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Nashville: Jumpstart Foundry’s Marcus Whitney Named CTO Of The Year By Nashville Technology Council

Marcus Whitney, Jumpstart Foundry, Nashville startups,accelerator,Moontoast, Boston startup,startup,startups,startup news

(photo: marcuswhitney.com)

Marcus Whitney is a renaissance man of sorts when it comes to entrepreneurism and startups in Nashville and Boston Massachusetts. Some of his credentials include being an advisor and curriculum lead at Nashville’s Jumpstart Foundry accelerator where he traditionally fires up the troops on day one. He is also an advisor to several Nashville area startups, co-founder of Southernalpha.com and an overall leader in Nashville’s startup community.

It’s actually for his day job though, as the CTO of social marketing, commerce and analytics startup Moontoast that has earned him the title of CTO Of The Year by the Nashville Technology Council.

Moontoast was founded in 2008 as a social knowledge base provider that eventually led to the social marketing and analytics suite that they employ today to companies big and small including some on the Fortune 500. Their stable of top-shelf clients include branding power house Proctor & Gamble, Ford, Kirkland’s, and Universal. Even Nashville country powerhouse record label Big Machine records uses Moontoast, you may have heard of their superstar Taylor Swift.

Whitney has grown to become an expert in the world of social and email engagement. Prior to starting Moontoast in 2008 he spent the previous four years of his career as Director of Technology and Partner at Emma. Emma is an email marketing firm that uses creative, out of the box approaches, to again engage their over 10,000 customers.

Whitney’s energetic personality and real life experiences have led him to be engaging in person as well. In different discussions with Whitney we’ve talked about how he and his team at Jumpstart Foundry are able to pull the real entrepreneur and founder out of a startup. Some startups come into the three month accelerator program with a great idea and a horrible pitch. Whitney is able to pull the real message out which has actually led to follow on funding for several program startups.

Whitney’s latest startup is Southernalpha.com a regional tech blog focused on high growth potential startups and technology in the southeast. They’re centralizing out of Nashville at the moment with plans to rapidly expand across the south east in the same way that Silicon Prairie news covers the Silicon Prairie.

Whitney was honored at the annual Nasvhille Technology Council Awards on October 23.

Linkage:

Moontoast is here

Jumpstart Foundry is here

SouthernAlpha is here

Everywhere else is here

Nashville Startup WannaDo Finds You What You Wanna Do

It seems like, on the surface, the event discovery space is a big space. When you peel it back though there aren’t many event discovery apps that are doing it right. The two we like the most are Louisville startup Impulcity and Nashville startup WannaDo.

Wannado, under the leadership of founder Steven Buhram, is starting out local in Nashville for now with plans on scaling out soon. Impulcity on the other hand is going all in, connecting their user base to music, and entertainment events nationwide and hyper local.

Wannado has a different approach though, than the average event discovery nut. The first thing that we noticed when testing Wannado in their home town was that everything was laid out in very easy to understand categories.

Play- obviously encompasses fun things to do, artsy stuff, plays and music (which Nashville has a lot of).

Work & Network is your guide t company events and career minded conference.

Eat & Drink, is pretty self explanatory

Learn, is all about learning and can be anything from health and wellness events to CPR courses.

You can even peel back layers and get to geek categories, nerd categories, artsy categories and more.

Once you find the event that’s for you, you can easily save it to your wannado list or share it using this unique share tool that allows you to share it by email, Facebook, text message of Twitter. Why not invite all your friends in the world to the great events you find on wannado.

That’s not the only way wannado differs from other traditional event discovery platforms though. Like any other app you can invite all of your Facebook friends to use wannado and you can see if any of your Facebook friends are currently using wannado. Naturally you’re going to trust a friends opinion about an event.

With wannado though, they also have guides, more seasoned people from an area that may know the lay of the land a little better. You can see what the guides are recommending or you can ask the guide something which makes the experience socially engaging.

So does it work?

Well in one night in Nashville we were able to use Wannado to take in Luke Bryan and Rodney Atkins at two different events free. We found some awesome hamburgers and realized we missed out on what would have been a fun startup breakfast event.

