Ohio Archives - Page 3 of 3 - Serious Startups

Ohio Startup: Venturepax, Adventurers This Site Is For You INTERVIEW

If you’re an outdoor enthusiast of any kind than there is a one stop place for you called Venturepax. Whether you’re into skydiving, rock climbing, leisurely strolls through the woods, hiking, mountain biking or anything else outdoors, adventuring is always more fun when you can share it with others. It’s fun to brag, share ideas, and of course best practices.

Are you longing for a new adventure? Venturepax is great for that too, there are great ideas from Diving the Florida Springs to climbing up Arthur’s Seat and everything imaginable in between.

There are a few other notable outdoor sites out there but the user experience at Venturepax is appealing and the community is strong.

We got a chance to interview Venturepax. Check out the interview below.

Cleveland Startup Organization Jump Start Receives $250,000 To Spur Development Of Women,Minority and Inner City Startups

The JumpStart organization in Cleveland Ohio is a non profit organization looking to help startups across the country. While Startup America does a great job on a broader scale, JumpStart focuses on women, minority and inner city based entrepreneurship. JumpStart is also a member and partner with Startup America.

The $250,000 grant came from the Surdha Foundation one of the nation’s oldest and largest family foundations. The foundation is headquartered in New York City and was founded in 1917 by John Emory Andrus, a successful New York businessman who served four terms in congress.

“Through our Strong Local Economies program, we aim to create robust and sustainable economies that include a diversity of businesses and sectors, improved access to quality jobs and opportunities for economic mobility. We are proud to support JumpStart in its efforts to expand this valuable program,” said Surdna’s president, Phillip W. Henderson.

“Minority and women entrepreneurs growing larger scale firms can contribute meaningfully to the country’s economic output by becoming more significant job creators,” says Darrin Redus, JumpStart’s Chief Economic Inclusion Officer. “With Surdna’s help, JumpStart can continue to develop and share inclusion best practices and make key connections that will help speed the growth, market entry and success of these high potential young companies.”

Along with the Knight Foundation, the charitable foundation that is the legacy of the Jack and Jim Knight, the brothers who started the Knight Ridder newspaper empire, Surdha is a founding partner of Jumpstart Inc.

Linkage:

Find out more about Jumpstart here

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

Nibletz is on a sneaker-strapped, nationwide startup road trip and could use your help please check out this link and also watch the video below:

Ohio Startup: Fundable Launches CrowdFunding Startup For Startups

Exciting news in Ohio today as Fundable, a crowd funding source for startups, after seven months of work, and making sure the Jobs Act passed, Fundable is open to the public. They are dubbing themselves the Kickstarter for startups.

If you’re not aware, Kickstarter doesn’t let you fund startups. We’ve tried several project ideas surrounding our “sneaker-strapped nationwide startup road trip” and all were rejected by Kickstarter. We then switched to Indiegogo which we used twice. The first time we raised $300 and the second we didn’t raise a dime. That’s despite the fact that literally hundreds of people looked at the page, showed interest and asked us via email, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.

After Congress passed the JOBS act it went over the the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The SEC has until July 4th to set the rules up for crowdfunding. Crowdfunding means that the public at large can invest in a “startup” or other company, or product through crowdfunding sources in exchange for equity.

Startups and small businesses can receive up to a million dollars with this form of funding.

Fundable (if approved as a broker by the SEC) will become one of the first startup funding crowdfunding websites. They opened up for business two weeks ago with a “reward” model similar to kickstarter but devoted to startups and businesses.

The Fundable website outlines what kind of businesses they want on the site as it first rolls out. Fundable is targeting startups in the fields of gadgets, technology,apparel food and sports. John’s dry cleaners, or a franchise of pizza hut isn’t going to get approved. At this time they are also not handling charities or a “Clown suit franchise” (damn there goes that idea).

The other great thing about Fundable is it’s not a place for artists, either the painting kind or the musical kind, and it’s not for crafters there are plenty of sites out there for that.

Fundable is a great way to fund a startup and good ideas are going to shine through on the site (we’ve submitted an application for nibletz and hope it’s approved and you’ll support us).

Since their launch, Fundable startups have already raised $40,831 (at the time of this writing). In fact Elevation Training Mask 2.0 is already 115% funded at $11,506.

