom of each and every story, and we encourage you to use them. However, we know that we have some long stories here at nibletz.com so when you can’t wait to share something, highlight it and send it out immediately using nibletz.com now powered by Markerly.

Linkage:

Check out Markerly here

500 startups here

Everywhere Else here

Washington DC Tops Inc’s 500 List Of All Time

The Inc 500/5000 conference just wrapped up in Phoenix Arizona. The three day conference highlights the private sector companies, both big and small, that are the fabric of our American corporate culture.

The Inc 500 is a list published every year by the premiere business magazine, that lists the 500 fastest growing companies in the country. The list, first published in 1982, has become the benchmark that many companies set for growth in their formative years. Companies like Pandora, Zipcar, Zappos and even companies with rich history now, like Toys R Us and 7 Eleven have topped the list.

The Inc 500 is a subset of the Inc 5000 which shows off an even broader range of US companies, those who are the fastest growing 5000 companies in America. Each of the Inc 5000 companies are featured on Inc’s website. The 500 companies are featured in Inc’s traditional magazine in the September issue.

The Kauffman Foundation, the non profit foundation in Kansas City that procures important data relating to startups, innovation, corporations and growth, recently analyzed the last 30 years worth of Inc 500 companies.

They found that over the past 30 years worth of Inc 500 lists, Washington DC has produced more companies that have appeared on the list than any other metropolitan area, in the country. In the last 12 years alone Washington DC has been home to 385 companies that have appeared on the Inc 500 list.

On a state by state basis California and then Texas topped Kauffman’s list. Virginia (which borders DC) was in the number 3 spot and Massachusetts was number 4.

When the list was adjusted for population Indianapolis ranked 6th, Baltimore ranked 15th, Philly ranked 19th and Louisville Kentucky ranked (20th).

When examined by county, Virginia had three of the top five counties with Fairfax City, Falls Church City and Arlington County. Motley County Texas and Broomfield County Colorado topped that list.

Check out the interactive map of the data in the links below

Linkage:

Source: Inc Magazine

Kauffman’s data set

Something worth checking out

Washington DC Startup: Review Signal Launches More Trusted Review Platform

Washington DC startup Review Signal launched last week after 19 months in the making. Founder Kevin Ohashi has developed a product review platform that can be more trusted than traditional platforms like Yelp or Google reviews. Review Signal analyzes data points across social media to gauge the pulse of what people think about a particular product or service.

While there are hundreds of verticals that Review Signal could be applied to Ohashi has started with web hosting reviews as his first full on demonstration of how the system works.

Review Signal mines the data across social networks, and then separates the “mentions” for a specific product or service into good or bad. As Ohashi tells us in the interview below, if there are 100 tweets about a product with 50 being positive and 50 being negative, the raw review score would naturally be 50%. Now people aren’t forced to read long, sometimes biased long-form reviews.

One of the biggest problems we’ve seen with traditional reviews stems from the reason the average person would write a review anyway. Aside from career reviewers and those types that have to review absolutely everything, the bulk of the rest of reviews on review sites come when a customer is raving about a company, product or service after having a great experience or after they’ve had a bad experience.

You don’t get a lot of “average” everyday folks that take the time to write a review about a run of the mill or average experience.

For example say you went to a decent (not exceptional, just decent) restaurant and had the best chocolate cake ever. You’re much more likely to tweet “had this awesome chocolate cake” with a photo, rather than write a 5 paragraph review on the restaurant itself or, heck, even the chocolate cake.

One of the most fascinating parts about this story is how it came about in the first place. Ohashi actually based Review Signal off the idea he used for his masters thesis.

Check out our interview with Ohashi below. He does a really great job of explaining how the system actually works.

DC Entrepreneur: Sarah Ware Makes Her Markerly Over 2800 Miles For 500 Startups

Sarah Ware’s mobile office set up in Littleton CO on the way to 500 startups

Nearly two weeks ago the woman behind Washington DC startup Markerly and her gal pal Megan set out on an epic journey. These two twenty something women set on a cross country road trip only rivaled by Thelma and Louise. Except this was 2012, and Ware managed to work throughout the entire trip.

In between camp sites, horseback riding, boating, hiking, and picture taking, Ware was constantly working to prepare her social highlighting startup for the real journey which begins soon in Mountain View California.

