New York Archives - Page 12 of 14

We Talk With Sonar CEO Brett Martin One Year Later, Meet The Here Now Network.

Last year at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC we were out in full force to support Ocean City Maryland native Brett Martin. I city I practically grew up in and lived in for nearly 8 years of my formative years. Aside from that Sonar was the first of true social discovery apps and it was very cool then, and even cooler now after todays announcements.

We were totally stoked when Martin and the Sonar team made it to the finals where they came in as a runner up to high end peer to peer car rental startup, Get Around.

We wanted to know what it was like for the last year for the Sonar team. They didn’t win the cup last year but it seems that being a finalist was just as good.

They tripled their office size from 3-9 and they’ve added a whole new suite of features. They also launched an Android beta, which Martin assures me will be released to the public shortly.

Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 it was all about the Here Now Network. Back in March on a phone call with Martin I expressed some worry over the initial Sonar concept. It was fresh and new in May 2011 but by March 2012 there were apps like Highlight, Banjo and Glancee in the space. Martin kept telling me that they were working on things on their back end that he couldn’t talk about but they would blow me away.

Those things Martin showed off today at Disrupt, the Here Now Network, move Sonar far ahead of the competition again.

Sure there are plenty of apps that do discovery and proximity based discovery but Sonar and the Here Now Network are all about your own personal network of people who are here now. Your closest friends, business associates and family members who are in your immediate area are what matters most.

Martin describes some great use cases in the video below. For example when he steps off the subway on his way into work he checks in. He leaves a status “Just got off the subway, headed to Starbucks does anyone want anything”. That message is broadcast to the Sonar team (his coworkers) as soon as he passes by the office door just down the street from Starbucks. Now he can pick up coffee and bagels for everyone without picking up his phone any more than just checking in and looking at the order.

Another example he gives is that his team likes to go out to an outdoor food court sometimes. They all get different items from different vendors and if one of them finds a table they just check in and say “I found a spot in the shade, southeast corner”. The message is broadcast to his teammates.

There are endless things you can do with that feature.

Check out our talk with Brett Martin on the new features, life for the past year and where he and Sonar are going. We recently saw social discovery exit Glancee take an early exit to Facebook. Martin tells us he’s in it for the long haul.

We Check Out NY Startup Knodes Social Context API At TechCrunch Disrupt

Ron Williams, the co-founder of SnapGoods and Knodes, caught our eye on the second day of TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012. Knodes is a social data driven context API. You’ve probably heard the term SaaS before (Software as a service), Knodes is a BadasS startup (Big Data As A Service) according to Williams.

Now we’re accustomed to getting pitches. We receive hundred of pitches a week via email, Twitter, Facebook, Google plus and in person. We know what to look for and how to cut through the pitch clutter that most entrepreneurs have to use to get noticed and talk the talk. We’re 100% guilty of doing the same thing. However, Williams is a show me person, so today he showed me an amazing API.

Knodes takes social data form all the major social networks. We’re not just talking profiles, likes or interests, we’re talking about all of that and actual conversation data too, to find the relevant people pertaining to whatever it is you’re looking for.

At Nibletz I’m the Content Director. We decided we didn’t want an Editor in Chief and content directing, procuring and writing is what I do among a million other things. There are a few Content Directors out there but that’s the title on my personal Twitter profile. For the demonstration of Knodes Williams typed Content Director in the box and I was the second result listed.

I thought, wouldn’t it be great for startups to be able to use the Knodes tool. If they wanted to make a pitch for coverage they could simply check the word Editor, and of course it served up hundreds of editors, and notably, the ones that were closest to us first.

Williams sees Knodes as a very valuable tool and service for developers, publishers and many more. The foundation for it is solid and it’s very fast. Williams says it was born out of a need to better search things in his other successful startup SnapGoods. SnapGoods was one of the first peer to peer rental sites in the space. Many are copying his model.

Coincidently Williams shared with me the crazy story about how they came up with SnapGoods too. Since it’s not in the video I’ll tell you.

Williams had started dating his now fiancé, back in 2009. He wanted to impress her by taking her out for a motorcycle ride. The problem was he didn’t own a motorcycle, and you can’t rent them anywhere. Sure you can rent a Vespa but if you’ve met Williams a Vespa really isn’t his style. He wanted a hog.

So on a whim, Williams took to Craigslist and was able to rent a motorcycle from a complete stranger for $250. After he did that he decided more people good do things like that. It’s more experience driven than needs. As SnapGoods grew, Williams needed to build a better search and that’s where the original idea for Knodes came about.

Enough of that, check out the video below:

Linkage:

Find out more about Knodes here at knod.es (developers especially)

For more of our TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 coverage click here

Nibletz is on a sneaker strapped, nationwide, startup road trip, check it out here and support us if you can

NY Startup MyStream: Share Your Music From Device To Device VIDEO INTERVIEW

NY startup MyStream is an app that allows you to share your music from device to device by simply using wifi or Bluetooth. Sounds basic enough right? Well the app comes packed with a lot of exciting features, and best of all it’s free.

When two friends have the MyStream app downloaded to their iPhones they can now share any music in their library with each other in a couple of different ways.

First, they can share over their choice of a wifi or bluetooth network.

They can also share the song one person is listening to in real time, with the other person. Or connected devices can browse each other’s libraries and listen to whatever songs they want off the library. Now this is a streaming share so you can’t copy the song form one device to another. However, if you like the song MyStream has a buy button that will connect you to where you can download the song directly to your device.

Now you don’t have to worry about sharing headphones and bumping heads or having to cuddle close to listen to the same iPhone speaker. MyStream eliminates all of that hassle.

Record labels aren’t put off by real estate agent turned tech startup founder Richard Zelson’s app because it encourages purchasing your own music. In an interview with our good friends at TechCocktail Zelson said: “We’re making it more valuable to have your own copy of music again,”

The buy button is the piece that keeps the industry folks happy. We’re sure you’re familiar with the scenario “Dude you need to hear this song”, well when the other user wants the song, they just go and buy it from their own device.

Check out the video below:

Linkage:

Find out more about MyStream here

More of our TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 coverage can be found here

We’re on a nationwide sneaker-strapped startup roadtrip, find out more here

Video Interview With Diego Saez Gil Founder Of wehostels.com (formerly inbed.me)

Back in March we reported on a world traveler turned entrepreneur, Diego Saez Gil and his startup inbed.me. Inbed.me is a service that connects travelers to hostels across the world. In addition for finding, booking and discovering hostels, it has a back bone social network that helps users recommend hostels, suggest things to do and meet up while traveling.

Inbed.me was Diego’s second startup. His first startup was called Off Track Planet, the ultimate backpackers online guide to travel.

Diego recently changed the name of inbed.me to we hostels.com because it’s a little more politically correct. Inbed.me has some risky connotations.

Wehostels.com is exhibiting in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 check out our video interview below:

TechCrunch Disrupt: I Shot A 50 Caliber Rifle At A Fax Machine, Thanks To Twake

Twake, a new big data startup, had a great attention grabber at their booth at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC’s Startup Alley. Twake hired a man in a wooded area in a remote location with an arsenal of high-caliber fire arms and a junk pile of computer gear. Old cpus, monitors, fax machines, radios and other electronics were put in the pile for the man with the guns.

Meanwhile back at TechCrunch Disrupt Twake had an iPad app where passerby’s could choose a device they wanted to shoot, and the gun they wanted to shoot with. After they made their selections they would hit a button labeled “fire” which sent a signal back to the man with the guns to go ahead a fire away at the old computer junk.

This was very reminiscent of Tommy Jordan, the laptop shooting dad in North Carolina. Now even though I didn’t get to fire the gun myself, I could feel the thrill and satisfaction of popping a cap in that fax machines ass. The boys from Office Space would be proud.

So what kind of company goes through this much promotion to attract people to their booth? That would be Twake, a recently launched big data startup.

Twake is a secure, agnostic, scalable recommendation service. In their own words they describe Twake as:

“Twake’s cloud-based service maps anonymous referential data on customers, products and services with behaviors such as view, like, buy, and comment along with the sentiment and significance of each. Our wave propagation and interaction algorithms analyze patterns, recognize highly relevant items that are far removed from the source and synthesize recommendations that resonate”

We would say it’s a predictive recommendation engine. The idea of being able to recommend what a customer may buy next is often the competitive edge companies need, provided the data is right.

Twake’s platform is scalable to most industries. Their unique adaptive recommendation engine can handle e-commerce, app discovery, deep personalization, restaurant suggestions, smart pre-fetching, sentiment analysis, genome research, social discovery, travel planning, business intelligence, and network planning.

Is that too many verticals? Twake is so new that we’ll have to wait and see how it all comes together. It will be great to see what developers can do using Twakes API’s.

Check out the video here:

TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Interview With Connecticut Startup Shizzlr

Shizzlr is a new group platform social event platform with a website and cool mobile app to bit. In a way it’s similar to the startup we saw last year at Disrupt NY called “Salsa” unfortunately that startup had a very short life. Shizzlr has promise though, because of it’s unique feature set.

Shizzlr’s mobile app is available for both iPhone and Android. It allows you to discover local events and places nearby. After that you can share them into a group chat with friends and then decide what you want to do. Afterwards you can even run a poll and get feedback about the event or activity.

Shizzlr was founded by Nick Jaensch and Keith Bessette in the fall of 2009 while they were both students at UConn. They kept working on it after college and saw an official launch in 2010. Now both co-founders are here showing off Shizzler in TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley because they know its the shizzle.

Shizzlr is designed for smaller groups of friends between say 5 and 20. It aggregates local events from Facebook. Once the events are aggregated, users can decide which ones to do and make plans.

It’s an interesting new spin on the social event app. Check it out for yourself at shizzlr.com and watch our video interview below:

See more nibletz.com TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 coverage here

TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Interview With NY Startup hoppit

We got a chance to talk with the founder of hoppit at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2012. Hoppit was the winner of the best “Big Data” startup at the recent NY Tech Day.

So what is hoppit? Well hoppit is a discovery platform that lets you discover places completely based on atmosphere. Yelp, Urban Spoon and other restaurant recommendation sites use reviews that focus on cuisine to attract customers. With hoppit their engine takes into consideration keyword phrases that describe ambiance.

For instance, hoppit looks for multiple instances of groups of words like “romantic dinner” from there it would be able to dig deeper and determine that a restaurant is smaller and more intimate. This may be exactly what someone is looking for.

Right now hoppit lets you choose from eight different vibes; classy & upscale, hipster, watering hole, romantic, cozy & quaint, mad men,swanky & posh, trendy & chic, vintage & old world, and chill & relaxed.

After a long work week you know what you want and hoppit will help you find it. Check out our interview Steve Dziedzic below:

See more of our Disrupt coverage here

TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Interview With: Bar & Club Stats VIDEO

There’s no cutesie name name, no outrageously loud logo, no booth babes and no crazy animation talking about Bar & Club stats. It’s very straight forward and like a great name, their company name says exactly what they do. What a novel idea, Bar & Club Stats provides bar and club stats. It’s how they do it and exactly what they do with it that makes it cool.

Bar & Club Stats founder, Ben Silbert, said he started the business after finding most of the places he went to were really crowded. He developed an app and id scanner and then the back end piece which collects data.

Bar & Club stats is an app and id card reader that allows bouncers and door men to scan IDs. Fake IDs will not scan which makes it easier to weed out bad IDs and actually get rid of the offending person. Sometimes when someone presents a fake id they go into a temper tantrum yelling and screaming that their ID is real. After the ID is actually scanned the argument becomes a moot point.

As we reported earlier, the entry validation portion is just the beginning. Bar & Club stats take the data from the ID scans, anonymizes it and then analyzes it for the bar or club. This is invaluable information to a club owner. Were there more 18-21 year olds on Monday or Thursday? Did ladies night draw more men? Did our midtown club attract a slew of customers from Hoboken? All of this information is now available to the venue for marketing and business development.

While it’s not cute or quirky Bar & Club stats solves a problem for bars and clubs, well actually two. Check out their video interview here:

Arrington Is Back: Fireside Chat With Fred Wilson

Mike Arrington was back, looking right at home on the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC. As most of you know he was here last year for Disrupt NYC but after that things between he and AOL got a little shaky.

Last year Arrington appeared onstage with a TechCrunch Green t-shirt that read “unpaid blogger”. This year there was no special shirt, just Arrington in his best form. After being introduced by John Biggs as a guy who used to be Biggs’ boss he sat down to chat with Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson.

Arrington pointed out that every time he talked face to face with Wilson they were always in New York. Arrington went on to ask Wilson if he was extremely wealthy and if Wilson had rode into Disrupt on a helicopter. Wilson was quick to point out he walked a couple blocks and then grabbed a cab. He also pointed out that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg often takes the train.

As far as Wilson and his investments are concerned, Arrington immediately started in on him about Duck Duck Go a new search engine. In regards to Duck Duck Go, Arrington looked at Wilson and simply said “Why, I don’t understand”.

Wilson responded by saying that Duck Duck Go has 40-50% of the traffic of AOL search which is still a top 5 search engine in the world. Wilson is also enthusiastic about Duck Duck go because it was created by just one person. Concerns about privacy will also drive the popularity of Duck Duck Go because it’s a 100% private search engine.

When Arrington asked Wilson if Google should be worried about Duck Duck Go, Wilson said no pointing out that Duck Duck Go is fundamentally different. Where Google uses algorithms and key words, Duck Duck Go “leverages 100s of services that are domain experts, hit their API’s and assemble on the fly”.

Arrington admitted that he was not enthusiastic about Kickstarter at first but has since become one of biggest fans of the crowd sourced funding site. Union Square was the only venture capital firm to invest in Kickstarter. When Arrington asked Wilson why they invested, Wilson described Kickstarter as a “futures market for product”.

Arrington and Wilson rounded out their conversation talking about Wilson’s investments in Twitter and Zynga. Arrington of course said Wilson needs to get to San Francisco more.

Check out more of our Disrupt coverage here:

NY Startup: Bar & Club Stats Presenting At TechCrunch Disrupt This Week

If you go to bars and clubs in the New York area and in the near future and have your license scanned by someone with an iPhone or iPod scanner, chances are they are using technology from New York Startup; Bar & Club stats.

The innovative new startup provides a two fold service to bar and club owners in their iPhone/iPod scanning app. The app allows bouncers and doormen to effectively check licenses and IDs. On the backend the app is providing anonymized demographic information that is analyzed and given back to the establishment in easy to understand data.

For example, a bar owner may find that Tuesday nights from 8pm-1am are great nights for women between the ages of 30 and 45, with that data they can offer better drink specials and promotions to attract more of that crowd. A club may also find out that on Thursday night, college night, they actually have a bunch of patrons who are in their late 20’s. Maybe changing college night to another night would work better for them.

This is just one of the many exciting startups presenting in either “Startup Alley” or the Disrupt Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC this week.

TechCrunch Disrupt NYC: Get Me Listed To Launch New Platform

We are reporting tonight from a Times Square hotel that actually has good wifi, something very hard to find in New York. We are here for TechCrunch Disrupt. This will be our third year bringing coverage from TechCrunch’s signature event in New York City. The previous two years we covered for our former site thedroidguy.com

In case you didn’t know, nibletz.com unofficially launched at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC last year. We still owned and ran thedroidguy.com at the time and we were looking for a place to put content from startups that really appealed to both Cameron and I, but didn’t really fit in the Android space. The fact that we were launching the site out of disrupt is exactly why our SM tagline was “small crunchy bytes from the tech and startup scene”. Most know that we’ve now pivoted to “the voice of startups everywhere else”. That’s exactly what we will find here, startups from Silicon Valley, New York and everywhere else.

One of those startups that will be in startup alley is are the folks from “Get Me Listed”. The New York based startup specializes in local marketing solutions. Get Me Listed’s technology allows marketing professionals to manage hyper local marketing campaigns from a simple easy to use dashboard.

At Disrupt this week (starting Monday morning), Get Me Listed CEO and Co-Founder Michael Mire and Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder Ravdeep Sawhney will be showing off their brand new Get Me Listed platform.

“We are excited to showcase our new platform to the public for the first time. We worked closely with our clients to develop a system that is even more versatile and offers an all-in-one solution for location-based marketing,” said Ravdeep Sawhney.

We will post more including an interview and video later on this week from Disrupt NYC.

Syracuse Startups: StartFast Venture Accelerator Announces 2012 Class

StartFast Venture Accelerator in Syracuse New York is preparing for the summer 2012 session which starts this Tuesday. They’ve selected 9 startups to participate out of over 300 applications from startups world wide.

Fewer than 3% of the entrants were selected for the session, making it harder to get into StartFast Ventuer Accelerator than it is to get into Harvard. It’s the first venture backed accelerator program in Upstate New York. Upstate Venture Connect, the Seed Capital Fund of CNY, CenterState CEO and The Tech Garden participated in the funding of the accelerator program, among others.

The nine startups selected encompass a variety of startup ideas including link aggregation,photos, mobile payments, mobile safety and more.

“Each of these teams has a big vision. We are counting on them to work tirelessly, accept coaching and demonstrate impressive execution in the marketplace.” StartFast Manager Nasir Ali said in a statement. “With the help of our investors and more than 80 mentors who have volunteered to work with these companies, our goal is to showcase nine awesome investment opportunities on August 16 Investor Day,” Chuck Storman the other StartFast Manager added.

See the nine startups selected after the break
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NY Startup: StoryTBD Revives The Choose Your Own Adventure Model (Interview)

This is the story of an awesome New York startup for many reasons. First off, it’s a woman founded startup, we love covering women founded startups in addition to startups everywhere else. Secondly, it brings back a favorite past time of mine, and many other technogeeks around the same age in Choose Your Own Adventure.

I remember many a day sitting at a Crown Book Store (way before the big boxes) and deciding which of hundreds of Choose Your Own Adventure titles I would buy with my lawn cutting money and my allowance. The series of books really sparked your imagination and it was almost like buying many different books in one by the way the stories were laid out and the alternative endings you could navigate through.

Now, Katherine Myers, who had a career in the entertainment industry, with stops at DreamWorks, CBS, AMC and New Line Cinema, has turned entrepreneur and launched StoryTBD, a digital, mobile form of Choose Your Own Adventure.

We got a chance to chat with her a bit interview after the break;

NY Startup: We Talk With Three Ring The Winners Of Best Education Startup At New York Tech Day

At the recent New York tech day a startup called Three Ring walked away with the best education startup award. In short three ring provides a platform that makes it incredibly easy to digitize students work. The backbone of the Three Ring system functions as a portfolio or digital filing cabinet.

Teachers can use an iPhone or Android phone and take a photo or video of a student assignment. From there they can organize the entries by tags including student name, class, assignment and other core parts of the assignment which makes it incredibly easy to recall for later use.

Teachers can use the assignments stored in Three Ring to provide assessments of the students work, go over the assignment more in depth with students and easily recall assignments for things like parent teacher conferences. Three Ring is currently in beta and only for teachers however Three Ring plans to incorporate a parent, student and administrator component.

In the future a parent module or student module could easily be the remedy for “the dog ate my homework”. The possibilities with all four components are endless. Later on, Three Ring could be a way for students to submit an assignment to a teacher once completed. Imagine uploading the assignment to Three Ring and even if the student couldn’t make it to school, got sick before class, or had to leave early for a football game an assignment could be turned in to a teachers Three Ring account and the student could still get credited on time.

There are several tools out there in the digital world for teachers. Three Ring makes is an extremely easy to use tool that can be adapted to several scenarios.

More after the break
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