Tampa Startup Banyan Wins Entrepreneur Track At Chattanooga’s Gig Tank

Over 500 people came from across Tennessee and across the USA to Chattanooga TN Wednesday and Thursday for GigTank’s Demo Day.

GigTank is a 90 day accelerator program based in Chattanooga with an emphasis on using Chattanoga’s 1GBPS internet. Chattanooga was the first city in the United States (edging out Kansas City and Google by a year), to implement 1gbps internet. Every resident and business in a 600 square mile radius has 1gbps fiber optic line straight to their home or business.

Chattanooga was able to set up the 1gb fiber by rolling out a smart grid that provides communications from utility meters at every home and business back to a central location. Citizens of Chattanooga can elect to get data and tv services from the 1gb fiber pipe in their homes on a monthly subscription based model.

Chattanooga’s GigTank accelerator featured two separate tracks. The entrepreneur track was a traditional 3 month accelerator model with a seed investment, and access to services, mentors, office space and other resources. The student track was similar to the entrepreneur track but without the seed investment. Students participated in a pitch contest in Chattanooga Thursday where they competed for a $50,000 prize.

The winner of the entrepreneur track was a Tampa Florida startup called Banyan. The Banyan team was Toni Gamayel, Travis Staton and TJ Weigel.

Banyan is a cloud based collaborative research system. This allows researchers who are working on the same project to keep their research together. It also solves major pains for those managing the research.

During Gamayel’s pitch he brought up an instance where two students at the University of Kentucky were working on the same exact research one floor above each other and didn’t even know it. With Banyan the research manager would have easily been able to identify this duplicate research.

In another instance a Stanford professor had been working on some research. The need arose to validate that the particular research he was working on was being performed at the school rather than at home or another lab. With Banyan they could have easily identified the source of the actual research.

Banyan took a $100,000 check back to Tampa where they plan on using it to beef up their development and marketing. Gamayel is very active in the Tampa startup community. He was a judge for a recent Startup Weekend in Florida and is well known as a resource and mentor in the region. In fact he has provided mentorship to Feathr a Gainesville based startup that is working on eliminating the paper business card.

Check out Banyan’s complete pitch below:

Linkage:

Check out Banyan’s website here

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Tampa Startup: Citizinvestor Looks To CrowdFund Neighborhood Projects

Digital strategist turned entrepreneur Jordan Raynor of Tampa Florida is working on a new and exciting startup in the crowdfunding space. I’m sure you’re wondering how can anyone be working on something “new and exciting” in the crowdfunding space, well read on and you’ll understand.

The first thing you need to know about Raynor is that he is a realist of sorts. Check out his personal website here and you’ll see that Raynor doesn’t pull any punches and he’s not wrapped up in self loathing bull shit. Most of his career as a digital strategist has been spent solving problems in government and politics through technology, which is exactly what he’s doing with his new startup Citizinvestor.

After being tipped off about Citizinvestor it was Raynor’s description of the platform that easily brought the idea home for me. Remember those days when a neighborhood would hold a yardsale, bake sale or spaghetti dinner to get new playground equipment, street signs repainted, or trees planted? Well Citizinvestor takes those ideas and puts them on the web for 2012. In the same manner that traditional, self crowdfunding takes panhandling to the internet.

There are so many civic projects that get shelved for one reason and one reason only, and that’s because they can’t get funded. Some new data analysts needed to crunch the numbers of how many Coke bottles vs how many Pepsi bottles were recycled last month’s salary is more important than replacing that slide that’s been ripping holes in the skin of the towns children for months. (boy that was a run on sentence).

The mulch at the neighborhood entrance that hasn’t been replaced in 12 years somehow keeps ending up on the bottom of the budget list.

So Citizinvestor has a couple of really cool purposes.

1. The platform helps raise the money for the projects that really matter to the people.

2. It puts the power in the hands of the people. If people stand up and donate for the new playground equipment, the city manager can’t take that money and buy more sticky notes.

3. It empowers the people.

Of course some may be outraged by this idea for crowdfunding civic projects. They may feel that it’s the responsibility of the government using the tax money they provide to the government. With that mentality though, projects will continue to get shelved so that more “important” budget line items can use those tax dollars.

I think as far as playgrounds, parks, library books are concerned, when people use Citizinvestor for those projects they’ll take ownership of them. After the slide and the swings are replaced, the townspeople may see how easy it is to come together and get things done and that the bureaucracy, while needed, can be cut through like a large ginsu knife on a stick of melted butter, when people ban together using Citizinvestor.

Linkage:

Check out Raynor’s personal blog here, it’s actually pretty good.

Here’s the link for Citizinvestor

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Can This Florida Startup Feathr, Get Rid Of The Traditional Business Card?

A gang of young twenty somethings from Florida have started a new startup to eliminate the business card. CEO, Aidan Augustin, along with cohorts Neal Ormsbee and Gabriel Busto are in the process of launching an app called Feathr.

Augustin says that while he was interning in Silicon Valley he attended a networking mixer with young entrepreneurs. Admittedly the attendance was the top echelon of future entrepreneurs, millionaires, Stanford students, graduates and drop outs. Augustin said in an interview that none of these young professionals had a traditional business card. By the end of the evening they were trying to take each others information down by downloading bump, passing phones around to input information and any other means that they could. It seemed ridiculous that there was no app to handle this process, so they created it.

Feathr allows the user to create an interactive virtual business card, that can link to a persons website, portfolio,email address, phone number, social networking channels and more. Then, through a graphically pleasing UI, users can share all or as much of the information they want with someone new.

The real benefit to Feathr lies in the fact that both parties don’t have to have the Feathr app installed in order to exchange Feathr cards. Augustin explains that if the receiver doesn’t have the Feathr app they get a text message with a link to where the virtual business card resides in the cloud. This is one of the big differentiators between Feathr and other similar apps in the space.

Another big difference between Feathr and their competitors is that most other apps in the business card, and networking space are about input and intake of information. Feathr is focused on sharing.

On the user side, once you’ve got someone’s Feathr card in your Feathr contact list, you have one click access to whatever means you want to communicate with that person. If you want to Tweet to them you can. If you want to send a text message you can. If you want to call you can. You can even view their portfolio and flip through their work. It’s that robust and at the same time that easy.

Feathr is still in private beta. You can follow the link below to request early beta access.

Linkage:

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Miami Startup: Sumpto It’s Like Klout For College Students, But Better INTERVIEW

Klout is still a big mystery to most, how do you get those crazy Klout scores. If you know how it’s really calculated feel free to send me an email. Klout Perks is a great program that puts manufacturers products into peoples hands. They presumably want the cream of the crop when it comes to Klout, but we have no idea who that really is.

Sumpto is looking to do something along those lines when they launch next week. They’re going to match products to college students with influential social graphs. Sumpto will rank a college students social clout (with a c not a k) and then link manufacturers with college brand ambassadors who can presumably get the word about those products out to the masses.

Manufacturers love it when they can get exposed to people with real influence. Ranking that influence can be a challenge but Sumpto’s Founder and President Ben Kosinski seems to have figured out the magic formula. Yes, Sumpto’s partners will most likely reach the hands of the right people.

The college demographic is a hard one to crack, with free stuff though it may be easier. When you add the free stuff to an exclusive layer of folks, your destined to gain exposure down the lines to the masses. That’s exactly what Sumpto is going to do.

We got a chance to interview Kosinski check out the interview below:

Miami Startup: CleanTie Makes Laundry A Cinch

A new startup in Miami is looking to take the pain away from laundry. Forget making time in your busy schedule to take your laundry to the laundromat, and forget having to fold baskets of clothes. CleanTie, a new startup in Miami has taken laundry referral to the web.

That’s not all though, CleanTie will help you find a laundry service that picks up and delivers from your home. That means you can make your laundry appointment wearing that last clean pair of boxers, from your iPad or laptop. CleanTie is adding to the growing list of services that have been able to generate business via the internet.

CleanTie is all about convenience for the customer. The search engine part of the site matches you with your closest laundry service and then you can drill down to the one you want to use from the available laundry services that pick up and deliver from either your home or office. Some of the laundry services even offer same day service.

“This is a great way for brick and mortar laundry services to reach an untapped market of busy people searching the internet for help with their laundry. Better yet, they can take advantage of the CleanTie marketing platform, without spending money or time on internet marketing themselves.” said Blair Nastasi PR Director at CleanTie.

The new startup reports that they plan on running tv commercials in their first market, of course Miami. They are also working on an official mobile app which will allow you to easily schedule your laundry pick up and delivery from your smartphone.

Linkage:

Check out CleanTie here

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Florida Startup: Sprigster, Crowdfunding For Veterans Looking To Start Franchise Businesses

There’s an alarming statistic when it comes to unemployment in our country and that is the fact that veterans who have moved from military to civilian life are one of the highest groups that are unemployed. That’s one of the reasons that TechStars just concluded their Patriot bootcamp to help and inspire veterans with ideas for startups to get started on their plans.

Sprigster, is a startup we actually heard about first back in April. Sprigster is a crowdfunding startup where several people can come together (as with any crowdfunding model) and support a franchise or business project for veterans.

CEO Mark Mohler likens crowdfunding to “Barn Raising”, back in the day towns would rally around their neighbors if one of their neighbors lost a building or had some other need. The townspeople would have a fundraiser in a barn to give money to the community member. With crowdfunding this is all done online and meant to help our military neighbors.

Ideally the platform is meant for former military who are now civilians who would like to hire themselves as the owner of a franchise business. Mohler explains why franchising is a better model for this platform than traditional startups in the interview below.

Interview With Florida Startup: Yovia, A People Engine

Yovia is a new startup in Jacksonville Beach Florida. They call themselves a people engine that focuses on the people that make social media work.

Yovia takes brands, products, services and leverages them across a network of people who has signed up on Yovia. Yovia users can use their hard earned social capital for good. So how is this achieved?

Well after you sign up for Yovia’s platform you are presented with opportunities to spread the word about products, services and brands across your social graph and are rewarded. Your rewards can be in actual cash or free products or a combination of both. Exploring the Yovia site we found, and participated in several offers. The offers ranged from $6.00 for a 200 word blog entry to $.08 and $.15 for liking something or sharing something across social networks.

Yovia is a great way to drive brand engagement, and social engagement. There were news blogs that needed a like or share, and new services that needed signups. None of the offers seemed too outlandish and so far none have asked for my credit card information. It looks to be on the up and up.

Now eight cents and fifteen cents may not seem like a lot however if Yovia continues to grow quickly it will be easier to find higher paying offers and easier to complete more lower paying offers.

We got a chance to talk to Jalali Hartman, co-founder of Yovia in the interview below:

Florida Startup: Vaultbox Is An Excellent Way To Manage Home Inventory INTERVIEW

How many of you have a comprehensive home inventory? Taking home inventory is a pain in the ass but it’s a necessary evil. You never want to get to the point where it’s too late, and you’ve been robbed, or had a natural disaster destroy your home, to start calculating what you’ve lost, especially when an insurance company is involved. So if you don’t have a home inventory yet than perhaps you should read this story and then get off the computer and take one.

Vaultbox is a new startup in Miami Florida that assists with your home inventory and then keeps it in the cloud where it’s actually safer. You actually might run into a problem if your house was robbed and your laptop was stolen with the home inventory on it. Or worse, if your home was destroyed by fire, tornado or other natural disaster. By keeping this data in the cloud, you can access it later, when you need it, from anywhere.

Vaultbox makes it simple to email your complete home inventory to your insurance agent, friends, family or law enforcement. It also makes it easy to add things, and subtract them, from your home inventory as you upgrade the things in your home, or clean out the clutter.

There are hundreds of reasons that a comprehensive home inventory is important for everyone. Whether you have home owners insurance, renter’s insurance or no insurance (which you should get) a home inventory is a life saver in certain circumstances.

We got a chance to talk with Jacob Israel from vaultbox. Check out the interview below:

Tampa Startup: Muzime Is A Spotify For Indie Artists That Kicks Ass

Music sharing startups are popping up all over the place. A lot of them would qualify as “a dime a dozen” but that’s not the case with Florida based Muzime. Joel Fenelon tells the FloridaTechnologyJournal that while he was in college his studies pivoted from business to music. After that he studied and became a conductor, eventually leading to an offer to conduct overseas.

While building up his musical repertoire he realized that his works were his and filled with emotion. He also realized he didn’t want anyone else to own his music, he wanted to own it, perform it and share it with who he wants to when he wants to. That tiny idea eventually evolved into what today he is calling Muzime.

Muzime is a familiar idea, a music sharing platform ala the newest iteration of MySpace and of course social music powerhouse Spotify. However those comparisons just about stop after the “shared music” anomoly.

Muzime,Tampa startup,Florida startup,startups,music startup,independent artists,Joel Fenelon

Joel Fenelon CEO & Founder Muzime (photo: 84degrees.com)

What separates Muzime from the Spotify’s of the world, is that the platform is entirely about indy artists and musicians, like Fenelon, who hold onto the rights of their music.

The service is free to sing up for both artists and music buffs. Artists can create a profile page and share snippets of their songs on their pages. In fact they can upload as many songs as they like. From there, Muzime charges $.89 for the user base to download songs. Of that, the musician gets $.69 while Muzime holds onto $.20 from each track, to keep the servers running .

One of the great features about the site itself is that music lovers can stream each song two times. After the second time they can get a :30 clip of the song or download it for the $.89.

Muzime catalogs the music by artist, title, genre and mood. If you’re feeling happy, sad, angry or any other mood you can select music that way as well.

Muzime has a wide variety of music from just about every genre. We checked out “Jam Bands”, Hip Hop, Jazz and Classical all offering a good sized list of songs and artists. Also each song and artist have their own page where you can get lyrics, read stories about the song and artist and interact with the artists. Muzime is an incredibly robust platform especially considering it’s made up of just independent artists.

The real beauty behind this innovative Florida startup is that Fenelon is not just looking to expose new artists to more people, he’s looking to help artists monetize on their works, which is obviously a win-win for everyone involved.

Linkage:

Check out Muzime and sign up here

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source: FloridaTechnoloyJournal

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Florida Startup: Coach Crowd Helps Connect You To Private Coaches INTERVIEW

Before this year I had no idea that private coaching was such a big thing across the country. Back in May we brought you the story about Jordan Fliegel and his Boston based startup CoachUp designed to help find and vet private coaches.

CoachCrowd, a Florida startup (with one founder in Austin) is about to launch their platform to connect athletes with private coaches. They’ve even gotten the endorsement of the Offensive Coordinator at Texas A&M Kliff Kingsbury who said:

“CoachCrowd is perfect for former athletes everywhere to turn their talents and experiences into a fulfilling way to help young athletes in their community and make money.”

CrowdCoach was founded by Branndon Stewart who is a former quarterback at Texas A&M and the University of Tennessee, Allan Branch who is a former D1 offensive lineman and Steve Bristol who is co-founder of Less Everything, along with Branch.

The three combined are promising an easy to use, easy to navigate, web platform to connect youth athletes with private coaches.

We got a chance to interview Branndon about CoachCrowd.

Florida Startup: Path.To Expands Job Matching To Chicago, Boston And NYC

Jacksonville Florida based startup Path.to has announced an expansion of their job matching startup to three major cities. Chicago, Boston and New York City joined the Path.to network to connect potential job candidates to hiring employers.

Path.To connects the right people to the right jobs using their sophisticated, proprietary algorithms assuring both job candidates and hiring employers that their connection is more relevant than other job search platforms. The startup was founded last year by Darren Bounds who also serves as their Vice President of Product.

Path.To understands an applicants passion, personality and experience and says that they connect people with jobs they love.

In addition to the new markets Path.To has announced some new email features as well. Path.To will email job candidates available positions that the service feels are a good match for them. Path.To users searching for a job can opt out of certain employers if they feel that they aren’t a fit, and of course continue to apply for jobs that they feel are, the perfect fit.

The company also announced a social resume feature that will allow users to add their social network information, accounts and streams so that potential employers don’t have to dig through the internet to find it. This also insures that the candidate shares what they want from social media, and delivers a more “open” feeling in the job vetting process.

At this stage in the game, Path.To is still free for both applicants and employers although Bounds told TNW that they will shift to a paid model for employers later on this year.

Linkage:

Check out and sign up for Path.TO here

Source: TNW

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Startup America Partners With Startup RockOn For DNC RNC Events

Startup America and Startup RockOn have announced that they are partnering for some very exciting events this year.

