Angie’s List Acquires Denver Startup BrightNest

On Friday it was announced that Indiana-based Angie’s list, the worlds largest referral startup, has acquired Denver startup BrightNest.

BrightNest was founded in 2011 in Denver’s River North Arts District. The startup is a community-based platform centered around homeowners. They offer tips, tools, and ideas that they say will “shape up your home and simplify your life.”

While Angie’s List is a great place to find a handyman to change a door, over the years their offerings have evolved to include contractors, carpenters, and other service people who can help complete long renovation projects and bigger home improvements.

With BrightNest incorporated into the Angie’s List site, home owners will be able to get suggestions for projects and then find the people they need to work on the projects.

“The only way to transform the local services industry is to solve real problems in a bigger, better, and new way,” Angie’s List Chief Executive Officer Bill Oesterle said in a statement. “With two million members and more than 18 years in this space, no one has better data on local service providers than Angie’s List. BrightNest adds a user-friendly front end and personalized member experience to our marketplace platform which is built on rules, tools and transparency.”

Angie’s List also announced the national rollout of its new communication and scheduling tools. In the second quarter, Angie’s List processed more than 116,000 transactions on its marketplace platform. This represents a tiny fraction of the total transactions that flow through Angie’s List. “We’ve been quietly transforming the way local service is transacted, and we are now in a position to scale it. We will put the platform everywhere our members want it to be, including web, mobile ,and call center,” said Oesterle.

In the new marketplace, Angie’s List can monitor and evaluate each transaction as it progresses through to completion. “If a transaction gets stuck at any point, we are going to step in and fix it,” said Oesterle. “We have the critical mass and the relationships with local service providers that allow us to change service outcomes.”

BrightNest Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Justin Anthony echoed Oesterle’s statement. “We’re excited to join a trusted brand and help facilitate the solution to make it even easier to hire local service providers. Our tools and interactive content allow us to tailor a custom experience for every member because no two homes and no two homeowners are exactly alike.”

Under the terms of the acquisition agreement, Angie’s List acquired basically all of the assets of BrightNest for $2.65 million in cash. The cash value included $2.15 million at closing and $0.5 million payable at the one-year anniversary of closing, subject to certain performance criteria. Angie’s List funded the acquisition with existing cash. In addition, Angie’s List will grant options to purchase $3.65 million of Angie’s List common stock to the members of the BrightNest team, all of whom have been retained by Angie’s List. The transaction closed on August 2, 2013.

Founder Spotlight: Ryan Frankel CEO & Co-Founder VerbalizeIt

Ryan Frankel is the CEO and Co-Founder of VerbalizeIt, the company that delivers instant access to a global community of translators. Ryan received his MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2012 and a Bachelors of Arts degree from Haverford College in 2006. Ryan is a 2012 TechStars alumnus, former private equity investor for Goldman Sachs and an endurance athletics enthusiast. Follow him @rvfrankel.

Who is your hero?

My dad, hands down.

What’s the single best piece of business advice that helped shape who you are as an entrepreneur today, and why?

Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. If you find yourself at the top of the intelligence chain at your company, you’ve done something wrong. In creating a team of intelligent and driven individuals, encourage healthy debate. Disagreement is a good thing, and many times, it’s the best of things in plowing the right path forward. Encourage people to air their opinions and take a stance, even if it’s against the broader consensus.

What’s the biggest mistake you ever made in your business, and what did you learn from it that others can learn from too?

The biggest mistake has been spreading myself and our team too thin by chasing after too many different opportunities. One of the best pieces of advice I have received is that the worst word in any entrepreneur’s vocabulary is “and.” As in, “We’re focused on X, and Y, and Z ….” Be laser focused and avoid becoming a mile wide and only an inch deep.

What do you do during the first hour of your business day and why?

I scroll through all of my emails and pick the highest value emails to respond to first. It’s my own 80:20 rule and it helps me focus on the most important outcomes. I also don’t neglect or push back emails to family and friends. When I first launched my business, family and friends naturally took a back seat and I have since re-prioritized my time to make time for those who support me beyond by business.

What’s your best financial/cash-flow related tip for entrepreneurs just getting started?

There’s a fine line between (a) being so scrappy that you miss out on the right opportunities or are not able to hire the best talent and (b) being ineffective or inconsiderate with cash management. As a naturally scrappy person, I have found myself in situations where being pennywise and pound-foolish has detracted more value than it has saved me capital. I make a conscious effort to remain mindful of our cash position but cognizant of how my naturally scrappy personality can be an impediment to meeting business objectives.

Quick: What’s ONE thing you recommend ALL aspiring or current entrepreneurs do right now to take their biz to the next level?

Find someone who will absolutely rip your vision apart and engage them in a constructive debate. Even if 95 percent of their feedback is off base, you’re bound to find some real pearls of wisdom in there. Accelerate success and failure by pushing yourself outside of your preconceived notions of the right approach.

What’s your definition of success? How will you know when you’ve finally “succeeded” in your business?