Comparatively speaking Wannado actually showed us more of what was going on in Nashville in one night than any other app we’ve tried. While it seems Buhram is comfortable with building scale with baby steps, if they could replicate this user experience to scale quickly across the country it could become our event app of choice for all events from seminars to cooking lessons to concerts.

Linkage:

Check out wannado here

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Nashville Startup Jamplify Exhibiting At DEMO Courtesy Of Startup America

As we reported earlier this morning, Startup America revealed the 8 startups that won their contest for a free trip to DEMO in Santa Clara California this week. Four startups are exhibiting in the DEMO Showcase Pavilion. The other four startups are presenting on the main stage.

Nashville Jumpstart Foundry graduate Jamplify was one of the four startup selected for the exhibit space in the DEMO Showcase Pavillion.

Jamplify is a hybrid, promotional, crowdsourcing platform. With Jamplify’s finished product, you get the most logical promotional vehicle for bands, musicians, and bloggers that’s available to date.

Jamplify crowdsources people for promoting the bands that they love. Rather than crowdsourcing for actual capital Jamplify is crowdsourcing for social capital and human capital, and then there’s the payoff.

Jamplify is like the kickstarter for fan based, crowd based musical promotion. As a fan of a band or a promotional ambassador you can agree to promote a band or musician. Based on your social graph and the amount of people that you actually touch with the campaigns short, trackable url you will become eligible for prizes from the band or artist you’re promoting.

Jamplify arrived at Nashville’s Jumpstart Foundry from New York City where the founders worked on Wall Street.

Check out their video pitch from Jumpstart Foundry’s demo day in August below:

Linkage:

Check out Jamplify here

DEMO here

Startup America here

Everywhere Else here

Nashville Startup: Edo Interactive Closes Another $15 Million In Venture Funding

Edo Interactive, a startup headquartered in Nashville TN has just announced another $15 million in venture funding. Silicon Valley based VantagePoint Capital Partners led the latest $15 million dollar round. Baird Ventures also participated. Bair led Edo Interactive’s $20 million dollar round last year and cumulatively Edo Interactive has raised $54 million in venture funding.

So what does this Nashville startup do that’s garnered such huge venture capital investments? They provide a deals service, similar to Groupon, but through banks and retailers vs mom and pop restaurants, coffee shops and other businesses. Retailers pay banks a fee to market deals to their databases of credit and debit cards. This gives Edo Interactives client base a much more lucrative market.

Using Edo Interactive’s proprietary technology bank cards are directly tied to participating retailers cash register systems, delivering an instant rebate right back to the customer utilizing the deal. The retailer can then notify the customer by email, text or voicemail. Chicagobusiness.com reports that Edo has relationships with 140 banks with 150 million card holders. They also work with 5 of the 10 largest credit card providers.

Ed Braswell is the CEO of Edo Interactive which is headquartered in Nashville Tennessee and has an additional 20 employees working in the Chicago area. They employ 75 total right now.

“Payments and advertising are colliding; to stay competitive, banks must deliver value to cardholders that goes beyond the traditional realm of services, while advertisers are searching for solutions to drive customer acquisition, loyalty and return on marketing investment,” CEO Ed Braswell said in the statement. “This latest investment will help Edo expand our market leadership position and scale our advertising content, merchant partnerships and growth within the highly competitive local business market.”

Braswell has said that he hopes to offer 140 million new offers per week by 2013. Crate & Barrel, Nordstrom, Target and Subway are just some of the companies that work with Edo Interactive’s platform.

Linkage:

Check out EdoInteractive here

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Nashville’s Griffin Technology All In On iPhone 5

While Griffin Technology hardly qualifies as a startup since it was launched in 1992, the company founded (and still remaining) in Nashville Tennessee is a driver of innovation. Griffin started out by making computer parts beginning with DB15 connectors and launching USB peripherals in 1998. However, it was the release of the original iPhone and a barrage of well designed accessories created in Nashville Tennessee that drove Griffin to “household name” status.

With the announcement of the iPhone 5 last week and the release of the device next Friday, Griffin, like the rest of us, waited with eyes glued to projectors, screens and monitors throughout their Tennessee campus, reports Nasvhille Business Journal’s Jamie McGee. Over 150 Griffin employees gathered around to watch the release of the iPhone 5, all seeing the same images that we saw thanks to live blogs and other information. They watched with pens and paper and immediately went to work on their designs.

Griffin Technology and other iPhone accessory manufacturers got a welcomed break when the last iPhone update was from the 4 to the 4S. There was no real form factor change.

“To have something happen like a complete form-factor change, like we’ve seen on the screen, means our industrial design people are going to be really, really busy for the next couple of weeks,” said Web Wester, who handles social media for Griffin told local news station WKRN.

By the next morning Griffin had a plan. About mid-morning the sent out a press release confirming that their Survivor and Protector collections along with their Reveal, Chevron, Moxy, Mustachio & Wise Eyes, Kazoo and Animal Parade lines will all be quickly updated for the new iPhone 5. The company also plans on adding some more cases to the mix as time goes on.

The iPone 5 hits Apple stores, Best Buy and carrier partner retailers on Friday. Griffin Technology hasn’t said when you’ll be able to pick up their accessories for the iPhone 5 but it should be soon. A Griffin spokesperson has also said that the power accessories the company is known for will be released for the iPhone 5 shortly. However, Apple changed the 30 pin cord design for the first time since the original iPod so those may take a little longer.

Griffin also has alumni startup founders among their ranks. The group behind Nashville Startup Evermind, a device that helps keep tabs on the elderly, all got their start at Griffin.

Linkage:

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Nibletz Is At The DNC And We’re Using Nashville Startup: KiWi

The Obama Administration continued to pave the way for Startups all over the country with the creation of Startup America, the passing of the JOBSAct and many other initiatives that have been it in place to help entrepreneurs and startup founders across America.

Thats why it’s our honor to cover the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte North Carolina. We’ll be partnering with Startup America and the guys at StartpRockon.com to bring you guys everything there is about Startups at what’s sure to be one of the best DNC’s of our time.

We’ve got some great access to bring the best coverage for Startups across America.

We’ll be representing one of the best states “everywhere else” for Startups and entrepreneurs and that is Nibletz home state, the great state of Tennessee. Not only that but starting Tuesday we’ll be using one of the exciting new startups that just graduated from JumpStart Foundry’s 2012 class, KiWi,

We got off to a rough start with KiWi after their founder ad libbed at the end of his presentation. Since then KiWi and it’s co-founder Jayme Hoffman has come highly recommended by Michael Burcham, Vic Gatto and Marcus Whitney,

Hoffman and his team couldn’t catch a break after demo day as they’ve been working tirelessly since then to make sure we’ve got something great to use at the Democratic National Convention.

KiWi is like Instagram except instead of photos you are taking short videos. The UI is extreme

As for Demo Day, Hoffman had said that he would be looking for term sheets in Nashville for thirty days. It came off to me that he was giving Nashville an ultimatum, give us a term sheet in 30days or we’re leaving. That was far from the case. Hoffman was trying to convey that things have been moving so fast for the KiWi team that an opportunity for local investors to get in at the ground level may not exist in 30 days. Of course we may speed that process along this week.ly user friendly. Filter selection is topnotch and from capture to share, the experience is fast and fluid. It’s actually not nearly as clunky as SocialCam.

We’re looking forward to the next few days here in Charlotte representing our home team: LaunchMemphis,LaunchYourCity,Launch Tennessee and Startup Tennessee.

Street Performers Go Virtual With Nashville Startup: Street Jelly INTERVIEW

Ok so here’s a concept we’ve never seen before and it’s quite interesting. A Nashville startup called Street Jelly has put street performers online for the world to enjoy. But not only that they’ve created a system of using virtual currency called “tokens” so that you can fill up that street performers jar, guitar case, hat or bucket. Yes, any kind of street performer be it a clown, a mime, a great saxophone player, guitar player or any other street performer, can go virtual with Street Jelly.

The street performers can take the “Rocker Pins” that viewers have purchased with tokens and cash them out for real money via PayPal. Now you can sit in the comfort of your own home and watch street performers until your hearts content.

Have you ever come back from a trip and told people about a great street performer you’ve seen? Now you can take them online to Street Jelly and show them first hand.

Street performers add to most cities culture. Most street performers are actually really good and some just prefer to be street performers rather than working late night in smoky dark clubs or trying their luck at studios and record deals. Street Jelly captures the essence of great street performers and puts them online to share with the rest of the world.

This idea was born in Nashville, a city that has no shortage of street performers. In fact Nashville, because it’s Music City USA, has some of the best street performers in the world.

Street performers was founded by serial entrepreneur Frank Podlaha, who’s history with music goes way back to his childhood and playing in the drum line. He’s had some other successful startups which he talks about in the interview below.

Nashville Startup: PhotoRankr Captures The Essence Of Jumpstart Foundry

Now in their third year the cohort based startup accelerator Jumpstart Foundry, in Nashville Tennessee has ironed out a lot of kinks. We got a chance to spend some time with Marcus Whitney a co-founder at Jumstart Foundry, who also serves as the accelerator’s Managing Director. Through each of the last three cohorts Whitney has spent the most day to day time with all of the classes.

Throughout the Jumpstart Foundry demo day the theme surrounding Whitney’s role was consistent. Whitney, while a great and likable guy, means business. He’s a serial entrepreneur himself who’s founded a handful of his own successful startups. That also means he knows the struggles first hand at what a founder and a founding team at a startup goes through. That’s why he’s one of the best possible people in Nashville to serve as Jumpstart Foundry’s Managing Director.

While a three month boot-camp style accelerator can be a fun and life enriching experience, Whitney is known for telling teams like it is and establishing the ground rules on day one. He’s also known for pushing entrepreneurs to their limit. As far as the program goes there’s no bs in the selection process. Whitney told us that they don’t take teams without a technologist. We’ve seen teams at accelerators all over the country who come with an idea guy, a business development guy and no developer or coder. Often these teams blow most of their seed money on outsourcing and barely have a product ready for demo day. One of the biggest things we noticed at Jumpstart Foundry’s demo day is that all seven teams had a product up and running. No wireframes, no mock ups, no business plans, every team had a working product you could go out on the internet and try right now.

We asked Whitney along with Baker Donelson’s Emerging Business Practice Chair, Chris Sloan, what team at the Jumpstart Foundry this year, was the most improved. They both unanimously and at the same exact time said PhotoRankr. In fact they both agreed that PhotoRankr captured the essence of what a cohort style accelerator program was all about.

Whitney talked about PhotoRankr’s day one pitch. Sloan, who is a pro-amateur photographer in his s

pare time recalled thatPhotoRankr’s pitch on day one included a slide show with no photos. Who does that? A photo platform slide show with no photos.

When Sloan introduced the PhotoRankr team on Thursday he spoke very proudly letting the audience know that not only was their pitch deck filled with photos, every photo in their slide show was procured from PhotoRankr.

So what is PhotoRankr, it’s an online community for photographers. It allows photographers to chat with one another, get advice, vote pictures up and down and the biggest part, it provides a platform to sell photos. As PhotoRankr co-founder Tyler Sniff pointed out in the presentation, the stock photo resources on the internet right now are relatively weak, most have had the same images for years and the ones with great photos are way too costly.

Now, someone looking for a photo for their website, book, magazine, movie or any other use can peruse the pages of PhotoRankr and find what they need. The photographers themselves set the prices for the photos, along with the licensing terms which typically means they will be fairly priced.

Sloan recently joined PhotoRankr and wasn’t sure what to expect. He had tried most of the other photo sharing services out there, but he was excited when he started receiving emails notifying him that people had liked his photos.