Ware and Markerly join a nice sizable handful of startups from the Washington DC area that have caught the eye of Dave McClure and his 500 startups.

While we’re preparing another epic journey of our own to cover a bunch of accelerator demo days from accelerators that have been working all summer long, McClure and the 500 startups fall 2012 class are just starting to arrive. They’re wiping the last bit of sleep out of their eyes and preparing for five months of intense bootcamp style work on their startups.

It may no even be fair o call what they do at 500 startups “boot camp style” some of the startups that have completed McClure’s rigorous program have likened it more to “startup hazing” with a much bigger pay off.

Ware is no stranger to unusually long work days as the 25 year old has managed to graduate from Georgetown, work at DC’s prominent startup, Living Social, and then battle her way through the mine fields of launching her own startup. She’s even had imitators come out of the woodwork already and those who have accused her of imitating.

We’ve tried a few of the highlighting applications out there and nothing is as easy to use or easy to share as Markerly.

As she gears up for 500 startups it’s easy to see why she and her friend decided to drive it across the country. There’s no more rest for the next five months. We will be checking in with Ware periodically over the next 5 months while she’s in the top secret 500 lair crushing it.

Linkage:

Go start using Markerly here

Check out 500 here

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” and we want you here

DC Women Startup Founders Are Old Enough To Be Zuck’s Mom; See What They’re Doing

We’ve had a lot of fun getting to know 68 year old Susan Jones and 54 year old Elizabeth Van Sant. These two mothers, business women and now startup founders in Washington DC are old enough to be Mark Zuckerberg’s moms. Their startup, Quad 2 Quad, was actually created because Van Sant and Jones have become somewhat pro’s at getting their kids off to college. They know the ins, the outs and “the ropes”.

We’ve interviewed and profiled quite a few college bound startups lately. Earlier this week we interviewed Cleveland startup CollegeSkinny who’s platform helps high school students transition from high school to college. We featured CiteLighter which is a highlighting bookmarklet app that allows users to easily make citations in their research. Exceleratr, a New York startup, connects high school students to much needed extra-curricular activities outside of the high school campus. We also recently interviewed Swedish startup Studemia, which is a collaboration tool for students as well as CampusShift, a Youngstown startup looking to take a bite out of college debt.

Jones and Van Sant’s startup aims to help parents of perspective college students, simpli

fy the college visit planning process. Quad2Quad essentially becomes the college visitor’s personal assistant.

Between Van Sant and Jones they have six children, all of whom have either graduated from college or are enrolled in college now. Jones told us in an interview that between her and Liz they visited over 30 college campuses between 1997 and 2011. Things were quite different, even back in the late 90’s. In 1997 it was unheard of to have to go throw hoops and bounds to schedule a visit. Now you need to schedule a tour, but even that’s not the hard part.

Navigating through the college’s rules and even temporary hinderances like for instance an assembly on an off Saturday night may close the important sections of campus off to students. Or some colleges require special access to even eat lunch at the student union.

Quad2Quad consolidates information from hundreds of sources about colleges, when to visit, how to visit, what you can do on the visit and where to go and who to call during the visit.

pandodaily,techcrunch,Quad2Quad,women owned startup,startup,startups,Washington DC startup,startup interview

Quad2Quad provides important information like admission office hours, admission office closures, interview and reservation policies and much more. They currently have 74 of the most sought after colleges in the Quad2Quad system and plan to add 300 more shortly.

In the interview below Jones highlights the community nature of the Washington DC tech community. Both ladies were shocked at how receptive founders half their age were to the Quad2Quad idea and to helping “two geriatric ladies” with their startup.

The fact is Jones and Van Sant are far from geriatric. They’ve both had great careers and are doing something that a lot of people their age would never dream of. I’ve personally been an entrepreneur and startup founder since 2003 and my mother, who is 64 I think (sorry mom), to this day still asks when I’m going to get a job. Both women have found the age barrier to be virtually non-existant in Washington DC and have big plans for their startup. Check out our interview with the golden girls of Washington DC’s tech scene below:

JustDecide Startup Dilemma Of The Week: Work Visas And Startups

A lot of my friends who are startup founders, developers or designers happen to be Asian, Indian, and even Russian. Many of them have either immigrated to the United States, work remotely and come here occasionally and a handful are actually working illegally. Now this isn’t the forum for an immigration debate but if a foreigner comes over to the US and wants to start a startup, more power to them it’s not like their startup is taking away jobs from Americans because their startup is their idea. Even better, when their startup gets bigger they’ll hire Americans.

So our Startup Dilemma Of The Week, this week, comes from a guy in Washington DC. He’s currently here on a work visa and working for a major corporation.

The dilemma comes in because he has a great idea for a startup, one that’s not really being done anywhere just yet. He wants to move to Silicon Valley but isn’t sure if he should move and work for a different startup or just venture out on his own.

This is obviously a dilemma with a bit of a legal issue in the background. Here’s the dilemma from justdecide.com

The Details:I am currently on my work visa with a corporate company working in the Washington D.C. area. I really want to move to Silicon Valley, but am unsure if I should try to find a job at a startup or start my own company. Because I am on my work visa establishing my own in the US isn’t that straight forward. But I know eventually that’s what I want to do. I am a web developer and you can find my portfolio at http://www.webileapps.com/ for which I am one of the Co-Founders and manage the App development, Customer Acquisition & Growth.

You can help him with this dilemma by submitting your answer here. There are four possible outcomes to choose from.

Linkage:

Weigh in on this weeks Startup Dilemma Of The Week, Here

See past dilemmas here

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

We Speak With Washington DC 500 Startups, Startup: Speek

While a lot of people are talking about TechCrunch Disrupt NY Battlefield winner UberConference when it comes to conference calling startups, another conference calling startup has been brewing in the Washington DC area. We first got to check out Speek back in May at the Capital Connection and TechBuzz conference in Washington DC. After carefully checking out both UberConference and Speek, Speek seems to be the simplest, most easy to understand conference calling solution out there.

It’s no wonder that Speek has everything together, it’s founded by John Bracken the founder of e-vite and Danny Boice who attended Harvard and is a former executive with The College Board.

More importantly though is how easy it is to setup Speek and get started with your own special url.

Speek is working out of AOL’s Fishbowl incubator in the Washington DC area, along another great DC startup CONT3NT. But Boice and Bracken were on the road to startup success even before that.

As Boice tells us in the interview below, Speek was created when two internet entrepreneurs attacked the group calling problem with startup vigor. Both Boice and Bracken had come from big corporate jobs and were always on conference calls. It was the clunkiness that is typical of big conference calls that drove these two to create Speek.

Check out our interview with Boice below:

Interview With Washington DC Startup: Distil, Content Protection Network

If you have a content based web site on the internet ( and who doesn’t) you may want to pay attention to Arlington based startup Distil.it. Distil focuses solely on protecting website owners’ content from data scraping, content theft, and competitive data mining.

Do you have countless sites just stealing your content with no linkback? Have you ever been totally plagiarized without your knowledge just to find in a Google search content that was obviously lifted from your site? Those are just some of the things that happen when your website content is scraped and your data is mined.

More importantly with the case of content scraping, you can actually lose page-rank and hinder your SEO. Most web crawlers discard duplicate content so sometimes when you’re writing articles to maximize your SEO return, you’ll actually lose that content when it’s scraped and thrown on another site without your permission.

In addition to identifying and blocking malicious content and data scraping Distil also accelerates content through 14 global nodes which improves site load time and reduces server load.

We found out all about this and more when we talked with Distil’s co-founder and CEO Rami Essaid in the interview below:

The Friend HookUp Goes Online With DC 500 Startups, Startup Hinge INTERVIEW

Dating sites have been around almost as long as the internet. I remember a time when it was actually odd to try and find a date online. Now it’s pretty much odd to find a date or relationship in real life. One thing that most online dating sites haven’t tackled though is hooking up friends of friends. Now we’re not talking about a one night stand hook up, rather the old school version where you introduce a friend to a mutual friend and voila.

Now Washington DC, 500 startups backed, startup Hinge helps achieve that… sort of.

Hinge uses the Facebook social graph to match users with compatible friends of friends. Now your market of available singles increases from what you normally see from online dating sites to your friends on Facbeook and then your friends’ friends who may be somewhat compatible with you.

