New York Archives - Page 10 of 14

Win! Alcohol Discovery From New York Startup Drynk.me

This story doesn’t really need any fancy dressing up. You go out. You like to drink occasionally or perhaps more than occasionally. You try great drinks, but maybe you’re too tired (read drunk) to remember what drink it was you tried, or what was in it.

New York startup Drynk.me is here to help.

Whether you’re a beer connoisseur (or beer snob), or a purveyor of fine wines, or you just like a great new cocktail, you want to remember it right? Drynk.me allows you to do all that, share it with friends, crowdsource new drink ideas, take pictures of your favorite drinks all on your smartphone. You can even geo-tag your drink so you can remember where you were when you had that wonderful concoction. Yes, drinkers, this is your app!

Who has made such a great idea a reality? Well the co-founders behind Drynk.me are Fernando Garza, Chevon Christie and Preston Hall. They took a break from their extensive customer validation and market research to talk to nibletz.com, check out the interview below:

Interview with Toronto, Ontario & New York Startup RemoteStylist

Interior decorating can be a pain in the ass. You normally have to go from store to store and showroom to showroom. Not to mention the fact that you’ve got to deal with a pushy sales person at each showroom and each store. It’s more of a pain than it’s worth. That’s why so many interior decorating and interior design projects get put on hold. Or worse, people spend thousands of dollars on something they don’t necessarily like, just to get the process over with.

That’s where Toronto, Ontario and New York based startup RemoteStylist comes in. With RemoteStylist you simply sign up for your own free profile and then you can coordinate your style for your interior project with one of RemoteStylists’ interior designers.

As you work with your stylist from RemoteStylist you’ll see your rooms come together right before your eyes. If something doesn’t look right on the screen you can simply send your stylist back to the drawing board and they’ll continue to work, change and revise until you have the room you’re looking for.

Once the painful part is over, you’ll be completely satisfied with what you selected. Then the second magic part happens. Everything you liked is purchased for less than retail prices and then delivered and installed in your home. Yes 99% of this entire process can happen at your desk, in bed or at the kitchen table. RemoteStylist founder Kelly Fallis and her team have made sure that the interior design process is simple, and easy and that in the end the customers are happy.

We got a chance to interview the folks at RemoteStylist check out the interview below:

JustDecide Startup Dilemma Of The Week: Foundersync Founder Wants To Know, Patent or Not To Patent

If you haven’t heard about the JustDecide/Nibletz Startup Dilemma Of The Week then you’ve been missing out on a great feature here at nibletz.com. Every week we partner with crowd sourced decision making platform justdecide.com to help one chosen startup handle an actual real life dilemma that they are going through in the startup process.

There are definitely some great advantages for startup founders in participating in this free feature that takes less than a minute to contribute.

– The founder of the featured dilemma’s startup gets great feedback from members of the startup community
– Members of the startup community get to contribute to a crowdsourced answer from like-minded individuals
– Founders who weigh in on the dilemma may actually be going through the same or similar problem that they can use the same advice for.

This week’s dilemma comes from our good friend Ryan Gambrill the founder of FounderSync in Cleveland Ohio. Fourdersync is a great way for startup founders to get involved and meet other founders whether it be technical founders, biz dev people or other entrepreneurs. From there you can network with great people who are living the same startup lifestyle you are.

Gambrill’s dilemma is actually about a new startup idea he is working on. He has a dilemma that tons of startup founders face, to patent or not to patent. While Gambrill thinks his idea is great, he’s a realist so he knows that it may not take off. If for some reason, the idea doesn’t take off, than Gambrill would potentially be out thousands of dollars in legal and patent fees.

What makes this tough for Gambrill though is he’s a networking pro, a people person and loves to talk. He’s one of those guys that doesn’t believe in “stealth mode” and as such he needs to protect his idea if it’s going to be out there.

