Indy Startup Weekend Team Max Recovery Already Up And Running

This weekend Startup Weekend is on fire. There are hundreds of startups being formed around the country and around the world. Indianapolis is one of the Startup Weekends happening this weekend.

Indianapolis startup evangelist, Nick Tippmann has jumped in to help form Max Recovery. With accelerator experience behind him, and even being a Startup Weekend Organizer in Bloomington Indiana, Tippmann has Max Recovery on a roadmap for success this weekend.

Max Recovery helps hardcore athletes track, balance and boost their body’s performance. It was built to help these body builders, UFC fighters, cross fit trainers, marathoners and those aspiring to be get the most out of their hard work. These people work themselves half to death and end up walking around like zombies. These are hardcore people we are targeting. They are the ones up at 4:30am to workout and not getting home until 9pm. Max Recovery allows these people to keep balanced. We have found that you need to work at Recovery as well to get the most out of these hard efforts or some of their effort ends up getting wasted because they have not properly recovered. They are not a sharp as they could be.

Tippmann told Nibletz exclusively.

Max Recovery is an app that allows these people to keep track of how balanced they are by logging their work and recovery in the terms of debits and credits. The idea is that everything cost. The more work you want to do, the more you have to pay for it. The goal is to keep a “balanced book.” For example a hard work out may cost -8, lack of sleep -4 and long run -6, you would then need to work at recovery to get credits from things like a massage +6, hot tub +2, 8 hours sleep +4, and acupuncture +8.

Max Recovery is in it for the long haul working on a legitimate, scalable, startup.

We are doing this at Indy Startup Weekend part of the global startup battle. We have one of the best teams I’ve ever seen assembled at one of these events. We have a specialist at every function and over 30 years experience combined in software. We have 2 devs, a graphic designer, UX designer, and a couple business/marketing guys. Tippmann said

Max Recovery isn’t like other health and wellness apps that allows you to track your workouts and count calories. It allows you to track how balanced you are. They haven’t found any competitors doing the same thing but they have found the area of recovery and habit building a hot topic. Tim Ferris mentions recovery as a key part of his four hour body workout

This weekend Max Recovery has already built their site and an app. Tippmann tells us they aren’t about mock ups, wire frames and demos, Max Recovery has done what teams ultimately should try to achieve during any Startup Weekend.

Linkage:

Checkout Max Recovery Here

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Indy Startup: Adproval Putting More Money In Blogger’s Hands INTERVIEW

As bloggers, any startup that’s purpose is making bloggers more money, of course catches our eye. Such is the case with Indianapolis startup Adproval.

Most full-time bloggers know that adsense is great but it’s tough to live off of when it’s your sole source of revenue. Sponsorships and the ability to sell direct/static advertising play a key role in the overall monetization strategy of a full-time blog.

Matthew Anderson and his startup Adproval have come up with a platform for bloggers that they claim is the easiest way to sell and manage sponsorships. Rather than setting up a blind network like adsense, NetShelter or even Say Media, Adproval lets bloggers sell their sponsorships to advertisers or sponsors that they approve of.

Adproval lets bloggers combine the power of traditional display advertising with other add-ons like sponsored posts, product reviews and social media.

Adproval lets bloggers manage their blog’s sellable inventory in ways that they couldn’t before. The idea for Adproval came to Anderson as a senior project in his last year at college. Now the project has gone from simple business plan to actual product.

Breaking up with a college girlfriend led to the idea for Adproval. How? We asked Anderson who said:

“Well. Funny story… I dated a sweet Chinese gal in college and, right after we broke up, a ridiculous amount of the ads showing up on Facebook and around the Internet were for things like “Find Single Asian Girls.” Not only were Facebook and AdSense kicking a dude’s broken heart while it was down, but they were creeping me out. Then, I was on a DIY crafting blog and an ad along the lines of “Meet Asians Near You” was displaying in the sidebar. It kind of clicked to me that (1) there is no way that this blogger wants that ad showing up to their readers and (2) there is no way that ad space on a niche blog with a relatively small amount of faithful readers is making as much money with an ad for Lonely Asian Girls or whatever AdSense was showing other readers as it could with an approved advertiser that the blogger could support with more than just a display ad.”

Check out the rest of our interview with Anderson below.

