1776 Lands Partnership With General Assembly

With a name like General Assembly, you would think one of the most respected incubator organizations in the country would have a presence in Washington, DC. But that’s not the case. PandoDaily’s DC based reporter Hamish McKenzie reports that “A couple of years ago, entrepreneurial educational institution General Assembly scouted Washington DC and decided there wasn’t enough startup activity to warrant starting a program in the city just yet.”

That seems to have changed now that 1776, the DC startup hub and coworking space founded by Startup Veterans Evan Burfield and Donna Harris, is up and running on all cylinders.

Since opening this Spring, there hasn’t been a dull moment at 1776. They’ve hosted Startup Grind, TechCocktail events, several hackathons, startup launch parties, and several other startup activities. They’ve also announced major partnerships with top educational publisher Pearson,and others. They’ve even announced a global startup challenge that will bring startups from around the world to Washington, DC for a tournament style final next year.

Now, General Assembly has given the nation’s capital a second look. They’ve decided to take up residency on two lower floors of 1776’s space on 15th street in NorthWest Washington, DC. The space sits directly across from the Washington Post which is in the process of being acquired by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

McKenzie reports that DC’s General Assembly will begin hosting workshops and short form courses as early as next month with their long-term curriculum kicking off in 2014. This marks the 9th General Assembly campus. They also have locations in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, London, Sydney and Hong Kong.

Burfield and Harris were influencers with Startup America before founding 1776 a short seven months ago. Harris was a director with the Startup America Partnership, and Burfield was the founder of the DC region for Startup America. They’ve attracted over 100 startups to the 1776 space. In addition to serving as a hub for startups in Washington DC they are also linking startups from across the country and around the world to the federal government which happens to be the largest enterprise client in the world. 1776 sits just four blocks from the White House.

Find out more about 1776 at 1776dc.com and General Assembly here.

Several DC area startups and founders are headed to Cincinnati later this month for this huge startup conference.

3 Three Things I Learned From An Accelerator

Running a startup can seem like a constant reminder of how far I have to go for success. Yet when I come across young startups or new entrepreneurs, I sometimes marvel at some of the mistakes that are made early. Mistakes that I would surely have made if I had not gone through an accelerator.

At Kairos, we were blessed to have gotten into the NewMe Accelerator in San Francisco. It was 12 weeks that changed my life. I often tell people, we went into NewMe going 40 mph, and left NewMe going 400 mph. It was that impactful. From what I learned there, I was able to parlay into a termsheet for 1.2 million dollars just last week. That termsheet represents months of learning, pitching, praying, and most importantly, building the company. NewMe is taking it’s act on the road, and I will be mentoring alongside some other great folks in Miami September 27th -29th. Google has sponsored them so that they can offer content across the country.

What are you going to hear, a LOT, and it will be tailored to your specific startup. Real 1-1 time. To give a taste, I thought I would offer my top 3 things I learned from NewMe.

1. NDA’s & Secrets

Don’t ask anyone to sign a NDA. VC’s will never do it, and it shows your immaturity in the process. No one wants to steal your idea, nor would they have as much passion for your ideas as you.

2. Practice, Practice, Practice

Learn how to tell your story, in a clear, succinct, and empathetic way. Then tell it over, and over, and over, and over again. Tell it so many times that the members of your team can tell it, tell it until your kids are repeating it at school. Tell it until your girlfriend or boyfriend leaves you because they can’t stand to hear it again.

3. Learn the lingo

Cap Table, Delaware C-Corp, traction, disruption, lean, patents, H1-B… These and a TON of other words need to be in your lexicon as a startup founder. VC’s and other startups will rate your maturity on the lingo you use and the answers to some standard questions. Accelerators and Incubators can help founders to learn these terms, and use them to qualify you as opposed to disqualify you in the eyes of your peers, funders, and media.

Startup is a wild and crazy world, but these three items can lay the foundation to a very successful enterprise.

Ad Astra!

Brian Brackeen is the CEO of Kairos, a enterprise facial recognition company recently selected as one of the Wall Street Journal’s top 20 startups. He lives in Miami and is a rabid Miami Heat and Philadelphia Eagles fan.

5 Startups Get In Motion At NMotion Demo Day

There’s so much talk about startup accelerators. We report on a lot of accelerators, with an emphasis on the ones accelerating companies outside Silicon Valley. NMotion is one of those accelerators. I spent a bit of time talking with NMotion’s managing director, Brian Ardinger, throughout the course of the program. I also did a mentor session with the five companies in the program about a week before demo day.

Ardinger is one of those accelerator directors that knows the most valuable lesson already: Demo Day isn’t the end for the startups, it’s the beginning.

“When we invest in companies, we help them for life, not just for the summer,” it says on NMotion’s website. On the surface Ardinger is a tech-transfer guy. As the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at NuTech Ventures, Ardinger oversees the crossover from the University of Nebraska and the private sector. However, NMotion was by no means a “student program.”

Each NMotion team received a seed investment of $15,000 which is par for the course for a city Lincoln’s size. The teams also received over $100,000 in important business services and access to a mentor network, which Ardinger stresses doesn’t go away on demo day.

HipPocket, PaperTale, Cinnamon Social, SynserScan, and Alumni Labs worked around the clock as hard, if not harder, than startups at some of the most prestigious Valley accelerators. When the time came on Thursday afternoon, they were ready to show off their summer’s work in front of a crowd of nearly 200 (not too shabby for an inaugural cohort in Lincoln, Nebraska).

Cinnamon Social is a software for automated and intelligent social media content curation led by husband-and-wife founders Jason and Holly Petersen.

SynerScan is a software to digitize hospital operations offering better health care through data led by founder Brett Byman.

HipPocket is a software offering families better context and confidence for financial decision-making led by founder Mark Zmarzly.

Alumni Labs is a software that simplifies and manages the college selection and application process led by founders Martin Wolff and Steve Scharf.

PaperTale is a new software product founded by Dan Castagnoli designed to help manufacturers curb the $500 million dollar loss in paper coupons. Omaha.com reported that Castagnoli revealed in his pitch that people are using photo editing software to change coupons and dupe manufacturers and retail stores out of millions of dollars. In some cases these crooks change $5 coupons to $10 coupons.

While some accelerators immediately start taking applications for the next cohort the day after demo day, Ardinger is making sure that the teams that just graduated into the real business world adjust well. He’s also knee deep in Lincoln’s Startup Week going on all week long. NMotion’s demo day and then Startup Weekend were the official kick off events for Startup Week.

For more information on NMotion click here. Here a re some of our interviews with NMotion teams in our Startups In The Fastlane feature.

Harlem’s New Harlem Garage Puts Business In High Gear

“New York’s startup community is made up of several startup communities that come together.”

That’s what Startup Threads founder and New York startup activist Frank Denbow told us in an interview last May. Whether you’re in Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Dumbo District, or even Harlem, every area seems to have a vibrant startup community.

Last year we reported on Harlem incubator IncubateNYC. That effort founded by Marcus Mayo and Brian Shields was in response to a call to action for Harlem small businesses and startups by Mayor Bloomberg.

Now Harlem is getting a new hub for startups called the Harlem Garage.

New York co-working company MicroOffice is opening their newest location at 318 West 118th Street right in the heart of West Harlem. The company already has several small office and desk space options scattered across New York City. They aim to help small businesses and startups transition from the home to a more traditional office. Like most co-working companies, MicroOffice bundles all the needs of today’s workers into one easy-to-understand agreement. Things like power, faxing, conference rooms, and internet are all in the agreement.

The company also installs community managers at their locations, but they function as much more than just landlords. They try to ensure complimentary diversity within the coworking space. They also help facilitate programming that’s necessary for today’s growing companies. Legal, accounting, PR, and other workshops are a mainstay across the MicroOffice facilities.

The Harlem Garage is 5000 square feet of coworking space and will house a diverse community of 150 members according to Black Enterprise. They also plan to offer discounts to women and minority-owned businesses as well as hold annual contests for desk space.

“Harlem Garage is about the advancement of Harlem small businesses through the exchange of expertise,” Ryan Young, Harlem Garage’s Community Manager told Black Enterprise.

They plan to open in the coming weeks. You can find out more about Harlem Garage at harlemgarage.com

New York Startup Bringing The Much Needed NetFlix For Books

So far 2013 has been a big year for readers and technology. We’ve seen startups like Memphis’ ScrewPulp offering a new kind of self publishing platform. We saw Amazon’s Jeff Bezos add the digital download to traditional books, and now it seems everybody is talking about Oyster.

E-Book reading is a huge growing market. According to a recent report from the Washington Post, e-book sales in the US topped $3 billion dollars this year. That, according to TechCrunch, accounted for a 44% increase in e-book sales. The UK saw a whopping 134% increase from 2011 to 2012.

As more and more people switch to table devices or add a table device to their smart devices, e-books are becoming more and more popular. Amazon, iTunes, and others have made finding and reading books so easy that you don’t even have to set foot in a library or bookstore.

