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Seattle Startup: WompMobile Promises Easy Web To Mobile Conversion

One of the most frustrating things for some web publishers is exactly how they’re going to get their sites onto mobile devices. Some choose to go with a native mobile app, meaning that a mobile app is created for each smartphone platform from scratch for the site. Others choose to use WordPress plugins or other competing platforms. We’re fortunate that our site scales to mobile nicely.

Seattle startup WompMobile is hoping to make the process much easier for their web publishing clients. WompMobile uses their own proprietary design engine to scale a desktop website to mobile maintaining the integrity of the desktop design. They promise to make “going mobile easy”.

While their process takes just under ten days, once the WompMobile team has run your website through their engine, every update the publisher makes to their website is instantly updated on the mobile version.

Madison Miner the company’s founder, says that their secret sauce is in their conversion engine. Things like fonts, styles, and branding remain consistent from web to mobile and the publisher doesn’t need to sacrifice their web presence by using a generic mobile format.

We got a chance to talk to Miner about WompMobile and the Seattle startup scene in the interview below.

Santa Monica Startup: DocRun To Challenge Legal Zoom, And Do It Better?

If you were to hear a pitch from a legal startup that planned to offer do it yourself access to legal forms, you would immediately think of LegalZoom right? Who would enter into a space crowded by a giant like LegalZoom? That would be as asinine as pitching an online auction site for collectibles, clothing, accessories and every day junk right?

Well Santa Monica based startup DocRun is doing just that. Of course their position is that they’re going to do it better.

DocRun has positioned itself to become the site to go to when small companies, and even startups need legal documents that may otherwise cost them thousands of dollars. When a user goes to the site they can create highly customizable, attorney level legal documents by answering a handful of relevant questions.

DocRun isn’t your run of the mill startup though. The company’s founder is Jennifer Reuting a nationally known expert on small business and corporate structuring. She is the author of the book “Limited Liability Companies For Dummies”.

This is also not her first foray into web platforms for small businesses. Reuting created InCorp.com the third largest registered agent service provider in the country and MyLLC.com a business entity formation service. Reuting has baked patent pending “artificial intelligence” into DocRun. This technology trumps LegalZoom’s one size fits all legal document service.

We got a chance to interview DocRun check out the interview below.

OpenTable And Fishbowl Veterans Join DC Startup Venga’ Rebrands To My Loyal Family

Back in March we brought you the story of Washington DC startup Venga. Venga began as a more traditional restaurant discovery platform similar to the likes of Urban Spoon. While they were accelerating at The Fort in Washington DC they pivoted to a more restaurant centric focus.

During their customer discovery they went to restaurants and talked to the owners to see what they really needed in an app.

When founders Sam von Pollaro and Winston Lord took to the streets to talk with the restaurants themselves they found that while traditional restaurant discovery apps could provide spikes in traffic, they weren’t receptive to the restaurant themselves. Apps like Open Table weren’t talking to the restaurant point of sale systems so there was no way the restaurants could take advantage of the well procured background data on the users.

Venga, with the help of Fortify, embarked on a new product to create mobile centric loyalty programs for customers. Now surveying customers on exits, and even rewarding them isn’t new however working it all back into a mobile focused program to benefit the customer and the restaurant is. Venga now has a tool that helps restaurants keep track of customers, their likes and dislikes and their service experiences. The restaurant takes that information, along with order information and then they can send each customer more targeted offers via email rather than a generic email blast.

Venga had already started picking up traction with their new product and have found that it was a great space to be in. Venga is data driven and pulls from customers previous checks to create detailed profiles, letting restaurant owners and marketers know exactly what hits their customers buttons and what will bring them back in for more.

The company has started ramping up their staff and with that they’ve brought on Fishbowl’s former Regional VP of Sales, Bob McKay as Vice President of Sales. Michelle Baker has also joined Venga as an account executive. Her experience includes marketing positions with Fishbowl and Open Table. They’ve also rebranded their consumer facing product as MyLoyalFamily.

“Bob and Michelle’s passion and demonstrated knowledge of the hospitality industry and its distinctive needs will be an invaluable asset to Venga as we continue to expand.”von Pollaro, said in a statement. “With Michael, we are getting one of the top software engineers in the area with expertise in scalability, which is critical in a business that collects and processes as much data as we do.”

Venga also beefed up their tech team by adding Michael Dumont as Lead Software Engineer.

Linkage:

Check out Venga here

Check out their consumer facing site here, MyLocalFamily

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Chicago Startup: clickInterview The Latest To Join Video Interview Space

A startup in Chicago called clickInterview is the latest to offer a video solution to recruiters, HR folks and perspective employers. clickInterview, like PitchPick in Austin among others, lets job candidates answer pre-screening interview questions in the comfort of their own home or wherever they happen to be when they feel like answering.

Legacy human resources folks aren’t entirely sold on the idea of pre-screening or interviewing candidates with pre-recorded videos. Naturally the candidate will only do the video at the best opportunity for them and of course they can prepare for the interview. It takes out some of the spontaneity of the interview.

Now with clickInterview and the other startups in the space no one is suggesting that they completely replace the actual in person interview, but rather use it in the first preliminary phase, eliminating the need to accommodate on site interviews.

Max Sperando, founder of clickInterview says that his secret sauce is in the design and ease of use. One check of their site and you’ll agree that it’s pleasing to the eye and simplifies the process.

Sperando is also hoping to give the candidates a little more control of their interview situation, again the part that “old school” HR folks don’t like.

clickInterview definitely has a chance to take over the video interview space if they can scale right. We got a chance to interview Sperando, check out the interview below.

Nashville Startup WannaDo Finds You What You Wanna Do

It seems like, on the surface, the event discovery space is a big space. When you peel it back though there aren’t many event discovery apps that are doing it right. The two we like the most are Louisville startup Impulcity and Nashville startup WannaDo.

Wannado, under the leadership of founder Steven Buhram, is starting out local in Nashville for now with plans on scaling out soon. Impulcity on the other hand is going all in, connecting their user base to music, and entertainment events nationwide and hyper local.

Wannado has a different approach though, than the average event discovery nut. The first thing that we noticed when testing Wannado in their home town was that everything was laid out in very easy to understand categories.

Play- obviously encompasses fun things to do, artsy stuff, plays and music (which Nashville has a lot of).

Work & Network is your guide t company events and career minded conference.

Eat & Drink, is pretty self explanatory

Learn, is all about learning and can be anything from health and wellness events to CPR courses.

You can even peel back layers and get to geek categories, nerd categories, artsy categories and more.

Once you find the event that’s for you, you can easily save it to your wannado list or share it using this unique share tool that allows you to share it by email, Facebook, text message of Twitter. Why not invite all your friends in the world to the great events you find on wannado.

That’s not the only way wannado differs from other traditional event discovery platforms though. Like any other app you can invite all of your Facebook friends to use wannado and you can see if any of your Facebook friends are currently using wannado. Naturally you’re going to trust a friends opinion about an event.

With wannado though, they also have guides, more seasoned people from an area that may know the lay of the land a little better. You can see what the guides are recommending or you can ask the guide something which makes the experience socially engaging.

So does it work?

Well in one night in Nashville we were able to use Wannado to take in Luke Bryan and Rodney Atkins at two different events free. We found some awesome hamburgers and realized we missed out on what would have been a fun startup breakfast event.

Comparatively speaking Wannado actually showed us more of what was going on in Nashville in one night than any other app we’ve tried. While it seems Buhram is comfortable with building scale with baby steps, if they could replicate this user experience to scale quickly across the country it could become our event app of choice for all events from seminars to cooking lessons to concerts.

Linkage:

Check out wannado here

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Israeli Startup Ringya, The First Collaborative Address Book For Smartphones?

An Israeli startup called Ringya has put an interesting new twist on the address book. They’ve taken, probably your most social set of data and added social functionality. Ringya allows users to share their address book, as much or as little of it as they want, as seamlessly as sharing a photo, video or other digital asset.

Sure you’ve always been able to share vcards and contacts via text, but Ringya groups contacts together any way that you like and than allows you to share them individually or in lists. Say you have a project management list, or a soccer team list, whatever list you have set up for contacts, if you need to easily share that list you can.

What’s even more interesting though is Ringya’s ability to turn paper lists into smartphone contact lists. Simply snap a picture of an actual paper contact list and Ringya will extract that information and put it into digital contact format and keep the list in tact.

In the interview below Gal Nucham, founder of Ringya, explains that all you have to do is snap a picture of a contact list and email it to a specific Ringya address, moments later you get the same list back, digitally. This would make migrating paper phone books, address books and black books a cinch.

It’s hard to believe that until now, no one has done this before. Check out our interview with Nucham, after the break.

Providence Startup: LoveGov, Politician Dating

With the second Presidential debate behind us and the third and final debate just days away, politics is on the forefront of everyone’s minds. No one with a Twitter account or Facebook account can escape the political races this year.

A new startup in Providence Rhode Island, is looking to add its hat to the political ring. The new startup called Lovegov is applying an algorithmic like approach based on user entries to political questions and statements to formulate possible candidate choices for the user. In other words Lovegov is the match.com for citizens to find political candidates to possibly vote for.

Now of course this is a machine designed to make the process easier and no machine should dictate the way you vote, however Lovegov is providing extremely valuable information to its citizen users.

For instance, you may not know where a candidate stands on issues that may be of importance to you and not necessarily a whole lot of others. Lovegov is going to pair you up with candidates that have commonalities with you. You may be surprised to find another candidate aligns more with you than the one you planned on voting for. What Lovegov really does is empowers voters with information so they can make a more conscious decision.

“These matching mechanisms help people understand and identify causes and organizations to get involved with,” Lovegov founder Joschka Tryba told masshightech,com . “And we feel this matching mechanism is innovative because it enables users to get immediate intuition as to how they relate to another political entity, person or group.”

Lovegov has three employees in their Providence headquarters and is seeing sign ups rapidly increase. For now they’re focusing on politics in New England, but plan a nationwide roll out over time.

Linkage:

Here’s Lovegov

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Memphis Entrepreneur Launches Phone & Personal Protection Startup Coyote Case

Memphis entrepreneur, Jonathan Page has just launched an Indiegogo campaign for his new startup Coyote Case. Coyote Case uniquely blends personal protection with phone protection.

Sure we’ve seen phone cases that hold pepper spray and even one that has a taser gun built in, but Page’s case is different. The Coyote Case features a 100db personal alarm which makes one heck of a noise if someone pushes the button and is being attacked. But in the infamous words of people like Billy Mays… But Wait There’s More…

With the Coyote Case there’s actually much more.

In addition to the personal protection alarm, Coyote Case has a bluetooth chip built into the case housing. It’s also integrated with a battery that will last well over a year. The BlueTooth is used to communicate with an app that’s on the smartphone. Using the app, a user can set up an emergency list for an outgoing text message.

Combining the Bluetooth technology, GPS and SMS technology the app within the phone will send an emergency text message to those on the list. If your alarm company, or University security is set up to receive text messages you can add those folks to your emergency list as well. When the app sends out the text message it will also send out your GPS coordinates so that your ICE (In Case Of Emergency) contacts know that you need assistance and exactly where you are.

The idea came to Page after his college aged niece visited him from Nashville last year. Page’s niece had told him that she was nearly attacked while walking back to her apartment at night. When Page found this out, not only was he scared for his niece he went out searching for more information .He found some startling statistics from the Department of Justice website that he talks to us about in the interview video below.

Not only were the statistics shocking for females in general but it was revealed that girls between 18-24 were at an even higher risk. When Page found this out he immediately set out on the idea for the Coyote Case.

Page is trying to launch Coyote Case without giving up any equity to traditional venture capital investors so he’s taken to Indiegogo where you can contribute to CoyoteCase and get early access to the life saving, and phone protecting case.

Check out our video interview with Page below and the links to the Coyote Case are in the Linkage section. Coyote Case will proudly be exhibiting at everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference, and you can too.

Here’s that video:

Linkage:

Check out Coyote Case here

Support their Indiegogo here

See them live and in person here

Seattle Startup Bibo Launches Social Drinking Beta App

There are very few areas where the phrase “There’s an app for that” doesn’t apply. The social drinking space is starting to produce a whole new crop of apps. On nibletz.com alone we’ve featured Wisconsin based startup Trinker, New York startup Drynk.me, Pittsburgh startup Grail, Baltimore startup BeerGivr, and Oklahoma startup Drink Easy.

Each one of these startups addresses social drinking in a different way. A few of them are about buying a buddy a drink either in person and charging it to your phone, or from afar. Some are about taking pictures of drinks and sharing them, while others are more like mobile based wine lists.

Seattle startup Bibo is hoping to become the social discovery platform for drinks. Their new iPhone app allows users to rate, and share beverages socially. It also allows you to search for drinks based on your physical location. Now you don’t have to walk into a strange bar or restaurant just to find out if they have your favorite craft beer or mixed drink. Bibo solves that for you in the palm of your hand.

Similarly to Drynk.me, Bibo wants to become the largest location based picture database of drinks in the world. The platform works in reverse as well. Say you go into a bar that you like for ambience and atmosphere but the bartender there doesn’t do your favorite cocktail. Well with Bibo you can show the bartender how to make that drink that will keep you coming back.

The co-founders of Bibo are no strangers to discovery. Natan Antolin, Mac McClian, Steve Jacobson met in late 2011 while working for a job search platform.

Bibo works with local bars, lounges, night clubs and restaurants to procure all of their drink data. From there restaurants and bars can be featured based on the drinks they serve.

At this point in time the drink space is anyones game. We’ll see if Bibo can bring it.

Linkage:

Check out Bibo here

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Chicago Startup StageBloc Is A Content Creation Platform For Everyone INTERVIEW

A new startup incubating at Chicago’s world famous 1871, has set out to create a new content creation platform that’s perfect for anyone and everyone. If you want to start a blog, you can do that on StageBloc. If you want to create photo and video albums, you can do that on StageBloc. If you want to create podcasts, again you can do that on StageBloc. If you’re into short form posts like status updates, you can do that as well. In fact you can do al that and monetize whatever pieces of it you want.

Now suppose you want to mix them all together. You can also do that using StageBloc’s robust platform. But even better, you can do as much or as little of it as you want. It’s like an all you care to eat buffet of content creation tools.

StageBloc makes it incredibly easy to create content in any way that you want. StageBloc founder Tom Giles was convinced that while Facebook and other sites are great for exposure, StageBloc is more about developing your brand online and also monetizing that brand.

This all in one approach to content creation means that if you use StageBloc you don’t need a blogger account, flickr account, YouTube account, Twitter account and Facebook account. You get all of those services in one. Now being realistic no ones going to shun their Facebook or their Twitter account but creating content and then having to move to another site to embed pictures and videos is a pain in the butt.

If you’re only in the mood for a short form post, you don’t have to leave the StageBloc dashboard, likewise if you’re in the mood to write a long Tumbler-esque post, you don’t need to leave the platform to do it.

StageBloc also recently launched their Mirrorgram app into the iOS app store and it’s quickly become the 11th ranked paid app in the store.

We got a chance to interview Giles. Check out the interview below.

Chicago Startup Everypurse Blows Out Kickstarter With PowerBag For Women

A new startup in Chicago has taken Kickstarter by storm with their integrated purse, charging bag. This bag designed for women, is a clutch style handbag on the outside. Inside though it has a battery charger that will fit most of the current line of smartphones via USB.

Integrating bags and power charging solutions isn’t new though. Michigan based Power Bag has been doing it now for two years. That company, founded by Homedics founder Ron Ferber, offers a full line of backpacks, rolling luggage, and messenger bags with integrated charging solutions and a variety of batteries for every work and travel scenario.

While Powerbag offers a “tablet bag” which I’ve personally been carrying around for nearly a year as a Murse (read man purse), it’s not a purse by any stretch for a woman.

In fact our reviews coordinator Allie Fox told Ferber and the PowerBag team personally that they were missing the boat by not offering a variety of stylish bags for women.

No worries now though because Everpurse has done a really good job of producing just that. The purses come in a variety of colors and in fact it looks like quite a few men have signed up on Kickstarter to buy a purse for themselves. Everpurse offers a black leather purse that looks no more feminine than half the leather iPad cases out on the market today.

To have the ability to charge your phone without the need for a plug is a definite plus, and far outweighs how unmanly carrying a purse around could be.

Everpurse trumps PowerBag in another department as well and that’s charging the device itself. All of the PowerBag products require the user to plug a standard “wall wart” AC charger into the wall and then into a weather protected charging mechanism on the bag, or directly into the battery pack.

Everpurse uses a white, stylish looking induction charger that you could easily put on a foyer table, coffee table or night stand. Simply place the Everpurse on top of the induction charger and you’re good to go.

People love it and so do we. We can’t believe that no one has taken this concept to market yet. The best part is that the product idea came from a busy social worker who realized her phone was dead after 6 hours on the go every day. People call me crazy because I carry several on the go charging apparatus but the one thing that drives me absolutely crazy is a dead phone.

Everyone seems to love Everpurse. They blew it out of the water on Kickstarter raising $238,187 of the $100,000 they aimed to raise.

Now that the Kickstarter campaign is over, start looking for Everpurse, soon.

Linkage:

Everpurse.com

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nibletz.com Becomes The First Site To Integrate With 500 Startups “Markerly”

Markerly founder Sarah Ware has teamed up with nibletz.com as their beta guinea pig

We’ve covered Markerly pretty in depth over the past few months. Their rockstar woman founder, Sarah Ware, will even be a panelist at the upcoming “everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference” event in February.

When we first started reporting on Markerly it was a browser plugin that allowed you to very easily highlight, clip and share any content on any website. Markerly allows you to share to your social networks, email or even your own personal Markerly account so that you can have text later on, and the source information from that text.

We installed the browser plugin a few months back and would share content from nibletz.com and other startup focused online magazines periodically using the Markerly tool.

Well, last month Ware and her DC based startup got accepted into Dave McClure’s 500 startups program in Mountain View California. We have a pretty good relationship with Ware and we weren’t surprised when she called to tell us that just under two weeks into the program they were making a mini-pivot.

We won’t go too much into what that mini-pivot is, we have to save some of the suspense for the 500 startups demo day early next year. But we will tell you that Markerly is now integrated within nibletz.com.

All you have to do is select text like you would to copy and paste, anywhere, in any article within nibletz.com. Regardless of whether you have the browser plugin or not, once you select the text you want a hover button will appear above the text. At the moment the button allows you to share the extracted text to Twitter, Facebook or by email.

When you share your highlight, those who check it out on your social networks will be taken to our original story and they’ll even be able to see the highlighted text within the story.

Markerly is a great tool in that regard. I’m willing to bet on a daily basis someone shares a link with me either by email or instant message and with that link, minimal text. Well the problem arises when I’m sent a link to a 1000 word story. I don’t have time to read 1000 words just to get to what someone else wants me to see. Using Markerly I can see the text that someone wants me to see within the entire body of the story so I can grab the context at my leisure.

While we’ve seen some of our readers adopt the browser plugin Markerly product and share across Facebook and Twitter, the team at Markerly has made it insanely easy for anyone to capture the experience (you see what I did there).

Right now it works on any desktop/laptop/PC/Mac browser and hopefully down the road it will work on Mobile as well.

So go for it, try it, select some text in this story and see what happens.

Markerly is actually solving two problems for nibletz.com. The first is the sharing problem I described above an also the more traditional social sharing problem. We have share buttons at the bottom of each and every story, and we encourage you to use them. However, we know that we have some long stories here at nibletz.com so when you can’t wait to share something, highlight it and send it out immediately using nibletz.com now powered by Markerly.

Linkage:

Check out Markerly here

500 startups here

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Tackle Your Student Loan Debt With New York Startup: Student Loan Hero

New York startup, and recent Startup Chile graduate, Student Loan Hero is looking to help college students after graduation. Student Loan Hero is the latest startup to join the growing student loan management space. Startups like Tuition.io, AllTuition and So Fi are also battling for the same college graduate users.

With a whopping $870 billion dollars in unpaid student loans in the United States alone, there probably won’t be a shortage of student loan startups.

While it was big business back in the late 90’s and the early part of the decade to enable websites with affiliate programs for low interest credit cards

Stay Tuned In With Memphis Startup StayTunedIn, Pitch Video

Over the weekend we brought you the story of Memphis entrepreneur Aaron Prather and his new idea, which is now called StayTunedIn. StayTunedIn is a new web based platform tool for publishers that allows publishers and editors to keep their finger on the pulse of their readers.

The concept is simple, in fact it’s so simple it’s one of those “Why didn’t I think of that” think of that kind of ideas, well the reason you didn’t think of it is because Prather did.

StayTunedIn is essentially a button that will automatically be placed at the end of a piece of content from a participating publisher. If you want follow up information on that particular piece of content, clicking the button will let the publisher/editor know that you want follow up and when they post a follow up story you’ll be notified.

Say you read a story about a local man that rescued people from a car wreck. Maybe you would like to know what happens next with the “hero” and the people he rescued. By clicking the button you’ll get that content.

Sure their are Google alerts and sites like reddit that offer a similar type of service however it’s not actual follow up and we all know that Google alerts can be messy. This is specific content from the same source. Now you can really keep track of a story.

On the publisher side the tool is great because it lets publishers and editors know exactly what their reading audience wants to read.

Publishing giants across the country have all echoed the same theme. For big sites like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, the problem isn’t readership the problem that they face is getting people to come back over and over again.

Raju Narsetti the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal’s digital network recently said:

“A promiscuous audience is our new reality. Are our news rooms ready to give them an experience worth coming back to, over and over again?”

Larry Kilman, the Deputy CEO of The World Association Of Newspapers echoed Narsetti’s sentiment saying:

“We are not losing readers, we are losing readership. Our industry challenge is engagement. Because someone is a subscriber does not make him a loyalist.”

One major way to get readers more engaged is to give them the content that they want. With StayTunedIn publishers have a better opportunity to do just that.

While Prather worked hard over 48 Hour Launch with a team of Memphis startup community members, he said the work is just beginning. The opportunity for StayTunedIn is too large to abandon after one weekend. In fact he already has commitments from some of the bigger local publications to try the service out when he has it up and running.

Check out his Sunday pitch video here:

Check out his Friday pitch here:

Linkage:

More 48 Hour Launch Coverage here

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