Indianapolis Startup LabDoor Is The Consumer Reports For Medicine & Supplements

St. Louis born, young, serial entrepreneur Neil Thanedar has been flying under the radar lately while he’s been working on his latest startup project. We ran into him at one of the Verge Indy startup events in Indianapolis over the summer. While he couldn’t officially say what he was working on, he gave us a little taste off the record. We couldn’t wait until his idea came to fruition and we could take the wraps off. Well the time is now.

Thanedar moved to Indianapolis after meeting Scott Case at the legendary Mark Cuban Shark Tank Season 3 Premiere Party. Thanedar was working on a concept and in a 1:1 session Case, the two startup geniuses hashed out what’s become LabDoor today, an extremely easy to use “consumer reports for medicine and supplements”.

Thanedar, like his father, is a lifelong scientist and entrepreneur. Thanedar’s latest endeavor, LabDoor, is scientific at the core, but a consumer tool that will become invaluable over time.

In a nutshell what LabDoor does, is allows any consumer with their smartphone app, the ability to scan the barcode of pharmaceutical or supplement product A and compare it with pharmaceutical or supplement product B. How much different is that Albuteral inhaler than Ventolin or Proventil. What about Lipitor and it’s generic counterpart? What about the Vitamin B capsules from Walmart vs the Vitamin B capsules from CVS?

All of those are great questions you’ve probably wondered once or twice. Or at least you have your own similar questions.

LabDoor provides the easiest means to make sure you’re taking the right stuff.

We got a chance to talk with Thanedar who actually hurt our feelings earlier this week when he told us he though he was dead to us since he got accepted into the World Famous (valley based) Rock Health Accelerator. Actually we couldn’t be more proud of this brilliant entrepreneur, who is passionate about helping other founders anytime, anywhere.

Check out the interview below.

Purdue Startup: FoundOps Wins Startup Bowl At Indy Powder Keg Conference

photo: TechCocktail

Last week downtown Indianapolis and Lucas Oil Field (home to this years Super Bowl) played host to the first Powder Keg conference.

Powder Keg piggybacked off Connections 12, ExactTarget’s annual conference for their digital marketers.

The signature event for this year’s Powder Keg conference was the first ever Startup Bowl. The Startup Bowl pitted 12 regional startups against each other in a traditional pitch contest. To put a very cool spin on it, conference organizer Matt Hunckler, held the Startup Bowl at Lucas Oil Field.

Derek Pacque and his startup CoatChex was among one of the 12 contestants. Pacque is somewhat of an Indy startup celebrity. He turned down a $200,000 investment from Mark Cuban in the first episode of Shark Tank Season 4.

Pacque’s mini celeb status wasn’t enough to thwart a duo of entrepreneurs from Purdue though. It was their startup, FindOPS, which took home a prize package worth $15,000.

FoundOPS founders, Jon Perl and Oren Shatken admit that their startup isn’t the sexiest. FoundOPS is a useful mobile app that offers route optimization, data collection and GPS tracking.

FoundOPS is in the hot enterprise space, targeting field services. Companies with field workers will take advantage of the many features found in FieldOPS mobile app.

What were the judges looking for?

“What’s their go-to-market strategy? Have they identified their market correctly? Where do they fit, versus their competition?” Judge Christopher Day, Managing Principal at the Nabudar Group told the Indianapolis Business Journal.

FoundOPS had all the components the judges pool were looking for. Startup America CEO and Founding CTO of Priceline.com, announced the winning team at the end of the event.

Linkage:

Source: IndyStar

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Photo: TechCocktail

Indy’s Powder Keg Startup Conference Announces 12 Startups In The Super Bowl

Startup evangelist, entrepreneur and founder of Verge Startups (Verge Indy), Matt Hunckler has been hard at work producing the upcoming Powder Keg regional startup conference in Indianapolis. Powder Keg is taking place in downtown Indianapolis with one amazing opportunity for 12 great startups, in a startup competition of Super Bowl proportions (can we say Super Bowl?).

“The Big Game” startup competition (see what we did there) will take place at Lucas Oil Stadium next Thursday, which just happens to be the same venue for last years Super Bowl. You know, the one where another Indiana startup evangelist put together this little Shark Tank party with Mark Cuban.