A patent isn’t like a copyright. We all know the “poor man’s copyright” and for songs or published works the process takes under $50 and under 15 minutes. A patent can cost thousands. This patent problem of Gamrbill’s is something we hear about all the time on the “sneaker strapped nationwide startup roadtrip” and unfortunately we’ve seen both sides of the issue.

We’ve seen first hand entrepreneurs who have blown their entire savings on a patent for an idea that totally fizzled. We’ve also seen entrepreneurs who went the non patent route and got screwed by a competitor.

What say you startup community?

Weigh in here at justdecide.com

Checkout Foundersync here, sign up it’s free!

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New York Startup: PubSlush Crowdfunding Book Publishing For Good

Writers and authors take heed we found an awesome startup in New York called Pubslush. Not only do they have an uber cool name but what they do is fantastic. We actually get amped up when we find a startup that has a unique idea that doesn’t fall under one of the normal categories like SoLoMo or discovery.

Pubslush is a publishing platform for authors to crowdsource the funds that they need to actually publish their works. Pubslush is building up a healthy following of people who love to read, write and check out new books from new authors. Sure there are authors out there crowdfunding their books on KickStarter and Indiegogo but with PubSlush there’s another great incentive.

With every book sold through Pubslush they donate a book to a child in need. This is perfect for the slacktivist set. You know the type, the people who buy Tom’s because they donate a pair of shoes to charity. Well PubSlush is even better. They’re putting more physical books in the world. Needy children are reading books and passing them along to the other children around them. Great idea right?

Pubslush has a trifecta of problem solving. New authors are getting their works read. Authors are also getting their works funded and books are going to people in need. Add in the fact that Pubslush is putting more books out there in the world at a time when print publishing is down thanks to the advent of e-readers, tablets, Amazon and iPads.

We got a chance to talk with Amanda Barbara the development director at Pubslush in the interview below:

New York Startups GroupMe and Groupie In Legal Battle, This Gets Confusing

Last year a little known group messaging startup called Groupie filed a lawsuit when it’s similarly named competitor started blowing up. If you remember back to last summer, Group messaging startup, with a lot more flair, GroupMe was acquired by Skype.

If you haven’t heard of Groupie that’s no surprise. The iPhone only group messaging platform had 60,000 users for about a million messages per day. GroupMe on the other hand has 4.6 million users who send over half a billion messages per month. GroupMe also just released no features surrounding events. What’s better than to pair a group messaging app with events you do in groups.

Fresh on the heels of GroupMe’s acquisition last August, Groupie quickly went to work suing GroupMe around trademark allegations. According to BetaBeat Groupie filed for their trademark back in 2009. That seems straight forward but in reality it looks like Groupie got a little jealous of it’s competitors success.

Betabeat reports that last years Groupie vs GroupMe lawsuit received a little bit of coverage from the likes of GigaOM, SAI and themselves. GigaOM’s piece got picked up by the Wall Street Journal, and then the lawsuit went quiet.

We’re not clear on why it’s been 11 months for this suit to resurface but GroupMe went back into court on July 11th and filed suit against Groupie. GroupMe is looking for declarations from the court that there is “no likelihood of confusion” between GroupMe’s mark and the Groupie mark. GroupMe is also looking for the court to declare that they have not violated any mark of Groupie’s.

Betabeat wasn’t able to get a statement from GroupMe and of course Groupie was more than willing to talk. Here’s what they said to Betabeat:

“This newly filed action is just the latest volley in an ongoing trademark dispute rooted in the confusing similarities between Groupie’s pre-existing, validly registered trademark “Groupie” and the nearly identical Groupme name. Groupie initially filed an Opposition Proceeding against Groupme before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board in July of 2011 (Groupie LLC v. Groupme Inc., TTAB Opposition No. 91200478). Groupie’s Opposition Proceeding seeks to protect its trademark by preventing Groupme from registering the confusingly similar “Groupme” mark. Not only do ”Groupie” and “Groupme” look and sound the same, the two companies’ products are virtually identical and are distributed through the same channels of commerce, thus causing ongoing consumer confusion. Additionally, the evidence will show that Groupme’s claim for cancellation of Groupie’s valid trademark is a late pursued theory premised on the illogical conclusion that the trademarked brand ”Groupie” is a generic term. Groupie is confident that claim will be summarily rejected. In short, Groupie has been vigorously fighting to protect its trademark in the Opposition Proceeding and will do the same in the newly filed action.”