As for the team itself, they work and operate like a family. That could possibly be attributed to the fact that three of the four members of the founding team are actually brothers. Tyler serves as the company’s Head of Business Development. Their CEO is Jacob Sniff who will be graduating from Princeton this year. Their third brother Matthew Sniff serves as the company’s CEO. Noah Willard, a family friend, serves as the Creative Director.

Whitney said that one of the teams keys to success throughout the program was their reaction to criticism. Rather than being head strong and ego driven, the PhotoRankr team took every piece of criticism in stride, often asked questions about what their mentors were telling them, and then sought advice immediately after making changes.

From where we stand the biggest challenge for PhotoRankr is going to be exposing the features to the market place and what sets them apart from Flickr, Photo Bucket and that product formerly known as Picassa.

When you watch the pitch video below you’ll see what a great job PhotoRankr did during the Jumpstart Foundry program:

Linkage:

Check out Photorankr here

Check out Jumpstart Foundry Here

Nibletz is the voice of startups in the southeast and everywhere else

Nashville Startup: OurVinyl’s Final Pitch From Jumpstart Foundry Demo Day VIDEO

Demo Day at Jumpstart Foundry was amazing. The class was great and miraculously every single team that presented had a working product. Of course that’s the goal behind every accelerator but we’ve been to quite a few accelerator demo days where that wasn’t the case.

So what is OurVinyl, no it’s not an online record shop for vinyl buffs. OurVinyl is actually a music video platform that encompasses the user and allows the user to curate their own channels, playlists and discovery new music. Where most music discovery startups focus on just the audio, OurVinyl is all about video.

OurVinyl has started with indie artists and other video content that you won’t find anywhere else on the web. The founders have backgrounds in video and it shows with the intuitive user experience created within OurVinyl.

The OurVinyl team has equated most of their best practices to Spotify rather than Pandora. Of course neither Spotify nor Pandora actually do video, they are both just audio only. OurVinyl is changing that by offering a streaming video platform accessible by Google TV, Apple TV, Xbox and Roku.

They have an easy to understand subscription model which guarantees you access to all of your favorite videos on the platform and customization features for your specific tastes. Many don’t realize that YouTube is one of the top places people go to source not just videos, or music videos but music itself. OurVinyl is capitalizing on that fact with their unique new platform.

In their pitch video from Jumpstart Foundry’s Demo Day, they explain exactly how the platform works and how they plan on monetizing it through advertising and subscription plans.

Another feature that’s rather new and baked into OurVinyl is not just the ability to like or not like songs and music videos themselves, but the advertising as well. After an ad unit plays you can tell OurVinyl whether you like ads like that or not. If you say “no” you won’t have to see the same ad again.

Check out their pitch video below:

Linkage:

Check out OurVinyl here at ourvinyl.tv

Here’s more Demo Day coverage

Nibletz is the voice of startups in the southeast and “everywhere else”

New York Startup Jamplify Presents At Jumpstart Foundry Demo Day

What do you get when you take a bunch of good ole Goldman Sachs financial guys from New York and throw them into an accelerator in Nashville Tennessee? You get a social media, hybrid, promotional, crowdsourcing platform called Jamplify. Now at the first glance of the description I just gave them you may think we’re dealing with another Vooza, no that’s not the case at all.

Jamplify’s finished product, that’s actually available now (what a novel idea building an actual product at an accelerator), you get the most logical promotional vehicle for bands, musicians, and bloggers that’s available to date.

The most interesting promotional “reward” or “perk” to date has been from a hip hop band where the artist actually recorded the outgoing voicemail message for that Jamplifier’s personal voice mail. Cool huh?

If you’re lost, you really shouldn’t be, but it would be great to check out the pitch video from JumpStart Foundry’s demo day in Nashville below:

Linkage:

Get Jamplifying today here

Here’s more Demo Day Coverage

Nibletz is the voice of startups in the southeast and everywhere else.