Yes, Indiana has it like that and Powder Keg will continue the tradition of great startup events produced by Hunckler on a much larger scale. Powder Keg has a great list of speakers including illusionist David Blaine, Scott Case (who’s also speaking at everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference), Dave Knox from RockFish and co-founder of The Brandery,and Erik Martin General Manager at Reddit. The event will feature two powerful days of sessions, the Startup Bowl, Startup Showcase and three great parties (what’s a startup event without parties).

Yesterday, the Verge Startups team announced the 12 startups competing for a $15,000 startup growth prize sponsored by Microsoft and Elevate Ventures. Here’s the list:

CoatChex
CoatChex is focused on bringing innovation and value through today’s technology to an industry that hasn’t been touched in decades. The patent-pending process optimizes coat check-in and retrieval functions and reduces the risks that are commonly associated with checking coats, making it the hassle-free solution to running a secure, profitable, and efficient coat check station.

Team Mash
TeamMash is a daily email for sports fanatics. Every day, their editors scour the web for the best sports content. Each morning, they email you a mashup of what happened with your favorite teams in the past 24 hours. It even contains links to hand-picked articles from around the web.

FoundOPS
FoundOPS is developing an operations platform to help small field service operate more efficiently by gamifying carbon savings. In one, easy to use cloud based system, they’ve incorporated GPS technician tracking, drag and drop dispatching, and intuitive customer service management. The platform is provided for free, but customers are incentived to purchase premium features such as route optimization, QuickBooks integration, and BI reports in order to increase their carbon savings.

Adproval
Adproval is a service that streamlines the process of direct ad sales for small and medium bloggers while allowing them to maintain relationships with their advertisers. Working with an approved advertiser lets bloggers use their voice – by means of product reviews, featured posts, etc. – to back them as a sponsor, making ad space on that blog more valuable. Bloggers set up their sponsorship offerings with Adproval and put a page on their blog where advertisers can choose what they want and make an offer. If the blogger finds the advertiser suitable and approves of them, the ad image is automatically uploaded to their blog, the payment is automatically transferred, and the relationship is managed through their dashboard on Adproval.

Lisnr
Lisnr aims to change the way that consumers experience audio by turning what has historically been a passive experience into an interactive engagement platform. Lisnr is an app that allows music or any other audio medium to passively trigger consumer interactions, direct to their mobile device, during a consumer’s listening experience. Lisnr is completely source agnostic as notifications can be sent from audio being played anywhere.

PetBookings
PetBookings.com is the first and only website to offer instant and confirmed online reservations to the $3.5 billion professional pet care industry. They are launching v2.0 of their website platform Friday October 5, 2012 and are armed with some remarkable test data going to market. Pet owners (B2C) are not only experiencing the convenience and benefits of booking online with instant confirmation, but pet care facilities (B2B) are also seeing a significant impact on their bottom line.

Lesson.ly
Lesson.ly is a teaching and learning marketplace. It’s like iTunes, but with lessons and courses instead of songs and albums. It is “the simplest way to learn” and is currently in beta-testing.

Bonfyre
Bonfyres are private groups created around events where you can share chats and photos. All of these shared photos become part of group photostreams, called Memories, and are accessible only to others at that bonfyre. Simple event planning, private real-time sharing and collective group photos in one app, just like it should be.

Squarejive
Squarejive is a free mobile application that recommends things to do nearby. The app is built upon a mosaic design that allows users to seamlessly find and share events across Facebook, Twitter, SMS Text, and Email. With Yelp integration, the app also includes business profiles for over 400 venues in Indianapolis. They intend to launch Squarejive version 1.0 on October 13th at the Broad Ripple Music Festival.

Modulus
Modulus helps developers spend less time configuring servers and more time building products. Modulus does this by providing a complete platform that companies can use to host and scale their internet-based applications. We add to that an integrated database and file storage solution, and wrap everything under a powerful statistics engine.

Visit Apps
Visit Apps empowers Convention & Visitors Bureaus (CVBs = tourism agencies) to harness the mobile channel to deeply engage their visitors. Visit Apps has built a proprietary platform that allows any CVB – from the quaintest of towns to a bustling metropolis – to have their own mobile app. Visit Apps is a SaaS startup in the explosively growing mobile sector (available in iPad, iPhone and Android devices). The Visit Apps team is led by Santiago Jaramillo (serial entrepreneur of University Storage & MyMusicCamp.com).