When you consider all the facts it’s hard to say who is right and who’s wrong. Groupie did start out three years before GroupMe however GroupMe is much more successful. Groupie may have wanted to protect their idea, and name but now it does just look like they’re going after deep pockets. It’s really up for a judge to decide. Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Linkage:

Rochester Startup: Wi3 Expanding To Hospitality Industry, THANK GOD

We travel an awful lot. Most of our readers know that we’re on a sneaker strapped, nationwide startup road trip, which means we stay in the car a lot, but in hotels a lot too. The biggest challenge in hotels isn’t about bedding, towels, or even what’s on tv. We book rooms based on wifi, availability and pricing. The problem is even when you do a preliminary check on a hotels wifi it’s still slow as molasses and typically a horrible experience.

Outside of bringing our own wifi (which we do as backup) there hasn’t been much change since hotels started offering wifi. Free or not most hotels have less than subpar wifi.

Well a Rochester startup called Wi3 is doing something about that.

We first met Wi3 at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas back in January. They were demoing their innovation award winning WiPNET product. As you can see from the video above, WiPNET in home allows the user to set up access points with the bulk of the load making it from point a to point b over coax. This is ultimately the same thing that cable internet providers are doing from the node to your home.

WiPNET makes sure you have a clear wifi access point with very little (if no) latency or loss of signal from the entry point to the end user. Pretty magical stuff.

Well now they’ve announced that they are offering their product to the hospitality industry (hotels)

WiPNET allows many devices to simultaneously access HD and rich media digital Web content on the same hardwired network using existing coax cable infrastructure and a hardwired access point in every guestroom. This innovative application of MoCA technology eliminates the problem of network buffering caused when several devices are accessing the Web within the same environment. It also simplifies network management and oversight, even allowing hotel owners to create tiered-access services as an additional profit center.

“Serving hotel guestrooms or commercial properties with just one WiFi router or a few WiFi repeaters across a property does not meet the needs and demands of the ever increasing WiFi enabled mobile consumer,” said Wi3 CEO Bill Thompson. “Wi3’s patented in-wall Ethernet and WiFi products enable properties that have coax connections to convert every room or space into a full-bandwidth dedicated access point to satisfy even the most heavy of users, thus simplifying and eliminating today’s singular WiFi router approach.”

Now in a nutshell, every hotel guest in every room will have their own dedicated wifi access point and won’t overload the Belkin or Linksys routers that are typically not so strategically placed in hotels.

Linkage:

NY Startup Moovio Offers A Really Easy Way To Discover Movies, Interview

If you’ve felt like the current movie discovery platforms aren’t quite getting it you my be in luck. A new New York startup called Moovio promises to offer the fastest way to find a movie either in the theaters or for at home. They do this by offering a graphic intensive list of movies that looks reminiscent of the screen on a redbox. They couple that with some quick preferential questions and voila, you’re off to the movies.

If you find a movie you like on moovio than the site takes you right to where you can buy tickets. If you’re looking to watch a movie at home it points you to where you can rent the movie either on or offline.

Moovio says that they’re discovery platform isn’t just simple, they call it “ridiculously easy”. We noticed that after a brief tutorial coming back to the site is pretty easy and extremely fast.

