Florida Archives - Page 7 of 7

Miami Startup: Senzari Raises $1 Million Dollars For Global Expansion

Miami music startup Senzari has just raised $1 million dollars for global expansion.

Leading the round was Dave McClure’s 500 startups. Other investors from both Miami and Silicon Valley also participated in the round for this unique global music service.

Move over Pandora, Senzari has over 11 million songs (compared to Pandora’s 900,000) and the best part is that it is available outside of the United States. The service is available in the United States as well as Spain (in a partnership with MTV) and Brazil (in a partnership with VH1).

Aside from it’s gigantic catalog of songs Senzari separates itself form other on demand listening services like Pandora, Spotify and Slacker Radio by partnering with music distributors instead of the record labels directly. Some of their partners include SoundExchange, and publishing companies ASCAP, BMI, and SEASAC.

“We are excited about joining the 500 family as it allows us to leverage its impressive mentor network and global relationships,” says Senzari COO Demian Bellumio to techcrunch.com. “As a matter of fact, we created a special section in Senzari with radios for each of the stops of the tour with music that represent current and classic hits.”

Senzari also offers a proximity based service called “Around Me” that allows users to use social media data to find songs that people in close proximity to them are listening to, very similar to Berlin startup wahwah.com

Linkage:

Check out Senzari for yourself here

Source: TechCrunch

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Miami Startups: Herald Announces Winners For 2012 Business Plan Competition

The Miami Herald newspaper just announced the winners of their 14th annual business plan competition contest. The contest had several tracks including a high school track and the winners came from a variety of categories. Yes you read that correctly while many cities are just now working on their inaugural business plan competitions, and others have contests less than five years old, the Miami Herald has been promoting startups through the contest for fourteen years.

All of the contestants were judged by entrepreneurial experts from the Miami area as well as successful entrepreneurs, investors, consultants and academics. The Herald also has a “People’s Pick” category that was voted on by video. The contest is sponsored by Florida International Univerity’s Eugenio Pino and Family Global Entrepreneurship Center.

The winner of the community track was a winery experience for cruise ships called Blend Craft Wines. Blend Craft Wines also won the “People’s Pick” category, which was the first time in the last six years that the same startup has won both categories.

A mobile couponing Android app called Geopon won the FIU track in voting. Other startups that ranked in the top included: Agape Marine Ventures, LegalFileIt, BidThatProject and WedWu.

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Florida Startup: LokalMuzik Proximity Based Local Music Aggregator INTERVIEW

A Jacksonville entrepreneur, Jason Belanger, has just launched a new mobile app for discovering new local music by proximity to your device. The app called LokalMusik is available for Android phones in the Google Play store.

Basically you open up the app and based on your GPS coordinates you can find new music and artists of multiple genres. New unsigned artists create profile pages which allow you to learn more about them, hear their music, even find out when and where they are playing next.

This is great for people who love to find new music and artists a lot or even if you want to keep up with your local music scene. Since the app is proximity based, if you’re in New Orleans you’re going to get an entire different set of artists then you would n New York, LA or even Florida.

Now if you’re attending a big music festival like SXSW, the New Orleans Jazz Festival, or even Bonaroo you can check out the national acts coming to the stages and the home brewed talent in whichever genre you like. Whether you want to support up and coming hip hop artists or a local string quartet LokalMuzik will offer it all.

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Florida Startup: WUBB Wants To Be The One Social Network For Business

A Cooper City Florida company has launched a new social network called WUBB. Their mission seems to be targeted at business and very multi-faceted. If WUBB takes off it’s going to be spectacular for them however if it doesn’t it’s going to be one crazy hodge podge of social mess.

This morning WUBB described itself as “a platform for social entrepreneurs across the world that inspires, connects, communicates and manages your business and professional network by joining Entrepreneurs, Cofounders, Freelancers, Investors, Employees, Family and Friends. It is a multi-user, community-based, business networking hub where people join only to be benefited.”

The home page and dashboard look like a hybrid between Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. Speaking of which you can login with your Facebook or LinkedIn account or create your own account.

In addition to the usual dashboard links like dashboard,profile, people and even companies, you’ll also find tabs for contests, services, projects, ideas and even domains and websites. WUBB gives you a portal to buy domain names and buy and sell websites. A little odd for a social network but most likely a revenue stream for the new company.

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Florida Startup: Showoff.com Provides DIY Home Virtualization For All

If you’ve purchased a new home in the last few years you may have had your real estate agent show you what the house you were buying would look like with hardwoods instead of carpet, or sky blue paint instead of brown. They may have shown this to you on a laptop using some very expensive virtualization software.