Startup RockOn is a collaborative effort of fast growing Startups, Event Farm, HyperVocal, and Fighter Interactive. Together they are putting together mini festival style events at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) on September 3, 2012 in Charlotte North Carolina and the Republican National Convention (RNC) August 27th in Tampa Bay.

The events will highlight America’s thriving startup culture, have interactive displays and sessions and feature musical performances, including the group The Roots who have agreed to headline the events.

Startup America CEO, Scott Case, stated, “As the RNC and DNC capture the attention of the country, it’s imperative to highlight the importance of startups to our national economy, and we’re incredibly excited to partner with EventFarm, HyperVocal and FIGHTER Interactive — three hard-working startups themselves — to do just that.”

The StartUp RockOn leadership team stated, “From a garage band to culture-shifting software, from next-generation media companies to 21st century energy solutions, the greatest American success stories start (and will start) through ingenuity, creativity, hard work and perseverance. StartUp RockOn honors the entrepreneurs of America’s bright future.”

Startup America is now 23 regional partnerships strong and has already hosted or partnered for a bunch of great events including a Startup America event at the Hilton in Austin during South by Southwest Interactive.

This new partnership will spur even more interest in Startups, entrepreneurism and technology in the United States, regardless of political affiliation.

Linkage:

Florida Startup: Bellco’s Ion Air Mouse Computer Glove Preparing For Holidays

This is going to be a great holiday season. We are expecting to see new Retina display MacBooks introduced this week at WWDC, there will be a ton more ultra books and of course traditional PC laptops. In anticipation of that, a hot new startup from Central Florida called Bellco, will also see stock piles of their Ion Air Mouse Computer Glove, hopefully fly off the shelf.

Now that smartphone adoption has come to record heights, and tablets are flying off the shelves as well, people are growing more and more accustom to using their fingers for navigation. Sure you can do it on a track pad but it’s not the same familiarity as your tablet or smartphone screen.

I’m sure I’m not the only one that has tried to swipe across the screen of their MacBook Pro. (see you laughed) that’s where the Ion Air Mouse Computer Glove comes in. It’s a glove that fits around your hand snuggly, has a comfortable charging port (via micro usb) and a wireless dongle that attaches to any computer.

Once the glove is on you can use it your hand/finger as your pointing device. Admittedly it’s still not the same as the gestures that you’re used to with your smartphone but it’s effective. The glove also leaves your fingertips free for typing.

Now not only is it an effective peripheral but it’s also effectively priced. While the new startup behind the Ion Air Mouse Computer Glove, Bellco, could probably get away with selling it in the high $100 range, it comes in at just $79.99 making it priced the same as some of the more serious mice available today.

Bellco reports that the glove comes in gray and black and works with Windows, Linux,Mac and Android. Bellco encourages users to try it by setting up your computer via HDMI to a big tv for a “Wow” worth of experience.

Linkage

Itching to know more about it, go to their website here

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Orlando Startup: Doccaster, Proximity Based File Sharing For Convention Go-ers

A new startup in central Florida is looking to disrupt the file sharing space. Rather than going with a cloud based model, like every other startup in the space, Doccaster offers proximity based file sharing. This type of file sharing will be great for conventioneers.

Doccaster is based in Orlando, which reportedly hosts 25 of the top 250 conferences in the United States and ranks behind only Las Vegas and Chicago for hosting conventions. I’ve personally attended many conventions in Orlando, most recently the 2011 CTIA spring show.

With Doccaster you will be able to share files with large groups within a 15 mile radius. The user will be able to search files based on proximity or DoccasterID (user name).

Co-founders Kyle Steele and Himanshu Pagey first launched a location based chat platform in 2010. That startup, called GoTootie, has pivoted into Doccaster.

More and more conventions are going green. Over the past two years the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the producers of the largest trade show in the United States, CES, have made a huge effort to go green, and encourage their exhibitors to go green.

Certainly major exhibitors have the dollars needed to produce thumb drives with their material on them (no company in 2012 would dare give out a CD), but smaller companies at CES or any major trade show don’t necessarily have the money to invest in thousands of thumb drives. Doccaster makes it easy for those companies to sign up for their service and use it as a vehicle to get their literature into convention go-ers hands.

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