Success for me is encapsulated in both personal and professional achievements. Finding personal satisfaction and enjoyment in my work and ensuring that I’m enjoying the journey and not just focused on the destination is important to me. I know I have a penchant for being too focused on the end result. Professionally, setting and achieving specific goals for revenue, market share and brand awareness is how I evaluate when I’ve finally “succeeded.” I constantly revisit these goals and our relative progress.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

How To Nail Your Next VC Pitch

It doesn’t matter how world changing your idea is; if you need money to make it happen, but ruin your opportunities in front of potential venture capitalists, it’s not going to make it off the ground. Venture capitalists are a unique bunch and pitching to them requires a unique strategy. There are four main categories that you need to perfect in order to really nail it, and a few things to note in each one.

The Prep Work

Before you ever step foot in the room to give your pitch, you’ve got plenty of homework to do. Knowing your audience is a key component of nailing a pitch. If you’re pitching to a VC firm, know who they are and what they’ve invested in previously. If you’re working with an angel investor, know who that person is and what he or she does.

Remember, not all money is good money. You’re interviewing the VC as much as they’re interviewing you. Come prepared with questions. A seasoned investor will be able to bring more to provide you with industry knowledge, introductions, and connections. Don’t just take money to take money.

Opening Statement

When you’re putting together your presentation, it shouldn’t be any more than eight slides. Avoid using tools like Prezi—investors are going to jump into your pitch with questions whenever they want, and you may have to skip quickly to another slide to make a point that you planned to make later. Make it easy on yourself by using a presentation tool like keynote or PowerPoint, which has more flexibility.

Your opening statement should convey your idea in two sentences or less, just like an elevator pitch. This is your first and biggest opportunity to say everything you need to without confusing anyone. Being clear, precise, and simple can’t be overstated. There’s no reason to overcomplicate the issue in your opener, or for that matter, anywhere else in your presentation.

After your opening statement, tell a story that helps your audience understand the problem you’re trying to solve. Get creative, and make them feel the pain of the problem. The rest of your pitch will show how you plan to solve it.

If you don’t have a clue where to start for your statement, there are tools out there to help. Harvard Business School created an elevator pitch builder that walks you through a simple and easy method for building a pitch. Founder Institute developed a MadLibs method for developing your pitch. These are two of the best resources available for getting a solid start.

The Team

Frequently, a VC may not be investing in your idea as much as in your team. Highlight the team in your presentation by showing the kind of things they bring to the table, and show what makes them unique. Frequently, a good team can take a mediocre idea and do incredible things with it. At the same time, a weak team can completely ruin a great idea. Show them why your team wins.

The Context

There are five primary points that need to be covered in your pitch presentation.

The idea. This is your opportunity to elaborate more on the opening statement and discuss the idea behind what you’re trying to do.
Your solutions. Why is your solution best, and why is it going to work now?
Traction and validation. If you have a product already built, talk about customers or conversations with experts. Anything that will validate the need or want for the product is key in showcasing your idea. You have to have proof that you’ve done your research and development. If you’ve made a single dollar doing this, make note of it. This is also your opportunity to be honest with them. If you have a weakness (and you do), bring it up. Whether it’s the team, industry, or lack of money, point it out before an investor does.
The future. How will your idea change the industry? Focus on the positive changes here.
What you need. You’re in front of VCs for a reason. They don’t know what’s in your mind. Come right out and ask for exactly what you need. That isn’t just how much you need, though. Talk about what the deal structure looks like. It’s always good to talk with a startup attorney before pitching. They’ll help put together a deal structure among other things.

Cover these topics, and you’ll nail the VC pitch. Make your points quickly, and don’t get frazzled. Remove any buzzwords from your presentation entirely, and don’t take yourself too seriously. And limit name-dropping. Just because you hung out with Mark Cuban at the Super Bowl doesn’t mean they’ll invest in your idea. Have fun, be passionate, and bring it home.

Tony Monteleone(@StartupTony) is a serial entrepreneur and does Business Development for PERQ, a measured marketing software and services company that specializes in increasing online and in store traffic for businesses. He also serves as the Indianapolis Chapter Director for Startup Grind.

4 Early Bird Startup Village Booths Left For Everywhere Else Cincinnati

UPDATE: 8/12/2013 Only 4 startup village booths left at the early bird discount rate.

Everywhere Else Cincinnati is less than two months away. When we announced the conference last week, we offered the first 30 startup village booths at an early bird discount rate of just $495. That rate includes three attendee tickets, booth space, a pitch contest, and more.

The Startup Village at Everywhere Else Cincinnati is a great place to get your startup huge exposure. VC and angel firms from across the country will be in attendance at the conference including Fortify Ventures, DVP, CincyTech, Elevate Ventures, DFJ and many more. Also, the Brandery demo day is on October 2nd, and a lot of investors will already be in town for that.

The Everywhere Else conference series gives startups from across the country and around the world access to top tier conference content, networking, and education, even on the most bootstrapped of budgets.

We’re still not finished announcing speakers for this big national conference. Speakers already committed include:

Naithan Jones, Founder agLocal
Andrew Warner, Founder Mixergy
Andy Sparks, Co-Founder Mattermark (backed by NEA and a16z)
Wil Schroter, Mr. Ohio, founder of Fundable

Jake Stutzman, founder evlevate.co
Jonathon Perrelli, Managing Director, Fortify Ventures
Justin Gutwein, Filmmaker and Entrepreneur startupland.tv
Mark Hasebroock, Founder Dundee Venture Capital
Jason Healy, Founder, Blu
John Bracken, Founder e-vite and Speek
Dave Knox, CMO Rockfish, co-founder, Brandery
Patrick Woods, Managing Director a>m ventures
Sarah Ware, Founder Markerly
John T. Meyer, Founder lemon.ly
Raghu Betina, Managing Patner, The Starter League
Ryan O’Connell, VP Influence & Company
Blake Miller, Managing Director, Think Big Accelerator
Michael Bergman, Founder Repp.

We are going to close out the discount this week. The first 30 startups in the village will get the best booth placement and a featured spot in the startup village guide.

If your startup is currently in an accelerator or accelerator alumni, there’s a good chance that your accelerator has a discount code. If not, the remaining 8 4 early bird Startup Village booths are discounted an additional 10% by clicking here.

We’ll see you in Cincinnati at the end of September.

SellingThe Parents, Richard Branson & Acquisition: Bad Ass Startup Chick Stacey Ferreira Tells Her Story

Stacey Ferreira is a bad ass startup chick, and quite frankly has one of the most bad ass stories we’ve ever heard. That story starts when she was a student at an all girls Catholic high school in Phoenix, Arizona. When you hear about entrepreneurs starting out as developers in high school, a lot of times those stories are about boys.

Well Ferreira was lonely and missing all of her public school friends who were about 40 miles away. Looking for something to do to pass the time she turned to her brother Scott. He had just begun teaching himself how to program, so the two of them decided they would learn how to become game developers.

Through the rest of her time in high school, Ferreira spent her free time creating and developing different projects with her brother. Then the time came to graduate high school and their parents insisted that they had just one more summer left before they had to go get real internships like everyone else. The Ferreira siblings decided to go all in and move to Los Angeles to build out one of the projects that they had worked on in high school. That project became MySocialCloud.

During that summer Richard Branson held a fundraiser contest of sorts that said if you could donate $2,000 to his charity you could have cocktails with Branson in Miami. Stacey wasn’t even old enough to drink, but quickly realized the value in spending time with Branson. Oh, the other problem was they didn’t have the money. To make matters worse, when they called and talked with someone in Branson’s office they discovered the two of them would need $4,000 not $2000.

Scott and Stacey now had the daunting task of selling their dad on getting a loan. Dad wanted a business plan, Stacey told the standing room-only crowd at a startup event Tuesday in Chattanooga. So she and Scott developed a business plan. Almost reluctantly their dad said yes, but they had to return the money in 3 months.

That ended up not being too tough because that meeting in Miami ended up with a million dollar investment.

Stacey, who is also involved with the Young Entrepreneur’s Council, told her story during FireSide Talks, which featured Thiel Fellows and other entrepreneurs 20 and under. Stacey talked about her entrepreneurial journey from that private school in Arizona, to living in almost the slums of Los Angeles, meeting Branson, getting $1 million dollar investment, and eventually getting acquired. Oh, and that was in less than two years.

Watch Stacey tell her own story:

DC Startup Bracketeers Engages Customers With March Madness All Year Long

Contesting is one of the best ways to enhance customer engagement. People love to win prizes and are typically willing to give up their contact information and other data to get something free. The problem with this is that after the contest is over, the engagement is over as well.

Facebook and Twitter may seem like excellent forms of engagement, but they have one big drawback. The problem with engaging on these social media platforms is that you’re sending customers to other websites instead of keeping them engaged on your site. Social media is an amazing source of engagement, but there is risk that you could lose your audience.

Well DC-based serial entrepreneur Craig Zingerline, one of the cofounders of Barrel of Jobs, has launched a new startup called Bracketeers. They offer longer tail engaging contests, typically tournament style like March Madness. The goal: keep the customer engaged and coming back.

“All businesses want hardy, exciting relationships with customers and more potential to reach new ones. However, engagement and list building is challenging and costly. Existing social marketing and contest platforms are expensive – often starting over $5k/month – and businesses are at the same time sending users out to Facebook when they could be keeping them on their own websites. We provide a cost-effective, easy-to-use, and FUN way to enhance customer relationships,” Zingerline told us in an interview.

In addition to providing customers with a fun and engaging way to improve a customer relationship, the user, or brand is getting valuable data from the experience itself.

We got a chance to talk with Zngerline about Bracketeers. Check out the interview below.

What is your startup called?

Bracketeers

What does your company do?

Bracketeers is a SaaS web-based platform for connecting companies & brands to consumers through voting and list contests. We offer “March Madness” style tournament Prediction & Voting Brackets as well as matchup based voting. Our clients grow their audience and marketing list with high engagement contest tools, and have more fun while spending less money doing so.

Who are the founders, and what are their backgrounds?

Craig Zingerline, Co-founder & CEO – Craig is a 15 year veteran of web technology and brings deep team building, product development and strategy to the team. Craig provides pragmatic leadership and direction to the company and started developing web-based applications while in college. He has been both founder and executive of multiple startups, and has also worked for and consulted with dozens of small to large firms. Craig earned his Bachelor of Science in Information Management and Technology from Syracuse University.

Stephen Phillips, Co-founder & CTO – Stephen’s career has spanned close to 20 years, building enterprise applications in a myriad of technologies for major brands. During that time he has held the role of CTO, Technical Architect, Consultant, Senior Software Engineer, and business owner. Prior to founding Bracketeers, Stephen held the role of Technical Architect for Accenture, one of the world’s largest consulting firms, working with major brands like Google, Motorola, Godiva, and Taylormade-Adidas-Ashworth. Prior to this, he founded Cardiff Creative, an interactive consulting firm, building an impressive portfolio of premier life science companies.

Where are you based?

We’re based in Washington, DC and San Diego, CA.

Why now?

We are the only company offering prediction & voting bracket contests that we know of. Our platform is getting great input from the market, and with all of the high profile enterprise acquisitions of social contest tools (i.e. Wildfire acquired by Google) there is an opportunity in the lower cost SMB segment to reach a huge number of clients who have been priced out of other platforms.

What are some of the milestones your startup has already reached?

We have multiple paying clients now, including monthly and yearly subscriptions and are just getting started! Our system has collected tens of thousands of leads for our clients, and we’ve seen over 1.6 million votes tallied so far.

What are your next milestones?

We’re looking to raise a seed round to continue building our team, refining our product, and ramping up marketing and sales efforts – we’ve been growing solely on word of mouth so far.

Where can people find out more? Any social media links you want to share?

People can follow our updates at www.bracketeers.com. We’re on twitter @bracketeers and facebook

Bracketeers will be in the Startup Vilage at this huge startup conference.

Startup Accelerators: The Hard Advice

GigTank, Mira Designs, Sisasa, TidBit, startups, accelerators

(Lawrence Yu CoFounder of Mira Designs. Photo NMI 2013)

Startup accelerators are great,] because they give young growing startups capital, access to resources, mentors, and hopefully investors. But they aren’t always rosy. In fact, if all your days in an accelerator program are rosy, then you need to run like hell from that accelerator program.

On our sneaker-strapped startup road trip, we’ve had the privilege of meeting several startups in mid session. We’ve seen startup founders cry, scream, cuss, even break things, typically right before they have that “aha moment”. What we normally find is that the hardest piece of advice, and usually the “ugly baby” moment, is very early on in the accelerator. In fact most accelerators engineer an activity on day one or two where mentors, advisors, or even media members are invited in to tear an idea to shreds.

We got a chance to talk with Lawrence Yu, cofounder of Mira Designs, Alejandro Dinsmore, cofounder of Sisasa, and Sam Bowden, founder and CEO of TidBit. All three startups graduated from the GigTank accelerator in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Tuesday afternoon.

For Yu, the hardest advice came as an eye opening experience that they weren’t the only startup trying to fix offline retail with online components. The team at Mira Designs needed to make sure that they were clearly differentiating themselves from the competition and they needed to do it in a big way.

For both Bowen and Dinsmore, their harshest advice was an ugly baby moment that for both startups meant a pivot. Sisasa totally changed course from the idea they came into the accelerator with. For Bowen it meant going after a different industry, actually an industry he knew more about first hand. The end result of both of their “ugly baby” moments was what most would call traction.

The video below features all three founders talking about their harshest or most eye opening advice in the GigTank.

Check out the accelerator panel with accelerator heads from across the country at this national startup conference.

Portland’s Money Ball Customer Intelligence Startup Lytics, Raises $2.2M Seed Round

By now we all know about the movie MoneyBall that chronicled the way an economist set forth a new analytical approach to scouting vs the gut instinct of decades past. Being Memphis-based we’re seeing that all with our own Grizzlies, who’ve gone the analytical route. Although the naysayers in Memphis doubted this method last February when our star was traded to the Raptors, the team finished with the best record in franchise history. Does that method work, absolutely.

Now what if you could take that analytical approach and use it with almost any data point in customer analytics?

“We built the first cloud-based platform that collects and integrates digital and offline data to create the most comprehensive view of your customer,” James McDermott, CEO of Lytics said in a statement. “Effective marketing is built on organizations’ truly understanding their consumers – from their engagement across digital channels to previous purchases, and we deliver the most definitive and actionable customer record marketers have ever had access to.”

Using the Lytics tools, users can dive deeper into the view of their own customers, rather than taking a tiny sample of data and moving forward with a marketing campaign, direct mail, or engagement on a hunch.

Lytics collects, analyzes, and consolidates data from web, mobile, email, social, or any integrated system such as ExactTarget, SalesForce, Eloqua, SendGrid, Urban Airship, Push.io. The result is a powerful solution that enables marketers to segment data from any source, create targeted audiences and trigger highly relevant interactions with consumers in real time.

“Connecting our key platforms to derive customer insights from SalesForce, Eloqua and Netsuite is an inefficient and cumbersome process,” Jascha Kaykas Wolff, CMO of Mindjet said in a release. “With Lytics, we can finally create a customer gold record that you don’t need a PHD to understand. Lytics gives our global marketing organization meaningful intelligence about our customers and makes it even easier to orchestrate a great experience, with our current marketing tools.”

This powerful and intelligent data form was enough to garner a $2.2 million dollar seed round lead by Rembrandt Venture Partners. Voyager Capital also participated in the round.

“The shift in technology purchasing from CIOs to CMOs has created an immediate need for a new kind of digital CRM to transform customer data into a meaningful timeline that marketers can use to manage a lifecycle,” said Scott Irwin, Rembrandt Venture Partners in a statement. “Lytics has a stellar team and their new data platform is solving a big problem. We’re excited to invest and accelerate their innovation to build a solution that is helping brands strengthen customer relationships.”

One of the top cable providers and two major retailers are currently in a private beta with Lytics. The company plans to use the funding to hire staff, accelerate development, support, and grow customers.

You can find out more about Lytics here at lytics.io

PlanG Is All Things Giving–Right In One Place

My favorite thing about working in startups?

Companies like PlanG. We are inundated with apps, social networks, and games that seem to make little real difference in the world. It’s often hard to identify the real problem companies are solving, even if those companies are creating something fun.

PlanG isn’t like that. Instead, PlanG is taking philanthropic giving and making it easier and more efficient. Individuals simply create a “giving” account and deposit funds into it from their credit or debit cards. They can also create fundraising campaigns to get their friends involved, or give and receive PlanG gift cards. Then, each person can pick from over 1 million charities to give to, as many charities as they want. The PlanG account gives the money securely, and at tax time, there’s a tax report all ready to go.

Personally, I love this idea alone. It makes it easier to manage the money you give to causes you love, and increases your awareness of what you’re giving. I’m sold on just those features.

But, the best thing about PlanG is the platform they’ve created for brands.

We all know how giving-through-shopping works: brands pick a cause and customers know when they purchase something, a percentage goes to the advertised cause. Think Gap’s (red) campaign.

This tactic is called cause marketing, and it allows brands to promote brand loyalty through the emotional connection people have with giving to others. By some measures, 80% of customers are willing to switch if a brand is associated with a good cause.

How much more powerful would that be if the individual shopper could pick the cause themselves?

PlanG’s “Spend and Give” platform allows brands to offer just that kind of customization. When you shop at businesses with the free platform, a percentage of your purchase is deposited into your PlanG account. Then you can give to whichever cause you see fit.

With their suite of business products, PlanG helps brands build customer loyalty, but it also makes giving more frictionless for individuals. Sometimes the big name organizations a brand might partner with are actually pretty controversial. Customers may not want their money going to that particular cause. Allowing individuals to channel their money to causes they love will also increase their loyalty to the brand.

Win-win-win

The Richmond-based company has had a busy 16 months.Founded in 2010 by Marti Beller, Heather Loftus, and Melina Davis-Martin, they closed a $4 million angel round in February 2012. They used that money to build their beta site and various features of the product. The site launched out of beta in February 2013, and now they are focusing on new strategic partnerships with businesses that may want to utilize PlanG’s giving platform.

Check out the PlanG website for more information and keep up with them on Twitter. This female-led startup is doing great things.

This 14 year old social entrepreneur in Chattanooga has been at it for 4 years already.

Berlin Startup Tame Launches First Context Search Engine For Twitter

Twitter is a treasure trove of content. We actually source quite a bit of startup news and new startups from everywhere else using Twitter. The problem is, until now there was no great way to do a contextual search. You can use the Twitter search tool built into Twitter and most of the good third party Twitter apps, but they fall short when looking for context. For example, a search for accelerator brings up tweets about car parts and incubator talks about babies.

The team behind Berlin startup Tame have been tirelessly working on solving that problem. They want to make it easier for people to find what they’re looking for on Twitter. That can be tough when at peak loads there can be 300,000 tweets per minute.

The company has launched their product today at tame.it. We got a chance to talk with them, check out the interview below.

What does your startup do?

Tame is the first context search engine for Twitter delivering relevant content around a specific topic in real-time. Aimed at journalists, PRs, marketers and politicians, Tame analyses content from Twitter, sifting through the huge amounts of noise to find exactly what is relevant.

Who are the founders, and what are their backgrounds?

Frederik Fischer is founder and CEO of Tame. Fischer has five years of professional experience as a staff and freelance journalist for TV, radio, online and print.

Arno Dirlam is founder and CTO of Tame. The developer guy!

Torsten Müller is founder and CMO of Tame. He has three years professional experience as freelance journalist for online and print including the German Press Agency dpa, stern.de, Zeit Online.

Where are you based?

Berlin, Germany

What’s the startup scene like where you are based?

Berlin is a perfect place to start a business. It may be over-hyped, but we find that the scene is indeed very active, people help out each other a lot and are very open. Since the city is attractive for living, many people from Europe or beyond flock into it which helps creating international teams with a global approach from the start, which we think is important. We came to Berlin with not much more than an idea and thanks to the Humboldt University’s spin-off team and many others we could get Tame off the ground in a bit more than a year.

What problem do you solve?

Tame aims to address information overload on Twitter. Nearly every user follows more people than they can manage. At peak times, more than 300,000 tweets are sent out per minute, hence people miss a lot of important content. Professionals working with social media need to identify relevant topics, users and content quickly. A solution to ‘Tame’ the social web is needed.

Why now?

In 2011, Google stopped indexing Twitter and has since left a gap in filtering real-time information. Twitter has continued to grow and has a global impact as not only an alternative, but often primary news source (think of Arab spring). Our mission is to tame the wealth of real-time information in social networks so as to empower people to make sense of the world.

What are some of the milestones your startup has already reached?

We got an initial € 94k ($125,725) funding from the German Federal Ministry of Technology and Economics (BWMi) in 2012

Tame has secured € 250k ($334,375) from a crowd-investing campaign with Companisto

A product already used by thousands of journalists and PRs, first paying customers and first cooperations with outlets

We won a spot in the Germany Silicon Valley Accelerator (also by BMWi) and will be working from San Francisco from October on for at least 3 months.

What are your next milestones?

rolling out more features for Tame including a refinement of our Algorithm that will improve the results by ie filtering out spam on Twitter

starting our global launch by entering the US market from October onward

looking in to the possibility of including more real-time information services

Where can people find out more? Any social media links you want to share?

People can find out everything they need at tame.it. We’re also on Twitter – https://twitter.com/tame_it – and Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/tameapp.

Tidbit, A Cayman Islands Startup, Is Fixing Training [video]

When Sam Bowen took the stage at the GigTank demo day on Tuesday afternoon, he talked about everything wrong with corporate training. And he should know. He’s been a trainer throughout most of his career. He has trained professionals in state government, the hospitality industry, and non profit organizations. At one point he even had to train judges, which can be an extremely hard task.

Kicking off his pitch, Bowen said, “I can tell you two things have remained constant, a majority of folks hate training,” which drew a chuckle from the crowd of investors and startup supporters in Chattanooga.The second thing, according to Bowen, is that everyone in the hospitality industry focuses on one number: the annual staff turnover rate. The national average annual staff turnover rate is a whopping 65%.

That’s obviously why everybody hates training. With employee churn that high, business owners, corporate trainers, and HR departments are constantly training new employees to do their regular jobs, making it almost impossible to find the time to teach existing employees new things.

Online training in one form or another has been around for nearly two decades. Text and “module” based training or even “knowledge base” training has fueled big corporations, staffing firms, retailers, and chain restaurants since the 90’s.

The problem with those solutions is, as technology improved, training didn’t. The other key factor is that for more and more busy people, the computer is becoming screen number 2. Screen number one is the phone or tablet.

So Cayman Islands native Bowen, his brother, and their team created Tidbit, a startup that incorporates the smartphone and all its available technology to make training materials easy for the trainer to create and just as easy for the employee to consume. Bowen gave the example of a bakery owner who would be able to use her smartphone’s video camera and microphone to walk employees through how to make her latest cupcake designs. The employees can then in turn, watch the content created by the owner and make the cupcake at the same time.

Hotels could use Tidbit to quickly show an entire fleet of housekeepers some new way of making the beds or where a new piece of flair goes in a room. The employees become more productive by having those training modules in their hand, in the room while they’re doing the job.

For employers that want to allow their employees to access the content from their own device, training becomes something that an employee can do on the bus or at home in some down time without the worry of finding a computer.

There’s an unwritten rule across most accelerators: to wow the investors in the room, they save the best startup for last. Tidbit went last, here’s the video:

Drive Capital Announces First Investments In OH Startups, RoadTrippers (Cincinnati) And CrossChx (Gallipolis)

When Mark Kvamme left Silicon Valley for the Midwest he went all in. Kvamme took a position as the lead for JobsOhio, where he helped create jobs across the state. He used his vast experience as a VC with Sequoia, where he was one of the first investors in LinkedIn, to help spur innovation across the state. He and cofounder Chris Olsen continue to do that with their VC firm Drive Capital, which just announced the closing of their first fund yesterday.

The firm reported to the SEC that they have raised $181 million dollars with a goal of raising $300 million.

“Since moving here, I have had the opportunity to meet several companies and entrepreneurs that would rival those in any other place in the world, and these two companies and these entrepreneurs are among the very best,” Kvamme said in a statement. “We can’t wait to see what they become.”

With that announcement they also revealed the first two startups the firm has invested in. Kvamme gave the audience at the Southland Conference in Nashville, TN in June a hint about one of their first investments saying that they had invested in a Brandery startup. That startup, revealed yesterday, was RoadTrippers.

RoadTrippers graduated from The Brandery two summers ago. They built a platform that offers more intricate road trips than just hopping on hotels.com or kayak. The company, America’s fastest growing startup travel site, just announced a partnership with Travel Oregon. The terms of Drive Capital’s investment weren’t reported.

“In very practical terms, Drive Capital’s investment has given us the financial resources to allow me to spend less time fundraising and more time on growth. When I’m not fundraising, our company grows faster,” said James Fisher, founder and CEO of Roadtrippers. “But more than that, the experience they bring has helped us scale up and execute our vision at an accelerated pace. They understand not just the opportunity we have, but the challenges we will face. There was great alignment between all parties, and they have backed my vision as founder of this company 100 percent.”

