New Mexico Hosting 3 Startup Weekends November 15th, Including Teen Albuquerque

Startup Weekend, New Mexico startup, Taylor Chavez, Teen startup weekend, Teen StartupsNew Mexico is a beautiful state. We make an annual trip out to Russell’s Truck Stop and Car Museum every January on the way to CES. It’s not a state that comes to mind when you think startup hub, but since we’re the voice of startups everywhere else, we’ve covered New Mexico quite a bit. Well they continue to find ways to cultivate their startup community.

In November New Mexico will be hosting three Startup Weekend events. Now the only other states (as far as we can tell) that have hosted three Startup Weekend’s in one month are California, Texas, and Florida. So that says a lot right there.

As the Albuquerque Business First put it, New Mexico will see 162 Startup Weekend hours in November instead of the typical 54. What’s even better is that one of the Startup Weekends is all about teenagers. To take that a step further, the new Teen Albuquerque Startup Weekend was started by a girl.

Taylor Chavez (14), attended the first Startup Weekend Mexico with her father Lawrence, who was a coach for that event. The teenager was so intrigued that when Startup Weekend rolled around to Albuquerque last June she went as a participant and joined a team called Crimson Curriculum, which she described as a STEM education tool that uses Lego’s to teach kids complex engineering concepts.

What makes this story even better is that I found that information out from Chavez’ TedX talk that she did last month called “Let Me Tell You About My Summer.” She tells the standing room only audience at TedX Albuquerque about Startup Weekend with the same excitement other girls her age would talk about seeing One Direction, Taylor Swift, or Justin Bieber.

After you watch her TedX video you’ll see why she was an integral part of her Startup Weekend team’s presentation, which went on to win first place.

 

Teenagers participating, and even winning, traditional Startup Weekends isn’t new. Back in June we brought you the story of 14 year old Nathan Eyal, who won Tampa Bay’s Startup Weekend. We’ve also told you about Las Vegas tween Ethan Duggan who launched his app at SXSW. And of course there’s the story of 14 year old Emerson Walker, who won Cincinnati’s Startup Weekend and has already received venture funding for his startup.

This time around in Albuquerque though, the event has been organized by teenagers for teenagers. We’re looking forward to hearing more about Albuquerque’s Teen Startup Weekend next month. If you’re a teenager in the area you can register here  for the event that runs November 15th- 17th. 

Farmington, New Mexico’s first Startup Weekend event is also November 15th-17th. This is the traditional tech startup focused event. You can register here.

Finally, Las Cruces Startup Weekend is also November 15-17th and if you’re close to Las Cruces you can register here.

Forget Seeing In The Data Center, Albuquerque Startup ProCog Lets You See In The Data

ProCog,Albuquerque startup,New Mexico Startup,startup,startups,startup interview, search engineLast month Google made a historic move and let reporters in to see some of it’s many data centers. These data centers manage search, gmail and all of the many other pieces of data that Google stores. In the photos (like the one on this page), showed very colorful pipes, wires, and stacks upon stacks of servers.

Now imagine if Google let you see what it was like inside the data. More specifically, imagine if you could see how the results of your search were scrubbed and located throughout the vast internet.

That’s what Albuquerque start up ProCog is doing. ProCog is a full scale search engine which is totally transparent. ProCog users can see every little bit of information that ProCog uses to deliver it’s search results. Such open access to the data used in search can be very useful when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine research.

ProCog is short for “Proficient Cognition”. The site returns more data than you could ever dream of in a single search engine tool. Information you would need to scour the internet for hours to find, is all right there in your ProCog search results. Every entry has an seo report, scoring, duplicates report, site inlinks, traffic, cached data and reindex. All of it compiled together in one easy to use tool.

ProCog boasts 1 billion pages indexed so far and it continues to grow.

We got a chance to talk to Steve Cook, Co-Founder of ProCog. Check out the interview below:

Read More…

New Mexico Joins Startup America Partnership With Startup New Mexico

New Mexico marks the latest state to join the Startup America Partnership with their region Startup New Mexico. Startup New Mexico launched on Wednesday evening at an event at the Embassy Suites Downtown Hotel in Albuquerque. New Mexico has a growing ecosystem of startups covering technology, web startups, mobile and tangible products. Now, those entrepreneurs and startups in New Mexico can take advantage of the over 90 member benefits Startup America offers to it’s 9500+ and growing membership. Joining Startup New Mexico and Startup America is free.

“Focusing on high-growth startups is a smart strategy for New Mexico to grow its economy,” said Scott Case, CEO of the Startup America Partnership. “Startup New Mexico provides a state-wide network to help the entrepreneurs building the next great success story to access the opportunities and resources unique to the state.”

There is a hotbed of startup activity in the southwest spanning from southern California including LA’s “Silicon Beach”, through New Mexico, Las Vegas and the southern parts of Texas.

“Given its unique business, research and cultural environment, New Mexico is poised to unleash its potential to become a national leader in startup creation, science & technology commercialization, economic growth, and job creation,” said John Mierzwa, Co-Chairman of the Startup New Mexico team.

Loraine Upham, Startup New Mexico Leadership Team member notes, “As host to the two largest National Laboratories continually generating innovative new technologies and solutions, and as owner of the second largest Sovereign Wealth Fund in the U.S., New Mexico is a cauldron of economic growth potential. Entrepreneurs are the catalysts that can leverage these terrific resources into jobs and value creation. Startup New Mexico can help bring it all together.”

Linkage:

Here’s Startup New Mexico on the web

Join the Startup America partnership here at S.co it’s free

If you’re a startup “everywhere else” you need to make sure to get here.

5 New Mexico Startups From The Angel List (angel.co)

We’ve recently started highlighting startups from “everywhere else” that appear on angel.co. Angel.co is one of the top resources for startups across the web. It’s right up their next to CrunchBase.

What we discovered though, was in our weekly email from angel.co every single trending startup was from Silicon Valley. Once in a blue moon we would get a startup from New York, but the trending startups are predominantly from the valley. This shows that Silicon Valley has a lot of active users on angel.co. This is no fault of the valley or angel.co however we figured we would start an ongoing feature series on Angel.co startups.  It’s free to create your profile there and if you haven’t you should (you should also make sure you’re on Crunchbase).

Today we’re going to look at five angel list companies from New Mexico.


Volopt   (Las Cruces)

Volopt is based in Las Cruces New Mexico and is a web aggregator. They bill themselves as the “Huffington Post” for web content. We’re not sure if we get that reference from looking at their site. After all Huffington is a web site, and well the Huffington Post would be the Huffington Post of web content.

Volopt on the other hand has an easy to understand web interface. When you go to their site there is a “cloud” of content tags on the home page that you can click on to discover more information about the tag. There is also a search bar where you can travel outside of the content cloud.

The co-founders are Hank Muetterties, Joel Diemer and Louis O. Constantini.

They look like their on to something but when you’re building a startup that is going to encompass the entire web there needs to be an entire webs worth of content. There was a great amount of sports content, tags for the NBA,MLB and NFL served up great answers, as did tags for Mathematics and photography.

On the other hand a search for startup and startups returned no data at all.

The UI is very easy to use and understand, building scale may be a challenge.

Find Volopt on the web here and on Angel.co here

 

AgeNation (Santa Fe)

AgeNation is a web hub and content platform targeting baby boomers and seniors. As many baby boomers are entering into retirement in their work lives they were on the cusp of computers, new media and the digital age.

These baby boomers, no how to use a computer, and the internet but don’t have a portal or destination targeting them without making them feel old, like the AARP or any of the thousands of sites targeting seniors.

The AgeNation media group includes AgeNation.com, AgeNation Radio, AgeNation Live, NEXT Magazine, AgeNation Consulting and Coaching. They’re also about to add AgeNation television, publishing and travel.

The AgeNation group was co-founded by husband and wife team Sedena and George Cappannelli. Both workaholic, energetic babybooomers themselves they’ve set out to grow their media empire with their core audience.

Find AgeNation on their website here  and on Angel.co here

 

MoTag (Santa Fe)

MoTag is innovating the QR space with a loyalty and rewards model gamifying discovery of products through a hide and seek platform. MoTag combines QR tag code info and UPC info with users personalized information, creating a fun social game based commerce network.

Think of it as Scavngr for products. But there is much more you can do with MoTag than just scavenger hunts.

MoTag presents themselves as a QR Code browser that has robust features.

MoTag is hoping to merge big box retailers and local retailers in reward and loyalty based games.

Co-Founder Allen Branch has a vast background in big box retail holding advisory positions at Whole Foods, REI, Home Depot and Autozone. He also founded Real Estate TV in 1995.

Co-Founder Bruno Allaire holds an MBA from Harvard and has 18 years experience in managing new business development.

See more about MoTag on their YouTube Channel and here on Angel.co

 

UsersUnite (Taos)

UsersUnite is a product review and social networking platform revolving around software reviews for business. The company seems to be taking an actual user approach to reviews and discussion about software rather than a techblog feel where readers often wonder about the deals behind the software reviews.

The premise for the idea seems solid. Co-Founders Bret and Linda Weir have over 29 years of software experience (Bret) and 10 years of public accounting experience (Linda).

Bret says in their YouTube pitch video that UsersUnite will be worth $200 million dollars within five years by saving businesses billions of dollars in software expenditures. That’s quite a lofty goal.  If the startup lives by it’s user generated ideas and beliefs, especially behind the name UsersUnite, they could achieve that goal.

However, their angel.co profile suggests that their revenue stream is going to come from charging software vendors to participate, ultimately that will be what keeps them from the $200 million dollar goal. Once money from the publishers comes into play than the questions surrounding the authenticity and ethics behind the reviews put UsersUnite right back into the same categories as the TechBlogs that regularly run “sponsored” content.

Hopefully they will pivot back to the original premise, and make money off advertising or even affiliate sales of the software titles being discussed, then they could easily become a seven or eight figure company in revenue within five years. 9 figures though? Not likely.

More about UsersUnite from their website and from Angel.co

 

Enlitten.com (Santa Fe)

As online sales sites like Amazon.com continue to obliterate the local and big box bookstores into oblivion, one New Mexico startup, Enlitten, is trying to return people to local bookstores.

Enlitten uses a model that links users to local bookstores. They can pay through the website, which in turn pays the local bookshop and then the user can go into the local bookshop to pick up the book.While this isn’t as convenient as having the book shipped to your home or office, it can, sometimes mean you get the book quicker.  Of course it also means you get out of the house and into the local bookshop.

A lot of local bookshops are adding entertainment, poetry readings, and cafes with increased menus to get customers to stick around longer.

Enlitten was founded by John Cole who is an award winning book designer

For more check out Enlitten at their website here and on angel.co here

 

Linkage:

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New Mexico Startup: Cute Cribs Wins StartupNation’s Mommy Competition

startup competition, cutecribs, nibletz, ladybug cribStartupnation.com in conjunction with web.com and Sam’s club have announced the top 200 Leading Moms in Business. These mommy owned businesses are successful, with great product, execution and innovation. The contest saw over 350,000 votes, which showed the great interest in these powerful ladies that can manage a household, raising children and owning a thriving business.

“There’s been a sea change among moms as they’ve come to realize that adding entrepreneurship to their lives brings exhilaration and immense gratification, not to mention supplemental—sometimes primary—income to their families in these dicey economic times,” says Rich Sloan, chief startupologist and co-founder of StartupNation.

Donna Fisher, the founder of Cute Cribs, came out victorious among the other 200 mom owned businesses which were all still winners. Cute Cribs is based in Albuquerque New Mexico and was born in 2006 out of Fishers need to find the perfect crib for an adorable little girl.

All of the Cute Cribs are custom painted and can be designed to match any room decor. Fisher will even add the baby’s name and birth information to the crib. Fisher says all a customer needs to do is submit a picture and they’ll take care of the rest.  Fisher and her company can even match other nursery fixtures like changing tables, chests of drawers and other must haves for your new baby.

The designs themselves can come from designs Fisher has done before or custom designed for the new baby. Some of her popular designs include a jet theme, ladybug, frog, trains and more.

Fisher’s cribs and other baby furniture exceed federal safety regulations.

Fisher is a military wife an admitted that changing jobs every three years as her husband moved about was a tough job in itself. Now, when her husband gets re-assigned she can move Cute Cribs to the new location.

Linkage:

Check out Cute Cribs at cutecribs.com

Check out the Startupnation  Leading Moms In Business competition here

Nibletz is the voice of #startups “everywhere else” check out these new stories

We’re on a sneaker strapped nationwide road trip, check it out and support us here 


New Mexico Startup: Whiteman Technology Unveils Windows Set Top Box At DEMO

A Clovis New Mexico startup, Whiteman Technology, is hoping to take advantage of a hole in consumer entertainment that’s been caused by the delayed release of next generation gaming systems by both Microsoft and Sony. While the world awaits the two gaming giant systems, Whiteman has unveiled a monster of a set top box.

There are a lot of choices in set top boxes these days. You’ve got Boxee, Roku, Google TV boxes, Netgear Neo boxes and many more all competing for the same space. However Whiteman has packed their box with a ton of features.

Whiteman Technology’s set top box features:

– The ability to display cable tv programming (not found on most boxes)
– Playing 3D games for the PC
– Recording 6 channels at the same time (DVR)
– 1 terabyte hard drive to store everything in your collection
– voice control and gesture recognition

“We’ve taken people off guard with a hardware startup,” Ryan Whiteman said at DEMO. “We have gotten a lot of attention, and we intend to build this in the U.S.”

Whiteman and his co-founders Blake Jordan and Shaffin Baldwin have not announced pricing or availability for the new set top box but did say it would be on par with TiVo’s set top boxes which tend to run a little more than the Roku, Boxee or Google TV variety. But, you’re getting a ton more features.

Whiteman Technology was one of 80 companies chosen to participate in IDG’s Demo Conference in Santa Clara, CA this past week.

source and photo: VB