Diagnotes
In an effort to eliminate the problems associated with effective communication and care during on-call medical encounters, Diagnotes has developed an integrated software solution that provides critical information, secure communication and convenient documentation for healthcare providers via their smartphones, focusing initially on on-call physicians and the 50-100 million such patient encounters conducted annually in the US.

Tickets for PowderKeg are still available for $299 check the link below.

Linkage:

Get your tickets now for just $299 here for Powder Keg

Source: Verge Startups

Then, we’ll see you in February for this

Indiana Startup: CoatChex Turns Down $200,000 From Fellow IU Alum Mark Cuban To Kick Off Season 4 Of Shark Tank

Derek Pacque co-founder and CEO of CoatChex (photo: Ibj.com)

Indiana University Kelley School Of Business graduate Derek Pacque’ took his startup CoatChex in front of fellow Indiana University alum and ABC Shark Tank Shark (and Dallas Maverick’s Owner) Mark Cuban on the season premiere of Shark Tank Friday evening.

Pacque’ has a great concept. CoatChex is a system that uses pictures to match customers up with coat checked items. His current technology is boxed up in a device that’s about the size of a Verbatim credit card reader. Now, instead of using an old fashioned ticket redemption system for coat check, it’s done with technology where pictures of someone’s face are tied to their items. It’s safer, greener and easier to use.

Pacque’ explained that CoatChex isn’t just about coat checks though, it’s about any “bailment” system. Bailment is when you charge someone else with taking care of your stuff, like coat checks, valet parking,dry cleaning, baggage holding services and other similar services. Pacque holds a patent on using technology for these bailment businesses.

The 2012 graduate hasn’t sold anything yet, which was of course a complete turn off to Kevin “Mr. Wonderful” O’Leary. In the beginning of the segment, Cuban didn’t seem very interested in the fact Pacque’ hadn’t sold anything yet. Cuban called Pacque’s idea “horrible” over five times.

It looked like things were going to turn around though after Pacque explained that CoatChex wasn’t just about coats. Pacque went into the Shark Tank looking for $200,000 for 10% equity in his company, valuing it at $2 million dollars. O’Leary and FUBU founder Daymond John were the quickest out. Barbara Corcoran didn’t get the concept at all and bailed.

Robert Herjavic and Cuban stayed in the longest but both were concerned about the value. Herjavic asked Pacque for a new offer and wasn’t pleased when the entrepreneur changed his valuation to $1.5 million dollars. Herjavic bailed.

Cuban was still in and made Pacque an offer for $200,000 for 33% of the business. That’s where some may think Pacque’ went wrong. Pacque made a call to his professor and business partner who told him to tell Cuban no. Pacque’ told Cuban no. PacQue’ countered with 20% for $200,000. Cuban quickly said no.

Before he walked away though he kept telling Cuban that he wanted more experience before he pitched again.

While there’s a lot of drama in Shark Tank after all it’s a Mark Burnett reality tv show, however based on Cuban’s history with companies that he likes and the entrepreneur’s he likes I wouldn’t be surprised if Cuban turns around and invested CoatChex down the road.

Linkage:

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Indianapolis Public Startup Angie’s List Sees Stock Drop 16%

Publicly traded tech startups haven’t been doing very well lately. Groupon, and Zynga have both dropped more than 70% since their initial public offerings earlier this year. The world has been watching the public story of Facebook as well. The largest social network in the world debuted at $38 dollars a share and has since dropped 46%. Right now is a tricky time for tech startups turned public companies.

For Angie’s list, the story hasn’t been much better. Except for the fact that Angie’s list debuted much lower than Groupon, Zynga or Facebook, they’ve still seen a steady decline since going public. Tuesday, Angie’s list stock closed at $11.17, which was below their IPO price of $13. The 16% drop on Tuesday was the single biggest decline for the Indianapolis based startup since they debuted on the stock market 9 months ago.

Angie’s list is a marketplace for people to vet and find service workers. Carpenters, babysitters, plumbers and more can be found on the site. The Angie’s list community is filled with reviews from every service sector possible. Companies can’t pay to be on the list it’s all referral/review based and there are no anonymous accounts.

