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Boston Startup: BRIGHTdriver Has Mobile Games Even The Driver Can Play

Do you get bored in the car? Sure you do,everybody does. Now in a lot of states, it’s illegal to do anything on your smartphone that requires you to actually hold the phone. Playing Angry Birds at a stop light is a little too risky, you don’t want to get a ticket, or cause an accident.

Well there’s got to be a way to play games in the car without actually holding the phone. A Boston startup incubating at Dog Patch Labs, called BRIGHTdriver has the answer, audio games.

BRIGHTdrivers unique and fun games are audio based and don’t require you to actually hold the phone to play. BRIGHTdrivers audio games are as safe as talking hands free on your mobile phone or yelling out the answers to the dj’s trivia question on the radio.

Currently BRIGHTdriver offers three titles. Volley, is their pub style trivia game. Careoke is BRIGHTdriver’s sing-a-long Karaoke game and Best Mile is a game that challenges you to drive your best (and safest) mile. They have plans to introduce more games as the platform gets off the ground.

BRIGHTdriver’s platform is set up to allow you to play by yourself or against others on the BRIGHTdriver network.

The BRIGHTdriver team has taken to Kickstarter to help fund their official launch. You can donate to their Kickstarter campaign here and get cool perks like early access to this exciting new platform

We got a chance to talk with BRIGHTdriver founder Matt Albrecht about his unique new spin on mobile gaming. Check out the interview below.

Knoxville Startup: FairMechanics Launches To Help You Find Fair Mechanics

Knoxville, a town in the great state of Tennessee with just under 200,000 people has an entrepreneurial revolution occurring right now. A community group called “Entrepreneurs of Knoxville” or EOK for short, has seen over 40 small businesses and startups launch.

EOK was founded in April 2008 by Leonard “Leo” R. Knight Jr and today it’s amassed over 950 members. They offer a variety of programming from entrepreneurial “support groups” to mentorship efforts and everything in between. They also hold work shops, lectures and a variety of other great events.

Knoxville is just one of nine entrepreneurial pockets across the state of Tennessee. In fact, with nine different high growth areas that means Tennessee residents are never more than an hour and a half away from an entrepreneurial hub. Also, all nine regions within Tennessee are participating in the upcoming Global Entrepreneurship week.

EOK Founder Leo Knight and EOK member Augustine Gattuso launched EOK’s latest startup “FairMechanics” on Thursday.

As you might imagine the goal behind FairMechanics is to help consumers find the most fair mechanic for their next repair needs. FairMechanics offers their platform for bidding out auto problems on the web, and mobile devices with an iOS and Android app.

Rather than just offering a directory of local mechanics, FairMechanics’, platform allows users to bid out the work they need done on their cars. FairMechanics is looking for mechanics to join their service. They’re offering a “first 10 bids” free program for early adopters on the mechanic side.

Their website doesn’t say the vetting process for the mechanics but we’d imagine that there is some kind of process set in order to be able to call the service “FairMechanics” in the first place.

Users will create a profile for their vehicle and post a job out for bid. Mechanics will get the bids delivered to them via email and then the user/shopper will decide on the best mechanic for the job, from the bids they received. A ratings system will be in place when the work is done so that feedback can be given to the mechanics so they can bid on future jobs.

The shopper in this scenario is just as integral to the business model as the mechanic. FairMechanics is helping the user/shopper get their repair work done at the best cost, with the best customer service and the quickest possible. On the mechanic side FairMechanics is giving out job leads for mechanics, and what mechanic would turn down a good quality lead.

Linkage.

Check out this great Knoxville startup here

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Forget Seeing In The Data Center, Albuquerque Startup ProCog Lets You See In The Data

Last month Google made a historic move and let reporters in to see some of it’s many data centers. These data centers manage search, gmail and all of the many other pieces of data that Google stores. In the photos (like the one on this page), showed very colorful pipes, wires, and stacks upon stacks of servers.

Now imagine if Google let you see what it was like inside the data. More specifically, imagine if you could see how the results of your search were scrubbed and located throughout the vast internet.

That’s what Albuquerque start up ProCog is doing. ProCog is a full scale search engine which is totally transparent. ProCog users can see every little bit of information that ProCog uses to deliver it’s search results. Such open access to the data used in search can be very useful when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine research.