Fisher said that since he began working with Drive Capital about three months ago, Roadtrippers has grown from 200,000 unique visitors per month to 750,000.

The second investment for Drive Capital was with CrossChx, a biometric startup based in Gallipolis, Ohio. The company, led by founder Sean Lane, uses biometric security at doctor’s offices, pharmacies, and hospital systems to prevent medical fraud. Lane told The Wall Street Journal last summer that he became interested in biometric security when he was deployed in Afghanistan.

“When CrossChx was exploring growth options, we made a conscious decision to partner with accomplished investors that could provide more than just capital, and we found that strategic partner in Drive Capital,” Lane said in a statement “Drive Capital grasped our long-term vision and has been instrumental to the rapid growth of CrossChx.”

Both Olsen and Kvamme have long track records with Sequoia and plan on investing aggressively across the Midwest. “The region is set up for more success,” Olsen said. “(The incubators) have really been the seedlings of a tremendous growth economy.”

Now check this out: National startup conference heads to Cincinnati

Detroit Startup To Make The Dinner Decision Easier Beginning Thursday

Many of you know that for a long time in a previous life I was involved in top 40 radio in medium and major markets. As a music director and program director at several stations, I had access to very expensive, all-consuming research tools. Focus groups, call out research trade reports, and more were designed to make “picking the hits” much easier. What I found, though. was a little concept a few of us had come up with called “3 favorite songs.” Go to events, go to the mall, and ask the people, what are your three favorite songs.

What the heck does this have to do with a startup in Detroit? Well our best research, the research that led to great ratings was just asking what are your three favorite songs, without clutter and all this excess meat and fat.

Clutter, and fat, are what clogs up the arteries of what would be good recommendation engines and apps for discovering things like restaurants. On our sneaker strapped road trip a few weeks ago, I got invited to a brain picking. A funded startup wanted to bounce some ideas off me and offered to take me to any restaurant in Chicago at any cost for the time. I started Googling, yelping, urban spooning and every other -ing I could think of to pick a restaurant. I came across the restaurant I ultimately picked, but this was maybe 2 hours after I got the invitation call in the first place. It was also after I had read a review that would have taken up 10 written pages. What a time suck.

The team at Detroit startup myfab5 takes that simple, clutter free way of asking or recommending, to help people navigate a restaurant decision. Users just rate their 5 favorite restaurants in any food related category and voila, the magic happens. The app takes all of that data and serves up good recommendations.

Startups in Detroit are looking to help the city make a comeback sweeter than Twinkies. myfab5 is one of those startups. The company has residence in both the TechArb accelerator in Ann Arbor and the Launch Detroit accelerator in Detroit. We got a chance to interview co-founder Calvin Schemanski. Check out the interview below.

What does your company do?

myfab5 is a platform that reinvents the restaurant review. Designed to mimic offline human behavior, myfab5’s platform let’s people recommend restaurants by talking about their favorite. On myfab5 you can rank up to five of your favorite restaurants in any food related category (e.g. my favorite places for #DeepDishPizza in Chicago). myfab5 instantly aggregates everyone’s rankings to power dynamic search results that tell you how popular each restaurant is for different types of food (e.g. how a pizza place ranks in the #DeepDishPizza and #ThinCrustPizza categories).

Who are the founders, and what are their backgrounds

Omeid Seirafi-Pour is the Co-Founder and CEO of myfab5 and has previously worked in consulting where he helped fortune 500 companies develop winning growth strategies. He gained experience with online reviews when helping a big box retailer understand how consumers use reviews/recommendations when going about the multi-channel shopping experience. Omeid and his Co-Founders are passionate entrepreneurs and are members of the University of Michigan startup accelerator known as TechArb.

myfab5 Co-Founder Calvin Schemanski paid his way through college when he owned and operated a pedicab business for three years. Through this, he gained experience working with local businesses managing the growth of a venture, and managing a small workforce.

myfab5 technical Co-Founder John Gulbronson has a diverse software development background and previously worked at the University of Michigan Pathology department, developing algorithms that identify gene fusion pairs found in the genomes of cancer patients.

All three co-founders are graduates of the University of Michigan. John and Omeid graduated in 2011 and Calvin graduated in 2012.

What’s the startup scene like where you are based?

The startup scene in Ann Arbor and Detroit is small but quite energized. There is a big movement to revitalize Detroit; and entrepreneurship is at the heart of it. Several large corporations have relocated their headquarters to downtown Detroit and some venture capital firms and business accelerators have set up shop downtown as well. Even the State of Michigan is getting involved through economic development programs targeted at launching and growing startups in Michigan.

45 minutes to the west, Ann Arbor’s entrepreneurship scene is also developing. The University of Michigan is alma mater of some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. Many are now getting involved in educating and mentoring UM’s next entrepreneurial generation. The university is also churning out thousands of highly qualified engineers and other professionals every year. More and more of these talented individuals are choosing to stay in Michigan to either start a company or join a young startup.

What problem do you solve?

Star ratings and long reviews make finding and recommending restaurants time consuming and frustrating. Imagine searching for a pizza place on a site like Yelp; you will see a list of places between 3.5-4.5 stars, but will not be able to tell which of those places is popular for deep dish pizza, thin crust pizza or cheesy bread. To find out you’ll have to read a bunch of long reviews that bury the useful information. It’s bad enough having to read those reviews, it’s even more time consuming to write them.

With myfab5 you never have to deal with these problems again. myfab5 makes discovering and recommending fabulous restaurants easy and fun by getting rid of star ratings and long reviews. On myfab5 you can rank up to five of your favorite restaurants in any category (i.e. pizza or thin crust pizza). myfab5 adds up everybody’s votes so that if you search for pizza, not only will we show you the most popular pizza places, we’ll also show you the other categories each pizza place is popular for (i.e. deep dish pizza or cheesy bread).

Why now?

The social era has dawned, and people are tired of review sites that make recommending a business so time consuming that less than 1% of people contribute reviews. Furthermore, people are using mobile devices more than ever and demand content that is concise and consumable on a mobile device. Ratings and reviews go against the social and mobile experiences consumers need and demand

What are some of the milestones your startup has already reached?

In November 2012, we began developing and testing a prototype in Ann Arbor, MI.

In January 2013, myfab5 recruited our technical co-founder.

In March 2013, myfab5 launched an alpha version of myfab5 in Ann Arbor, MI.

In May 2013, myfab5 secured over $20k in startup grants.

On June 27, 2013 myfab5 won the Detroit Technology Exchange pitch competition in Detroit, taking home the grand prize of $15,000 in marketing/branding services.

On August 2nd, 2013 myfab5 graduated from the LaunchDetroit accelerator and received the “MVP” grant for being the best contributor to the program and the “Go” grant for being most commercially-ready company.

myfab5 users have made over 3600 rankings. On average, each ranking includes 3 businesses, resulting in over 11000 business recommendations.

What are your next milestones?

Launch nationally and gain traction in key markets outside of Michigan.

Iterate within food category to increase myfab5 use cases and engagement.

Offer more categories on myfab5 besides “Food & Drinks.”

Where can people find out more? Any social media links you want to share?

www.myfab5.com

@my_fab5

Check out this amazingly awesome, gigantic hackathon in Michigan.

5 Digital Leaders In Chicago Combine Forces For Ensemble An “Excubator”

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the success rates of both incubators and accelerators. While incubators can go long term, one of the biggest themes among people who doubt the accelerator model is what happens next. Accelerators want to continue to churn out new companies, and some suggest they do it at the expense of previous cohorts.

A lot emphasis is put on the few companies that get follow-on funding and move to the next level, and no one takes into account that most of the companies in accelerator program don’t make it 3-6 more months down the road.

Andre Fowlkes, the co-president of Memphis based Start Co, the organization that puts on the Seed Hatchery accelerator now in it’s third year, recently told the Commercial Appeal that programs with a 3 month bootcamp-style program and 6 additional months of curriculum and training would be a more effective model.

Many agree with that idea, including Jeremy Vaughn the co-founder of Atlantic Beach, Florida’s The Factory accelerator. They take companies through a quick intensive program and then continue to work with them for a year. The Brandery, Cincinnati’s accelerator that often comes in the top 20 in rankings, puts a cohort through the summer and then the companies are welcome to stay around, keep office space, and continue working with the mentors in the community until the next class moves in a year later.

Now, 5 digital services leaders in Chicago, including successful social startup Social Katy, have teamed up to form Ensemble, “a symphony of digital experts.” The concept was called an investment firm by the Chicago Tribune, an incubator alternative by other sources, and an excubator in a press release.

Ensemble is actually a combination of all three.

Red Rocket Ventures (business consulting & capital raising), Ora Interactive (technology development & design), Loud Interactive (search engine optimization), Walker Sands (public relations), and of course SocialKaty (social media marketing) have teamed up to offer startups and rampups a suite of focused services in a one-to-one relationship vs cohort based. All five together encompass most of everything a startup would need outside of technical expertise, which most startups have.

If you were to combine the cost of working with each of the five companies individually to reach a company’s common goals and grow a business, the services would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Through the Ensemble group, services in a combined suite will be discounted to startups. They will also offer their services at a substantial discount for an equity stake in the companies they are working with. This is commonly referred to as “creative capital” and is a growing trend across the startup landscape.

All 5 companies will play a part in managing Ensemble with Rocket Ventures Managing Partner, George Deeb, serving as the day-to-day General Manager.

“We created Ensemble to fill a void in the market for entrepreneurs desiring do-it-for-me solutions from a one-stop team of digital experts who have proven they know how to quickly and efficiently scale up digital businesses,” Deeb said in a statement. “The Ensemble alliance structure will best serve clients, given our domain experts’ focus and expertise within their respective niches, and the fact we are all entrepreneurs ourselves. Ensemble is by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs, which you would never get in a big conglomerate agency.”

Ensemble is based in Chicago but plans on offering their services to a nationwide roster of clients. You can find out more about Ensemble here at ensemblehq.com