Angie’s list also incorporates discounts of up to 70% off from the service providers found on the site. The company was founded in 1995 by Angie Hicks and William Oesterle and has remained in Indianapolis since then.

Angie’s List reported a loss of $37 million on revenues of $68 million during the first half of 2012.

Source: Yahoo

Video Interview With Indiana Startup Squad, Collaborative Code Editing

Imagine if Google Docs (or Drive whatever you want to call it) was all about developers and coding. Imagine if you could work on code projects easily and together from around the world. Then imagine if you could upload those projects to DropBox. Well with Indiana startup SquadEdit.com you can.

SquadEdit is like Google Docs for developers, except instead of working on papers, spreadsheets or presentations, you work on coding projects together.

With Squad you can have your coding project on several different “work spaces” and they have a plan for individuals and small groups, all the way up to 50 users. Everyone involved on the same Squad project can see everything updated and in real time. You can also create sub projects of projects. If one part of the team is working on one function and the other part of the team is working on a different function, each team member can see the task they’re working on and the entire community project.

This is one of those startups that is a great resource for other startups. Now you don’t have to have your developers in one room and you don’t have to take different conference calls, skype sessions and Google+ hangouts to make sure everyone is on the same page. As Squad CEO Hillary Cage explains in the video interview, it’s an all in one collaborative experience.

Oh and as for DropBox, you can save your Squad projects in DropBox and share them with others. Our West Coast editor Junaid Kalmadi got a chance to interview Cage at the The Innovation ShowCase in Indianapolis last month. Here’s that interview:

Linkage:

Check out Squad here at their website

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Indiana Startup: Volunteer Your Voice, So Easy A Congressman Could Do it VIDEO

An Indiana startup called Volunteer Your Voice has streamlined the phonebank process.

If you’ve ever had to execute a phone bank campaign you’ve probably experienced a long and tedious process. Most phone banks rely on volunteers which makes even finding out who’s helping a task in itself. After you’ve got your volunteers set up you have to set up the phone bank, print surveys and register the volunteers to the phone.

Then the next long step starts, which is training the volunteers on that particular banks mission, survey and goals. And then you wait…

Once the volunteers are done you tear down the phone bank, wait for results,and prepare reports.

Volunteeryourvoice.com has revolutionized this whole process from the top down. The biggest way they’ve changed the phone-bank industry is that you’ll use your own computer and headset and their built in telephony to actual make the calls. This saves the campaign huge amounts of money in overhead and means you can do the surveying from the comfort of your own home. If you have a PC headset and a high speed internet connection you’re ready to go and the quality is great.

If you don’t have a PC headset or a high speed internet connection you have the option of routing calls through your own personal phone, a landline or a cell phone/smartphone will work. The calls will be routed similar to the way Google Voice routes calls. This still insures that you can keep great data on the success of the campaign and that the people administering the campaign can still monitor your calls.

Volunteeryourvoice.com’s web based dashboard provides campaign administers easy access to real time reporting.

We got a chance to interview Jayson Manship the founder of volunteeryourvoice.com in the video interview below. He talks about their new SaaS platform and the industries that they serve. Naturally they are in the political space along with nonprofit surveys and alumni phonebanking for schools on pledge drives.

Check out this cool startup video:

Linkage:

Check out VolunteerYourVoice here

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Bloomington Indiana Startup Weekend Is Back November 9th

Bloomington Indiana, home to Indiana University, is a hotspot for startups and entrepreneurial activity in Indiana. It was while attending the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University that Nick Tippmann not only helped organize Startup Weekend Bloomington, but also a Shark Tank Season Premiere Party with Mark Cuban.

Now, Startup Weekend Bloomington is back. While a lot of cities Bloomington’s size are embarking on their first or second official Startup Weekend event, this will be the fourth in the town of just 81,000.

This time around the organizers include Matt Burris, Jessica Falkenthal, John Adamson, Paul Simacek and Chris White. They also have Steve Bryant the Executive Director for the Cook Center for Entrepreneurship at Ivy Tech on board as a coach. They also have Kyle Johnston, President of Onsite OHS signed up to judge. They will announce more coaches and judges soon enough.

For those of you not familiar with Startup Weekend, it’s a 54 hour startup hackathon that starts on a Friday evening and finishes up on Sunday evening.