Well the folks at VisApp in Sarasota has launched an award winning web tool called showoff.com that provides free virtualization software for home owners. This new startup has already won the award for the best website generating leads at the 2012 BizTech Innovation Summit in Tampa.

Showoff.com was also showing off their home virtualization tool at the DEMO conference in Santa Clara California last week.

While the fact that you can use showoff.com when you’re buying a new house, the software can be applied in so many other ways. TechNewsWorld’s Rob Enderle is building a house in Belize. As he writes in his piece about Showoff.com’s appearance at DEMO, he can now do all his modifications at home and see what they’ll look like at his house in Belize. Possibly shaving off some expensive travel to and from, not to mention explaining to his contractor in Belize exactly what he wants. With Showoff.com he can just show him.

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Boca Raton Book Swapping Startup Wins FAU Business Plan Competition

A Boca Raton software entrepreneur putting two kids through college just won $15,000 in the Florida Atlantic University business plan competition. Mark Fredericks and his son David, a junior at FAU, pitched SwitchMyBooks which won the competition and the money to go along with it. They also won $80,000 in business services for the startup.

The contest was open to South Florida entrepreneurs and not just students at FAU.

SwitchMyBooks was born out of necessity. Fredericks quickly realized that spending $1000 or more per year on textbooks for college was a reality.

“The average student spends well over $1,000 a year for books,” Fredericks told the palmbeachpost. “That’s a huge burden.”

Sure there are other ways to get used textbooks online, however SwitchMyBooks has a more innovative approach on a local level. Students who want to sell their books using SwitchMyBooks simply list the book on the site. When they have a buyer the buyer pays a $.99 fee to SwitchMyBooksand then negotiates the actual sale of the book with the seller individually. They can then meet up, presumably on the same campus or nearby to actually do the exchange. The reservation fee lets the seller know they have a serious buyer and the buyer know they have the book.

FAU is the first campus to use SwitchMyBooks they implemented the site on campus last month. Fredericks has his sites on a nationwide rollout though. If he can get one million students using the site he could easily generate $5M in revenue.

Unlike other used book sites SwitchMyBooks users deal locally and don’t have to worry about shipping heavy books through the mail. They can also of course use cash versus Paypal or another form of online payment.

source: Palmbeachpost

3 Fort Lauderdale Entrepreneurs Launch MyNyte A Mobile Nightlife Social Startup

Three young entrepreneurs in Ft. Lauderdale have teamed up to launch an innovative new social mobile startup called MyNyte. The focus is to answer the question “What are you doing tonight” and then team up with your like-minded friends to do the same thing. Essentially, the app helps eliminate the hours of planning, phone tag, text tag, email tag, voicemail tag and any other kind of tag you can play as you plan your evening.

This app is pretty hot, how hot? Well Tyrese for one has been tweeting about it. MyNyte’s co-founder Jimmy Caylor says that Tyrese isn’t the only celebrity that’s checked out the app. A social mobile startup like this could not have picked a better market to introduce itself in as south Florida. We all know that Miami, South Beach and Fort Lauderdale are the hubs for night-time entertainment.

The three guys that founded MyNyte are no strangers to nightlife and the partying scene. Through their own personal experiences and the experiences of their friends they’ve made sure that MyNyte has everything taken care of.

Planning your night- MyNyte helps you scout the perfect places. Whether you’re looking for an upscale night of martinis, cocktails and lounging or you’re looking for the hottest clubs with the best people MyNyte uses your profile to match you up with the action.

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Miami Startup: YourListen Crosses 100,000 Audio Uploads

Audio sharing site Yourlisten.com, founded by Scott Goodman, hopes to become the audio version of Youtube. They are well on their way as they recently announced their 100,000th audio upload. That’s definitely not too shabby for an audio file sharing site not based in Silicon Valley, and having to deal with the fallout from sites like MegaUpload.

Yourlisten.com is a free user-generated network that allows flexibility for uploading just about any kind of audio file. You’ll find a variety of music, podcasts, ringtones, interviews, soundbytes and other audio files on Yourlisten.com. The user can share the audio on the site, with friends and across social networks.

You would be surprised at the types of audio files that you can find on yourlisten.com. It’s not the site of the day out there to replace sites like megaupload. There are a lot of spoken word poetry pieces, international interviews and songs by new and undiscovered artists. A quick perusing of the site found that WTOP radio in Washington DC (one of the top billing radio stations in the country) uses Yourlisten.com to host interviews for people to listen to if they miss them during the original broadcast.

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