Nashville Startup: The Skillery Pitches At Jumpstart Foundry Demo Day VIDEO

The Skillery CEO Matt Dudley pitching at Jumpstart Foundry demo day (photo nibletz llc)

Jumpstart Foundry demo day continues with the team from The Skillery. When their mentor introduced the team she talked about how CEO Matt Dudley started his entrepreneurial roots when he was just 7 years old and put up signs in his neighborhood advertising his services as a GhostBuster.

The Skillery in it’s simplest description is a platform to sell tickets to workshops. They are in the same space as Dabble and Skilshare but with a twist. Dudley and his team are specifically targeting small business owners who want to teach classes.

For instance, the local woman who owns a shop selling hemp and weaved products could start a class on The Skillery. Here in Nashville they’ve had teachers come out of the community that did whiskey tastings and even classes on the value of cotton diapering as opposed to disposable diapers. In fact the woman with the disposable diaper business saw 25-30 people come to her workshops that were listed and promoted on TheSkillery, and she was able to convert students to customers.

Dudley is charismatic and explained his pitch in a way that everyone in the room understood exactly what he was talking about but with the passion that would come with the next Instagram and not a learning platform. As for a learning platform, Dudley is quick to point out that The Skillery is not about online classes, it’s one of those startups that bridging the online world back with the real world, something that will be vital to the next wave a startups, according to the New York Times.

Check out Dudley’s pitch below:

Check out The Skillery here

Here’s more demo day coverage

Nibletz is the voice of startups in the southeast and everywhere else

Nashville Startup Evermind Pitches At Jumpstart Foundry Demo Day VIDEO

Today marks the end of Tennessee demo day month with demo and investor day for Jumpstart Foundry in Nashville. Jumpstart Foundry is a nationally known startup accelerator currently based at the Entrepreneur Center in Nashville. They were recently recognized with an honorable mention in the 2012 national accelerator rankings, reported by TechCocktail just yesterday. This is the second year in a row Jumpstart Foundry has appeared as an honorable mention.

Evermind is a very unique new, “ambient monitoring” solution geared towards family members that care or are worried about the care of their elderly family members and loved ones.

Evermind is not nearly has obtrusive as many of their competing products. The founding team, who was part of the founding team at Griffin Technologies in Nashville, has approached this product with care and with always keeping both the end user and the consumer in mind, never losing site of that.

To that end, some of the things that immediately stood out to me with Evermind included:

– The non obtrusive design. The Evermind product looks sleek and it doesn’t look like a medical device
– The pricing is at $199 for three Evermind units
– easy to use website
– non obtrusive monitoring.

As for the way the system itself works, it’s simple. You plug an appliance that your elderly loved one uses everyday into an Evermind remote unit and every time your loved one uses that appliance it sends a message to the Evermind cloud and then to the loved ones phone. For instance if your grandpa John makes a cup of coffee at 7:30am every morning, you would plug the coffee maker into the Evermind unit and when he made his cup of coffee it would signal you. If he misses the cup of coffee you’re alerted, maybe there is something wrong. These remote plug devices can be set up on any small appliance, can openers, tvs, bedside lamps etc.

There is no need to worry about a life alert pendant or security cameras, it gives the elderly person privacy and the care giver, piece of mind.

Check out their pitch video at JumpStart Foundry video below:

Linkage:

Check out more Demo Day coverage here

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more startup stories from “everywhere else”

Check out Jumpstart Foundry at jumpstartfoundry.com

5 Angel.Co Startups From Everywhere Else: Nashville Edition

Nibletz.com is the voice of startups “everywhere else” and your source for Tennessee startup news. As many of our readers know we’ve been working on a series called “5 Angel List Startups From Everywhere Else”. It stems from the weekly traction email that most angel.co members receive. We’ve noticed time and time again that the “trending” startups on the Angel List email are predominantly from Silicon Valley. This of course isn’t the fault of angel.co it’s an amazingly great resource. But here you’ll find five startups profiled from “everywhere else”.

Since it’s Demo Day Month in Tennessee we thought what a great time to do “5 Angel List startups from everywhere else, Nashville Edition” if you’re looking for the Memphis edition, you can find it here.

Wannado

Let’s kick this thing off with one of the Jumpstart Foundry graduates from 2011. The startup called “wannado” is your guide to everything you wanna do. Great name, great concept.

We actually got to see a preview of wannado the other night in Memphis and it blew me away. The app has a robust feature set, yet an aesthetically pleasing user interface. It simply does exactly as they say it will, it tells you what’s available around you to do. If you’re looking for a show or a concert, it’s there. If you’re looking for a business networking event, it’s there. If you’re looking for a cooking class, a lecture, a speaker, a book club, they’re all there for you and everything is served up according to your preferences.

Wannado has an amazing sharing circle breakout piece which allows you to easily share an event any way you like. They also allow you to share events with friends that don’t have the wannado app without having to download the wannado app. They’re given a text message which takes them to a landing page for that event with an equally pleasing user experience.

Truth be told they weren’t on the Angel.co site but we like them that much so check it out here. They are still in private beta but sign up for an update and you’ll be the first person on your block to know wannado. (you like what we did there)

Find wannado on the web here and if you’re reading this wannado, you may want to sign up for the Angel List it’s free.

The next two entries come from the same entrepreneur. Phillip Maddox is the co-founder of Deedsy and VenueBlast.

Deedsy

Deedsy is a good deed engine. The premise is simple, do good deeds, and earn points. A good deed can be anything from a hug to house sitting, to picking up trash. Whatever good deed you do, with Deedsy you earn points.

You can create deeds for others to do and look for a “do gooder” to do that deed for you and then they’ll earn points. It’s a great feel good startup that will promote doing good in your life and community.

You can start off with 25 points if you head over here to the deedsy site and add your name to their LaunchRock.

Here’s a link to their Angel List page

VenueBlast

VenueBlast is the other entry from founder Phillip Maddox. VenueBlast is your ticket to live music online. Basically it’s a video streaming venue for live music and entertainment productions. For the end user they promise great quality productions that can be found in streaming or even pay per view offerings.

For the client they offer a robust set of features that can be delivered to the end user in a variety of ways. Their feature set is constantly evolving to stay up to date with the changes in streaming technology optimized for concerts and live entertainment. They also offer the ability for companies to sponsor live concerts and streaming events and offer analytics back to the customer.

Earlier this week VenueBlast reported that they’re working on some exciting new features and they hope to rollout to the public soon.

Find VenueBlast on the web here and on the Angel List here

Populr.me

Populr.me is the easiest way to quickly crete a great looking micro-site that the Nashville startup calls “pops”. Within minutes you’re able to create,deliver and manage your microsite for whatever the function.

One of their users, Jason Moore, is in the healthcare industry uses Populr.me to create microsites to push out to their healthcare industry partners in hospital and provider systems. Moore said that their custom communication via a secure portal is a game changer.

Populr.me offers a simple drag and drop layout engine making editing and publishing a cinch. They also offer unlimited custom domains with analytics available as well.

Populr.me is so popular that they won the 2012 Governor’s Innovation Conference and the $5,000 check to go along with it.

Here’s Populr.me’s website and here is their Angel List page

Meevl

Meevl is a Slovakian startup that graduated from Jumpstart Foundry in the 2011 class. They’ve actually relocated back to Slovakia but nonetheless they appear under Nashville on the Angel List.

Meevl is a unique startup. The Meevl platform easily allows employees to participate in reporting company news, typically a task handled by a PR person or team in large companies. With Meevl when an employee gets recognized for an achievement, has a baby, or maybe an employee related policy changes, Meevl crowdsources the news from the company employees.

“Currently, social media management platforms are mostly for small teams, where members watch their company’s presence on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and so on,” Vladimir Tucek told BetaKit. “Even if it’s a really huge company, [social media] is managed by a very small team, and all content is produced by that team. We’d like to involve more employees in this process.”

By virtue of the employee participation in the Meevl platform companies can crowdsource news from their employee base, possibly reduce the PR budget for inhouse news and employee morale would stand to improve.

We’re on an international sneaker-strapped startup roadtrip here’s the details, we could use your support