If you’re a startup with a good idea, you definitely want to consider Fundable.

Linkage:

Get funded with Fundable here

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

Get your startup covered email startup@nibletz.com

5 Trending Angel List (Angel.co) Startups From Everywhere Else

Chances are if you read nibletz.com regularly, you are a startup, accelerator,incubator or angel from “everywhere else” just like us. So I’m sure you’ve probably noticed in your daily check to angel.co that all of the trending startups are almost always from Silicon Valley.

We’ve decided to highlight some of the trending startups from “everywhere else” that can be found on angel.co. So here’s our first list of five.

NetPlenish (Los Angeles)

NetPlenish is an innovative way to keep track of the things you regularly buy from the store, albeit razors, gatorade, coffee, socks, diapers etc. It hold all that information in a list for you in the cloud. NetPlenish then finds the best prices for everything on your list. This could be at K-Mart, WalMart, Target, Wahlgreen’s or which ever NetPlenish merchant partner has the best price.

Then, once a week you’re notified by NetPlenish either with a push notification or email, that they’ve done the research and found the best prices for the items you need. They get each item at the vendor with the best price and then voila in a few days your items are at your doorstep.

Talk about the king of convenience.

Find out more about NetPlenish here.

FormLabs, Boston

FormLabs in Boston is hoping to make 3D printers actually attainable. Right now companies like Makerbot and others have 3D printers that they can sell to you but they are often thousands of dollars.

The FormLabs 3D printer is going to be low-cost and print in 3D right out of the box.

Co-Founders Maxim Lobovsky and David Cranor are hiring right now and we’re hoping for a roll out soon because I want to start making action figures in my basement.

Find out more about Formlabs here

Mile High Organics, Boulder

We all know that Boulder has a thriving tech scene. In fact TechStars is based there and it’s like a little metropolis of all the next best ideas.

Mile High was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch section as the Nation’s First USDA -Certified Organic Online Grocer.

Mile High Organics is America’s First Certified Organic Online Grocer. Members order online and receive convenient, scheduled home or office delivery of local, organic, non-GMO (non-genetically modified) produce, dairy, meat, seafood, groceries; health, home and beauty products. We have over 500 SKUs and growing.

Mile High is backed by Dave McClure and 500 startups.

If you’re into organic food, now you can order from Mile High, get your every day supplies from NetPlenish and never have to leave the house again, where we know you’re incubating that next big startup.

Ohio Startup: Whotever, A New Social Website To Discover Whotever You Want

After South By Southwest in Austin Texas earlier this year, the last thing people want to hear about is a new “discovery” app or platform. It seems everyday another startup is launching to help discover people socially. Well this startup, based in Ohio, called Whotever is hoping to fix that problem.

As more and more social discovery sites pop up, actually using the web or your mobile to discover information on the things you actually want to know about gets harder in harder. Even with basic search engines like Google, the results you get today are much more polluted than the results of say a 2005 Google search.

That problem became evident to Timi Azeez and the other co-founders of Ohio based startup Whotever, 8 years ago. Azeez told nibletz.com:

“About 8 years ago, the three of us were in a heated debate and it prompted us to confirm our facts/findings on the internet. During the research online, we discovered that we could not find exactly the information we needed for our debate. Instead, we spent hours sifting through the data page by page defeating the purpose of the discussion. We realized the internet experience was more hectic than fun and this precluded us to start Whotever.com. It was the first step to improving the users’ experience on the internet.”

That’s the foundation for this new startup that they hope to launch later this year. We got a chance to talk a little more in-depth with Azeez about whatever.

More after the break
Read More…

Toledo Startup: Buyvite Launches Group Payment Platform INTERVIEW

Do you have a big family? Have you ever pulled money together from your entire family to buy grandma and grandpa a cruise, a vacation or other gift? Well pulling all the money together, checking off the payments and then writing one big check or paying by credit card can be a huge hassle. Sure these days you can have most of your family Paypal you but there’s still those few that don’t have a Paypal account. This is just one of the scenarios that Toledo OH based startup Buyvite is looking to solve.

Another easy scenario is times when maybe you and a bunch of friends have wanted to pull together money to buy tickets to a concert or a basketball game. One person typically shells out all the money and waits to get paid back. No more of that thanks to Buyvite.