Friday kicks off with “Friday Pitches” those entrepreneurs and founders who have registered and have an idea they would like to see turned into an actual startup have 60 seconds to pitch that idea. After the pitches the crowd votes, by show of sticker, on which startups will be built over the next 52 hours. After the ideas are picked, teams form and breakout into groups for the next 50 or so hours to develop, build out their ideas and prove customer validation. This is a daunting task for some.

Some Startup Weekend venues allow the teams to work around the clock in true hackathon fashion. Others typically break for the evenings around midnight and come back first thing in the morning at 8am or 9am.

On Saturdays, teams dive head first into creating websites, designing mock ups for apps, and hitting the streets interviewing potential users about their idea. Some of the teams are lucky enough to have outside people they can go to by phone, skype or in person to work out the kinks. Coaches and mentors are also on hand to help answer key questions about viability, design, legality and everything else a business would need to know to launch.

Sunday is the day of reckoning for the remaining teams. At the end of the evening they will have five minutes to present their idea in it’s finished state and get grilled by a panel of local judges.

Startup Weekend’s are typically fueled by tons of food (Pizza, donuts etc) and plenty of caffeine.

Lunker, a social app for fisherman, was the winner of Bloomington’s last Startup Weekend event which was held in May. The team received a grand prize package featuring goods and services from local businesses and organizations, including three months of office space at The Solution Lab, legal services from Mallor and Grodner, accounting services from BKD, a free marketing campaign from BizProps and a free business plan review from Localstake.

If you’ve got what it takes, head on over to the official Startup Weekend website at the link below.

Linkage

Here’s the page for the next Startup Weekend Bloomington

Here’s our coverage of Startup Weekend

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Indianapolis Startup: Trensy Makes Doing Good Deeds Fun INTERVIEW

A hot new startup in the vibrant startup community of Indianapolis Indiana is gamifying good deeds. The startup, called Trensy, makes it easy to earn points for just about any kind of good deed.

Good deeds ranging from volunteering, to much easier tasks like taking the bus or using a reusable grocery bag at the grocery store can help you earn points on Trensy’s good deed platform.

The platform ties into your Facebook account for 0-auth verification and then a way to share your good deeds socially and invite others to participate as well. One of the cool parts about Trensy is when you sign up and look at the available good deeds, you’ll probably find that you’re doing some to these things already. (if not most of them).

The two founders that met at IU (Alma Mater of Mark Cuban and Nick Tippmann) didn’t set out to do a startup together. They first became roommates and friends, and then went off into the real world. When they realized they wanted to start something, and something good for the community, they naturally turned to each other as co-founders.

Trensy co-founder Kyle Robbins told us:

“After graduating, we both moved to Indianapolis to begin careers and worked independently for several year before connecting on trensy. Bryan worked on the service side of an educational software company and I worked as a developer. The decision to venture together on this journey all came down to the trust and confidence they had in each other. Fate got us together to work on changing the world”

Trensy is available for both iOS and Android. The good deed app platform can be a lot of fun especially when you challenge yourself or friends to get more points.

Here’s our full interview with Kyle Robbins below.

22 Year Old Nick Tippmann’s Party Leads To Cuban Investment In Atlanta Statup Bad.gy

bad.gy,Badgy,Atlanta startup,Nick Tippmann, Mark Cuban,SuperBowl

22 year old Nick Tippmann With Mavs Owner Mark Cuban (photo: IU Kelly School Of Business)

It was SuperBowl weekend in Indianapolis and 22 year old startup evangelist Nick Tippmann was charged with a task by his mentor Larry Chiang. The task, organize a viewing party for the season premiere of ABC’s Shark Tank. To make the task even more stressful, ABC Shark Tank Shark and Dallas Maverick’s Owner Mark Cuban would actually come to the party.

With less than 10 hours lead time from speaking with Chiang until the premiere of Shark Tank season 3 the whirlwind of startup energy went into motion. Tippmann booked the venue, took care of the menu and started formulating a guest list which of course included Startup America CEO (who I’ve now got beat in travel miles) Scott Case. Both Chiang and Tippmann said that the Westin was very accommodating and that the infamous Don Shula was gracious in accommodating the party in his restaurant. Tippmann pointed out that Cuban hadn’t had a chance to meet Shula until then either.

Somewhere in Indianapolis, Atlanta startup Badgy founder Rob Kischuck was preparing for the Super Bowl. He knew there would be a Startup America event that Friday night and heard about the party that Chiang and Tippmann were hosting later on that afternoon.

Tippmann tells Nibletz exclusively that there were 23 IU students at the party and over 50 entrepreneurs. “My mentor Larry Chiang and I were talking about startups and entrepreneurs at a table with Cuban when Kischuck came up and told us about his startup. Badgy sounded like a great idea…”

Tippmann was shocked at the turnout for the party thrown together with just a moments notice. “It was good for all of the students and entrepreneurs that came out” as to Cuban, Tippmann said “Mark was very approachable, and he gets energized talking to most entrepreneurs. It was a rather intimate setting and a lot of the entrepreneurs were able to get face time with Mark”

As for Badgy, the Atlanta startup’s booth was non-stop at Monday’s TechCrunch Atlanta meet up. Kischuk was pitching from just about 6pm-10pm straight.

Thursday his company announced a $600,000 round led by Cuban.

Badgy helps increase visibility to Facebook marketers with “badges”. The innovative marketing idea also caught the eye of super Angel Sig Mosley who recently came out of retirement with a $25 million dollar venture fund. Bad.gy is also a graduate of Georgia Tech’s accelerator FlashPoint.

Linkage:

Find Bad.gy here at Bad.Gy

Check out Tippmann’s own blog here

Here’s a story about Tippmann here

And our Crowdfunding page, please help us out

Indianapolis Startup: Blab Bubble Is A DIY Platform For Pay Per Click Social Media Advertising INTERVIEW

If you haven’t noticed advertising is moving away from traditional online pay per click models of years past. Advertisers are reaching out to both mobile and social media channels for advertising.

Companies like Ad.ly,MyLikes and Sponsored Tweets allow individuals with good social media followings to capitalize on their tweets, likes and recommendations by offering cash based incentives. Blab Bubble is a new startup that’s coming into the same space with a new spin that may work out even better in the long run.

Blab Bubble spent a lot of time and money researching the market to find out where social media advertising is breaking down. They found two key areas that had the biggest pain points.

The first was that many advertisers felt that traditional social media advertising sites were too cumbersome when trying to create campaigns. The other area that needed improvement was in the startup and small business arena. Most social media advertising companies targeted big brands and enterprise. Of course, with that, they were pricing small businesses and startups out of the market.

Blab Bubble has created a simple, easy to use interface for businesses of any size to set up social media campaigns. The process takes just a few minutes and the campaign is off and running. Blab Bubble also offers very easy to understand pricing, how about $.40 per click no matter who you are.

We got a chance to interview BlabBubble to find out more about this Indianapolis startup and their spin on social media advertising.

Interview With Indiana Startup BizProps VIDEO

During my nearly 20 year radio career I had one of the ultimate secret weapons, it was called American Hole In One, this company is the company that sponsors the gigantic birthday game heard on many radio stations across the country as well as those hole in one for a million dollar contests that are held often at golf tournaments of any size.

The great thing about that company was that it allowed radio stations of any size to perform gigantic promotions which of course are the catalyst to generating new business and new leads.

An Indiana company by the name of BizProps is doing something very similar with companies and their online marketing. Now we’re not talking about badly written flashy banner ads that say “You’re our millionth customer click here”. We’re talking about a real promotional company with a solid marketing background that works.

Bizprops will help you generate leads, validate your message and amplify your reach through social media channels. To demonstrate the effectiveness of BizProps Tony Monteleone from BizProps ran a campaign surrounded by this past Thursday’s Verge Startups meeting, where they were presenters.

With very little social effort he was able to garner 1000 signups, lot’s of genuine Facebook likes and social media amplification. While Verge Indy startup meet ups sell out and have over 1000 members, they’re relatively small compared to BizProps newer clients like national consumer electronics chain HH Greg and Ford. So as you can see BizProps is making headway with their company.

Don’t let the big names scare you away though BizProps can scale their product to any sized company and they work with small companies all the way up through giant enterprises.

For more information check out the video interview below:

Linkage:

For more on BizProps click here

Check out our video interview with Verge Startups founder Matt Hunckler here

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