We got a chance to talk with Erik Linde, Co-Founder of Moovio. Check out the interview below:

JustDecide.com Startup Dilemma Of The Week #2 Should I Quit My Day Job

Startups, the Justdecide.com dilemma of the week is a feature here at nibletz.com where you can participate in an active discussion with other like-minded startups and founders to help a fellow startup with a dilemma. You can also submit your own dilemma to startups@nibletz.com if you’re having trouble making a decision about your startup you can crowdsource our community via justdecide.com

That’s exactly what Atlanta-based entrepreneur Aaron Gray did. Gray is the founder of the Legacy Movement, with a goal of becoming the go-to site for deals and to change the discussion about entrepreneurship and founding especially in regards to under-served communities of entrepreneurs and founders within the startup ecosystem. To that end Gray is trying to help all entrepreneurs and founders with an emphasis on black-owned, women-owned and latino-owned startups.

Gray has a dilemma though, and it stems from his strategy to build his user base and community base before focusing on funding. For Gray this is actually a great strategy, if he can build scale for his startup then it becomes more valuable in the eyes of the potential investor. Naturally with more funding he can do more for both aspects of his startup, the Legacy Movement.

Gray is still working a full-time job, which he needs to “pay the bills”. He knows at some point he’s going to need to leave his day job so that he can focus on his efforts with his startup. He’s come to the startup community to gauge their feedback and help him solve this dilemma.

His options include:

Continuing to work full-time while working on his startup in his spare time.

Negotiate a part-time agreement with his current employer

Leave his job

Raise an angel round of funding to subsidize his switch from full-time employment to full-time founder.

You can find out more about Gray’s back story here.

Each week we will present to you a startup dilemma of the week with our partner justdecide.com We would love it if you could take just a few minutes out of your day to weigh in on the discussion. The “Startup Dilemma Of The Week” is a free resource to any startup everywhere else, and you may need it some day.

Linkage:

Participate in this week’s dilemma

See last week’s dilemma

submit your own dilemma

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New York Startup: Hashable Shutting Down

Hashable was destined to become the best way to save and remember where and when you met someone. That’s why they debuted at South By Southwest Interactive in 2011. In fact we saw them at the Androidandme party that year where they pitched before a crowd of die hard Android fans. The technology was actually pretty good.

Hashable wasn’t people discovery, more of a way to do a virtual business card exchange in person and then take it from off-line to online.

The backbone to Hashable was the on-going history that the app kept for everyone you may have met and used Hashable to remember since their launch 18 months or so ago.

Well this evening they sent out their “lights out” email to users, saying that they are shutting down on July 25th.

Dear Hashable Users,

We regret to inform you that the Hashable mobile apps and Hashable.com will be shutting down on July 25th. The service will be unavailable after this date.

While we are still very passionate about making better connections and meeting new people, the time has come for us to focus our energy elsewhere.

Some of you have stored valuable information in Hashable, and we want to give you the opportunity to save that data for your own records. If you’d like to receive a file with your complete history, please log onto Hashable.com, navigate to the “Profile” tab, then to the “Your History” section on that page. You can download the file by clicking “Export full history to .csv” and accepting the dialog that pops up.

We are incredibly grateful for all the people we have met through Hashable. Thank you for all your support, and we hope to connect with you again in the future.

All the best,

The Hashable Team

No word on what the next project is, but if you’re a Hashable user at least you can save your history, which is the best part. It’s too bad, this was a great idea and had a lot of thunder at the 2011 sxsw.

Linkage:

Hashable.com

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NY Startup BarkBox Raises $1.7M Almost By Accident

Matt Meeker has had a successful exit with MeetUp and has also served as the entrepreneur in residence at Polaris Ventures, it’s no wonder that his admitted “side project”, BarkBox has just raised $1.7 million dollars.

While the round itself was intentional, Meeker never really thought this business would create such momentum. Obviously he wasn’t familiar with his $53 billion dollar pet care industry. It was only natural with a subscription box available for everything from purses to shoes, to healthcare and wellness products to, “bro stuff” a subscription box for pet care products was a shoe in for a great business.

“We started thinking this would be a little side project, and a nice little cash flow business, and then we got such tremendous feedback about it we decided there’s a much bigger opportunity here,” he said.”If we want to do it right, we’re going to need some capital in the bank to go build a team and start building real relationships with suppliers and things like that, so we decided to go out and raise that money to do it.” betakit.com reported

This $1.7 million dollar round was led by Mike Hirschland of Resolute.vc, and included Lerer Ventures, RRE, Polaris Ventures, Bertelsmann and Dave McLure’s 500 startups.

