500 Startups: Markerly Founder Sarah Ware Video Interview

Undoubtedly, unless you’ve been living under a rock, if you regularly read nibletz.com, than you’ve heard of 500 startups, startup, Markerly. The Washington DC startup is in the latest batch of companies being accelerated at 500startups in Mountain View.

Markerly makes easy to use, but robustly analytical publisher tools. Their tools don’t require a widget, great publishers can just insert one snippet of code and do things like share bits and pieces of content across social networks or comment on photos. The best part is that Markerly is free.

Nibletz.com, the voice of startups everywhere else, was the first blog to use Markerly’s tools and we’ve been the beta testing guinea pig throughout their entire experience at 500 startups. Recently they added the voice of Silicon Valley, PandoDaily as well.

The company was founder by Sarah Ware. The New Jersey native, Georgetown graduate and former employee at hot DC startup, LivingSocial, and longtime friend Justin Kline started Markerly as a way to share highlighted content. Since arriving at 500startups the team has found more refined ways to share. They also provide sharing analytics which can be invaluable to a founder.

We got a chance to meet up with the Markerly team at CES 2013 and #nmx Blog World. Check out our video interview below

Ware is one of the lead panelists in the “Kick Ass Female Founders From Everywhere Else” panel at the biggest startup conference in the US, everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference

NMX 2013 Interview With Boston Startup UberVu

Boston startup Ubervu is a new social media dashboard startup. Sure there are a lot of startups in the space however what sets Ubervu apart is their intelligence layer.

Ubervu finds what people are saying about companies across the social web. They take that information and convert it into easy to understand usable data to get companies engaged with their customers.

Ubervu’s VP of Marketing Dragos Llinca tells nibletz in an interview:”People talk about companies and products online every day. We monitor and analyze those public conversations. We then use smart methodologies to come up with ways for brands to send more relevant messages to more relevant and influential people, at the most relevant time.”

We caught up with Ubervu’s social media marketing & community manager Elisabeth Michaud at NMX 2013. Check out our video interview here:

Here’s the rest of our interview with Llinca:

500 Startups Backed, Speek, Releases iPhone App

Last year after TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, most people thought that conference calling app Uber Conference was the bees knees. They had won the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield and were all the rage from the big publications. Meanwhile, back in the Washington DC suburbs Evite founder John Bracken and co-founder and PandoDaily contributor Danny Boice were busy working on Speek.

Speek is actually the easiest way to execute great sounding conference calls. Everything is handled through a web/cloud based interface and all you do to initiate a call is direct the participants to your Speek page, for instance mine is http://speek.com/kyle from there I can control who’s in the call, file sharing, information and anything else that pertains to a conference call.

The whole process is extremely easy and doesn’t require jotting down pin numbers or long codes, which can be quite cumbersome driving down the highway.

Well today Speek has released their iPhone app which makes it just as easy to initiate conference calls from your iPhone as it is from the web (although it was pretty easy just using a mobile browser like Chrome).

With Speek’s iPhone app, you can make super simple, free and visual conference calls. Reserve an easy-to-remember username (i.e.,http://speek.com/YourName) for your calls, instead of fumbling for a traditional phone number and PIN.

Features:

Talk instantly with one-click calls
Know who’s joined the call
Know who’s talking
Share images from your phone
Comment, mute and add/remove participants

Avoid the hassles of traditional conference calls with:

No telephone numbers and PINs
No scheduling
No elevator music
No interruptions

Check out Speek in the iTunes app store and go register your user name before all the good ones disappear. If for some reason you want to try it out feel free to Speek to me at http://speek.com/kyle

Join the nearly 1800 people who’ve bought tickets to the largest startup conference in the United States, more info here!

Cardigin Gets To The Root Of Customer Loyalty For Their Loyalty Platform

Charlottesville Virginia startup Cardigin isn’t about rewards games, checking in, or loyalty cards. Their loyalty platform gets to the roots of what customers are actually doing in their favorite establishments and then allows businesses to play right into those trends to keep loyalty customers coming back for more.

In the past two years we’ve all seen that loyalty and rewards startups are literally a dime a dozen, however Cardigin’s founder and CEO Rob Masri saw that everyone was doing it wrong.

“We witnessed first-hand local establishments attempting a myriad of conventional approaches to their loyalty programs – buy-10-get one-free punch cards, keychain fobs, paper coupons, social media, check-in games and daily deals – none of which produced significant profits or customer retention.” Masri told us in an interview.

Cardigin has an iOS app and an Android app as well but Masri knows there are still a lot of customers out there that either aren’t using their smartphones for things like loyalty or are much more comfortable without fumbling with technology while grabbing a latte. That’s why businesses using Cardigan can sign customers up with just their phone number. Once the establishment has the customers phone number they can start earning loyalty rewards real rewards that they will use.

Check out the rest of our interview with Masri below.

Kauzu Targets Entry Level Job Seekers With Smartphone And Basic Phone Apps

With all this innovation and startups targeting the job market there’s one job market that still remains horribly under served. The entry level or basic jobs market hasn’t had its own app or platform until now.

Chicago startup Kauzu, is taking advantage of the open space in the entry level jobs market. Grocery stores, retail jobs, call center jobs, fast food, crew work and other types of jobs can connect to local employees using one of two apps created by Kauzu.

Kauzu offers a smartphone app that allows users to view jobs on a map and find jobs in close proximity to their homes. They’ve also created a basic phone app that allows job seekers wuthout smart phones to text their zip code and get job listings close to them as we’ll.

We got a chance to interview Mitch Schneider, the founder and CEO of Kauzu. Check out our interview below:
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CES 2013: Memphis Startup CoyoteCase Presenting At Eureka Park, Announce Samsung Galaxy S III Case

Back in October we were the first tech media outlet to report on hometown Memphis startup CoyoteCase. The company founded by entrepreneur and concerned uncle Jonathan Page, produces a phone case originally for iPhone that protects your phone, and you as a person.

Basically the CoyoteCase doubles as a personal security system in addition to a bump proof case for your iPhone.

There is a little bit of competition in the market already. For instance there’s a case out there that also holds a small pepper spray can. There’s another case with a personal alarm, and one in the works with a taser (that will most likely never make it to market).

CoyoteCase combines the power of a loud audible personal alarm, along with BlueTooth and an app. The BlueTooth connectivity, combined with the app, add functionality like a tie in to a home’s alarm system, to give a monitoring station GPS coordinates of the users location.

CoyoteCase is making its first big tradeshow debut at the International CES in the Eureka Park startup tech zone. Page is also presenting at CES unveiled.

Page took this occasion to announce a CoyoteCase for the popular Samsung Galaxy S III Android smartphone.

After CES, CoyoteCase will be one of the 130 startups in the Startup Village at everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference

Fitness Startup PumpUp Picks Up The Pace Again With iOS App

Back in May when the high princess of startups inside the valley Sarah Lacey suggested there were no good fitness startups we found out about Waterloo startup PumpUp.

What makes pumpup.co so great are a number of things. For starters the three founders behind pumpup.co know their roles and do them well. In an industry that can run a little top heavy on the ego side they have the entrepreneurial founder, the sales, marketing and bizdev founder and of course the athletic trainer founder. You couldn’t have a fitness startup without one.

The UI is intuitive and it’s made for the average person, not the overly buff set that don’t need the gym as much as us normal folks.

Now, to make things much easier to manage PumpUp on the go, they’ve released an iOS app for iPhones and iPod Touch, both devices that make it into the gym while you’re working out.

With over 40% of new gym memberships cancelled in less than a year, people are looking for an easy-to-use solution that gives them the guidance and motivation needed to get fit. By asking a few simple questions about people’s fitness goals, where they want to work out and the equipment they love to use, PumpUp automatically builds a highquality workout designed specifically for each user.

PumpUp is meant for people who want to get started with a fitness routine but don’t know what to do, or those who want to take their fitness to the next level. PumpUp shows users what to do, how to do it,and over time, adapts their plans to ensure they continue to improve.

“People aspire to be fit and live a healthy life but most people find difficulty in reaching their goals,” says Phil Jacobson, co-founder & CEO of PumpUp. “We’re simplifying the experience by asking you what you want and taking care of the rest. Getting fit doesn’t have to be tough; people just need to be shown what to do. With PumpUp, that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

The PumpUp App is available as a free download on the Apple App Store on iPhone or iPod Touch at http://itunes.com/apps/pumpup. PumpUp is free to try for 30 days and costs $4.99/month on an annual subscription. To celebrate the launch and New Year, an annual subscription for PumpUp is only $2.99/month for the rest of January 2013.

Pumpup your startup everywhere else at everywhereelse.co The startup Conference, details here!

CES 2013 Preview: Indian Startup Emo2 To Launch Large Touch Screen OS

An Indian startup called Emo2, or Emotional Squared Technologies is set to launch what looks to be a great operating system and large multi user touch screen tablet. The device itself is 42″ and allows multi user input at the same time.

The 42″ touch screen surface is great for hotel lobbies, operating rooms, electronic casino gaming, retail environments and collaborative work spaces. The underlying operating system is designed to support the hardware without any hiccups, lag or delay, making for a pleasing user experience no matter what the application.

The company based in Chennai India, has been working on the technology since 2010 under the leadership of CEO and cofounder Mir Abid Hussain.

Emo2 is venture backed with an early stage investment from Indian firm Blume Ventures. Although the exact funding has not been reported Blume Ventures specialized in angel, and seed investments between $50k and $250k. Rajan Anandan, Zafar Baig and other angels also contributed to Emo2’s angel funding.

To date emo2’s technology has already been deployed in a coffee shop chain with 30 locations.

Although they weren’t specific early on, Emo2 has officially announced that they will launch Tuesday when the International CES show opens in Las Vegas. Before returning back to India they will be showing off their technology in Silicon Valley and New York the weeks immediately following CES.

After CES but before SXSW you can come to the biggest startup conference in the U.S. everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference

$9 Million Raised By Wisconsin Startup Study Blue For Digital BackPack

Madison Wisconsin startup Study Blue has raised $9 million dollars for their digital backpack company. Study Blue helps students store and organize their class study materials and turns them into digital flash cards and quizzes. The platform also allows the study materials to be compared with other students that are taking the same subjects.

Study Blue is cross platform which allows students to pick up where they left off whether they’ve moved from a laptop or desktop to an tablet or smartphone.

The $9 million dollar Series A-1 funding round was led by Great Oaks Venture Capital, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation also participated as well as existing investors. This new funding will allow them to continue building on their existing user base which is already 2.5 million users strong. Those users have created and shared 100 million study materials across the web and their mobile apps.

“We are experiencing rapid growth. This financing allows us to further expand our community and platform to help students master their course material faster, said Becky Splitt, StudyBlue’s CEO. “Our online, mobile and social tools connect students to a comprehensive crowd-sourced library of content on nearly any subject, and to each other, in a highly relevant way.

“We are really excited to be a part of the StudyBlue movement,” said Andy Boszhardt, Partner, Great Oaks Venture Capital. “The entire edtech industry is seeing tremendous growth and StudyBlue has particularly impressive traction in the space with over 2.5 million registered users who use its platform across a myriad of devices. They are in a perfect position to expand the audience of students they serve and we’re really pleased to be a part of that.”

“We see Great Oaks as a perfect complement to our efforts” said StudyBlue Founder Chris Klundt. “Their breadth of experience across consumer, mobile and online businesses as well as a commitment to the edtech industry makes this a great partnership.”

You’ll be able to check out some great EdTech startups at the largest startup conference in the U.S. everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference!

Continuously GeoTag Video With UK Startup RouteShoot

Geotagging is nothing new, we’ve been able to do it on our iPhones and Android devices for the past few years. You can geotag a tweet, a Facebook status message, Instagram photo and photos that you post to just about any social network. Geotagging allows the creator to mark where their photo was taken or their checkin was made.

Videos can be geotagged as well, however it’s typically one geotag at the beginning of the video or associated with the link for the video.

UK Startup RouteShoot has developed away to use your smartphones gps in conjunction with it’s video camera to continuously geotag a video. Say for instance you are hanging out in South Beach and start a video at your hotel, if you keep the video going down the A1A and then onto the beach, RouteShoot would allow the geotags to change to correspond with the different locations you were at while the video camera was rolling.

What’s more is once the video is uploaded the route is tracked in a line. A viewer can click the line on the geo mapped route and pick up the video based on the location if they wish, or watch as the locations change throughout the recording of the video. The video also shows a “you are here” symbol on the map as the video is playing.

RouteShoot was created by co-founders; Gary Wilson, Adam May and Andy Pym. Wilson and May have years of experience in the highway maintenance field while Pym has experience in highway engineering. We got a chance to talk with Wilson about RouteShoot. Check out the interview below.

Kick Ass Female Founders From Everywhere Else At everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference

Girls Rock, Right?

If you’re a regular reader of nibletz.com, the voice of startups everywhere else, then you know here we celebrate startups across the country and around the world outside the valley. We call this “everywhere else”.

Startups from “everywhere else” are typically “grittier”, and work harder. After all, startups that raise money outside Silicon Valley know that their investors actually expect to see the money back, and that’s of course if you can score funding in the first place. There are lots of other factors that entrepreneurs deal with in entrepreneurial pockets across the country and around the world that you don’t find in Silicon Valley.

Sometimes startups elect to build their companies in their home town and they may be located in a town that’s more familiar with health tech, ed tech, or logistics. There are a number of verticals depending on what town you live in, that may not mesh with what you’re team is working on.

Talent is one of the other big issues that startups everywhere else face. It’s harder to attract or keep talent in different cities across the country and around the world. A lot of talented designers, engineers and hustlers often times move to Silicon Valley or other high density metropolitan areas looking for higher paying jobs.

Now take all of those challenges and add into the mix that you’re a woman with a great idea and you may find that things get even tougher for you.

At everywhereelse.co the startup conference we’re holding a panel discussion on Monday after lunch highlighting some “kick ass female founders from everywhere else”. Women who’ve been able to push on no matter what came their way. We’ll hear from established entrepreneurs who’ve had major success with their companies. We’ll hear from great startup founders like Sarah Ware from Markerly, Brandy Wimberly from Buyvite, Natalie Novoa from Teachmeo and severeal others who’ve launched startups in the last year.

This panel discussion will be part panel and part town hall session for the over 500 women who’ve bought tickets (as part of the 1790 tickets sold so far). For the Q&A part, Memphis entrepreneur Danielle Inez will help field and select the questions. 25 year old Inez has her own Memphis PR company and launched a startup of her own at the Upstart Memphis 48 Hour Launch in December. When it comes to startups Inez is wet behind the ears and still soaking up every bit of knowledge she can get, but she has the attitude, energy and perseverance that many of these other women have. We also have a special guest that will speak about her trials and tribulations in building a huge company.

Tickets and Startup Village booths, for the nearly sold out everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference can be purchased here. We’re almost to the 2000 capacity mark so hurry!

CES 2013: Nibletz Will Be Rawportering From CES 2013 And Eureka Park

Imagine if you could make money by simply taking video of something newsworthy with your smartphone. This new form of reporting is called citizen journalism and startups like Charlotte NC’s Rawporter are at the forefront of this wave of crowdsourcing the news.

Rawporter was founded in 2011 by Kevin Davis and Rob Gaige two marketing executives who left their cush office jobs to to dig into the trenches of startup life and make everyone, potentially, a Rawporter.

The idea came to Davis and Gaige after they were eating at one of their favorite local Uptown Charlotte restaurants. While they were dining there was a rather big car accident right in front of the restaurant. Naturally smartphones were up in the air taking video and pictures at the scene. What Davis and Gaige noticed was that the official news stations didn’t arrive until the accident had cleared.

They, along with several others, sent their homemade videos into the news stations but none of them actually aired. Sure there some of the national cable stations ask people to send in their videos but localized rawportering hadn’t broken through.

Now Rawporter has become a platform that allows bloggers, journalists and even tv stations to crowdsource news footage and has a mechanism for citizen journalists to get paid for their videos. For small one to three man blogs, Rawporter is a great way to get video coverage of events they can’t otherwise attend or report on.

We’ll be sharing a lot of our CES video coverage on Rawporter for free. Other blogs are welcome to use the video coverage that we supply via Rawporter, all we ask is that you credit nibletz.com with a source link.

While we’re giving our videos away, if we wanted to we would be able to sell them for whatever we would like.

On the flipside if we needed video from CES or any other event we could put out a call for an assignment, let the community know how much we were willing to pay and voila we would have our video like we were there.

Check out our Rawporter CES coverage once CES officially gets rolling. We will link to it here on nibletz.com on the right side bar.

Rawporter is also the official on-site video sponsor for the biggest startup conference in the U.S. everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference, for tickets and info click here

Revestor Is Simplifying Real Estate For Investors On The Web And Mobile

If you’re in the market to buy or sell your home in a traditional way there are plenty of resources for you. When it comes to mobile we immediately think of Zillow. On the web there’s hundreds of websites that will easily access MLS listings for you and make it easier for you to do your own work on buying or selling your home before bringing a real estate agent into the mix.

For those looking to buy or sell real estate as investors though, the tools are quite limited.

San Diego startup Revestor is all about real estate from the investors perspective. The tools out there today allow investors to sift through hundreds of thousands of listings but they don’t take into consideration the important information for investors when it comes to looking for the best deals.

“Revestor is a multidimensional patent-pending real estate search engine that finds homes-for-sale by the highest potential cash flow based on the average rents in the area. Revestor can be accessed for free on the web or on the iPhone as a free App. Our goal in 2013 is to be the #1 ‘must have’ tool for real estate investors and real estate agents who work with real estate investors. Revestor solves one of the hardest problems in real estate investing: finding deals in the first place. Instead of spending hours sifting and sorting through multiple websites and archaic spreadsheets, Revestor does all the heavy lifting by presenting potential listings/opportunities to our users so they can go out and do their due-diligence. We simply give investors and agents a better place to start from. Users can expect User Profiles, Foreclosure Auctions, Advanced Searching, Alerts, and Advertising to be released in 2013.” Founder & CEO Bill Lyons told us in an interview.

We talked in depth with Lyons about Revestor, check out the interview below.

DC Hot Tech Startup Gryphn Finding New Problems They Solve Every Day

One of Washington DC’s hottest startups is Gryphn. This mobile security firm released their ArmorText secure text messaging application for Android users last summer and they’re constantly hearing from customers that they’re solving a new problem every day.

“we are still discovering all the problems that Gryphn solves. People come up to us at events and tell us how our products can be used for public notaries, insurance resellers, journalists… you name it. We are staying focused to solving regulatory compliance problems for Healthcare, Finance, Government, Law Enforcement, First Responders and Defense.” Gryphn’s CEO and co-Founder Navroop Mitter told us in an interview.

Back in June the team had grown enough that they took over the space of fellow DC Startup JESS3 which relocated to Los Angeles.

Much of their success is coming from innovating in the security space in the sectors where security matters most.

We got a chance to catch up with Gryphn. In the interview below they reveal how they got their name Gryphn. Check it out: