Vegas Tech Fund Startup Romotive Lands $5 Million Dollar Round, Prepares 3rd Generation Robot

Romotive,Las Vegas startup,Vegas Tech Fund,startup,startups,startup news,Pando DailyMany of you are familiar with the story of Romotive. This was the company that was building iPhone controlled robots in a mini assembly line in the founders’ apartment at the Ogden in Las Vegas. Of course if you’re familiar with Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Project or the Vegas Tech Fund you know that the Ogden building is entrepreneur and founder central.

Romotive has been making all the right moves. In the summer of 2011 the then three person company participated in the TechStars Seattle cohort. After that they launched a Kickstarter campaign to get their robots into the hands of backers.

It was that Kickstarter campaign that caught Hsieh’s eye. The story goes that Hsieh received the weekly email from Kickstarter highlighting some of the projects raising money at the time and Romotive was one of them. Hsieh reportedly liked their three minute video and actually knew a friend of theirs who was staying on his couch.

Hsieh is big on referrals in fact you can’t get a meeting with Hsieh or the Vegas Tech Fund without having a referral from inside the network. But like other tight knit organizations, once you’re in you’re in.

After Hsieh participated in a $1.5 million dollar round in December of last year the team relocated to their current home at the Ogden building. Business Insider reports that the team has grown to 18 and they are all living, playing and building robots together.

That’s all going to change now though as Romotive has just closed a $5 million dollar Series-A round. With that round the company plans on adding a few more employees and shifting production to a factory in China.  According to Geekwire, the round was led by Sequoia Capita with CrunchFund and SV Angels participating among others.

On top of the $5 million dollar round Romotive has gone back to Kickstarter to raise another $100,000 from the community. As they report in their Kickstarter pitch they are looking to broaden the robot by creating more apps and the $100,000 will be used to start that development program.

Romotive isn’t the first smartphone controlled robot startup to catch the eyes of David Cohen and the TechStars team. Orbotix, the Boulder based creator of the “Sphero” ball, accelerated at TechStars Boulder and had Brad Feld as one of their main mentors. Feld went on to participate in Orbotix seed round via his Foundry Group.  Orbotix has grown up big time as well. They recently announced a partnership for distribution in 1200 Target stores just in time for the holidays.

Linkage:

More on Romotive here

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Salt Lake City Startup: Text Me Tix Is The Ultimate Fire Sale Ticketing Startup INTERVIEW

No venue, promoter, sports team, or stadium likes empty seats. Not only is there a loss in revenue but if you go to a show or a ball game and the stands are not filled to capacity it looks bad. The problem lies in the fact that there’s never really been a good last minute ticketing platform.

Sure scalpers are abundant, especially outside of popular sporting events and concerts. You’ll notice that scalpers will charge a high premium an hour or two before an event, but once the event has started, or as the minutes countdown to show time or game time, those scalpers even lower their prices. Nobody wants to take a loss.

The ticketing space is a very difficult one to crack. TicketMaster/LiveNation has a stranglehold on most large venue tickets and they don’t seem to budge as the clock narrows down. Separate venues and groups that like to stick it to the man, like Pearl Jam, and of course your local bands have other alternatives for ticket sales.

Salt Lake City startup Text Me Tix, provides a really great way for venues, promoters and teams to fire sale tickets. The method of delivery is text messages, which according to Text Me Tix Founder and CEO Mark Harmsen, are read within 3 minutes of receipt. Why not use that urgency in the text message realm to sell tickets.

Text Me Tix is picking up a lot of traction. They just won the opportunity to pitch Zappos founder and Mr. Startup Las Vegas Tony Hsieh as the first place winner of the Crowdfunder.com, Crowdstart Las Vegas competition.

In the interview below Harmsen explains how Text Me Tix saves ticket buyers a lot of money and solves a huge problem for ticket sellers.

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Zappos Alum’s Las Vegas Startup: Fandeavor Brings Fans Up Close & Personal

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Tony Hsieh’s company Zappos, the online shoe and clothing shop, is fueling a startup movement in Las Vegas that’s hard to rival anywhere else. Hsieh himself is dumping millions into the Las Vegas tech scene. He’s also very supportive of Zappos employees who have left his company to start their own startups in Las Vegas. One of those startups is Fandeavor.

Fandeavor is a new startup in Las Vegas that’s looking to match sports fans with over the top fan experiences that can’t be experienced any other way.

8newsnow reports that last November Fandeavor’s co-founders Tom Ellingson and Dean Curtis, who both used to work at Zappos, did a fan experiment. They were able to procure two sets of tickets to the Las Vegas Invitational basketball tournament at the Orleans Arena. Two fans paid $250 for the experience to see the Rebels beat the University of Southern California in the semi-finals. The other two fans paid $275 to see the rebels defeat UNC in the finals. Their seats were in an arena suite. They also received a pregame talk with an assistant UNLV coach, floor access to pre-game warm ups and a presentation at halftime on the floor with autographed basketballs.

At an August 5th soccer match between Real Madrid and Santos Laguna Fandeavor auctioned off a prize packaged for $575 which included on field, hospitality tent seats, free food and drink and an off-chance meeting with one of the players. They’ve also been able to put together packages for fans of professional bullriders and other UNLV games.

Currently the Fandeavor roster includes: UNLV, University of Southern California, Arizona State University, and Texas Christian University. Both Ellingson and Curtis have plans to continue to expand through the world of college sports, who are known for their passionate fans.

“We want to give the colleges a revenue stream that didn’t exist before,” Ellingson told 8newsnow. “They have assets that they may not be using up, like sideline passes. We want to help them monetize their hospitality assets.


Ellingson Continued: “One thing we want to do is give out stadium tours, which is something that doesn’t cost the university anything other than to have someone give the tour. We’d like to have the ability to get a fan into a press box when the announcers are going through their pre-game routines. We’d like them to have access to the locker room and weight room. These stadiums are shrines.”

The duo is also courting the NFL, NBA and Nascar. Like most of the other Zappos alumni, Fandeavor has raised $525,000 in financing including an investment from Hsieh himself. They plan on using the cash to help with expansion and marketing.

Linkage: 

Check out Fandeavor here

Source: 8newsnow

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Entries Now Open For Business Excellence Awards 2013 Best Startup Company

The Business Excellence Awards is a global event put on by ActionCOACH the world’s largest business coaching and executive coaching firm in the world with offices in over 40 countries.

The next Business Excellence Awards ceremonies begin January 25th and 26th 2013 in Las Vegas. They continue in Europe on February 7th and 8th 2013 and finish in Asia February 22 and 23rd 2013. Each region will present a “Best Startup” award for companies that have had the best results since beginning no later than January 1, 2011.

In addition to Best Startup, other award categories include:

 

Best Overall Company
Best Turnaround Company
Most Innovative Company
Fastest Growing Company
Best Customer Service Results
Young Entrepreneur (35 or younger)
Entrepreneur of the Year
Best Retailer
Best Service Based
Best Manufacturer/Wholesaler
Most Community Impact

Source88 in St.Petersburg Florida was the 2011 Best Startup Winner. That ceremony and forum event were held in Miami Florida.

Linkage:

If your startup is ready you can check out the awards and enter here

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Las Vegas Startup: Instagripe Makes Customer Feedback Instant INTERVIEW

We’ve talked about some great startups lately that function in the customer feedback space. Entrepreneurs continue to try and streamline the process of getting store owner to know what store customer thinks, quick and efficiently. Long gone are the days that $10 off at Denny’s for calling a survey line, actually gets results.

Customer feedback is critical and it needs to happen quickly because these days people are looking for things to happen at the speed of the net.

Instagripe provides a platform that allows businesses to achieve “insanely responsive customer service”.   Like most other business segments founders are finding that customer service can be achieved quickest via mobile phone. Now a customer still in an establishment, can provide much needed feedback.

With Instagripe a customer can be anonymous if they’d like and they can also provide feedback instantly through their smartphone. Instagripe also allows you to leave feedback based on geo-location.

We got a chance to interview Instagripe’s Josh Payne. Check out the interview below:

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Las Vegas Startup: SpoonerSpot Prepares For Global Rollout

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A new Las Vegas startup called SpoonerSpot is preparing for a global launch. Their socially charged recommendation platform has been in beta for a while. The develops are putting the finishing touches on the official public release and tidying up their website.

SpoonerSpot is trying to bridge the gap between the physical world and the world. This is achieved by users posting “spots” or places and recommending them on a global map for others to see. Its like a crowd sourced, map based version of Yelp.

SpoonerSpot was born when Las Vegas startup CitySpoon pivoted from a coupon platform along the lines of daily deals, to recommendations. Users, called “spooners” could report their own great or hot deals to the social community. Now the platform is for any kind of “spot” and soon it will encompass the globe.

The company did an extensive beta test which they report gave them lots of feedback:

Feedback from beta users of SpoonerSpot has allowed the site to increase its overall User Experience, continuously creating an even more engaging social networking platform. Beta user demand has given the team insights that has led to a notification system, so users can be updated on recent changes in their SpoonerSpot social network, a more robust layout that brings all of the site’s features to the forefront of the experience, and an easy to use method of finding friends on SpoonerSpot by searching for either user name or first and last name.

CitySpoon was launched in Las Vegas’ thriving startup community last summer and they pan to release the first version of their public product by the end of the week.

Linkage:

For more info on SpoonerSpot visit this site

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Las Vegas Startup: Rumgr Is Like A Garage Sale On Your Phone

We constantly hear about Google alumni and Facebook alumni who have moved on to greener pastures with their own startups. Today we turn to Las Vegas and a new mobile startup called Rumgr. It’s founders are alumni of online shoe site zappos.com

The startup was born out of an idea from co-founder Dylan Bathurst. Las Vegas’ 8newsnow.com (which for a tv station does  a kick ass job of covering Vegas startups) reports that Bathurst was looking to unload some old housewares that he was storing with a buddy. He didn’t want to wake up early and have a garage sale, and most likely didn’t want to deal with a bunch of fake buyers wanting to paypal him $5,000 for his microwave in Nigeria, using craigslist.

So what he decided to do was take a bunch of pictures of the stuff he was selling and put those pictures on his phone. He showed off his wares to his friends and was able to sell everything. That’s when he thought to himself that this kind of thing would make a great app.

Bathurst teamed up with Ray Morgan and Alex Coleman two other developers who previously worked at Zappos the Las Vegas online shoe retailer. The three co-founders liken Rumger to a gigantic yard sale on a free app.

More after the break
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Las Vegas Startup: Ticketometer Looking To Disrupt The Ticket Space With Creativity

How creative can the ticket space be? It’s a pretty straight forward business right? Have an event, you need to have a ticket. Nowadays that can be a hard paper ticket, a printed ticket at home or a virtual ticket housed on your smartphone. So is their room for creativity?

Well brothers Ardon and Jaron Lukasiewicz of Las Vegas think there is. In fact creativity is what is driving their startup Ticketometer from being different than all those other event ticketing sites. 24 year old Ardon tells Las Vegas’ Channel 8 news that they have a company of 5 already and their hoping to turn a profit in their first year with their ticketing business.

Ticketometer hopes to attract venues to using their service by being creative. That can mean making a wild and popping event web page or incentivizing ticket sales with new promotions and concepts. Ticketometer also provides back end details on ticket sales to venues, statistics that some other ticketing sites are quick to give up. But that’s not all to their openness. Ticketometer provides information to those buying tickets like how close an event is to actually selling out. Sure we all know what it’s like to miss a ticket sale and find our favorite show is sold out, but when a ticket is available is the show really popular? Are you one of 100 people going to see your favorite local band or one of 5,000. These things make a difference to both the event go-er and the venue.

More after the break
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Las Vegas Startup: Hangover Heaven Hopes To Drip You Back To Life

This story has been making it’s way around the interwebs. It’s been vetted now, a number of times and while this may seem like something out of a movie, Hangover Heaven is very real.

A Las Vegas anesthesiologist, Jason Burke, came up with the idea for Hangover Heaven after realizing that most of the effects of a “hangover” are things that he regularly sees in a recovery room after surgery.  Burke decided that he could use mild doses of the drugs used to revive patients after surgery to get people back on their feet after a night of card playing and binge drinking.

Hangover Heaven has a fleet of IV equipped buses that will be strategically placed throughout Las Vegas’ infamous strip. They’ve already been approved for pickups at The Cosmpolitan, Hard Rock Hotel, The Paris and The Bellagio.

After you’ve been drinking and you need a little pick me up, simply board the bus and fork over Dr. Burke’s fee. There are three different plans available; the Redemption, Salvation and then In Room Treatment. The latter will set you back just $500 for the first person and $375 for each of your other drunk buddies.  They are discounting the Salvation package to an introductory price of just $150.

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Las Vegas’s Newest Start-Up Tracky Debuts With A Huge Splash

Tracky is a new Las Vegas bred startup that allows users, both businesses and individuals, to collaborate and organize to-do lists, share files, delegate tasks and more project management functions. It’s like a Google Wave on steroids with a top notch social interface for many to be on the same page, working on the same project across the country and around the globe.

The startup led by CEO David Gosse and CMO Jennifer Gosse, held a media event and kick off party on Tuesday. The day started off with a press briefing at SuperNAP, a high tech data center that houses Tracky’s servers among others. According to 8newsnow Gosse briefed the press on the ins and outs of the Tracky application and the technology behind it.

Later that night the hobnobbing moved over to the mansion once owned by heavyweight champion Mike Tyson. While the party was absent of any loose tigers, hundreds of members of Vegas Tech showed out to support the Tracky Launch. Vegas Tech is a community of entrepreneurs, startups, developers, designers, marketers and “do-ers”.

While some other tech and startup communities proud themselves on competing with hot spots like Silicon Valley and New York, Las Vegas thrives on it’s own.

“There is an entrepreneurial boom taking place in Vegas, called Vegas Tech. More than 200 startups have recently formed in the valley and other businesses are migrating to Vegas from other cities like Silicon Valley, Seattle and Salt Lake. Rather than try to emulate these cities, Las Vegas is aiming to focus on being innovative collaborators that just get things done,” Tracky’s CMO Jennifer Gosse said in an interview with KLAS-TV.