What this also means is if your perfect match is single, but not actively pursuing dating or a relationship, you may still meet that person via hinge. You know the same way your buddies or girlfriends introduce you to that perfect someone, that may not actually be looking.

When you actually check Hinge out and what they’re doing, it’s hard to believe no one else has tried to do this. Hinge is a great idea and an awesome Washington DC startup. It’s so awesome that they’ve caught the eye of Dave McClure’s 500 startups.

We got a chance to interview Bennett Richardson, Hinge’s CMO. Check out the interview below:

Who Was That Girl At The Wedding, Find Out With DC Startup SocialTables

Weddings, Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, even reunions can be a bit awkward. Sure the person planning the event knows the social make up of the guest, they may even have some great reasoning behind the way the tables were set up, but you don’t. You may strike a conversation with someone in the same business as you or maybe even a hot guy or a hot girl. Perhaps you feel awkward exchanging data at someone else’s wedding. Fear not, the web has you covered, in a startup called socialtables.

socialtables is a hot dc startup founded by Dan Berger. It’s much more than a seating chart tool. socialtables allows wedding planners, brides to be, Bar Mitzvah moms and anyone else planning a party with seating charts, to use their tool to do it. But wait there’s more…

socialtables allows users to set up a seating chart and then pull the seated’s ~~seatee’s~~ (is that even a word), social data through to the socialtables website. The socialtables website can be accessed by guests. It’s up to the creator of the seating chart as to whether or not they open up the chart to guests before or after the wedding.

Berger tells NBC affiliate 5 KSDK.com, that more users are opening up the seating chart after the wedding, which is as good. Now you can figure out just who that was sitting next to you. Typically we all put our best game faces on for a wedding, maybe you’ll check out that person on socialtables and find out they aren’t as cool as you thought they were. Or, conversely, you may find out that they have more in common with you than you think.

When the creator opens up the socialtables seating chart ahead of the wedding you can find out more about the people you will be sitting next to.

Berger told KSDK that the idea for socialtables came up after he attended a destination wedding and didn’t know anyone. More and more people are connected online in different ways now and socialtables is another way to blend the online and offline universe for just about anyone.

Crunchbase reports that socialtables received $500,000 in seed funding in May of this year.

Linkage:

Check out socialtables here

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

Nibletz is on a sneaker-strapped nationwide startup road trip read more here

Tell Your Life Stories With DC Startup: Monthsof.me INTERVIEW

Sure there are plenty of video apps out there and there are plenty of photo apps out there. Not it’s time to put everything together to tell a story. Scrapbooking grew to an amazing popularity in the 1990’s. There were scrapbooking classes, scrapbooking stores and more. There are still a few brick and mortar scrapbooking businesses, but like everything else scrapbooking has taken to the internet.

Monthsof.me is a Washington DC area startup that helps you collect, and organize all your photos, video and other media to tell stories that you can share with friends and family.

You can choose to tell the story of your life or stories of life’s precious moments. Baby’s first day, a wedding, the first day of school, soccer season, there are so many ways that monthsof.me would come in handy.

Monthsof.me came about after co-founder RJ Johnston had his fourth child and came to the realization that he had hundreds of albums of digital photos and videos across several sites, but none of them really told a story. He immediately went to work on monthsof.me. Johnston has a varied background mostly in sales, even government sales and a performance at the rock and roll hall of fame. Now he’s turned hie business acumen to the home and the family. Monthsof.me is a platform that people everywhere will find meaningful.

Check out our interview below with Johnston about monthsof.me and the hot startup ecosystem in our nation’s capital.

Uber Says F*ck You To Massachusetts Cease & Desist, For Now

Please before you fire off a hate mail telling us that Uber is based in San Francisco (The Valley) we know this already. Since Uber expanded outside of the Valley to “everywhere else” we’ve written about Uber on occasion. They are really great people, and each city office is a corporately owned office, they are actually run more like franchises. Their Washgton DC and New York office are really good to us (disclosure Uber likes what we’re doing on our road trip and supplies us with uber cards when we are in their cities. They care about the rest of “everywhere else” like we do)

Uber has been served with a cease and desist from the Division of Standards of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The Division of Standards is using the National Institute of Standards and Technology as a vehicle to try and push their anti Uber agenda. Massachusetts contends that, because the National Institute of Standards and Technology doesn’t have guidelines in place for GPS location technology, Uber can’t legally operate in Boston.

Uber’s says in this blog post, that they’ve had their legal team go over this with a fine tooth comb and they feel that they are not in any kind of violation. As such they plan on continuing to operate in Boston, despite the Cease & Desist, as they have since October 2011.

The sedan hailing app service was recently under fire in Washington DC. On July 11th we reported that Washington DC area cabbies had solicited the help of Washington DC City Councilwoman Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3). Cheh has proposed legislation that would make the minimum fare for an Über ride $15 which is a five times higher than the minimum fare for a normal sanctioned district cab.

By the end of the day that had been squashed as locally based celebrities and even members of congress took to Twitter to defend Uber.

NBC’s Luke Russert took to Twitter to express his dismay:
“I’m willing to bet #DC cabbies after 12am will say, ‘cash only, no credit’ or claim that their credit machine ‘is broken.’” Russert tweeted earlier in the day.

He wasn’t alone, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) tweeted about the issue from his official Twitter handle @Jasoninthehouse, “Uber fans unite! D.C. Council wants to keep fares high. This is wrong! #UberDClove political website rollcall.com reported.

After that public outcry on Twitter Cheh removed the Uber portion of that Taxi bill.

For now Bostonians, fear not as Uber is still in service until the Division of Standards comes with a better argument.

Linkage:

Here’s Uber’s website

Here’s their blog post

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

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Washington DC Startup Barrel Of Jobs Launches

We first covered Washington DC startup Barrel of Jobs back in May. They were one of 28 startup teams pitching at the two day Capital Connection event in our nation’s capital.

Barrel of Jobs isn’t your ordinary career startup though. What Chris Hertz and Craig Zingerline have done with the concept of job hunting is truly innovative. Their unique new platform harnesses the power of social networks and present day “word of mouth” to connect businesses with the best candidates, even if they weren’t exactly looking for a job.

In our video interview with them here, both Hertz and Zingerline explain exactly how Barrel of Jobs works.

Companies everywhere are quickly realizing that beyond connecting people, social networks are the “word of mouth” for current times. Marketers, brands and musicians have all harnessed the power of social media for “word of the mouth”.

Barrel of Jobs does the same thing for jobs. You may not know a top level JavaScript developer or a marketing executive in the Real Estate Industry but a friend of your friend on a social network may have the perfect candidate in mind. Again, even if they aren’t necessarily looking.

So I’ve said “not necessarily looking”a couple of times so far, what does that mean?

Well Barrel of Jobs and it’s social element mean that jobs can be connected to people who may be passively looking. You know the type, you may have a friend in a career position that’s upset about pay or their boss but they aren’t actively looking. They may be ok with their current position because it’s comfortable, or because of the benefits. Friends may know this information but also know that person hasn’t floated a resume in years. By taking advantage of social networking open jobs can be referred to those people and vice versa.

Inevitably when you go to a networking event you hear about some job opening. Perhaps it’s not for you, but you recommended a great candidate. Barrel of Jobs takes that exact concept, takes it to the web and multiplies it.

Even just recently launched this hit startup is picking up traction. Nibletz covered them in May here. They are in the Huffington Post here, The Business Journal here.

Linkage:

See how Barrel of Jobs works in the video here

Check out Barrel of Jobs yourself here

We could use your help here

Sarah Ware And Her DC Startup Markerly Are Making Their Mark INTERVIEW

Sarah Ware is the founder of new social bookmarking platform Markerly. She was working at the DC office of LivingSocial before branching out on her own to found this unique tool, that’s intuitive, fun and useful.

Markerly is a social bookmarking tool that sits in your browser like a bookmarklet for when you need it. When you need it or you want to use it you simply click on the Markerly button, highlight text and then you can save that text for later, save it as a bookmark or share it via Twitter or Facebook with your highlighted text and the entire article so others can see what you highlighted and the context around it.

Ware, a New Jersey native, is getting her name out in the DC tech and startup circles. One of the key points to Markerly is sharing and that shines through in Ware’s own personality, reaching out to other DC area startups and helping where she can and soaking up information when she can.

We got the chance to talk to this rock star founder about Markerly, in the interview below: