Out Of Toilet Paper? There’s A Startup For That: Restroom Alert [onespark][video]

Who’s ever gone to the bathroom at a public place only to sit down and find there’s no toilet paper in the toilet paper dispenser? Or you go through a beautiful looking store or a great restaurant and find paper towels all over the floor and a trashcan that looks like it hasn’t been dumped in days?

Well if you said yes, you’re not alone. These problems happen to millions of people every week at a variety of restrooms across the country. Going into a dirty, filthy or not well stocked bathroom affects businesses in ways you wouldn’t believe. One survey said that 94% of respondents said that a non well kept bathroom would make them leave an establishment.

Some believe that when going to restaurants a dirty restroom is a signal that the kitchen may not be that clean either. While there are people who will speak to a manager or an employee about the cleanliness of the bathroom, others are embarrassed to do so, or sometimes so grossed out they just want to leave.

Well now there’s an app for that. The multi-platform Restroom Alert, is a way for customers to anonymously report to a manager, owner or other employee that their restrooms need some attention.

It’s pretty simple. A business, small, big or gigantic, can sign up for Restroom Alert for $5 per month per room. The establishment will get signs that can easily be affixed to mirrors or walls with a short code to send a text message about the restroom. Does it need toilet paper? Do the sinks need cleaning? Is the trashcan overflowing? Is the toilet stopped up? All of these things and more can be reported anonymously via the text code.

On the business’ side, they get a text message as well saying what needs to be fixed. At that point a timer begins and the platform records how long it takes to go fix the problem.

The system can also alert owners, managers or employees when the restroom hasn’t been cleaned or checked in the allotted time. This wipes out the need for clipboards and paper restroom checklists, which often go unused.

Restroom Alert even supplies analytics detailing the restroom problems, how often they’re stocked and checked and other key factors. A clean restroom is just another way a business owner can provide excellent customer service.

Restroom Alert can be used by small mom and pop shops all the way up to Fortune 500 companies. The owner, or person in charge of such things, can get reports based on their entire network of restrooms. This way they can deal with employees that don’t give a crap about the way the restroom looks (you see what I did there).

While there are plenty of apps that can find you a restroom on the road, this seems to be the first startup to modernize the restroom checklist.

We got a chance to check out Restroom Alert one of the 464 projects found at OneSpark in Jacksonville.

Check out our video interview with Rod Dornsife one of the co-founders of Restroom Alert below.

For more on Restroom Alert visit restroomalert.com or follow them on Twitter @restroomalert

We’ve got a lot more OneSpark stories for you here at nibletz.com The Voice Of Startups Everywhere Else

Aurora Rediscovering Cities Through Local Music, Launches At One Spark [onespark]

Angel Ayala Torres pitches Aurora At OneSpark (photo NMI 2013)

Aurora is a new Jacksonville Florida based startup that is looking to connect two mobile experiences in one cool functioning app. By using the Aurora app, people will be able to rediscover a city through that cities local artists. This app combines location discovery with artist discovery in a way that actually makes sense.

Creator Angel Ayala Torres took to the Hemming Plaza Pitch Deck stage on Wednesday afternoon to pitch Aurora to an enthusiastic audience.

I actually heard the pitch about an hour earlier in the day at the OneSpark food village when I bumped into Torres and at that time I didn’t totally understand the concept. Now, after watching him pitch and downloading the app, it makes a lot of sense. It’s perfect for local people and local artists.

As he says in the video, take downtown Jacksonville for instance. When you open up Aurora downtown it will immediately start streaming a local downtown Jacksonville artist. If you hear a slow song and you’re briskly walking or jogging and “shake” your iPhone it will change the song and match it to your “mood” they call this “mood swings”.

Now if you venture to the beach area of Jacksonville or even New York City, you’ll get artists that are local to those areas. The Aurora team calls those “Echoes”. In New York you’ll hear New York echoes and in Jacksonville you’ll hear Jacksonville artists.