Eric Stromberg, Andrew Brown, and Willem Van Lancker are preparing to disrupt the e-book market again by offering a Netflix style “book renting” platform. Their startup, Oyster, lets the user download/rent unlimited e-books for $9.99 a month.

Oyster already has over 100,000 titles in their library and has scored partnerships with some big publishers in the world including Harper Collins, Houghton Mifflin, Worman, Rosetta Books and more.

In addition to its first to market rental platform for books, Oyster has also deployed a social layer on top of their reading platform so that users can share and stay updated with their friends on what they are reading.

With most e-book downloads ranging from $9.99 to $14.99 for one book, any one who reads should check out Oyster and get on their waiting list.

Vancouver Startup Wantering: Google For Fashion?

You’d be surprised how many data points there are when it comes to shopping online. When you take into consideration data across the web and then across the social web we’re talking about hundreds of millions of data points. While the normal shopper can’t analyze or look at all of those data points, sometimes shopping for clothes online can easily result in 30 or 40 open browser windows. This can get ugly, confusing, and slow your computer down.

A Vancouver startup called Wantering is hoping to help solve your fashion faux pas, by analyzing over 100 million data points for you in what they call the “WantRank” algorithm.

Whether you’re shopping by deal, brand, category, color, print, fabric, or any other category, wantering can help narrow down your search and point you to the best deal. Then, the web platform can take you to a destination to purchase.

The team behind Wantering all came from the online retail world and they’ve spent years combing through and analyzing data.

We got a chance to talk to Wantering Evangelist, Kathleen Ong. Check out the interview below.

What does your company do?

Ever try to shop online when you’re not quite sure exactly what you’re looking for? We’ve been there. Wantering helps shoppers find clothes they’ll love through our fashion search engine. Save yourself the wasted time and frustration of opening up multiple browser tabs, wondering if something is on sale or in stock, and trying to shop from tiny thumbnails.

You can shop for clothes by brand, category, materials, prints, and color across a curated list of boutiques, flash sales sites and major retailers all in one place. And if you’re curious about why something is at the top of a search result, it’s because of our WantRank algorithm. WantRank tracks and analyzes over 100 million data points across the social web and ranks products based on what’s getting the most social-love.

Who are the founders, and what are their backgrounds

The Wantering team are no strangers to online shopping. Wantering’s CEO is Matt Friesen, a technology industry veteran. Matt was previously the founder and CEO of Thirdi Software, a custom software development shop specialized in building eCommerce stores and web applications. Matt started Wantering in 2011 after Thirdi Software was acquired by Invoke Media (the creators of Hootsuite). Nick Cairns is Wantering’s head of UX and was previously the Director of User Interface & Design at Move Inc (the parent company of Realtor.com). Jesse Sherlock is Wantering’s CTO, and has experience building highly scalable systems for Reinvent (one of the largest domain owners in the world) and the BC Lottery Corp. Nicholas Molnar is the head of product, and was previously a web strategist at Thirdi Software. Nicholas sits on the board of directors of F Cancer and has been a speaker at numerous technology-focused events including TedxVancouver.

Where are you based?

Wantering is based in Vancouver and New York City.

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

Vancouver is known as Silicon Valley North. There is a great startup scene here with a growing community of startups, investors and accelerator programs such as GrowLab, which Wantering went through in 2012.

In New York, we’re based out of General Assembly. Wantering was selected as one of six startups to be part of the Canadian Technology Accelerator (CTA) New York program this fall. We’re looking forward to meeting people and getting to know the New York tech community on a more intimate level.

We get the best of both worlds; participating in Vancouver’s growing tech scene is such a rewarding experience and travelling to New York, where the industry is much more mature, has been eye-opening.

What problem do you solve?

We’re solving some of the most basic problems in online shopping. Where do I look for a new pair of shoes? What’s on sale from my favorite designer? Where can I get a blue cocktail dress for this wedding I’m going to?

Wantering gives shoppers a beautiful platform to discover and buy clothing by pulling together the best e-commerce stores all in one place. Gigantic images, detailed descriptions, trending products, and up-to-date stock and sale information make shopping less time consuming and more fulfilling.

Why now?

We believe searching for clothes online has lost its way. The results you see in leading product search engines are typically paid posts by retailers. One look at Google Shopping and you’ll find a big notice in the corner explaining exactly that! Not to mention, they don’t understand my style taste, and they completely disregard current trends in fashion.

Can you name two new features in product search since the ’90s? Shopzilla launched in 1996, Yahoo Shopping in ’97, MySimon in ’98, and Nextag in ’99. They’ve barely changed since, and are somehow still billion dollar businesses.

We think this is an area ripe for disruption. On Wantering.com we put the best products first by using 100 million data points from the social web, and we aren’t going to sell our users out. There is tons of room for innovation in this space, and we’re excited to be building something really cool to help people shop online better.

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

There’s been quite a few big milestones for us in the last 18 months. Releasing our search engine in spring 2013 was a one of the biggest moments for us; it’s both rewarding and motivating to see what you’ve been working on for months come to life. There is still more work to be done and we’re looking forward to what’s ahead.

What are your next milestones?

We have some cool product features in the works over the next while, so we’re excited to get those out!

Where can people find out more?

Shop for clothes you’ll love on www.wantering.com

St. Louis Startup Aisle411 Raises $6.3M Series A

The St. Louis startup that’s changing the in-store experience for everyone has just closed a massive series A round. Aisle411 is an interactive indoor mapping startup for grocery stores and other places where you need to locate things on an indoor map.

The St. Louis based startup has raised $10M since its launch in 2008.

This latest round of funding came from Google’s Don Doge, Plug & Play Ventures of Silicon Valley, Cultivation Capital and St. Louis ArchAngels. In addition to the funding the company already has some big partnerships in place including one with Walgreens, Home Depot, Schnucks, and Stop and Save.

While people immediately recognize the need for Aisle411, the company is still working on aggressively building scale and going global.

“We’ve seen a significant increase in demand from the retail market for our services,” Nathan Pettyjohn, founder and CEO of aisle411, said in a statement. “The investment round allows us to aggressively scale to a growing list of global retail partners.”

You can check out Aisle411 here.;

Chicago Startup Personify Merges Human Interaction With Digital Content to Make Presentations More Personal

We’re still far away from teleporting technology. In the meantime a Chicago startup called Personify has found a way to make remote presentations more personal.

Using depth sensing camera’s like the one found in the Microsoft Kinect, the company’s product called Personify Life, puts someone giving a presentation as close to being in the room as possible.

“Most remote presentations, including webinars and PowerPoint slideshows, lack the personal component that make in-person communication successful and keep audiences engaged. Personify Live brings those critical elements back by seamlessly merging human interaction with digital content,” a company spokesperson told Nibletz in an interview.

Personify boasts an incredibly well educated team of founders who are working on something that will make boring old meetings much more engaging. It’s almost like a hologram of the presentation giver is in the room.

We got a chance to interview the team from Personify. Check out the interview below.

What is your startup called?

Personify Inc.

What does your company do?

Personify is an immersive video communication company that bridges the gap between communicating remotely and talking face-to-face. Personify products create a deeper sense of presence while remote by seamlessly merging human interaction with digital content.

Personify Live, the flagship product from Illinois-based Personify, uses a virtual-green screen technology called User Extraction to visually immerse the individual in the content they are presenting, enabling the presenters’ body language, passion, enthusiasm and visual persona to dramatically enliven the experience.

With Personify Live, an individual can lead a virtual presentation from anywhere, in a one-to-one or one-to-many setting, and all presentations can be recorded and stored in the cloud. Users simply connect a depth-sensing camera, such as a Microsoft Kinect or ASUS Xtion Pro Live, to his or her PC. Personify Live’s technology was developed for sales and marketing professionals, however, its clients operate in industries ranging from online education to medicine. Personify Live has been adopted by hallmark enterprises and institutions such as SAP, Oracle, LinkedIn, Marketo and the University of Illinois.

The product’s technology is beneficial to a variety of industries, backgrounds and use cases.

Clients across all industries are reporting shorter sales cycles and more engaged audiences. One study found a 60 percent improvement in sales closing rates when online demos were used. In another case, a Personify Live client noted that 90 percent of webinar attendees reported being “more engaged” than with a traditional webinar. Furthermore, studies show a 400 percent increase in perceived learning using Personify Live vs. traditional online education tools.

By using Personify Live, organizations see a substantial increase in its business metrics, including close rates and ROI. Additionally, Personify Live works with WebEx, GoToMeeting, Skype and other traditional Web conferencing solutions for ease of use.

Who are the founders, and what are their backgrounds?

Personify might have the most well-educated group of co-founders of any startup on the planet. Of the five co-founders, four have Ph.D.s and one has a Master’s degree. Three are professors of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois.

Although academics do not have a history of correlating with entrepreneurs and startups, the University of Illinois, and its engineering department, is bucking that trend. The U of I is well known for startup and entrepreneurial successes including Netscape and YouTube. Personify is one of its most recent.

Sanjay Patel, Personify’s CEO, began his career as a chip designer in the 1990s, later becoming the CTO of Ageia Technologies, a company that developed chips to improve the graphics in video games. In addition to his CEO duties, Sanjay is also a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the U of I. Two other cofounders, Minh Do, Personify’s co-founder and chief scientist, and Wen-mei Hwu, one of the world’s foremost experts in parallel computing, are both professors at the U of I as well.

The depth-based rendering of video utilized for Personify’s two products, Personify Live and zChat, slated to be released this fall, was constructed based on Minh and co-founder Quang Nguyen’s research.

Personify’s fifth co-founder, Dennis Lin, holds a Ph.D. from UIUC, specializes in computer vision and is a leader on Personify’s development team.

Where are you based?

Personify, which is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, also has offices in Champaign and Ho-Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

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

Personify benefits from the location in Chicago thanks to the city’s burgeoning tech scene. Chicago is home to 1871 and TechNexus, some of the most active and innovative startup incubators in the United States.

Why now?

Personify was founded in 2009 after the technologies needed, including depth-sensing, had developed enough to utilize in-product. Personify Live uses various types of cutting-edge technology to connect people instead of distancing them. The field of perceptual computing, thanks to a movement lead by Intel, has developed significantly and will continue to do so in the coming years. Personify, in fact, is a proud participant in Intel’s perceptual computing movement and was showcased on stage with Intel at the 2013 International CES in Las Vegas, Nevada back in January. Personify Live also utilizes gesture recognition technology which allows a presenter to advance a slide on his or her PowerPoint with just the swipe of a hand.

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

Personify was named a finalist for the Illinois Technology Association (ITA) CityLIGHTS Trailblazing Award, which recognizes companies that have developed or introduced an ingenious, non-traditional and innovative way of doing business or creating a culture that produces significant value and growth for the company.

Personify Live has been adopted by a number of Fortune 500 companies that range in industries from healthcare to education.

Additionally, within six months of launching, Personify Live earned a position as an emerging market leader in the Web conferencing Industry by G2 Grid, a service of G2 Crowd. G2 Grid rates products and services algorithmically in real-time based on user reviews and analysis. Personify Live is currently considered an innovator in the Web conferencing segment, a category that includes Cisco’s WebEx, Citrix GoToMeeting and Skype – all products that integrate with Personify Live.

What are your next milestones?

Personify recently opened their new headquarters in the River North neighborhood of Chicago and announced plans to increase full-time staff by 50 percent in the next six months.

Personify’s consumer-facing immersive video chat tool, zChat, is slated for release this fall, which will bring perceptual computing to consumers and allow users to stay connected like never before.

Finally, in the near future, Personify hopes to be adopted by more companies, both large and small, across the world. Personify Live will hopefully be used to improve communication for these corporations, both internally and externally.

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

More information about Personify can be found at personifyinc.com

Cincinnati & Pittsburgh, A Startup City Swap?

Sports rivalries are intense between Pittsburgh, PA and Cincinnati OH (home to the Everywhere Else Cincinnati Conference). Of course there’s the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Cincinnati Bengals but also the Pirates and the Reds. Enough to make a grown person very passionate. Another thing people in both cities are passionate about is entrepreneurship and startups.

Pittsburgh has several startup initiatives including Built In Pittsburgh and Rustbuilt. Cincinnati has Cintrifuse, The Brandery, and CincyTech. This year Cincinnati also has the national Everywhere Else startup conference. Leaders in both startup communities thought the natural sports rivalries created a unique synergy of sorts that could help entrepreneurs in each city learn from each other.

So to further those ideas, Cincinnati’s Cintrifuse and Pittsburgh’s RustBuilt accelerator are holding a city swap on the last two Fridays of the month.

On Friday September 20th Rustbuilt will host a group of Cincinnati entrepreneurs from Cintrifuse at their facility in Pittsburgh, just in time for RustBuilt Night at PNC Park, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Entrepreneurs from both cities will enjoy each other’s company, share best practices, and then take in a night of baseball as the Pittsburgh Pirates host the Cincinnati Reds.

Then, the following week, Cincinnati’s Cintrifuse will host a group from RustBuilt for either startup speed dating or a startup crawl of sorts, still to be determined. Then the startups will enjoy an evening of baseball at the Great American Ballpark as the Reds host the Pirates.

But wait there’s more. Pittsburgh entrepreneur Kit Mueller tells us that several of the Pittsburgh startups will stay all weekend long and attend the Everywhere Else conference beginning that Sunday night.

Tickets for Rustbuilt night at PNC Park in Pittsburgh September 20th can be found here.

Info on the Cintrifuse event at the Cincinnati Reds game can be found here.

Go register for Everywhere Else Cincinnati here.

Everywhere Else Cincinnati Is Less Than A Month Away

The national conference for startups everywhere else continues to grow.

Thank you so much for being part of the Nibletz community. We all know that startups across the country and around the globe are fueling innovation and creating jobs. Whether it’s in Boise, Idaho, Memphis, Tennessee, Pittsburgh, Alaska, or anywhere in between we all face similar challenges.

That’s why Everywhere Else Cincinnati is all about starting where you are. Learn tips from pros. Hear from people who have raised money outside of Silicon Valley and New York. Meet investors who could be looking for deals in your neighborhood.

We’ve assembled over 30 top tier national speakers for the two and a half day event which starts September 29th and runs through October 1st at the Duke Energy Convention Center in downtown Cincinnati.

With the conference less than a month away our early bird pricing will end at the end of this week. Right now you can save big on an attendee ticket or Startup Avenue booth which includes three attendee tickets, booth space, exhibition area, and a great pitch event.

Need more reasons to attend Everywhere Else Cincinnati? Here’s 42 of them.

Here are the speakers we’ve announced so far (we still have even more to announce):

Blair Garrou, Managing Director Mercury Fund
Scott Gerber, Founder of YEC
Ethan Austin, Founder GiveForward
Joe Medved, Partner SoftBank Capital
Naithan Jones, Founder AgLocal
Derek Flanzraich, Founder Greatist
Andrew Warner, Founder Mixergy
Andy Sparks, Co-Founder MatterMark
Wil Schroter, Founder Fundable
Jake Stutzman, Founder Elevate.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 Evite 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 Partner The Starter League
Ryan O’Connell, VP Influence & Co
Blake Miller, Managing Director Think Big Accelerator
Michael Bergman, Founder Repp

Investors committed so far:
Mercury Fund, SoftBank, Detroit Venture Partners (DVP), CincyTech, am>ventures, Fortify.vc, Ben Franklin and many more.

You can register below at a great early bird discount rate or at eecincinnati.com

Online event registration for Everywhere Else Cincinnati – “Start Where U Are” powered by Eventbrite

Startups In The Fastlane: Velocity Startup Pass It

Velocity Indiana, a startup accelerator just outside of Louisville, Kentucky, just graduated their first class last week. They brought startups from across the country to learn, grow, and accelerate in a beautiful area in the middle of the country. Velocity is the epitome of “everywhere else”.

Pass It, came from Seattle, Washington to work on a next generation photo sharing app. Nowadays, regular photo sharing apps are getting boring and there’s a filter for everything. Startups are looking to find ways to make photo sharing apps more engaging.

Pass It wants users to send their photos “around the world”. They’ve also added an element of competition to the mix.

Pass It is in our Fastlane, our interview feature that profile’s startups that are going through, or just completed an accelerator program.

What is the name of your startup?

Pass it

What accelerator are you in?

Velocity Accelerator. http://velocityindiana.org

Where is your startup originally from?

Seattle

Tell us about your current team?

Bryce Anderson – Moving the business forward.

Robert Eickmann – Mobile developer with superpowers.

Cameron Chinn – Marketing and user acquisition specialist.

Jon Matar – Primary Advisor

What does your startup do?

Pass it is a photo sharing app that allows users to connect, compete, and send their photos around the world.

What are your goals for the accelerator program?

To substantially improve our business model and create as many new relationships as possible.

What’s one thing you’ve learned in the accelerator?

Failure is a part of the process. Every week we tested several hypotheses and we had to constantly adapt our thinking based on our customer feedback.

What’s the hardest piece of advice you’ve had to stomach so far?

To pivot. We came in to Velocity with an EdTech company and we completely changed our business due to the Lean Startup methodology.

What is your goal for the day after demo day?

To create meetings with potential investors and business leaders in the Indiana and Kentucky entrepreneurial community.

Why did you choose this accelerator?

We chose Velocity because of its central location and outstanding business mentors. I would like to give a shout out to Tony Schy, Dave Durand, Terry Goertz, Michael Browning and Greg Langdon.

What’s one thing you learned about an accelerator that you didn’t know when you applied?

How much I would learn from the other startups participating in the program. Even though we all had substantially different businesses, we all faced the same day-to-day startup challenges and I learned valuable information from their experiences with the lean startup program.

Where can people find out more?

www.passitapp.co

What’s your twitter handle?

@PassPics

Dave Knox And Blair Garrou Jumping In The Shark Tank At Straight Shot Demo Day

The first week of October is going to be huge. Of course that’s when Everywhere Else Cincinnati is happening. It will be an even bigger week for some of our speakers: Brandery co-founder Dave Knox, Dundee Venture Capital Co-Founder Mark Hasebroock, and Mercury Fund’s Blair Garrou.

In addition to speaking at Everywhere Else Cincinnati, The Brandery is graduating its summer class the following day, October 2, making it a big enough week already for Dave Knox. But in the words of Billy Mays, “But wait there’s more”.

Dundee backed accelerator, Straight Shot, is graduating its summer class on October 3rd, making it a huge week for Hasebroock as well. All three Everywhere Else speakers are attending the Brandery demo day on October 2nd and then Straight Shot’s demo day.

Straight Shot announced on Tuesday that Garrou and Knox have both agreed to be “sharks’ in their Shark Tank style demo day. Rather than just a straight pitch event to a room full of 400 investors, and startup supporters, the Straight Shot inaugural class will also receive feedback from Garrou and Knox. While we consider both to be very nice guys, they are straight shooters when it comes to startups and their viability.

The seven startups graduating from Straight Shot are:

BusinessExchange – a referral SaaS model that allows small businesses to make evaluations of, connections with, and recommendations for other small businesses as vendors and/or suppliers. BusinessExchange recently launched a pilot program with the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce that aims to spur economic growth and increased collaboration among Chamber member companies.

BuyNow – an e-commerce application that allows customers to instantly purchase advertised goods and services from any TV, print, online and/or out-of-home ad by simply sending an SMS text message. BuyNow has a patent pending for their ad-tech application. The founders are on the cusp of pivotal partnerships with one Fortune 500 media company and a handful of major retailers.

CardioSys – a software currently under development that uses fluid algorithms that will help health insurers, third-party administrators, and brokers to forecast preventable life events and mitigate risk among their client/customer population. CardioSys partnered with UNeMed, the technology transfer branch of the University of Nebraska Medical Center responsible for bringing intellectual property from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Cosmic Cart – an e-commerce platform that consolidates fragmented shopping carts across the web while enhancing the shopping experience for customers. Cosmic Cart allows publishers to monetize their media and retailers to sell their products across the web. Currently, more than 85 brands, six fashion bloggers and five major retailers have signed on with Cosmic Cart.

Crateful – a software that leverages advanced audio and data analytics to help music enthusiasts find the best music for their mood or the moment. Crateful’s technology analyzes each song in a customer’s database by tempo, key and rhythm structure and then allows the user to sort based on their needs. Currently, more than 60 well-known electronic music deejays are piloting Crateful.

Cympel – an e-commerce and ad-tech platform that streamlines online shopping for consumers and expedites the transaction process for brands. An attractive platform for advertisers, publishers, and customers alike, Cympel eliminates the multiple redirecting windows currently involved in the online advertising and shopping process. Cympel’s team has two campaigns underway currently and is showing a positive return-on-investment for each.

HuntForce – a software that enables hunters to become more strategic and successful in their sport by reducing the hours they currently spend sifting through and organizing the thousands of photos taken by their trail cameras. The father-son founding team has established relationships with more than a dozen professional hunters interested in using the HuntForce technology to improve their upcoming season.

For more information on Straight Shot and their demo day visit straightshot.co

See all three speakers and 27 more national startup speakers at Everywhere Else Cincinnati.

Philly’s Novotorium Announces New Seed Funding Program

Philadelphia’s Novotorium continues to support health, wellness, and nutrition startups across the Philadelphia region. We’ve covered Novotorium quite a bit over the last 18 months and their progress has been fun to watch.

The team backing the startup support organization wants to get in with companies in their wheelhouse as early as possible, sometimes backing companies as early as a business plan stage or during the development of a companies minimum viable product (MVP). More often than not, companies at that early a stage are turned away and can’t develop without funding, especially in health and wellness sectors.

Novotorium has announced a week’s worth of programming geared towards the earliest stage companies. The program runs the week of September 16-20 and at the end of the week those that participated will be part of a business plan competition on September 23rd. The competition will have a $2500 prize, but Novotorium will consider all participants for possible future investments ranging from $5,000 to $250,000.

“Our goal with this program is to work with companies in the early stages of developing a business plan and creating the first iteration of their business. We are looking forward to helping them build out their plans and create their minimum viable products. We anticipate that we will be able to offer seed funding to several companies,” Novotorium Managing Director Stuart Segal said in a statement.

Novotorium’s Marketing and Business Director, Chuck Hall, summarized the program on their blog:

During each day of the week-long program — September 16 through 20 — Novotorium partners will be on hand at Novotorium in Langhorne to offer classes and hold office hours on key parts of creating and launching a business — finance, law, marketing, sales, operations, lean startup, agile development, technology, health care products and markets and more. This is a completely free week of sessions, with the goal of helping entrepreneurs accepted into this program move forward with their business plans and business implementation efforts.

On Friday, September 20, business plans and business development efforts will be vetted, with approved startups slotted into presentation times for Monday, September 23. Entrepreneurs will be asked to present to a Novotorium panel that will then determine the winner of the competition. The winner will receive the top prize of $2,500 in cash and $3,000 in services at Novotorium over a 30-day period.

Companies wishing to participate in the program must apply on the Novotorium website using the ordinary application form. Applicants should note “TBD” in any part of the application that is yet to be determined. Applicants should also note “Applying for September Program” in the “What Else?” section of the application.

Interested? Hit the application link above

STACHE Investments Exceeds $1 Million Dollar Commitment To 2013 OneSpark Companies

Last Spring we were one of the national media partners for one of the most incredible startup related events we’ve ever seen. That event, the OneSpark crowdfunding festival in North Florida, saw over 130,000 attendees throughout the course of the week. The event was like taking Kickstarter or Indiegogo, pulling them offline, and putting the creators into a five day festival.

We saw startups, art projects, art installations, music projects, visual arts, and a variety of amazing, but unclassifiable ideas. All of the participants were looking for crowdfunding in person at the event and to earn the OneSpark prize money or get an investment from Jacksonville based STACHE investments. STACHE investments is the investment arm of Shahid Kahn’s company. Kahn is the automotive entrepreneur who purchased the Jacksonville Jaguars in November of 2011 and took up residency in Jacksonville.

Since that time he has been very active behind the scenes in Jacksonville’s startup and entrepreneurial community. Khan quickly got involved with the OneSpark festival, committing $1,000,000 in follow on funding for the most promising ideas during the festival.

Late last month it was announced that not only had STACHE Investments (named after Khan’s legendary mustache) reached and exceeded their $1,000,000 commitment, but they committed to 2014 and also helped back a new accelerator in Jacksonville called KYN.

KYN will launch with four companies in its inaugural class and will leverage its resources to support numerous One Spark creators that have been in talks with the STACHE Investments Corporation. KYN has also partnered with the University of North Florida to help train students in design and development. The accelerator’s inaugural class are all businesses who participated in the wildly successful One Spark festival.

“We are impressed by the outpouring of talent we witnessed at One Spark earlier this year,” Jim Zsebok, Chief Investments Officer at the STACHE Investments Corporation said in a statement. “STACHE has provided the seed capital for KYN because we view it as an essential component of the entrepreneurial ecosystem that Elton and his team is creating in Jacksonville which began with CoWork Jax, then One Spark and now KYN. So today, via KYN we announce the 4 companies who will participate in the inaugural class at KYN and we will continue to work with several other Creators we met at One Spark who require different resources, including Heritage Farms, Workout Navigator and Chair to Share.”

The companies who participated in One Spark and are receiving funding at this time are:

Heritage Farms
Pure Treats
Floppy Entertainment
Original Fuzz
Hatchware

Pure Treats, Floppy Entertainment, Original Fuzz, and Hatchware are the four companies who will be in the inaugural class and receive funding directly from KYN.

Nearing the completion of the 16-week program at KYN, the companies will have an opportunity to participate in a demo day where other venture capitalists and angel investors interested in their companies will review opportunities to invest in the companies.

“This is a natural outgrowth of what we hoped to achieve with the inaugural One Spark festival, and the next step in supporting great startups in Jacksonville,” said KYN Co-Founder, Elton Rivas. “Our selection of downtown to house this accelerator is further commitment to the continued support and growth of Jacksonville’s thriving startup community in the heart of our city. We couldn’t be happier to be working with the STACHE Investments Corporation in support of the growth of this ecosystem for Jacksonville.”

In addition to the accelerator program, KYN has also announced their partnership with the University of North Florida. KYN will hire select students to participate in a semester long apprenticeship program where they will earn course credit, learn web development, and user interface and design, all while working directly with KYN startup companies.

The accelerator will soon begin selecting applications for its second 16-week class, slated to begin January 2014. All information for the application timing and process can be found on the KYN website at www.kyn.is.

“We’re focused on linking early stage companies in technology, health and fitness and hard goods with seed money, tools and great mentors to support the rapid growth of their business,” co-founder, Rivas said. “This intensive 16-week program provides access to mentors, developers and designers, workshops, work space and a collaborative community while also training nearly a dozen UNF students that could be potential future hires for these companies. It’s a great model.”

Find out more about KYN here and check out our 2013 OneSpark coverage here.

Check out this enormous conference 100% devoted to startups “everywhere else”

image: Shahid Khan