Linkage:

Visit BarkBox here

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New Startup WarSocial Is A “Risk” Like HTML 5 Game, Interview Here

If you spent hours as a kid, or even a teenager planning, strategizing and taking over the world in the game Risk then you’ll be happy to know that two entrepreneurs have started something called WarSocial which is an HTML 5 game based on the fun, and strategy behind the game Risk.

The game was born out of another game that Bill Franceschine and his co-founder Dustin had played but was pretty much abandoned by it’s founder. They put their heads together and expanded that idea to form WarSocial. Now with one game out under their belts they may continue to develop other group played social games using HTML 5.

As a kid I played a lot of Risk, after graduating from Stratego. While many think of big multiplayer online and mobile games being fantasy, or science fiction based, it’s nice to see a startup bringing back a real thinker’s game.

We got a chance to interview Franceschine. Check out the quick interview below:

What is warsocial?

An HTML5 social game inspired by Risk.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

Bill: Serial web entrepreneur with a deep background in poker. There is your hint about what our next game might be!

Dustin: Software engineer who was previously CTO of a venture backed startup.

Where are you based?

Distributed team: Bill in California, Dustin in NYC, contractors in Canada and India.

How did the idea for WarSocial come about?

Dustin and I met playing a simliar game. A game the creator has all but abandoned the last few years but which still has a very loyal following who play it many hours per week for years. We both saw the potential for the game to be very popular if done correctly so we decided to do it.

Briefly tell us how the game is played?

2-7 players can play. Each is randomly assigned lands on a map and those lands are randomly assigned dice. Players attempt to win the whole map by attacking the lands of other players.

Can people win prizes? Money? Virtual goods?

We are currently giving away $500 per season (roughly six weeks) in cash prizes to the top ten on our leaderboard.

Tell us one of the challenges you faced in the startup process?

Our biggest challenge thus far has been onboarding additional programmers. The game is very popular with engineers so recruiting talented developers is easy. Indeed many people reach out to us volunteering to help. However since we use a number of cutting edge technologies onboarding them has been a challenge. They have to setup a Ruby on Rails environment to work with Redis, Heroku, Pusher, HTML5 and in the near future probably also Node.js. This isn’t an easy task.

Whats next for War Social?

Continue quickly iterating based on user feedback and growing the community. Bringing the game to Facebook, iOS and Android are also top of mind. Once we are ready we’ll be using our platform to launch additional games as well. We could easily launch most turn-based games.

Linkage:

Wanna play? Check out WarSocial here

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NY Startup: Emotish Lets You Share Pictures With Emotion INTERVIEW

Emotish is a new mobile app startup in New York City. They’ve taken a twist of the standard photo sharing app and added an element to it that makes this app special. The element is emotion.

With Emotish you take photos of yourself or you and your friends and you can tag it with what you’re feeling at the time and then share it via Facebook and Twitter. Users will soon be able to keep tabs on the photos and tags and see what feelings are trending, how everyone was feeling in a given area, favorite photos and contextual tags.

Emotions bring a whole new life into photo sharing. Instagram is great with it’s filters and likes but with Emotish not only will you see photos and a smile but you’ll have a better context of what the smiles about, or even what the long face or frown is about.

What makes Emotish even cooler is this isn’t just about great coders or a cool mobile app development startup. Emotish Co-Founder Ryan Wegner is actually a PhD candidate in the clinical psychology program at Columbia University. So like Smurks in Chicago, there is actual real psychology behind this app and what emotion brings to the table in people’s every day lives, in context and in photos.

We got a chance to talk to Wenger in between saving the world and developing great apps, check out the interview below:

JustDecide & Nibletz Present The Startup Dilemma Of The Week

Justdecide.com and nibletz.com are partnering for something very exciting, thought provoking and hopefully helpful to startups everywhere.

Jay Amato, the founder of justdecide.com has a long standing background helping to build and rebuild fortune 500 companies in New York. After a great career of doing just that, he found that he had a dilemma, what to do next. That’s where justdecide was born out of Amato’s own dilemma.

While many people turn to Amato for his advice in business and mentorship he’s also jumped head first into Justdecide, his own startup. That’s where the idea for the “Startup Dilemma Of The Week” was born.

There’s no real “if” about it, along the startup path you’re going to come into a dilemma, or two or ten and need some help. Now every week you can submit your dilemma to startups@nibletz.com and if you’re lucky we will post it as our dilemma of the week.

All week long you’ll be able to see your dilemma on justdecide.com at this link or by clicking the banner to the right side of the page here on nibletz.com.

We will encourage our community of startups “everywhere else” do help solve your dilemma by choosing one of the three possible answers and weighing in with feedback. Hopefully you’ll come to some resolution with the help of the startup community. Also we will randomly select people who weigh in on the dilemma for cool prizes from some of our great sponsors.

Our kick off dilemma actually comes from a crowded discussion at dinner during TechWeek in Chicago. There were actually about 10 of us around the table discussing one founder’s dilemma.

“I’ve finished my pitch deck, what should I do next”. The discussion got heated because everyone at the table had a different point of view, mostly predicated on where they were in the startup process.

The person who asked the question was ready to go head first and pitch venture capitalists, in Chicago and all over the country, and of course the valley too.

One of the participants in the discussion thought that the idea hadn’t been vetted out enough. The entrepreneur was still green and wet behind the ears. Other participant thought at this early stage in the game the entrepreneur would be chewed up and spit out by any venture capitalist and perhaps blow his chance at ever getting in front of that VC again.

We all seemed to be in agreement on that. If the entrepreneur took his idea to a VC this early in the game he would blow his one and only shot. Of course we could all understand why he wanted to just go pitching away, like many of us, he needed the money.

Another one of the participants in the discussion suggested that the entrepreneur vet the idea and practice the pitch with friends and family. Of course the downside to this is that more often than not his friends and family are going to blow smoke up his ass.

One person suggested he just randomly talk about the idea with 50 complete strangers in Chicago and see what they thought.

Please click over here to justdecide.com to weigh in on the “Startup Dilemma of the Week”. Also don’t forget to send us your dilemmas so that the startup community can help you out with your important startup dilemmas.

Linkage:

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New York Startup: DoGoodBuyUs Charity Made Products Marketplace INTERVIEW

Charitable organizations are producing products all the time with the idea to sell those products as fundraisers. Everything form tie-dyed t-shirts, bracelets, hats,ties, baskets, even custom fitted chair backs have all at one time or another been created for and by charities.

The problem was, until last year, that there wasn’t a central online marketplace to buy and sell these charitable goods. Sure churches, civic organizations, and social activist charities may have sold their wares on ebay, Craigslist or their own personal website, but that still meant only a finite number of people would actually see the products and the charities they support.

Enter Zack Rosenberg and DoGoodBuyUs. Last July when the site launched, Rosenberg told the mother nature network:

“Right now, nonprofts don’t have a central marketplace where they can congregate and maximize awareness,” says Co-founder Zack Rosenberg. “I’ve tried to find a functional ‘marketplace for social good’ out there for aggregating meaningful products, and there just aren’t any adequate commerce platforms for distinguishing nonprofits exclusively.”

DoGoodBuyUs organizes all of their charitable products by type of product and also charity. If you’re looking for something specific it’s easy to find, if you’re looking for a specific cause to support, that too is easy to find. They have a wide variety of products to choose from and an even wider amount of causes to back. One of the most interesting things we found was this hammock for every hammock someone buys, treated mosquito nets are given to families in Africa or a malaria research class is held.

With such an innovative socially conscious idea we had to interview Rosenberg. Check out the interview below the break: