New York Archives - Page 9 of 14

New York Startup: Exceleratr Finds Extra Curriculars For High School Students INTERVIEW

High school students applying for college are finding more and more that extra-curricular activities within the walls of the high school they’re attending are no longer adequate when it comes to moving your college application up the chain. Sure class president, yearbook, and maybe a high school Habitat for Humanity project are great, but more and more high school students are gravitating towards extracurriculars outside of the school.

These extra-curricular activities can include anything from unique volunteer opportunities to internships in a career field that the student wants to study. There are a broad range of extra-curricular activities for high school students out there, but until now Google was the easiest way to find them.

A new startup called Exceleratr, based in New York, has designed a platform to link high school students to extra-curricular activities that make a difference in both their lives and their college applications. Ezra Mosseri, one of the co-founders of Exceleratr warns though, if you’re a high school senior this year, it could be too late.

The Exceleratr platform is aimed at high school students of any age and of course the earlier you start racking up your extra-curricular resume the better.

Whether you’re looking for a traditional high school internship, an academic program, or a non academic program, Exceleratr covers all the bases.

With Exceleratr students can create profiles, and manage their extra-curricular applications the same way you might if you were looking for an actual job. Of course there are a lot of job platforms out there. There are also a fair amount of startups out there catering to college students looking for internships, however Exceleratr is the first platform designed specifically for high school students looking to add to their pre-college resume.

We got a chance to talk to Mosseri. Check out our interview below:

We Want To Launch Our Startup With The Most Traction: Startup Dilemma Of The Week

We’re back with another Justdecide.com/Nibletz startup dilemma of the week. We’ve teamed up with justdecide.com to bring crowdsourced startup dilemmas of the week. If you’ve encountered a dilemma in the startup process and need some help figuring out what to do than email info@nibletz.com and we will post your dilemma in this feature.

Today we’re faced with a dilemma that most startups in “stealth mode” face, and that’s how to build traction. First things first we are adamant believers that “stealth mode” for lack of a better word is bullshit. It’s not about the idea as much as it is about the execution. 100% total original ideas, that are going to knock it out of the ballpark from the minute they go live, are rarities. Further more, most startups that go in “stealth mode” have the same problem that this startup has. Obviously, if your idea is so great that it deserves stealth mode, than you should have no problem with traction right?

Well since that’s definitely not true, our startup this week is now worried about how they can develop traction.

Should they:

Send PR pitches out to the top tech publications such as TechCrunch, PandoDaily, Venture Beat, GigaOm, TheNextWeb, etc.

Hire a PR firm to take care of it

Review articles written by different technology journalists in different publications and choose one that we deem a good fit for our product launch

Don’t contact anyone and wait to be contacted once we gain traction and/or a Series A round of funding

What’s your advice for this startup? Please weigh in here for the Justdecide/Nibletz Startup Dilemma Of The Week.

Linkage:

This week’s dilemma

Previous dilemmas

Submit your own dilemma

Humanity.TV Named Finalist In Startup America Contest INTERVIEW

Startup America teamed up with American Airlines for a huge contest. The grand prize in Flights, Camera, Action is a prize package which includes 80 round trip flights. Of course for any startup or entrepreneur this would be a great prize. Most startups need flights to get to important conferences or investor meetings. Humanity.TV, a New York startup, has something else in mind.

Humanity.TV is a technology startup that’s using technology, specifically video, to travel around the country and around the world and show the human side of life in the 21st century. They take a brief look into the lives of fascinating people. Obviously that seems like a daunting task.

“Our messaging and overarching goal is authenticity. We try to find people that have intriguing lifestyles and live passionately, regardless of their popularity or fame. Ultimately, we want to inspire people to visit countries around the world and get off the beaten tourist path to encounter unique experiences with people that will have long-lasting impacts on them.” Humanity.tv co-founder Gaston Blanchet told nibletz.com in an interview.

Humanity.tv strives to capture the lives of fascinating people in obtrusive ways, for a more natural look at the world we live in today.

Of course with a startup like this the lack of capital to travel is definitely a hardship (we know about that first hand). They’re hoping that if they win the Startup America/American Airlines Flights, Camera, Action contest, they can use the flights to continue working on their story telling video platform.

The contest kicked off in July with a video from Startup America CEO Scott Case. The contesting period went through August 20th and the finalists were announced earlier this week.

We got a chance to interview Blanchet their startup as well as the contest and the Startup America partnership. Check out the interview below:

JustDecide Startup Dilemma Of The Week: Work Visas And Startups

A lot of my friends who are startup founders, developers or designers happen to be Asian, Indian, and even Russian. Many of them have either immigrated to the United States, work remotely and come here occasionally and a handful are actually working illegally. Now this isn’t the forum for an immigration debate but if a foreigner comes over to the US and wants to start a startup, more power to them it’s not like their startup is taking away jobs from Americans because their startup is their idea. Even better, when their startup gets bigger they’ll hire Americans.

So our Startup Dilemma Of The Week, this week, comes from a guy in Washington DC. He’s currently here on a work visa and working for a major corporation.

The dilemma comes in because he has a great idea for a startup, one that’s not really being done anywhere just yet. He wants to move to Silicon Valley but isn’t sure if he should move and work for a different startup or just venture out on his own.

This is obviously a dilemma with a bit of a legal issue in the background. Here’s the dilemma from justdecide.com

The Details:I am currently on my work visa with a corporate company working in the Washington D.C. area. I really want to move to Silicon Valley, but am unsure if I should try to find a job at a startup or start my own company. Because I am on my work visa establishing my own in the US isn’t that straight forward. But I know eventually that’s what I want to do. I am a web developer and you can find my portfolio at http://www.webileapps.com/ for which I am one of the Co-Founders and manage the App development, Customer Acquisition & Growth.

You can help him with this dilemma by submitting your answer here. There are four possible outcomes to choose from.

Linkage:

Weigh in on this weeks Startup Dilemma Of The Week, Here

See past dilemmas here

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

Xoogler Spotlight NYC Startup: Flatiron Health

In 2010 Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg sold their startup Invite Media to Google for $81 million dollars. At that time they were absorbed into Google where they spent the last two years. Now the co-founding team is back at it again, and navigating through unchartered territory.

Their new startup is New York City based Flatiron Health. FlatIron Health hopes to streamline cancer screening for clinical trials. Currently biomarkers among other diagnostics, are used to identify cancer patients for clinical trials however the team told Business Insider they feel that the process could be improved upon and streamlined.

“It’s actually very complicated to find out if you’re eligible,” Turner told SAI. “It’s like 120 variables and there’s no way to know quickly. We hope to speed that up for physicians because clinical trials are huge for cancer. In general, treatments fail and trials are the way to go.”

After both 26-year-old founders had loved ones suffer through cancer they knew their next mission would somehow be related to cancer. They admittedly don’t have their exact product yet however they’ve been holding weekly brainstorming sessions and have a pilot going with some of the major hospitals.

FlatIron Health is a far cry from the ad technology and bid manager platform Turner and Weinberg created with Invite Media. That platform allowed advertisers to manage online campaigns across multiple platforms.

Weinberg and Turner are in a better financial position than most new medical startups. They’re attacking this startup with the vigor of anxious entrepreneurs and aren’t intimidated by the fact that neither founder has any kind of background in medicine, biology or cancer.

“Flatiron Health is either going to be a great success or a horrible failure,” says Turner. “Hopefully we’ll do well by doing good.”

Linkage:

Here are some other Xoogler spotlights at nibletz.com

Source: Business Insider via Fierce

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.

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.

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.

Facebook Is What I Like, NY Startup Mirror is What I’m Like INTERVIEW

Mirror, a startup in New York’s bustling flat iron district, has created something innovative and different bridging parts in a few different spaces. Mirror says that Facebook is what I like, and Mirror is what I’m like. With Facebook you talk about the things you do and like. With mirror, other people talk about what you’re actually like. It’s in essence bridging online personals, online dating, and people recommendation engines in a unique way.

Where California startup Recmnd.me is about people recommendation at a professional level, mirror is more personal, and more free flowing. For instance if you’re a really nice guy, and a great romanticist, people on Mirror can vouch for you or as the Mirror team calls it, people can give their “take” on you. If you’re a passionate entrepreneur that’s helped a bunch of folks, one of your takes can say that. Or to borrow an example from their website, if you’re a really great DJ, people can add that to their take on you.

Mirror bills themselves as real recommendations by real people. The platform can be used for dating, to find new business colleagues and to make new friends. They leverage real contacts and real opinions of someone rather than trying to build around a social graph or recommend people based on whether or not you like Mark Zuckerberg’s dog. The Mirror platform has real potential.

We got a chance to interview Dan Mattio, check out the interview below:

Just Decide Startup Dilemma Of The Week: Should I Fire My Outsourced Developer?

If you haven’t been keeping up with the JustDecide.com/Nibletz startup dilemma of the week, you should be. This valuable feature from both justdecide.com and Nibletz, provides insight into issues that a lot of startups are facing. In addition to checking out this week’s Justdecide.com/Niblets startup dilemma of the week, you can also submit your own dilemma for consideration at startups@nibletz.com. Now you can crowdsource your problems and dilemmas that could be quite costly for the average founder.

This week’s startup dilemma of the week is undoubtedly something that hundreds, if not thousands of startups have faced.

“Should I fire my outsourced developers”. The situation is this, a startup has outsourced their development work. They went through elance.com which typically has a good developer base. However the project is taking a lot longer than expected and it’s costing a lot more as it drags on.

While everyone wants to believe the best in people, when startups are faced with this exact issue you can’t help but wonder if the outsourced developer is just trying to milk you for more non-existent funds or if they’re really having a hard time with the concept and project you gave them. Either way, your marketing is in place and you’ve been grilling your team for months to make sure they’re ready for even the most alpha-ist of beta launches.

Without the work of the outsourced developer you have no product to sell. In some cases the outsourced developer may think that they have you between a rock and a hard place. Because they do.

The Details:I outsourced the web development work for my startup and it is taking longer than expected and getting more expensive. I had a great idea for a social gaming startup, but couldn’t find a technical co-founder. I decided to raise some FFF money (family, friends and fools), and found someone through elance to build my gaming app. The developer said that it was going to be more complicated than he originally thought and it has been over the 6 months timetable he originally gave me. He is charging me for the hours that he is still working on it, and I don’t know if I am getting ripped off, or if the development work was more complicated than I thought.

What do you think this startup should do?

Continue on to justdecide.com and weigh in on this week’s startup dilemma of the week.

Buy,Sell,Swap Your Clothes With NY Startup ClosetDash INTERVIEW

Just yesterday we brought you the story of a new social e-commerce platform centered around the newest and latest fashions. With Ann Arbor startup HangTrend you can see the latest styles, talk about them with your friends and even purchase them direct from the designer. HangTrend is about the hot new clothes.

NY startup ClosetDash is about the buying, selling and swapping of gently used clothes. Face it there are tons of clothes in most people’s closets that they’ll never actually wear out in public again. For whatever reason, that great dress, or pair of slacks is hanging in the closet .Wouldn’t it be great if you could easily sell them, or swap them?

What if you’re looking for a way to affordably outfit a new wardrobe. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could go through someone else’s closet and find your next great outfit? Well with ClosetDash you can.

ClosetDash was created by Jennifer Lee, for exactly those things. The concept sounds a lot like Australian Y-Combinator startup 99dresses sans the virtual currency model (which in most cases is actually better).

Jennifer Lee goes into detail about how ClosetDash works in the interview below, but it’s basically this, you upload your closet and open it up to the ClosetDash community. You can sell clothes, swap clothes and buy clothes to put in your virtual ClosetDash closet and your actual closet at home.

Check out our interview with Lee below:

Syracuse Startup: Coursespree, An Online Marketplace For Students INTERVIEW

A clever new EdTech startup in Syracuse New York is providing access for students to tutors, help, class notes, study buddies and more. Coursespree.

Coursespree is hoping to provide college students a more practical way to succeed academically and earn a little income on the side. In effect Coursespree has two different EdTech avenues for college students on one site.

First, students can virtually connect to tutors anywhere in the world using the Coursespree platform. Whether they need help in math, engineering, English, biology or any other college subject, Coursespree can connect them to help for an assignment or on-going tutoring.

Students can actually make money by selling their class notes (read class notes, NOT homework). On Coursespree.com students can take the notes from their class, set a price and sell them to another student at the same school or hundreds of miles away.

The very young startup was founded in May 2012 and is currently incubating in the Sandbox in Syracuse.

We got a chance to talk with Danish Nadeem the founder and CEO of Coursespree, in the interview below:

A Social Network For Skilled Workers Interview With NY Startup: SkilledWizard

LinkedIn is a professional business social network for all kinds of professionals. Sure there are some blue collar workers, and truck drivers out there on LinkedIn but for the most part “skilled workers” don’t have their own social network to go to. There’s a lot of money in trade labor, trucking, and manufacturing. There are plenty of people in these fields making great incomes and loving life. With more and more people turning to social networks every year there is a wide open opportunity for New York startup SkilledWizard.

The team behind SkilledWizard is hoping to connect “skilled workers” to each other, and to future employers. Skilled workers everywhere will be able to interact with each other, share extra side work, find out the ins and outs of employers and more, on their own social network.

SkilledWizard co-founder and CEO John Ducar climbed the corporate ladder in some of the companies that employ hundreds of thousands of skilled workers; UPS, DHL and even Saks 5th Avenue.

Many, including Ducar, say that there is a global shortage of “skilled workers” and SkilledWizard will help skilled workers across the globe connect with each other and with employers.

Check out our interview with Ducar below:

Startup Interview With New York Startup: tipspring

More and more social startups are beginning to harness the power of the social web to replace traditional “word of mouth” advertising. It’s always been said that “word of mouth” advertising is the best way to advertise a product, service, brand, store or restaurant. In fact, we reported earlier this week on Barrel of Jobs, a Washington DC startup using the social web for “word of mouth” connecting jobs to good quality candidates.

New York startup tipspring is using the power of the social web and it’s “word of mouth” advertising to promote major brands. On their website they call tipspring a marketplace for sharing and saving, and who doesn’t like sharing and saving. Not only that but tipspring allows users to accumulate points to win some really great gifts.

tipspring’s founder Greg Doran has said that users have won prizes like $1,000 gift cards and VIP invites to top fashion shows in New York City. What Doran has essentially done is taken many of the most popular brands who offer their own loyalty and reward programs and put them together in one central marketplace. Gone are the days that you have to sign up for twenty different reward clubs and then remember to go back and check them.

We got a chance to interview Doran about tipspring. Check out the interview below:

Yes Great Ideas Do Happen In The Shower, Interview With NY Startup Room Hints

If you like nice things, beautiful things, picturesque things but just need a little help with you’re interior design project, no worries there’s an app for that (soon). While there may be a few apps and platforms coming up in the interior design space that doesn’t worry Tiff Wilson and the team behind New York based Room Hints. In fact, they label themselves as weird, extreme and fearless, a combination that can only lead to impeccable style.

Room Hints iPhone app is currently in a private beta and you can sign up here to try it out. The app provides a host of ways to get recommendations on the latest fashions and trends in your homes. You can see what other Room Hints users are doing, you can share your ideas and designs with friends, and the app itself will suggest great design pieces as well.

Room Hints also has professional designers on board that can help you complete that interior design product. Imagine having a teen tiny interior designer at your beck and call on your smartphone. It’s like a private shopper but for interior design.

We got a chance to check in with Tiff as the team prepares for a more grand-scale launch.

Should I Fire My Co-Founder? The Startup Dilemma Of The Week Powered By JustDecide.com

This was a community submitted startup dilemma of the week. However, as you can imagine from the headline, this startup wants to remain anonymous. You can submit your startup dilemma of the week to startups@nibletz.com and we’ll put it on our startup dilemma of the week segment with justdecide.com. Also the names have been changed to go with the anonymity.

John and David were best friends since the 8th grade. The two of them were for the most part inseparable as kids. They went to the same high school and then onto the same college. In fact they married two girls that were best friends as well. As kids in middle school, high school and then college the two of them had several business ideas, some even amounted to schemes to make money. They were able to find little “lemonade stand” businesses that helped them get through college.

Everything was going great in their lives. Then, a year after the two married their girlfriends (who were also best friends), John and a friend of his from computer science classes at their college came up with a great idea for a startup. It’s a new web platform/mobile app startup that has little competition. In fact it’s a great idea.

David was never very technical he was always the “money” guy and the guy with the schemes that helped them get through college. As John’s best friend though, he made what some might consider a fatal startup mistake and told him he could be a co-founder. David would be the “biz dev” guy.

They both liked the idea but because of his day job, new interests and new married life, and because he didn’t entirely understand the concept, David didn’t contribute much to the startup. While John and the other co-founder put up $20,000 of their own money raised from their parents and relatives, David only put in $5,000.

Now John senses something needs to be done.

The startup is about ready to go to market but they made another fatal error that may work in John’s favor. They havent yet formalized their company, nor have they done a true operating agreement. John and the other co-founder, we can call him Chip, are ready to move forward and roll out the product without David as a co-founder, or an employee.

John and Chip are concerned that if they make the move to get rid of David he will sabotage their work. He may actually sabotage the product itself or damage their reputations through social media. David was always a little more popular than John and has a sizable social media presence.

Now, John and Chip are stuck. They admittedly haven’t pulled the trigger to get rid of David out of fear. It seems like the most logical step to take.

John is of course worried about his friendship with David and the fact that the two wives are best friends as well. Aside from the obvious missteps they’ve taken along the way, what should they do?

You can weigh in at the startup dilemma of the week here. John and Chip need our help!