Buyvite members will have the ability to create a Buyvite by inviting friends and family to a group purchase. Once the requested amount is achieved, the group purchase organizer has the ability to trigger a Buyvite Code, that functions like a gift card code, that is worth the requested amount and can be used to make the purchase on any site that integrates the Buyvite API. Group purchase organizers also have the flexibility of sending the collected funds directly to any U.S. bank account for free.

We got a chance to talk to Brandi Wimberly the woman entrepreneur behind Buyvite

Interview after the break
Read More…

Cleveland Startup: Foundersync Helps Startups Everywhere Find Co-Founders

You may have heard about the exclusive and very cliquish, Silicon Valley based Founderdating. The site suggests they connect the best of the best to founders in the Valley and a handful of other cities, but what about everywhere else? Well there’s a company in Cleveland Ohio has you covered.

The problem with the founderdating site is it bleeds the mantra that everything that happens in the Valley is better. However with over 300,000 startups across the country there are plenty of great ideas, great founders and great startups, well “everywhere else”. Foundersync will of course connect valley startups to founder and other resources, but they definitely realize the growth of startups on a nationwide level.

Foundersync is a startup itself, they started in 2011. Foundersync deals in a pretty easy to understand idea, there are plenty of business oriented social sites that connect you with people that you do know, or are connected somehow. Foundersync connects you with people that you SHOULD know.

Foundersync’s mission is “To ethically and efficiently help entrepreneurs reach their potential by providing a conduit to the resources that will best serve their needs.”

They achieve this mission with their combined mixed experience in marketing, design and development. The four co-founders, Ryan Gambrill, Nick Pavlak, Robert Clark and Todd Goldstein met by accident in 2011 and immediately clicked. They are all entrepreneurs in their own right and wish that they had a service like Foundersync when they were getting started.

If you’re idea driven, a workaholic entrepreneur that bleeds ideas than you need to register for a Foundersync profile. On their website they also offer some great startup advice on their blog page like, exercise before pitching.

If you’re tired of the snobbery from sites like founderdating we’re sure you’ll benefit from the community of founders being built at Foundersync

Linkage:
Go get a foundersync profile

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

Ohio Startup: Former Navy Seal Starts Earl Energy, CleanTech Generator Company

Doug Moorehead is a retired Navy Seal from Cambridge Ohio. He also happens to hold a materials science degree from MIT and an MBA from Harvard. Wired reports that his military service spanned South America, the Persian Gulf and the South China Sea.

As the President of CleanTech startup Earl Energy he is drawing from his experiences in desolate areas, military training, and education to create solar diesel generators. During his military duty he would see enormous generators powering very little. Also as part of his military duty he would guard “countless” fuel convoys in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those convoys would be transporting fuel at $35 a barrel or more. They also had a casualty rate of one soldier for every 24 convoys.

Keep in mind in the desert the fuel isn’t just powering vehicles, it’s powering everything.

The biggest load on the traditional fuel based generators employed by the armed forces is the constant running of the engines. Moorehead has created generators with solar panels on top. In addition to the solar panels the battery mechanism he has created only require the engine to run in short bursts. While traditional generators run for 24 hours at a time, Moorehead’s generator engines run for 4 to 5 hours a day, drastically reducing the amount of fuel needed to power them.

More after the break
Read More…

Columbus OH Startup: Flymuch Launches New VenueSeen Photo Monitoring

Sure most business owners probably have a Google Alert set up for their business. They may also use some kind of clipping/monitoring service and then of course, a smart business owner (startup or not) is using some sort of social media monitoring to see what people are saying and doing about their business. Well now, Columbus OH based startup FlyMuch has launched a new photo monitoring tool for brands.

Did you just have a really great burger from CheeBurger Cheeburger and share it with the world? Did you have a bad experience at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse and post a photo of your server? Well whatever it is, business owners, whether they like it or not, are constantly having photos take in their business.

Perhaps there was a great 21st birthday party with a lot of smiling faces at TGIFridays or your 5 year old hit a hole in one at a local miniature golf spot. Businesses want to see it all, the good, the bad, and with VenueSeen, the ugly.

More after the break
Read More…