ProCog is short for “Proficient Cognition”. The site returns more data than you could ever dream of in a single search engine tool. Information you would need to scour the internet for hours to find, is all right there in your ProCog search results. Every entry has an seo report, scoring, duplicates report, site inlinks, traffic, cached data and reindex. All of it compiled together in one easy to use tool.

ProCog boasts 1 billion pages indexed so far and it continues to grow.

We got a chance to talk to Steve Cook, Co-Founder of ProCog. Check out the interview below:

We Talk Mobile Payments & Brazilian Startup Culture With 500 Startups’ UniPay

We’re continuing our series of interviews with the latest class of Dave McClure’s world famous 500 startups. One of the reasons we love 500 startups is because of McClure’s commitment to startups in and outside of the valley. Sure the top secret lair and command center for 500 startups is based in the valley but McClure targets startups anywhere and everywhere. He’s also known for his geeks on a plane startup events that are literally all over the world.

Fitting right into McClure’s rockstar requirements is a mobile payments startup from Brazil called UniPay. Mobile Payments definitely aren’t new. Brazilian startups aren’t new either, however when you put them both together it does become a new concept. This is partially because credit card payments in Brazil are a beast in themselves. Unipay’s co-founder Tahiana D’Egmont tells us in the interview below that because of bureaucracy, high fees and an ambivalence with trust that runs in the Brazilian culture, electronic payments are a tough nut to crack.

UniPay is addressing the needs of those smaller merchants that don’t have access to credit card processing. If Payfirma is the “Square” for Canada, than UniPay is aiming to become the Square for Brazil.

Check out our interview with D’Egmont below. She tells us all about UniPay but she also tells us about Brazilian startup culture. One of the things we found most interesting is that most Brazilians are deathly scared of their ideas being stolen, and “fail fast” doesn’t work in Brazil, just yet because Brazilians are afraid of failure.

Read the interview below, D’Egmont does remind us that she’s new to the states and he’s still learning English.

Romanian Startup Appscend Streamlines App Building For Performance

A Romanian startup called Appscend is already one of the most popular app development houses in the country. They have 250 apps published in the Google Play and Apple iTunes App Store already. The startup employs 12 people at their home office in Romania and they plan on expanding this year into the US (New York) and Latin America (Chile).

Appscend offers their app development customers a more holistic approach to app development with the ability to go multi platform/cross platform and native at the same time. They’ve also taken the best pieces out of over 100+ development tools and streamlined them with a focus on performance when building out apps on any platform.

Sebastian Vaduva, Appscend’s CEO and co-founder told us:

finding the right tools for each phase of the app’s lifecycle is by far the most time intensive and resource consuming process for businesses trying to embrace mobility. This is the reason most of them fail or they postpone the process.

Vaduva says that with his companies “Ignite Markup Language” they’re able to produce and develop apps up to ten times as fast with no learning curve. They also provide a cloud based content system that Appscend customers can access directly giving their customers the advantage of being able to update their app without needing the original developer’s help.

Check out our interview with Vaduva below.

It’s Tea Time At 500 Startups With Hawaiian Startup Tealet

Subscription startups are blowing up these days. It seems there’s a subscription service or subscription box for just about anything (and everything). We’ve reported on, or interviewed, quite a few here at nibletz, including KlutchClub, Bulu Box, FlavrBox and hip hop artist Nas’ subscription startup 12 society.

Today we’ve got Hawaiian startup Tealet. Tealet is about sampling tea just as much as it is about discovering tea. Tealet co-founder Elyse Peterson told us in an interview “Tealet tells the stories of tea growers around the world and allows tea drinkers to explore these teas through a bi-monthly subscription service.”

After the customer gets their tea bi-monthly tea samples they can go back to the tealet website and order larger quantities of the teas they like.

Tealet isn’t about mass produced coffee house teas or even the teas that you can pick up at your local Whole Foods or Trader Joes. Through Peterson’s personal experience, connecting with actual tea growers around the world, Tealet members are getting access to the most interesting and best tasting farm grown teas in the world. Check out the interview below to read how Peterson fell in love with farm grown teas and the farmers who make it.

Mississippi Startup YeHive Share & Attend Events Socially! Launches Today

Typically when we get an email or pitch that has the words “event” and “app” in the same pitch, we get skeptical. The event space is a crowded space and an extremely hard nut to crack. We were actually referred to YeHive by our lawyer who is one of the leads in the firms emerging technologies practice. In other words he sees a lot of startups. I told our lawyer of my ambivalence about “event startups” but he insisted we check it out.

So Thursday morning we got a walk through of YeHive from the startups co-founder Brad Fuller.

YeHive isn’t about event discovery, it’s about making events more social. YeHive combines photos, videos, comments and a timeline to any event. Users can easily create an impromptu event or participate in an ongoing event. When you log into your YeHive account and then an event on YeHive all of your photos and videos get uploaded to the event. You can comment on other users photos and videos and also comment on the events timeline.

YeHive then archives all of the photos, videos and timeline entries, right now “forever”, Fuller told us. If you’ve set up a YeHive for a wedding, birthday party or even a camping trip you’ll be able to go back and check out the memories. If you participated in a YeHive for a sporting event you’ll be able to replay all the action directly from YeHive anytime you want.

Fuller and his co-founders haven’t cut any corners in building out YeHive. The website is built and functioning and for mobile they are debuting in the Google Play store and the Apple iTunes App Store today, simultaneously insuring just about anyone who wants to try it, can.

We got a chance to interview Fuller, check out the interview below.

Atlanta Startup Vir2o Sharing Everything In Real Time Improves In Person Relationships

Atlanta startup Vir2o, promises to be a whole new social experience. That’s quite a lofty statement, but after checking them out and talking with them, if executed correctly it will work.

Vir20 shares just about everything there is to share in real time, which improves actual in person relationships. You can go shopping with your friends on Vir2o. You can go to the movies with your friends on Vir2o. You can share photos with your friends on Vir2o. You can listen to and share music on Vir2o.

Anytime an entrepreneur wants to create a new social network or new social media outlet it’s immediately compared to Facebook. When Facebook burst onto the college scene and then opened up their doors to anyone over 13, no one believed they would overtake Myspace, but they did.

In an interview we did with Vir2o’s Founder,Kayode Aladesuyi, he mentioned sharing a lot. When we think of sharing and social media we naturally think of Facebook. Spaulding explains how Vir20 is different than Facebook “…doesn’t necessarily enhance social interaction between people, especially if there is physical distance between them. We wanted to bridge the gap between people who live in different parts of the world and provide them with a real-time interactive tool to bring them closer together”

Since Vir20 is all about live sharing, in real time, they consider themselves a “Live Community” versus a social network.

Check out the rest of our interview with Spaulding below.

200 Startups Participate In Startup Maryland’s Pitch Across Maryland Bus Tour

Late this past summer Startup Maryland co-founders Mike Binko and Julie Lenzer Kirk announced that they would be holding a one of a kind bus tour across the state of Maryland in September. Binko and Lenzer Kirk were able to procure a giant tour bus, get it wrapped and outfitted with a video studio, work space and a place for startups to sit and talk as it caravaned across the state.

The trip began September 11th and ended on September 28th. The bus adventure started on Maryland’s eastern shore and continued all the way to the communities in Western Maryland.

“The Pitch Across Maryland tour, which ran from September 11 – 28, 2012, held celebration and promotional rallies at 25 stops throughout the state of Maryland,” Lenzer Kirk, Startup Maryland Co-Chair said in a statement. “Culminating in the Last Stop, First Step party and celebration event at Merriweather Post Pavilion on September 28th this Tour has rightly placed the spotlight on the vitality in Maryland’s innovation economy.”

Both Lenzer Kirk and Binko are passionate about the startup community in the state of Maryland as is Howard County Executive and 2014 gubernatorial candidate Ken Ulman, who provided some financial backing for the trip. When the bus tour was announced Binko was optimistic that 40-50 startups would use the onboard video studio to do pitch as part of a state wide contest. When all was said and done 168 startups actually did pitches. Maryland’s sitting Governor, Martin O’Malley also pitched on the bus. Binko told a group of Startup America regional champions in October that O’Malley had contacted the bus team and asked to come and take a tour. Admission to that tour was a pitch video.

“These videos are a testament to the strength, dedication and diversity of Maryland’s entrepreneurial community,” said Binko in a news release. “When we launched the Pitch Across Maryland tour we thought we might have 40-50 entrepreneurs join us on the Tour Bus and pitch, so 168 is phenomenal. Including all the rallies and events we held more than 200 startups actually participated in the tour.”

In addition to the 168 startups that pitched another 30 or so startups came out to the 25 stops that were on the bus trip. Some even volunteered to help.

All 168 pitches (not including the governors) are posted to YouTube where anyone can vote for their favorite pitch. A prize will be awarded to the entrepreneur with the most “view” votes after the voting closes on December 31st. Startup Maryland will announce 7 finalists next week on November 7th. Those finalists will have a chance to pitch during the entrepreneurial expo November 13th.

Members of the judging panel include serial entrepreneur peers as well as representatives from TEDCO, DBED, universities, incubators/accelerators and economic development agencies (EDAs).

Linkage:

Get warmed up for Tuesday and go vote for your favorite pitch here

Stay in tune with Startup Maryland here

Make sure you click this link and sign up for “everywhereelse.co” here

Miami Startup: Clearci Simplifies Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence, a critical part of corporate strategy, and also one of the most misunderstood, has evolved tremendously since it was officially inaugurated in the mid 80’s. Now,clearCi, a company based out of Fort Lauderdale, FL, arrived to transform it by making information simpler and more accessible than ever. The practice, innocently confused by many as ‘spying’, consists of collection, classification and distribution of information about the competition in order to facilitate better strategic decisions.

The Internet changed the form in which secondary intelligence was collected since instead of retrieving it from supermarket aisles, pamphlets, books, and TV commercials, now it’s available online, and for the most part, what Competitive Intelligence (CI) professionals need to do is surf the Internet to gather information from numerous websites; still a time consuming proposition. Recently, with the evolution of search crawlers, some companies simplified the task, but now clearCi is making a big push by simplifying the process to unprecedented levels thanks to patent-pending algorithms and technology.

When asked to explain what the cloud-based SaaS platform does Co-Founder Joe Levy is reluctant to offer complicated explanations, rightfully using one sentence: “We offer software tools that help you keep track of your competition.” How so? The marketing team breaks it down further by saying that the technology works as an automated CI informant hired to monitor any competitor webpage or data source related to products, industries, markets, customers, vendors and even key partners. The tool cuts through the clutter caused by Big Data, and only relevant information is gathered and stored into an online portal that organizes data into channels, sharable folders, and reports, making data more manageable across an entire footprint.

Continue reading at our partner site Startropica.com

Berlin Startup: Versus IO, The Comparison Platform, Adds 240 Cities To Compare

The internet is great for comparison shopping. Every major online retailer like Amazon, Best Buy, Carphone Warehouse and everyone in between, offers some kind of side by side comparison of products. Just about every time I go to make a major electronics purchase, I comparison shop something online.

Well Berlin startup Versus IO is a comparison platform for just about anything in the world. Sure you may want to compare the iPhone 5 vs the Samsung Galaxy S 3, or the Galaxy Nexus vs the iPad Mini. But what if you wanted to compare other things? What if you wanted to take a European vacation and wanted to weigh France vs Italy. Well Versus IO allows you to do that comparison too.

Versus IO added 240 cities to compare using their platform. Just go to their website here and enter each of the two cities you want to compare (as seen below) and voila, instant comparison.

While the site is still in Beta the folks behind Versus IO plan on continuing expansion in to a wide range of verticals. Versus IO has been set up in such a way you should be able to compare just about anything.

Adding comparisons for things like hotels, cars, airlines, department stores and other things people use everyday will definitely make Versus IO a goto site for information. Review sites like Yelp are great but with Versus IO you can get the comparison info and do your own research based on the things you’re looking for.

With their new city comparison Versus IO used over 100 factors in their criteria for comparison. Including:

Education – universities
Crime rates – murder
Climate
Infrastructure – airports, stations
Safety – smoking ban
Economy and business – GDP
Culture – museums, art galleries
People – population, salaries, ethnic groups
And many more…

The results screen is graphically rich but once you drill down you can see where each city met in terms of those criteria factors. For the comparison that we tried, Baltimore vs Caracas, we saw that Baltimore was “Pro” for 17 reasons and Caracas was “Pro” for 12.

The comparison actually took milliseconds but the information returned was plentiful. The top reason to choose Baltimore over Caracas was the higher proportion of women. Baltimore is 53.4% women where Caracas is only 50.5%. Versus IO also found that there are 72.37% more Facebook users in Baltimore than Caracas. Surprisingly, we found out that Caracas has more murders than Baltimore.

Versus IO isn’t just a cute expansion on the hot or not concept, it does exactly what the founders say it does.

Now that they’ve implemented cities and made a step away from traditional electronics comparisons they have plans to increase their comparison engine to 640 verticals. In the coming year Versus IO plans to add real estate, food, credit cards, TVs, banks, plastic surgeons and motorcycles.

Linkage:

Go try it for yourself here

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New Jersey Startup SmartTests Streamlines Professional Test Study Guides

Are you a licensed real estate agent? Do you have your series 7? Are you a CPA? If you answered yes to any of those three questions and you’ve become licensed, or taken your test in the last few years it may have involved a mobile app study guide. More and more professional accreditation and licensing tests have started to offer their study materials for mobile devices, and specifically smartphones.

Bryan Van Demark, the cofounder of New Jersey startup SmartTests discovered first hand how cumbersome study apps can be for professional testing when he was studying for the CPA exam.

In researching this story we found that the study apps available for real estate licenses and CPA certifications were either inundated with extra buttons and functionality no sane person would need, or so light, you might as well be looking at your test study materials on a text editor.

SmartTests has solved that problem by offering the most robust study materials in an easy to understand, easy to navigate and appealing UI. The SmartTests team has baked functionality into the app study guides for the CPA exam, based on the way professionals actually study.

Currently SmartTests is available in a whole suite of apps for the Roger CPA Review. The company plans on building on the success of their Roger apps by offering study guide apps for similar, important professional testing.

Sure this may not be the sexiest startup, but it’s definitely one of the most useful, especially taking into consideration the fact that tests like these often lead to more lucrative career opportunities.

We got a chance to talk with SmartTests Co-Founder John Ceniza. Check out our interview below.

Indianapolis Startup LabDoor Is The Consumer Reports For Medicine & Supplements

St. Louis born, young, serial entrepreneur Neil Thanedar has been flying under the radar lately while he’s been working on his latest startup project. We ran into him at one of the Verge Indy startup events in Indianapolis over the summer. While he couldn’t officially say what he was working on, he gave us a little taste off the record. We couldn’t wait until his idea came to fruition and we could take the wraps off. Well the time is now.

Thanedar moved to Indianapolis after meeting Scott Case at the legendary Mark Cuban Shark Tank Season 3 Premiere Party. Thanedar was working on a concept and in a 1:1 session Case, the two startup geniuses hashed out what’s become LabDoor today, an extremely easy to use “consumer reports for medicine and supplements”.

Thanedar, like his father, is a lifelong scientist and entrepreneur. Thanedar’s latest endeavor, LabDoor, is scientific at the core, but a consumer tool that will become invaluable over time.

In a nutshell what LabDoor does, is allows any consumer with their smartphone app, the ability to scan the barcode of pharmaceutical or supplement product A and compare it with pharmaceutical or supplement product B. How much different is that Albuteral inhaler than Ventolin or Proventil. What about Lipitor and it’s generic counterpart? What about the Vitamin B capsules from Walmart vs the Vitamin B capsules from CVS?

All of those are great questions you’ve probably wondered once or twice. Or at least you have your own similar questions.

LabDoor provides the easiest means to make sure you’re taking the right stuff.

We got a chance to talk with Thanedar who actually hurt our feelings earlier this week when he told us he though he was dead to us since he got accepted into the World Famous (valley based) Rock Health Accelerator. Actually we couldn’t be more proud of this brilliant entrepreneur, who is passionate about helping other founders anytime, anywhere.

Check out the interview below.

Ohio Startup Huddlewoo Wants To Know What You’re Extraordinary At? Launches Today

A new startup based in Columbus Ohio and Phoenix Arizona, called Huddlewoo, is launching today. This video platform gives ordinary people like me and you access to people we admire. Huddlewoo also lets ordinary people show off the things that they are extraordinary at.

Through Huddlewoo’s unique platform you can schedule 1:1 video conversations with people that you may not get the opportunity to meet in person.

Huddlewoo users create a profile and highlight what they are extraordinary at. The user than sets up an availability calendar through a tool within the web app. Once those two things are in place the user can set a price for their time, they can then decide if they want to make a little extra income or donate the fees from the video sessions to charity.

Are you a Zen SEO master and want to share a few tips in private settings? How much do you think that information is worth? You can set the price and the times and wait for people to line up to have Huddlewoo sessions with you. Maybe you’re a great baker and want to share some kitchen tips for making the best cupcakes, you can do that too. Whatever you are extraordinary at and willing to share (even for money) can be added in your profile and easily discovered by other members of the Huddlewoo community.

This unique video, mentoring, online class hybrid, startup opens up in alpha today. We got a chance to talk with the Huddlewoo team as they prepared for their alpha launch.

Check out the interview below.