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Kentucky Startup Tagapet Brings The Pet Tag Into The 21st Century

As an animal owner all of my life I know the feeling when you’re dog has run off. Luckily I’ve never permanently lost an animal but I know several people who have. Microchips are great for recovering animals but what many pet owners don’t realize is that microchips can only be read with microchip readers at your local vet’s office, and if you’re lucky, the shelter.

With the rise in use and popularity of smartphones many people who’ve lost a pet wish they had a microchip reader built into their iPhone or Android device. While that’s not possible, a Lexington Kentucky startup called Tagapet, has a solution.

Tagapet’s new pet tag incorporates both QR code and NFC technology. This means that NFC equipped smartphones, and bar code readers (available for every smartphone these days), someone who finds your pet can easily find important information. The QR code on the tag can be coded with all of your important owner information including contact info and even animal allergies. The QR code actually has a huge benefit over traditional engraved collars by allowing a much larger data field to incorporate complete contact info.

Not only that but Tagapet has also incorporated GPS so that when the lost pet is scanned with a smartphone the owner is notified of their GPS location, making reuniting pet and owner, even quicker.

We got a chance to talk with the brilliant team behind Tagapet. Check out the interview below.

Life Is A Story, Tell It With Seattle Startup Jumyo

Everyday millions of people around the globe are using their smartphones, cameras, and apps to tell stories. They’re telling stories through pictures, video and of course text. Seattle startup Jumyo is helping people connect the dots and tell the stories of their lives through their social community and their iPhone app.

There are a few startups out there that are addressing the issue “if pictures could talk” by simply adding voice clips to photos sent to social networks. Jumyo knows that there is more to a story than just the picture, with or without context. Perhaps you’re at your daughters birthday party. Maybe you’re on a vacation to Mexico. What happened before these key events, what happened after? How did you get there in the first place. These are all questions that can be answered when the story is woven together.

As we put more and more pictures and videos on our phone, the ability to recall each event gets harder and harder. I travel all the time. When I visit a city I’ve been to before I often try new places but also go back to the places I really like. So at the end of the day (well actually at the end of several months) when I comb through Facebook albums, Google Plus instant upload albums and iPhoto I find pictures from the same places at different times. Sometimes it’s hard to remember why in the world I took some random photos, or videos, which at the time probably weren’t random at all.

Hopefully Jumyo can solve that problem for me and for you.

We got a chance to talk with Joe Egan, co-founder and CEO at Jumyo. Check out the interview below.

Memphis Grizzlies Star Rudy Gay Featured In Los Angeles Startup MyStorey

Rudy Gay, Memphis Grizzlies, myStorey, LA Startup,California startup,startup

Memphis Grizzlies star forward Rudy Gay will be featured in myStorey (photo: nibletz LLC)

A new startup in Los Angeles called MyStorey is set to debut with some celebrity heavyweights in the mix, including Memphis Grizzlies star forward Rudy Gay.

myStorey is a we-commerce platform where users build online stores through the stories of their lives. They allow people the unique opportunity to tag the things in their personal photos from Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, or their blog and aggregate those tags into a shoppable store so that others can discover and shop them too. Celebrities, bloggers, brands, and even everyday people have found immense value in myStorey’s ability to transform their digital content into shopping opportunities.

myStorey worked with Rudy Gay’s social team to leverage his social media content and use it to highlight the products from his everyday life. myStorey will highlight some of the clothing and accessories that Gay wears in everyday life along with some of the luxury items that help bring his swag like his Audermars Piguet watch.

Anyone can use myStorey, whether you’re the average Joe or a trendsetter, myStorey lets you highlight the things you wear everyday and then helps people discover those items and purchase them.

Other celebrities participating at launch include:

US Open Surf Champion Lakey Peterson
Fitness guru Chalene Johnson
Jacksonville Jaguars Quarterback Jordan Palmer
Miami Marlin’s player Bryan Petersen
Miami Marlin’s player Logan Morrison
Beauty Biz CEO and expert Sumita Batra
HoneynSilk.com fashion blogger Stephanie Liu
Beachmint’s Social Media Coordinator Vaneza Pitynski

myStorey seems like a very innovative platform, and with the star power they’ve recruited in the beginning they should be in good shape for a successful launch. We got a chance to talk with the team behind myStorey, check out the interview below.

Startup Communities: Celebrating Victories

Brad Feld, startup investor, co-founder of Techstars, co-founder of Foundry Group, Marathon Runner, and huge startup community evangelist offers lots of great advice in his recent book on startup communities. One of the things that he speaks about when talking about startup communities is celebrating a startup community victory.

Earlier this morning we reported that Memphis startup accelerator grad Restore Medical Solutions has raised a $2.5 million dollar series A round.

That’s a huge victory for not only Restore Medical Solutions but for the Memphis Startup Community.

Linkage:

Original story

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New York Startup: Self To Shelf Is A New Business To Business Market Place

New York based entrepreneurs Doug Crisona and Cyrus Park have created a new marketplace for businesses to market to other businesses. They call their New York startup Self To Shelf. They liken it to other marketplaces already out there like ebay and etsy but instead of onesie twosie operators with side businesses, their marketplace is for established businesses to sell their wares to other businesses without the need for their own e-commerce site.

Self to Shelf is a wholesale marketplace. If your looking for a place to sell your wares to other retailers, or you represent a retail shop, than this may be the platform for you. You can now get in front of a large and curated community of retailers and wholesalers without having to rifle through other folks, not so serious about their business, that can stifle sales and pollute a community.

“We read a newspaper article titled “Getting Your Product onto Retail shelves”. The story was about a man selling a gourmet food product who wanted to get into retail stores. His predicament was that he had a great product that his (small) customer base loved. However, he didn’t have the means to spread the word about his product to get the attention of stores. So he was forced to pound the pavement and go door-to-door, pitching his product. The article presented a few solutions: hiring a sales rep/product broker, or going to trade shows. From our experience, we’ve seen these traditional routes work well, but they can be expensive, time consuming, and very limiting by one’s budget and geography. So we got to talking about how an online marketplace, if done right, could really help to change this aspect of the industry. We started by talking to a lot of people in the industry and it grew from there.” Crisona told us in an interview.

The two cofounders are looking to help others break into retail which can be a very hard process going through traditional channels.

Check out the rest of the interview below.

Montreal Startup: JobBook Automagically Matches Users To Jobs

We’re all familiar with the old online job board model. You fill out a profile, then find the jobs you like and apply for them. Most jobs sites like Monster.com and HotJobs (Yahoo), would make it easy for you to apply by simply storing your resume information and then manually applying for a job. Montreal startup JobBook is one of the newer breed of job sites which matches you to jobs based on your profile.

The other thing that JobBook is doing is

Columbus Startup: Objra Provides An Easy Do It Yourself HTML 5 Platform

A one man startup in Columbus Ohio called Objra is making it easier for people with just a little bit of graphics experience to reach past animated gifs and do actual animation renders using HTML5. Objra’s founder Eddie Bowen created Objra after noticing the poor methods used to share graphics on sites like Reddit.

“It struck me that jpegs and gifs are terrible ways of sharing graphics, but there isn’t an easy alternative. It’s just one step from rendering vector graphics to animating vector graphics. Then a light bulb went on and I realized I was fumbling towards a great design product.” he told nibletz.com in an interview. With that Objra was born.

For lack of more technical verbage, Objra allows anyone to get to their website and create animations using simple drag and drop placement. You can watch the animations render before your eyes, edit, and change whatever you would like before downloading them to share. If you’re on a budget or looking for something fast and easy, Objra may be the way to go.

We got a chance to talk with Bowen about Objra. Check out our interview below.

Memphis Startup Restore Medical Raises $2.5 Million Seed Round

Restore Medical Solutions, Memphis startup, Zeroto510,funded startup

Shawn Flynn (L) Ryan Ramkhelawan (R) founders of Restore Medical Solutions

Memphis’ startup community has kicked it into high gear as of late. In 2012 Launch Your City, the organization behind the Seed Hatchery starutp accelerator, the Launch Pad free coworking space and Launch Memphis, the curriculum arm behind Memphis’ startup ecosystem, had a big year. They saw two cohorts go through their Seed Hatchery program this year. One group of web/tech entrepreneurs took their startups through Seed Hatchery. The other group went through a collaborative effort between Seed Hatchery and Memphis BioWorks called Zeroto510.

The Zeroto510 program is a medical device startup accelerator that relies on Bioworks for the medical part and Seed Hatchery for the startup, and business development portion of their training. After a rigorous accelerator program, and an intense demo day in May, the six startups in the program saw 85% follow on funding. Four of the graduating startup companies received $100,000 investments from MB Ventures and Innova. The fifth startup, Restore Medical Solutions, raised a $2.5 million dollar Series A round.

It’s no wonder that Restore Medical Solutions was able to close such a large round. Co-Founder Shawn Flynn announced that the company had a $3.75 million dollar purchase order, during his investor day pitch.

Restore Medical Solutions has come up with a concept and system to more efficiently sterilize surgical instruments. When we first met with Flynn and Co-Founder Ryan Ramkhelawan explained that not only was the current system for sterilizing surgical instruments filled with flaws, to a degree it’s also dangerous.

Currently surgical instruments are grouped in sets according to the surgery that the operating room is performing. The instruments are kept in a sterile container/tray until they are brought up to the surgical suite and used. However, if one piece of equipment is either missing, or shows signs of not being completely sterilized, the entire set is deemed unusable and another set is ordered up.

The problem with that is most hospitals don’t have a bunch of reserve sets for the operating rooms. The sterilization team has put together the sets based on that days surgeries. Waiting on instruments to be re-sterilized and recompiled can take hours. At that time the patient is either kept under anesthesia or they are woken up, either option can have risks.

Not only that but some hospitals still use sterilization procedures that are likened to the way silverware is washed in a restaurant, everything dumped on one big tray and run through a dishwasher type sterilization machine. The problem with that is the instruments at the bottom may not be as sterile as the instruments on the top. This is often the cause of hospital born infections.

Restore Medical Solutions system makes the process quicker, more efficient and completely sterile.

Flynn and Ramkhelawan get anxious and excited when talking about their process and the upside potential for hospitals. With the reduction in time, the more efficient sterilization and the cut down on infections, Restore Medical Solutions is in the business of sterilizing instruments, but more importantly to the bottom line, driving costs down. Quicker turn arounds in the sterilization process also mean quicker turn arounds in the operating rooms, and more surgeries.

How much money? We’re not talking a thousands here or a thousand there, we’re talking tens of millions of dollars per hospital.

The duo behind Restore Medical Solutions has already pitched a number of hospitals in Tennessee and along the east coast. To date they are proud to announce that they’ve at least secured a follow up meeting and in other cases, purchase orders.

While a $2.5 million dollar Series A round is great for the company and will allow them to start producing to fulfill their purchase orders, it wasn’t always easy. Both Ramkhelawan and Flynn quit their good paying day jobs in Atlanta to relocate to Memphis for the ZeroTo510 program. The program gave them a $50,000 seed round but waiting for that initial funding they were sneaker-strapping it like the rest of their cohort.

Both men left families back in Atlanta and Ramkhelawan and his wife had just had a new baby daughter. With kids, families, and houses in Atlanta these two middle aged entrepreneurs set out to live the ramen noodle eating, hipster lifestyle. They immediately went on the grind to make things happen.

And happen it did.

After finding out about the ZeroTo510 program from a friend of Flynn’s who has a marketing business in Memphis the two made the trip to Memphis to scope out the city and the program. They immediately fell in love with the town. They are sharing an apartment literally within feet from the new corporate headquarters for Restore Medical which officially opens Friday.

For what they’re doing, both entrepreneurs admit that the Memphis startup ecosystem is further along than things are in Atlanta. New initiatives have begun in Atlanta which will be great for the region but Memphis is already doing it. Also, Jackson Tennessee is doing it as well. Both entrepreneurs spend time in Jackson, helping to further that cities entrepreneurs along as well.

Flynn and Ramkelawan give a lot of credit to Launch Your City’s Eric Mathews and Bio Works’ Allan Daisley who were instrumental in the Zeroto510 programs inaugural class.

Linkage:

Check out Restore Medical here

Check out Zeroto510 here

Apply for Seed Hatchery’s next session here

No one covers high growth tech in the south east, like nibletz.com

Come to Memphis for this big gigantic startup conference here

UK Startup: Charity Kick, A Fundraising Platform With A Daring Twist

You know that crazy guy or gal in your group that will do just about anything? All you have to do is dare them? Well imagine if those dares could be done for pledges and the pledges were made for Charity? That’s the idea behind UK startup CharityKick.

Do you want to dare someone to bungee jump from a crazy place? Would you like to dare someone to eat 27 hot dogs in one sitting? Whatever the dare, you can raise money to entice someone to do it. But with CharityKick, the dare doesn’t actually have to take place.

For this to work you have to find someone daring, and you also have to find the dares. From there you can make a go out of fundraising by encouraging people to pledge money for the dares to be fulfilled. Take the hot dog guy for instance. Once someone accepts the challenge, you set up a pledge page and call on that persons friends, family members, co-workers, and heck, even complete strangers, to sponsor the dare. Once the dare is set, people can pledge funds for charity to egg the person on to do the dare.

Mat Wurm and Greg Fournier are the two crazy social entrepreneurs behind this big idea. They’re currently based in the UK but are establishing a presence in the United States as well. Of course everyone knows how crazy we Americans are.

We got a chance to talk with Fournier about Charity Kick. Check out our interview with him below.

Easily Build Facebook Fan Page Apps With Norwegian Startup iFrapp

More and more businesses, artists, musicians and even people are turning to Facebook fan pages to engage their audience. With that, the use of apps on Facebook Fan Pages continues to increase as well. It seems more and more people with Facebook fan pages want to engage their audience by holding contests, showing off products, embedding videos, sub pages, surveys and more. However most people think they can’t design these things on their own.

Well now they can, thanks to Norwegian startup iFrapp.

iFrapp is a do it yourself app builder for Facebook fan pages. It lets you take multiple types of engagement from your Facebook page, easily put together new features and then align them with your current themes and backgrounds.

The team at Norwegian social web agency Fennek and Friends created the startup to help companies big and small, increase their engagement on Facebook fan pages. They used their mix of experience in development, social media, innovation and marketing to come up with the tools baked into iFrapp.

We got a chance to talk with the team behind iFrapp, check out the interview below.

Holiday Goodies: Lego Comes Through For 11 Year Old With Asperger’s

From time to time I may drift on writing about startups during the holidays, one of my favorite times of the year. This is one of those times. I read a great story today found on consumerist.com.

Typically, theconsumerist.com works as a warning to buyers and consumers across the country and around the world. You usually find customer service worst practices, and read stories about big companies screwing over the lifeblood of their business.

Theconsumerist is also like a snopes.com for consumers of sorts. Sometimes when you’ve heard of a deal that’s too good to be true or a big box store running an ad for something that doesn’t quite add up, you can get the real deal from theconsumerist.com. While a lot of their stories aren’t “good guy” stories it’s an important site to keep up with the consumer world around you.

Well they changed up today, probably in that holiday spirit, and reported about something over the top that Lego has done. Lego has been the reigning king of the building block world. If Apple designed building blocks, they would undoubtedly be legos.

Well an 11 year old Massachusetts boy with Asperger’s Syndrome developed a love for Legos. The blocks were a toy that he used as part of his social therapy. A little over two years ago, James, saw a lego set he fell in love with, the Emerald Night Train Set. The set cost close to 100 dollars. It has over 1000 pieces and a working train when it’s all complete, with a motor.

After two years of saving birthday money, holiday money and allowance James finally had enough to get the beloved train set. But it turns out that the set had been discontinued. Once Lego discontinued the set the cost immediately doubled on Amazon and Ebay from collectors trying to make an extra buck. Of course no one is blaming them, that’s what happens with Lego sets. However $214 was out of James’ price range.

James took to emailing Lego, this is what he said:

“For two years I kept all the money I got for birthday and holiday gifts, some of my allowance and some money I got for participating in a research project. At last, a couple of months ago I had my $100 and was ready to buy the LEGO set of my dreams. My mom started looking for it online and could not find any. We checked the LEGO store in our area and they didn’t have it either.

I was completely crushed. You’ve stopped making it! I got another LEGO set, thinking I could forget about the Emerald Night, but every time I see it anywhere online I get very sad and disappointed. I still want the Emerald Night so badly, but there are none to be found. Do you have any at your corporate headquarters? Perhaps I could get one that way? If you have any other ideas, I would be happy to hear them. I have never wanted a LEGO set so badly ever in my life.”

Lego originally wrote back thanking him for writing and explaining the set had been discontinued. However 2 days before his next birthday James received a mysterious box in the mail with the following note:

‘The Emerald Night Train is a wonderful set, so we can understand why it is your dream to own it. I commend your willpower and patience to save money for over two years just to purchase this. We have located an Emerald Night Train for you, James, and included it in this package! I am sure you will enjoy building it and cherish your time playing with the train. Fans like you are why we are so lucky as a company. Who knows, maybe you will be working for The LEGO Group one day! You certainly have the heart and passion for our bricks to do so! Happy building, James!”

Watch this heartwarming video of when James received the Lego set in the mail accompanied by a letter from Megan the Lego employee who fulfilled James’ wish (It’s ok to cry)

A PR person with Lego explained that after they discontinue a set of Lego’s the company holds onto a few for archives, museums etc. They were able to locate the Emerald train set and sent it to James free of charge. James had purchased a different set of Lego’s with the $100 he saved up.

Linkage:

Source: Consumerist

Go on, check out Lego’s site

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California Teenage Serial Entrepreneur Creates EdTech Startup StatFuse

Jeet Banerjee is a 20 year old entrepreneur from Fullerton California, a town outside Los Angeles. He started his first startup at age 17 and sold it. Since then he’s had numerous other innovative ideas and he’s also written a book called “The Pursuit of Passion: Entrepreneurs Guide To Turn Hobbies Into Successful Businesses.”. Now he’s teamed up with 18 year old Supan Shah to create an EdTech startup called StatFuse, that really benefit students in their age group.

Their idea actually came out of a bet. Shah bet Banerjee that he could get into Harvard. There was a lot riding on this bet and neither young man wanted to wait the four months it takes to find out if he was accepted. They were shocked to find there wasn’t a website where they could quickly enter grades, extra curriculars and test scores to see if getting into Harvard was even a possibility.

Like all other great startups, this idea steam rolled into an entire suite of patent pending tools for prospective college students to use. Now StatFuse can estimate your chances at getting into a school, keep track of your applications, provide tips to improve chances of getting into colleges and even give virtual campus tours.

While there are other college preparation tools out there, StatFuse has been created by two incredibly intelligent founders who are currently at the age where their tools would be the most relevant.

We got a chance to interview Banerjee, check out our interview below.

Replace Your Next Events Sign In Sheet With Dallas Startup SimpeSign.In

A brother and sister founding team have come up with a new Dallas based startup, SimpleSign.in, that will replace the sign in sheet for your next event. We know that eventbrite has event management tools like sign in sheets, however SimpleSign.in allows groups and event organizers that don’t need everything else that comes with eventbrite to have an equally as easy to use sign in system.

Once on site, event attendees can use their smartphones to sign in to your event. Once they’re signed into the event they are “logged in” to the event. You can use this “login” to hold votes during your meeting and solicit instant feedback through the course of your event.

Professional and civic organizations, universities, clubs, churches, conferences and businesses can all benefit from the ease of use of SimpleSign.in

Simplesign.in has baked in features of much larger event software into something that can be used and planned for well in advance or set up on the fly.

Users hosting an event just log into simplesign.in and from their they can create an event in under a minute. An event host can set up how much info they want to capture at sign in including name, phone number, address, email address and other fields. When attendees arrive they’ll either scan the events QR code or insert the events password and then they’ll be logged into the event.

After everyone has signed in the event organizer will be emailed a .csv spreadsheet file that has all of the information they requested when they set up the event.

When event hosts use simplesign.in for the registration process ahead of the event the organizers can use the spreadsheet to create email lists, name badges and other important documents that go along with an event.

Nate Bleker and his older sister Anna Bleker are the founding team behind simplesign.in. Nate is handling the technical aspects while the design is being handled by Anna.

We got a chance to talk with Nate about SimpleSign.in, check out the interview below.

Accelerate Your Startup In Hawaii, BlueStartups Now Taking Applications For Spring

Who wouldn’t want to accelerate their early stage startup surrounded by blue water, sandy beaches and the tropical paradise that is Hawaii? Well we just heard, by way of our friends at Alohastartups.com, that Blue Startups is now taking applications for it’s Spring 2013 accelerator class.

Blue Startups is a member of the Global Accelerator Network (formerly TechStars accelerator network) and with that you get the standard $20,000 seed investment and $100,000 in services including things like web hosting, $60,000 in Microsoft Azure credits, $12,000 in SoftLayer hosting, $10,000 in PayPal transaction credits, as well as some other great business services that will help your startup.

The spring cohort will run from February 8 through May 9 2013 with Demo Day happening May 10th 2013. Brad Feld will be the keynote speaker at Blue Startups demo day.

Blue Startups features a mentor network of over 50 leading mentors reaching from China, Japan and Silicon Valley.

They will host up to 10 startups in their spring session and have work space available for up to three people per startup team. They will also have one on one meetings with an assigned mentor every week who will help develop the startup and the startup team and follow their progress throughout the session. Other mentor sessions will be available throughout the course of the program.

The early application deadline is December 15th with the final deadline January 15, 2013.

Linkage:

Learn more about Blue Startups here

Apply for their spring session here

More startup news from everywhere else can be found here

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