Aurora is working on a market place where users can purchase the songs to keep on their phone. This way you could listen to the artists wherever you go.

Local Jacksonville artists are jumping at the chance to have their music in the Aurora platform. Really this is a great idea for local music discovery. Just think of the music you would get in a city like Memphis, Nashville, New Orleans or Seattle. Every city has it’s own unique music scene and through Aurora you can easily discover it.

Check out the pitch video here:

Find out more about Aurora here at their Facebook page.

We’ve got more OneSpark coverage here.

Jacksonville Jaguars Are “All In” OneSpark The Crowdfunding Festival

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Jacksonville Jaguars voice, Brian Sexton, MC’s OneSpark’s opening ceremonies (photo: NMI 2013)

We’ve been to a lot of startup conferences, festivals and events, and aside from the world famous SXSW, I’ve never seen a city so supportive of an event like this, especially a first time event. The entire city from the municipal government to the chamber of commerce and all of the agencies in between are truly engaged with OneSpark.

Police officers and Sheriff’s officers on loan to the downtown area, know where everything is, ask about creators, and projects and heck we’ve seen a few cops taking iPhone pictures for passerbys. In talking with some of the officers, they are all excited about OneSpark and what it means to downtown. “Big festivals and events like this usually happen across the bridge, OneSpark is great for downtown”, a Sheriff’s deputy who asked to remain nameless because he was on duty told us while we were walking toward Hemming Plaza.

One organization that you wouldn’t think would necessarily be involved in an event like OneSpark is “all in”, and that’s the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars.

The voice of the Jacksonville Jaguars, Brian Sexton, was the MC for the OneSpark opening ceremonies. While he talks for a living, on the stage at OneSpark he worked from a set of notes but you could easily tell that he knew all about OneSpark, adlibbing about the founders, the event and the creators. Sexton’s familiar voice to the resident’s of Jacksonville serves as another reminder that the whole community is all in.

Jaguars cheerleaders were also mingling throughout Hemming Plaza all afternoon long, even lending a boost to one of the presenters during the afternoon pitch sessions.

As part of the opening ceremonies the cheerleaders returned to the stage to accompany the Jaguars drum line who played a nice ten minute set to warm up the crowd, pep rally style.

Of course that’s just the beginning. Jaguars owner, Shahid “Shad” Khan, a local businessman and entrepreneur is notorious for supporting downtown causes. For OneSpark though his Stache Fund (a play on his signature moustache) has committed $1 million dollars to the event and the crowdfunding prize given out at the end of the festival based on voting.

Luckily for Jaguars fans we’re in the thick of the offseason, but nonetheless this isn’t just an “appearance” for anyone associated with the team, like the police officers, city councilmen and women and others, the Jaguars are all in for OneSpark.

We’ve got more OneSpark coverage here at nibletz.com The Voice Of Startups Everywhere Else.

OneSpark Founders Answer Our Favorite Question: Why Now (startup community) [onespark][video]

OneSpark,Jacksonville startups,startup event

OneSpark Founders (L-R) Varick Rosete, Elton Rivas and Dennis Eusebio (photo: NMI 2013)

Two years ago three friends, businessmen, entrepreneurs and community minded guys sat around a Panera Bread talking about what they could do to help spark the startup community, and the creativity that comes with it, in Jacksonville Florida. Those three friends, Elton Rivas, Dennis Eusebio and Varick Rosete, set out to create an event that could serve as an ongoing catalyst for creativity and startups.

All three founders were paying attention to the growing trends across the country. Startup communities were popping up in cities all over the United States, many of them the same size as Jacksonville with similar resources but no real focal point. They all wanted to do something and create something, and they didn’t want to move to do it.

In this quick impromptu panel discussion, led by Jacksonville Jaguars voice, Brian Sexton, all three founders touch on “Why Now, Why OneSpark”.

Rivas talks about the timing saying “the time has never been better for this”. Rivas talked about how technology, smartphones in particular, people have the ability to connect from anywhere. To that end, while we talk about Chattanooga and Kansas City often when referring to high speed internet, Jacksonville Florida was the second market in the United States to get ClearWire’s WiMax service back in 2003.

Now with the connectivity, the people and the resources, with a catalyst like OneSpark residents of Jacksonville are starting to see they can do it right in their own city. Rivas has already gotten a taste of this by being a cofounder of CoWork Jax, a coworking space with an emphasis on collaboration and creativity.

Eusebio opened up his answer with the fact that he didn’t want to move. As a tech guy Eusebio was starting to feel the pinch, do I stay home, a place I love or do I brave the waters in another more tech savvy city like San Francisco. He set himself a 2 year deadline to come to that decision and during that two years the trio started creating OneSpark.

Rosete says he did this for the creators, he wants the creators to know that they have the resources to help get ideas, companies and creations off the ground without having to go take day jobs that creators don’t really want.

With a list of sponsors that reads like a telephone book, the city of Jacksonville is ripe and mobilized now to embrace startups, creators and entrepreneurs.

But OneSpark isn’t just about the local creators. They’ve attracted 464 projects from across the street, across the river, across the country and around the world. The 464 projects are spread out across 65 different venues in downtown Jacksonville.

Early estimates suggest that there will be between 15,000 to 20,000 people in Jacksonville over the next five days specifically for OneSpark, participating in voting, the speaker series and just walking around and checking out the 464 projects. Several local media outlets predict the swell of people downtown could reach 100,000 when you mix in the variety of great live entertainment that the OneSpark team has helped cook up.

While the focus of OneSpark and the creators is Music, Art, Science and Technology, when dusk hits the focus turns to the “entertainment district” where clubs, bars,restaurants and pop up venues are hosting hundreds of bands and performers in a festival atmosphere that can only rival something like SXSW. If anyone is keeping score there were around 800 attendees at the first SXSW festival and 29,000 official registered attendees for SXSWi 2013. The groundswell in Austin is also believed to be 100,000 when factoring in all three different festivals that make up sxsw.

On the subject of SXSW, Rivas hopes that in 10 years the OneSpark festival will still be going on, and people will say “Oh Jacksonville, that’s where they hold OneSpark”.

Well yes as a matter a fact we’ve got a ton more OneSpark coverage here at nibletz.com The Voice Of Startups Everywhere Else.

OneSpark Comes Alive In Downtown Jacksonville

Downtown Jacksonville has come alive with thousands of entrepreneurs, do-ers and creators in the first of it’s kind Crowdfunding Festival called OneSpark.

The five day festival runs from now through Sunday. Creators in music, art, science and technology are all showing off their wares while also competing for attendee dollars and attendee votes.

The festival has taken the crowdfunding concepts introduced by sites like kickstarter and Indiegogo and brought them offline and in person to hundreds of venues throughout the downtown area of Jacksonville.

Nibletz is on the ground in Jacksonvillr and we look forward to introducing you to the creators from across the country and around the world, exhibiting here at OneSpark.

But make no mistake about it, this is far more than an exhibition. All of the creators (startups) are looking for people to crowdfunding their ideas in person.

As for the voting, OneSpark has over $1,000,000 committed for a fund that will distribute money to the creators with the most votes. One of the biggest supporters of OneSpark, and the biggest contributor to the fund is Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shahid “Shad” Khan.

Throughout the event creators will be pitching their ideas to the audience at pitch stages set up all over downtown.

Today all ready we’ve seen a very innovative startup called Quick Solar. This company is working on a drag and drop platform for homeowners and other interested folks to drop solar panels on google maps images of their home.

Quick Solar will take these users through the cost saving benefits of moving to solar energy and eventually the company will link with providers that can install your solar system.

Creators from every corner of the globe and business are here. We also saw crowdfunding at the local level with Red Sable Art Supply.

This company is hoping to create an art supply store and collaborative work space for artists in St.Augustine Florida.

Currently, artists in the area are driving 1-3 hours away to find an adequate art supply store where they can learn about their supplies, techniques and actually squeeze bottles, feel paint brushes and talk to real humans.

Stick with us for OneSpark coverage here.

Jax Startup Floppy Entertainment Founder: OneSpark Sparking Startup Community

OneSpark starts this Wednesday and runs through Sunday. It’s the first of it’s kind crowdfunding festival for “creators”. OneSpark is taking the crowdfunding concept made popular by Kickstarter, Indiegogo and of course every single startup that’s popped up since we’ve been waiting for the JOBSact,and brought it off line.
The festival will be like SXSW interactive meets SXSW music and everything in between as creators from around the world spread out at venues across downtown Jacksonville. For a good summary of OneSpark check out this story.

We’ll be talking with lot’s of creators on-site and some as we lead up to this epic event.

First up we have Michael Le Manna, the founder of Floppy Entertainment. In our interview with Le Manna he credits the OneSpark festival for really sparking startups and the startup community in Jacksonville. Even Shahid Khan, the owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars, is on board.

Check out the interview below and for more on OneSpark visit beonespark.com

What is your startup, what does it do?

Floppy Entertainment is the first game company in Jacksonville Florida, founded in 2012. It consists of a small group of highly talented programmers and artists. The vision of the company is to create a new and innovative gaming experience for people on a mobile platform to play for brief periods of time throughout the course of a normal day. Our interactive games are fun, easily understood and challenging. Players will be compelled to play again and again.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

Michael La Manna creative lead, audio designer. Has been writing music for games and media for over 14 years.

Brian Marshburn programmer. Started programming games at the age of 8.

Thomas Schaffer lead technical artist. Master user of Maya software.

What is the startup culture like in Jacksonville?

Other than One Spark there has never been any support for a start up tech company such as game development.

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

The big challenge working in game development is the expensive software licensing fees.

What are some of the milestones your startup has achieved?

We have won multiple indie development contest and secured sponsorship from Microsoft.

What are your next milestones?

Our first mobile game will be released in the next 4 months.

Who are your mentors and role models?

Other independent game company’s such as Trendy Entertainment in Gainesville Florida, they have been very supportive.

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

One advantage is lack of competition but the big disadvantage is lack or interest of local support.

What’s next for your startup?

Develop and release at a minimum of 3 games a year.

Where can people find out more?

www.floppyent.com Or on twitter as floppyent

Check out more about OneSpark here at nibletz.com the voice of startups everywhere else

Huge Crowdfunding Festival: One Spark Kicks Off In Jacksonville Next Week

The first OneSpark festival will kick off next Wednesday night in Jacksonville Florida, and it’s going to be huge. The festivities kick off at 6pm at Hemming Plaza with an opening ceremony.

The kickoff event will feature party band The Sunbears, free food, drinks and plenty of opportunity to network with creators from all over the world.

Once the event kicks off Jacksonville will turn into one huge in person crowdfunding festival from Wednesday (April 17th) through Sunday (April 21st).

What is a “crowdfunding festival”,

Well think SXSW music and SXSW interactive meet in Jacksonville Florida, where the weather looks to be perfect. Then add creators who’ve created something in either the arts, music, science or technology. Now think Kickstarter and taking those project creators and bringing them into the real world.

This is the first festival of it’s kind. Creators will be staged in venues throughout downtown Jacksonville where attendees will be able to see their creations, ask questions, hear pitches and then decide if they want to crowdfund the creator in person. Talk about eliminating the risks of online crowdfunding.

Event organizer Elton Rivas and the OneSpark committee have wrapped the crowdfunding concept up into a huge event that has three main focus areas:

The creator zone: This is where you can go from venue to venue and see all of the creators and their creations, think gallery hop with some ultra cool new ideas and creativity overflowing like a volcano.

Pitch Decks And Stages: You’ll be able to hear live pitches and keynote speakers throughout the five day festival in these areas.

Entertainment District: here OneSpark will showcase all of what Jacksonville has to offer in the entertainment realm. Party with creators, VIPs, A-listers and jam out to some of the best musical offerings in Jacksonville.

Learn more about OneSpark at beonespark.com

Stay up to date with our OneSpark coverage here.

Tampa Bay Wave Announces First Accelerator Class

The paint is hardly dry at the Tampa Bay Wave incubator and accelerator. No, literally they just opened their doors on March 15th and with that, the center that prides itself on being by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs, announces it’s inaugural class.

Michael LaPlante, the curator of the Tampa Bay Startup Digest announced the first 8 startups to accelerator at Tampa Bay Wave in Monday morning’s digest. Here they are:

SHOOTRAC: Provides organizations of all sizes a simple way to capture big data on its customers, assets and workforce and use the information to leverage these resources for maximum efficiency and customer service using a cloud-based, scalable Software as a Service solution

Cartooga: Through its proprietary e-commerce platform and expert staff, Cartooga, Coracent offers shopping cart hosting and a variety of conversion optimization features designed to help businesses open an online store, drive traffic and increase conversion rates.

Secondhand Living: An e-commerce site where consignment, antique and thrift shops, as well as architectural salvage material suppliers promote their businesses and offer their products for sale. There are thousands of these independently owned shops in North America (even more abroad) and the majority of them have no online presence.

Drawer: A technology product expressed initially through a mobile application that provides a framework for capturing and cataloging real-life recommendations between friends and acquaintances. Drawer helps to catalog across various verticals – places, movies, music, products, books, etc. – in order to provide a comprehensive and centralized place for storing this information.

Commendable Kids: It is a community of children striving to be the best they can, as they work toward earning badges that can then be proudly displayed and shared with their supporters. Commendable Kids helps encourage and challenge children to learn new skills and reach new milestones.

Confy.co: Confy.co helps track and organize an event from start to finish by providing targeted solutions and management tools to conference organizers, sponsors, hosts and other event-related personnel to successfully manage the myriad of data, requirements and essential organizational needs.

Kite Desk: A personal cloud information manager that lets users connect their cloud service accounts and automatically links and organizes their messages, contacts, files, events and more into useful streams of information. Kite Desk provides the unique value of personalized, contextual computing to both web and mobile clients.

SavvyCard: A mobile web platform for actively referring business transactions. It combines features of an online business card with an intelligent referral system that generates measurable leads and sales. SavvyCard offers a convenient way to pass “warm” referrals from any web enabled device, track and respond to referrals in real time, reward referral behavior and build mobile-friendly referral networks.

Obviously Tampa Bay Wave is off to a great start, we expect to hear a lot more from them. If you’re in the Tampa Bay area you can find out more here.

We’ve got more accelerator stories here.

Powerhouse Team Behind Gui.de Raises $1 Million For Max Headroom Like News Startup

A new startup based in Miami, called Guide, promises to bring technology that will turn online news, social streams and blogs into videos guided by 20 different anchors or avatars. Included in the 20 anchors are a dog, a robot, and anime characters.

These characters will read articles, and present photos and videos like your personal guide to the content you’re looking at. The animated characters are the driving force behind the technology. If you’re thinking this sounds rather silly, well think again, as Guide has already raised $1 million dollars in funding from some credible heavy hitters in the video and entertainment industries.

The Knight Foundation, Sapient Corp, Bob Pittman (MTV founder), and Google’s employee 13, Steve Schimmel.

The Gui.de team is headed by Freddie Laker a former executive at Sapient with who’s been dabbling in startups for some time. Leslie Bradshaw, the company’s Chief Operating Officer, has a rock solid resume including being named one of the top five female executives in the technology industry by Fast Company magazine. Bradshaw was listed alongside Cher Wang of HTC, Marissa Mayer of Google and Mary Meeker of KPCB.

The demo on the gui.de website looks like they paired Siri up with some video animation and use her to read the news. The technology may not quite be there yet, but with the team they have in place they should be able to put something spectacular together.

Gui.de is headed to SXSW to debut their product and strike up some buzz at the conference that’s known as the launch pad for Twitter, FourSquare, Zaarly, Ban.jo and more.

Find out more here.

When You Say Jump Vert Says How High VIDEO INTERVIEW

One of the coolest startups we found at Eureka Park as part of CES 2013 last month was a startup called MayFonk Athletic and their app called Vert. It’s kind of a fitness app combining a piece of Bluetooth enabled hardware with a smart device app. However, Vert is specific to one thing, and that is jumping.

Vert uses a sensor that easily attaches to a person’s body (as seen in the video below), and is able to measure how high someone jumps. Whether they are jumping in basketball, doing jumping jacks, gymnastics or a workout infused with jumping Vert keeps up.

On the app side it’s able to measure, track and analyze all of the data provided from the device. With the right exposure it’s something that many basketball teams will want to take advantage of.

The Fort Lauderdale based startup is creating their own market, separate from the other fitness based measurement devices and apps.

Check out the video interview below. For more info visit

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Jacksonville Startup Weekend Entrepreneur Has Domain Name Ripped Off

Jacksonville just recently held a Startup Weekend event. The event, like most Startup Weekends, brought hordes of entrepreneurs, hackers, developers and designers together under one roof to build companies over a 54 hour period.

Jennifer Chapman, was one of those entrepreneurs.

She had an idea called “Pinstitute” an online education platform taking the concepts behind sites like Skillshare and applying them to Pinterest. Basically, a platform to buy and sell online classes to make the cool stuff you see on Pinterest.

“I’m relieved, I’m excited, I’m a little anxious that I’m about to take on this amazing new venture,” Chapman said after her first-place win reports the Jacksonville Business Journal. “This is amazing, it’s been an awesome experience.”

Co-founder of Banyan, and new Chattanooga resident, Toni Gemayel, was one of the judges for the Jacksonville event, giving some great advice to Chapman, “Don’t let anyone leave here with your idea”.

Unfortunately that’s what somebody did. Chapman couldn’t afford the $3800 for the premium Pinstitute domain name, and by the end of Startup Weekend, someone at the event had shelled out the money for it, someone not on her team.

“That was disappointing to hear that somebody would do that,” said Todd Smith, one of the event’s five judges. “At the end of the day, it’s the person with the vision and the execution who is the real entrepreneur.”

In the end it looks like Chapman will move forward with the idea, perhaps under a different domain. File this one under total douchebag.

Jaguars Support First Ever Crowdfunding Festival One Spark April 17-21

Onespark,Florida statups,shad khan,Jacksonville startup,crowdfunding festival

Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan (known for his mustache) has pledged up to $1 million dollars at the first crowdfunding festival One Spark (photo: sportsrantz.com)

An amazing thing is happening in Jacksonville, Florida April 12-21 2013. The entire downtown part of the city is being transformed into One Spark, the first ever of it’s kind, gigantic crowdfunding festival.

One of the event’s co-founder and Executive Director Elton Rivas told nibletz.com “Imagine taking crowdfunding offline”. He went onto describe how venues across the downtown area will be set up to showcase the latest in startups, technology, products and crowdfunding goods. At these showcases the creators and founders can show off their wares and encourage people to crowdfund their project right there in person.

While the concept is great in it’s own right, I mean imagine being able to touch the products on Kickstarter, there’s more to OneSpark than that.

On Tuesday night when we first talked to Rivas there was a minimum fund of $250,000 already in place to help crowdfund some of the project that will be showing off at OneSpark. It was revealed on Wednesday that Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan has pledged up to $1 million dollars through his investment arm STACHE Investments Corp. to help fund these projects.

“One Spark will attract and celebrate creativity in a variety of fields including science, technology, engineering and the arts, all of which are areas of great personal interest,” said Khan. “Jacksonville is the perfect host for this festival and I believe One Spark has the potential to inspire some really big thinking from the brightest minds in the area and beyond.”

“One Spark started with the belief that game-changers emerge from dorm rooms, garages and small studios – where great ideas develop. One Spark 2013 will be the point when creators of all kinds converge in our community, and when people from far and wide join together to decide on the next big thing(s). The heart of our city will be the place to get involved, be inspired, connect and collaborate,” said Rivas.

Some facts about One Spark:

— Open to all: Anyone can be a creator; One Spark venues can be spaces nearly anywhere in the urban core.

— Grassroots and independent: One Spark is built on the premise that the next great creation will likely come from a garage, small studio or dorm room. Creators will pair up with venues, independently, on the One Spark website. The organization does not select any of the creators or venues that make up the event.

— Empowered public: The $250,000 One Spark fund will be distributed based on public vote; the public can also contribute directly to entrants in any amount.

— Five packed days: During the actual event, there will be creator showcases, speakers, culinary experiences, music and what we like to call “spectacles.”

— Win votes and snag a slice of the $250,000 guaranteed crowd-fund. Crowd-fund monies will be distributed by popular vote. For example, if you receive 10 percent of the vote, you would receive 10 percent of the fund, or $25,000.

— STACHE Investments Corp: Formed by Shad Khan in 2012, the investment company has a component that focuses on entrepreneurial ventures in Northeast Florida and will be on the ground looking for investment opportunities during the five days of One Spark.

For more on OneSpark click here

Now that’s four months of great startup events including the biggest startup conference in the U.S. everywhereelse.co The Startup Conerence next month!

CES 2013: LivMobile Is Simplifying That Second Screen

A startup in Florida called LivMobile is looking to simplify that second screen for anyone that wants to watch any kind of video from any source. They’re doing this with a web based browser app that turns the browser into the video playback source.

We find out in the interview that the idea for LivMobile was born when their CEO was looking for a second way to view video. He was watching a football game and when they went to time out he wanted a second screen to know when the game was back. Nowadays second screens are common place.

With all the different video apps out there, LivMobile hopes to cut through all the clutter and bring together all video in one easy to use HTML5 browser based product.

Nibletz co-founder and CEO Nick Tippmann got a chance to interview LivMobile at their booth at CES 2013’s Eureka Park. Check out the video below:

You can find out more about LivMobile at livmobile.tv

The startup village at everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference has 135 startups in it, is yours?

Tampa Bay Startup: MamaBear Giving Parents A Piece Of Mind

Monitoring your kids on the internet and on their mobile phone can be a sticky issue. Every parent wants to know that their children are being safe and that they are safe, everywhere they go and no matter what they are doing. Parents in this day and age have a lot more to watch out for than even 10 years ago. Child predators, cyber-bullying, texting and driving are all real problems facing parents and kids but privacy can be almost as sensitive.

Tampa Bay startup MamaBear has come up a mobile app that allows parents to monitor as much or as little as they want to on their child’s mobile phone. The first step though is the acknowledgement the app gets from the monitored phone (the child’s). Parents download the MamaBear app to their smartphone and then on their child’s phone. The child then checks in, both acknowledging the app is on their phone and letting their parents know where they are.

MamaBear from Mamabear App on Vimeo.

Parents can monitor locations, texts, social media, and more. In fact, MamaBear app also provides a list of words that could indicate the child is doing something that’s at risk or that they’re being cyber bullied.

MamaBear evolved out of a location based company that was working on providing businesses with location based business intelligence. One of the co-founders, Stuart Kime got into a conversation with a parent who had told him that her full time job was monitoring her kids’ social media pages. Kime along with his co-founders were able to come up with an app that gave parents a piece of mind all the way around.

We got a chance to interview Robyn Spoto, co-founder and company President. Check out the interview with her below: