Tennessee Archives - Page 15 of 16

Video Interview With Memphis Startup Paytopia Making Payments Safer & Easier

There are a lot of payment startups out there today. There are consolidated payment solutions and mobile payment solutions coming out of the woodwork. None of them though are focused on convenience and safety, the way that Memphis startup Paytopia is.

We originally met Mike Hoffmeyer CEO and founder of Paytopia a few weeks back at 48 Hour Launch in Memphis. Hoffmeyer, like many others in Memphis isn’t just a local founder and CEO but he regularly gives back to the local startup community by mentoring, helping with pitches and pitching in at events like 48 Hour Launch. In fact when we met with him at our office hours in Memphis we were talking about the the startups he is helping at ZeroTo510 a medical device and biotech incubator in Memphis.

Hoffmeyer, a graduate of the most recent class at Seed Hatchery, loves helping other startups and of course working on Paytopia.

Hoffmeyer spent most of his career in the payment business. He worked with credit card processing and ACH processing (direct debit and checking account payments). Over the years he figured there had to be a better way then filling out these long, sometimes un-secure forms with all of your important information. Hoffmeyer set out to develop a system that was both easier and faster. That system is Paytopia.

In a nutshell Paytopia works like this.

If you buy something at an online merchant that uses the Paytopia system you will only need your email address and Paytopia pin. From there the merchant will ping your bank via the Paytopia system. Paytopia will send you a message with an authentication code for that transaction either in-app or SMS. You’ll then enter the authentication code into the transaction and voila, paid via your bank account.

Paytopia effectively takes a big bite out of payment fraud in the online environment by having a two step authentication system. The only way that a Paytopia customer could be defrauded was if the person committing the fraud had both the customers Paytopia pin and the authentication code delivered by app or SMS message. If someone tries to make a fraudulent Paytopia purchase the worst that can happen is the customer will get a bunch of text messages with authentication codes. Without that code, the fraudster can’t finish the transaction.

Check out more about this great new way to pay in the video below:

Linkage:

Find out more about Paytopia here at Paytopia.com

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more stories from “everywhere else”

Happy Fourth Of July, Help us cover the startups “everywhere else” in America here

Knoxville Startup: Virtuous Products Wins Business Plan Competition

Imagine if you could take recycled bottles and turn them into flooring, countertops and even outdoor casual furniture. Well you don’t have to imagine it anymore because Mark Wassenaar and his startup Virtuous Products Inc, have created it. Well at least the business plan for it.

The material called Sedonite uses recycled glass with the strength and look of resin or cement based products at a fraction of the cost, and much greener.

“We were impressed by all the entrepreneurs who took part in this competition,” Todd Napier, executive vice president of The Development Corporation of Knox County and co-presenter of the program with the Knoxville Chamber and Tech20/20 said. “Virtuous Products shows an enormous amount of promise and the judges indicated they expect big things from the start-up in the years to come.”

The Knoxville Chamber Business Plan Competition actually started back in April. That’s when Wassenaar submitted his original business plan. He was able to survive four rounds of judging which included written summaries and in person proof of concept presentations.

Tabletops made out of recycled glass and "sedonite" are why Virtuous Products won the Knoxville Chamber Competition (photo: Sedonite.com)

As the winner of the competition Virtuous Products wins:

$10,000 grant for start-up costs
$15,000 potential investment: Tech 20/20 Venture Start-up Fund
One-year’s rent at the Fairview Technology Center
Accounting services provided by Rodefer Moss & Company
Business coaching provided by CEO Advisors
IT Hosting/Services by The IT Company & Digital Crossing Networks
Legal Services by Kathleen Zitzman
Chamber membership by the Knoxville Chamber
Business coaching by Tech 20/20

Wassenaar has plans to use the prize money to purchase a glass crusher, which will allow him to take recycled beer bottles and smash them into a sand-like consistency. From there, his company takes the material and can put it into a molding with a proprietary bonding agent that creates a faux stone surface that is as strong and less expensive than most competitors on the market today.

“I’ve been in manufacturing my whole life. I try to get out but it just keeps coming back because there is so much creativity involved. I literally lie awake at night thinking of new ideas,” Mark Wassenaar, the founder and CEO of Virtuous Products said. “This competition, even if I didn’t win, it would have been an unbelievable opportunity because the competition really helped me along the way.”

Linkage:

Find out more about Sedonite and Vertous Products here

Find out more about the Knoxville Chamber here

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more stories from “everywhere else”

Startups helping startups, try this link out

Nashville Startup Populr.Me Could Be A Game Changer

Tennessee has some great startups. We saw a slew of them this past weekend during 48 Hour Launch, you can check out all of that coverage here. Now we move our coverage of startups “everywhere else” east to Nashville.

There’s a startup in Nashville called Populr.me which is bubbling under the radar. Populr.me is a self publishing platform that the company dubs a “Personalized One Page” or pop. They were aiming for a Q1 release, right now they are currently doing a beta sign up on their home page.

From what we can tell Populr.me’s POP platform has a variety of uses. You can use it for your resume and include multimedia. On the other end of that spectrum, companies can use it to build a one page for welcoming new employees, or a flier page for talking about a company event.

The company’s motto is “Richer than email and Faster than a website”. While there are plenty of self publishing platforms, Populr.me seems to offer simplicity and quickness as their top selling points. There isn’t a service out there that allows for this quick, one page publishing. Sure you can set up a Blogger blog or Word Press blog in just a few minutes but you have to fidget with themes, produce content, figure out what plugins you want for multimedia and then you can publish.

The Nashville based startup was founded by CEO Nicholas Holland and the rest of the team includes Jared Scheel (Chief Product Officer) and Daniel Nelson (Chief Technology Officer). A couple of weeks back the company tweeted that someone in their beta test had embedded a Starbucks gift card, pretty neat stuff.

Some folks around the web have compared Populr.me to popular site about.me. I think the concepts are inherently different. About.me is my one online destination site to link all my links in the world. Of course it can include my resume and other things, but it’s not the same. Populr.me is going to allow the user to make a resume page, or maybe a birthday party page, an invitation, all kinds of other easy to use tasks.

Nashville music and technology entrepreneur Mark Montgomery, is an investor in Populr.me because he feels that the service could be “a game changing venture that could boost Nashville’s position on the digital map” that according to Getahn Ward at the Tennessean.

Linkage:

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” check out these stories from “everywhere else” (there’s a lot of Memphis in there right now)

Memphis Startup: Yaddoog Final Pitch At 48 Hour Launch

Yaddoog, Good Day spelled backwards, was one of the best startups at 48 Hour Launch this weekend in Memphis. It was a great event overall with a lot of Memphis’ startup community supporting the entrepreneurs and their ideas all weekend long.

For first time startup founder Harold Strong, it was a weekend to get the idea living in his head out into the open and developed. According to the support team at Emerge Memphis Strong had been working on his pitch for days prior to Friday’s first pitches and the hard work then and over the weekend has paid off.

Problem: The answer to the question “How Was Your Day” is usually bull sh*t. 99% of people answer “fine”

Solution: Yaddoog wants to turn the question on it’s head. They do this with a new photosharing app. I said repeatedly all weekend long to people who asked for my feedback on the event, that it has been a longtime since I heard a good pitch for a photo sharing app, until Friday.

Yaddoog lets the user take a series of up to 24 photos (representative of hours in the day) and then publishes them all onto the Yaddoog website at the set time at the end of the day. The user can also assign two emotions to each picture like, happy, sad, pissed, etc. As Strong said in his presentation and in talks with us throughout the weekend, 24 photos tells a story.

After the event I was talking with David Traxler co-founder of Memphis startup Friendsignia and Eric Matthews CEO and Co-President of Launch YourCity and we all agreed that in addition to telling great stories of someones day Yaddoog would be great for special days like, a baby’s first day, or leading up to a kids first day at school. Weddings was another time that Yaddoog would be awesome.

Showing the roulette wheel of emotions a bride has leading up to the big moment would make a great story for Yaddoog.

Of course it’s not all about happy bappy days either. We’ve all had a college buddy who has had their picture taken and posted to Facebook after a night of drinking, pictures get progressively worse as the night ensues, with the final picture typically being a face full of Sharpie marker. Traxler said, wouldn’t it be great to see that guys day starting with his bowl of cornflakes the previous morning.

Indeed it would.

Traxler’s startup Friendsignia just graduated from the most recent SeedHatchery class last month and was paying his experience forward by mentoring Strong and the other startups all weekend long.

Strong admitted that they have a lot of work to do to get the app to market but he’s going to do it or die trying. Check out his final pitch from Sunday here:

Linkage

Checkout Yaddoog here on Facebook

Here’s more coverage from 48 Hour Launch

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” check out these stories from “everywhere else”

Interview With Memphis Startup Work For Pie, Seed Hatchery’s First Funded Startup

Memphis has got a great startup culture, ecosystem and community. Most of that happens at Emerge Memphis in downtown Memphis Tennessee. Emerge Memphis is a co-working space, home to SeedHatchery, LaunchMemphis and LaunchYourCity. It’s also home to Work For Pie.

Work For Pie is an online community for developers, with a focus on open-source developers. It’s a lot more than a LinkedIn for developers and the only thing like it in existence right now.

The company was founded in 2011 when Cliff McKinney met Brad Montgomery at a Launch 48 event at Emerge Memphis. The two tweaked a different idea into what Work For Pie has turned into today.

Work For Pie’s unique community allows developers to start a free profile that includes a portfolio of their development work. There is also a rating system involved to show the achievements of the developers in the community. The plan as they continue, is to create a site for businesses as well and then link the two so that businesses have a talent pool of top rated developers to choose from for their project.

They’ll be able to do that now that they’ve secured a a $300,000 round in funding. Work For Pie went through the first incubator class at SeedHatchery last year and they are the first startup to get any kind of substantial outside funding round. The two co-founders are excited about working on Work For Pie full-time.

As part of that great startup culture and eco-system in Memphis, they were onhand at 48 Hour Launch this year to help mentor the four startups that are building out in the weekend event. Friendsignia, Paytopia and a host of other EmergeMemphis companies and SeedHatchery graduates also spent the weekend at 48 Hour Launch paying their experience forward.

Check out our interview with both Cliff and Brad about Work For Pie and the startup culture in Memphis:

Memphis Startup Interview With Friendsignia Not Just Another Social Dashboard

So this is how Friendsignia went down. I got a tweet from Cole Hawkins, co-founder of Friendsignia, the other night. He pointed me to a blog entry written as a parody of Lord of the Rings. Truth be told at 36, I read the Hobbit as a kid but never saw Lord of The Rings, or read the book. If you want to test my geekyness, I’ve never seen or read a Harry Potter book, Twilight or the Hunger Games, and don’t get me started about Doctor Who.

So I knew the blog entry was good, I just didn’t get it. Were they taking on Facebook. Who in their right mind would pitch me taking on Facebook. No. So I forwarded the link to the blog post to one of my other editors and asked her to explain it to me. She said “it’s a social dashboard”. I mean that’s a little better than challenging Facebook but I’ve tried a good 40 to 50 social dashboards to date.

Once I was told that Friendsignia was a social dashboard. I took another look at it, and basically what it does is it narrows down your social feeds to the 150 most relevant people to you. This is based on Dunbar’s number which says that scientifically you can’t keep up with more than 150 relationships. Truth be told I have a hard time remember 25 but ok.

The next piece is that it narrows down your most relevant social contacts, which for a Power User (like myself with 100,000+ Twitter followers, is truly relevant).

Friendsignia is a recent graduate of Memphis’ Seed Hatchery incubator program and they are currently building out of Beta. They are also starting to raise funds. After spending time with the founders they’ve got a great idea for a product.

I tried it late last night and I’m working with the team so that they can handle power users with six figure followings. I will tell you on my personal Facebook account with nearly 1000 friends, it did awesome!

Check out the founder video interview below.

Check out more of our 48 Hour Launch coverage here

The 4 Memphis Startups Selected To Develop At 48 Hour Launch

LaunchMemphis, SeedHatchery and LaunchYourCity had over 20 startups pitch on Friday evening to try and secure a spot for development over the weekend at 48 hour launch. The field was great. There were all kinds of different pitches as you can see here at nibletz.com. Here are the four that were chosen by popular vote amongst their peers to develop.

ScrewPulp

ScrewPulp (as in Pulp Fiction, literature etc). Founder Richard Billings has an innovative new spin on the publishing and selling of e-books. Traditional models are flawed because the pricing is so spread out.

Screw Pulp’s distribution works like this. The first 100 copies of an e-book are distributed free in exchange for two things. Those two things are a social media mention across Twitter or Facebook and a star rating review. In other words, threw ScrewPulp an avid reader could read as many books as they want for free, as long as they were one of the first 100 people to download it, share it on social mean and then they give it a rating and review.

Now you can’t get another free book until both the share and the rating/review are completed. Why is this important? Because it drives feedback for the book and sharing of the book. You’re not obligated to give it a good review, just a review.

Now the next batch of books are $.99 then $1.99 and so on. Hear Billings describe it in the video below.

Yaddoog (Good Day Backwards)

I had to think to myself for a while, when was the last time a good photo sharing app was pitched. It’s been quite a while. However Friday night in Memphis a brand new idea for a photo sharing app was pitched and it’s great.

Founder Harold Strong started his pitch out by asking “How was your day” and pointing out that just about everyone in the world says “Fine”, which of course is a BS answer.

Strongs app idea has you take 24 pictures on your smartphone throughout your day. Then at the end of the day at a set time, the app uploads all 24 pictures to the Yaddoog site. Why not one by one, why 24? Because 24 pictures tells a story.

Watch the pitch below… It’s good…

Happy Potty

I know one entrepreneur who had a very similar idea called soflush.it two years ago but never developed it. No problem because Douglas Starnes and Daniel Pritchett have Happy Potty down pat.

Imagine you’re on a car trip and you have to go to the bathroom. When you pull over at the local BP station the restroom is a disaster and hasn’t been cleaned in days. Now imagine if you had an app with bathroom ratings on cleanliness, ease of use, hospitality etc.

Now, imagine that the app followed your GPS location and mapped out for you bathrooms that were open on your route, and clean. You would use that, you know you would.

I can’t wait to see the product they have at the end of the weekend. See the pitch below.

LostAPet

The idea here is great. The pitch was heartfelt, I think the name sucks but that’s because the pitch was so good.

James told a great story about finding a lost dog, spending hours researching what to do with a found dog and then distributing over 100 flyers. This process took hours.

During the presentation, James said “There’s no amber alert for pets”. That’s why I think the LostAPet name sucks so bad.. the name was right there in the pitch, something like “PetAlert””Doggie Alert”BowWowAlert” but nevertheless if 48 Hour Launch was a nationwide popular vote contest, this idea would be hard to beat. Everyone has a soft spot for pets and a nationwide bulletin board site to find and post lost dogs is something long needed.

It’s one of those ideas where you think “Why didn’t I think of that?”, because James did! Watch the video below, and maybe someone from the team will agree that the name could be better:

See more of our 48 Hour Launch coverage here

Memphis Startup: Bryant Williams Pitches Crowdfunding Based On Social Clout

Over 20 ideas for startups were pitched Friday evening at 48 Hour Launch in Memphis Tennessee. One of the great ideas was pitched by Memphis entrepreneur Bryant Williams.

Williams wants to take advantage of the JOBS Act and crowdfunding legislation slated to take effect next month. Williams has a rather unique approach though.

What he is hoping to do is have a startup, entrepreneur or whoever is looking for crowdfunding for their project to get it based on the merits of their social graph. Basically, someone looking to get crowdfunded via Williams’ new startup would have to have their Twitter and Facebook influence factored in.

While Indiegogo and Kickstarter both allow for comments on their pages, it’s just another social network to comment on. Why bother utilizing a new comment space when you’re already posting on Twitter and Facebook anyway.

First things first though, is we have to hear the rules on the JOBS act. The SEC has until July 4th to establish those guidelines. Check out Williams pitch below:

Linkage:

See More of our 48 hour launch coverage here

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more stories from “everywhere else”

Memphis Startup: Unique Love First To Pitch At 48 Hour Launch

Tonight kicks off 48 hour launch in Memphis Tennessee. Nibletz is on location covering this 48 hour event where 4 startup companies are going to launch. The event is a collaborative effort of Launch Memphis, Startup Hatchery and LaunchYour City and takes place at the Emerge Memphis campus in beautiful downtown Memphis.

Over 20 ideas were pitched during the two minute pitch sessions tonight. Of those pitches four have been selected to be built out over a weekend of fun and camaraderie for Memphis’ thriving startup scene.

The first two minute pitch was for a unique dating site called “Unique Love”. The site focuses on people who are looking to connect that have common unique loves, obsessions or phobias. Get your mind out of the gutter this is not about fetishes, and more about cat lovers, dog lovers, people who love the stars, or antiques, places to find die hard unique interests.

It’s also a please where two people can connect with common phobias. It may be great to hook up with someone who has the same fear of the dark, spiders, or crowds. You may end up finding someone who understands your unique situation. That’s what Unique Love is all about.

Check out founder Stark Miller, pitching in the video below:

5 Angel List (Angel.co) Startups In Memphis

Please don’t mistake me for an angel.co basher it’s a very useful tool. However, week in and week out we get an email from angel.co with the “trending startups” and they are almost always invariably from Silicon Valley and New York. That’s why we’ve developed this series to highlight angel.co startups from “everywhere else” it’s more of a compliment to angel.co rather than a bash. Oh and by the way it would be super cool if you followed Nibletz on angel.co

Today we’re taking a look at five angel.co listings form Memphis because it’s a big weekend for Memphis startups.

Seed Hatchery

First up is Seed Hatchery they’ve been an instrumental incubator and backer of the thriving startup scene in Memphis, they are also one of the sponsors for this weekends 48Hour Launch Memphis event.

Seed Hatchery was born out of venture capital firm Solidus Company in Nashville Tennessee. Solidus has invested over $112 million dollars in 48 companies over the last 24 years. According to Seed Hatchery’s website, the Solidus Company saw a gap in investment opportunities to stimulate growth in startups. They found that many companies needed a lot less money to start working on their ideas.

In December 2010, Vic Gatto of Solidus, Eric Matthews of Launch Memphis, and Gwin Scott established Seed Hatchery in Memphis to help “seed” growth of early stage startups.

Seed Hatchery held a Demo day last month for their most recent “class” of six startups that went through their incubator.

For more on SeedHatchery visit this site
For more on this weekend’s event in Memphis click here
Follow SeedHatchery on Angel.co here

Friendsignia

Friendsignia is a very intuitive social dashboard that has a lot of people talking. SeedHatchery founder Vic Gatto said of the new social startup:

“They solve the biggest pain point in social media today… too much noise.”

Based on their description alone I’m waiting for my beta invite. What Friendsignia does is pulls social data from Facebook and Twitter and filters out meaningless updates from strangers. Friendsignia delivers the 150 people that matter most to you.

This is perfect for me as I have over 100,000 followers on Twitter and try and follow a good deal back (60,000) however I haven’t been able to look at my “home” timeline in over two years it’s way too noisy, so I use lists and streams from Hootsuite. As their angel.co listing says “For a power user it’s a more efficient social dashboard”.

As with Gatto, for the professional it’s a better way to keep up with business contacts and associates who matter.

Now, not only is Friendsignia a new and more powerful social dashboard but they’ve got this really kick ass blog entry here to talk about what they do.

Find out more & request your beta invite here
Follow Friendsignia on angel.co here

PayTopia

PayTopia is a startup that promises a way to pay online without exposing your financial information. Sure this sounds a lot like PayPal, but so many people are burnt out on post E-Bay merger PayPal that they are jonesing for a new way of using their money online. PayPal complaints are up 70% post merger, with many longtime users switching away from PayPal because they no longer defend the “seller” in most transactions.

PayTopia has taken an innovative approach to paying online. Now your financial information and personal information is no longer at risk. PayTopia allows users to use their email addresses and a pin number to initiate payments.

Merchants submit payments to Paytopia, Paytopia texts the user with an authorization code and then the user gives the authorization code to the merchant to complete the payment.

In addition to providing user safety, it’s quicker than filling out an entire web based payment form.

Find out more about Paytopia here
Follow Paytopia on Angel.co here

StiQRd

I know that loyal readers of nibletz know how I feel about “loyalty and rewards” right about now. We called it right before SXSW that loyalty and rewards were going to replace group couponing and they have. However Memphis based Stiqurd (Stickered) has a couple points up their sleeves.

First off, StiQRd CEO Aaron Prather has a background in restaurants. Before StiQRd he owned his own restaurants. He felt a serious pain point with current loyalty offerings. You could go the cheap route with untraceable punch cards. Or you could spend thousands of dollars, which just isn’t in the margin of a restaurant, to do a swipe card.

StiQRd solves that problem by putting the loyalty and reward piece in the phone.

StiQRd is a QR code based reward and loyalty app for iPhone and Android. On the merchant side they offer a comprehensive dashboard to track visits, purchases and points for their most loyal customers.

As we’ve heard ever so often 15% of the top loyal customers can account for up to 50% of a restaurants revenue. With StiQRd everything is kept in one place, your phone.

StiQRd is currently leading the 1-99 employees category in the social madness competition in Memphis. Voting ends June 19th

Check out StiQRd here at their website
Download the Android app here at the Google Play Store
Check out the iOS app here in the iTunes store
Follow StiQRd on Angel.co

Work For Pie

Work for Pie is a community for open source developers. They describe themselves as a bit like Klout (not sure why anyone would want to do that) and a bit like LinkedIn, but for open source developers.

The social community for open source developers allows developers to collaborate with each other and source each other for help with their projects. Users can also recommend and refer their fellow open source developers.

Their intuitive profile platform highlights not just their biography points but also their coding skills and work history. They also have a point based system based on recommendations and referrals so that if you’re looking for a certain type of developer you can find not just that type of developer but the best developers as well.

Last month Work For Pie closed on a $300,000 round of funding.

Check out Work For Pie on their website here
Follow them on angel.co here

Memphis Startups: Launch Memphis Holding 48 Hour Launch Event This Weekend

This weekend if you’re in the Memphis area and an entrepreneur you should probably go ahead and skip the heat and humidity and head indoors to EmergeMemphis (516 Tennessee Street) to Launch Memphis 48 hour launch event.

The event takes the format of a typical startup weekend but your time is actually shaved down six hours.

Friday will start off with a 2 minute pitch contest for ideas that entrepreneurs have.From there teams will be put together to launch these new ideas and the teams will have until Sunday evening at 7pm to build their idea, test their idea and present it to the crowd.

This event will be great for the startup community in Memphis and for entrepreneurs to test out ideas. As with the 54 hour startup weekend events across the world, some entrepreneurs take ideas that they aren’t 100% sure on and flesh them out. We’ve seen some great startups born out of a weekend’s worth of work.

More after the break
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Nashville Startup: Interview With Rentstuff CEO Chris Jaeger

If you’ve got nice stuff that sits around a bit you can make money by renting. Say you have a mountain bike that you never use or perhaps a lawnmower that only gets a work out very two weeks? Well with rentstuff.com, a Nashville startup, your stuff can make money for you.

Rentstuff.com is a localized marketplace set up to help local people rent stuff to each other. Everything from dome tents to Dyson vacuum cleaners can be found for rent on rentstuff.com at a decent rate. The site even offers a quick calculator to show you an idea of what your stuff should rent for by the day.

The company protects your stuff by allowing you to charge a security deposit that puts the deposit amount on an authorization hold on the renters credit card. Provided everything goes well, the user gets their stuff back and the renter gets their deposit back. Rentstuff also has a community feedback system for renters and users. This way the renter knows that the person renting the property is trusted and vice versa.

We got a chance to interview the CEO of Rent Stuff, Chris Jaeger.

Who are the founders for rentstuff.com and what is your/are their backgrounds before starting rentstuff.com?

I founded RentStuff.com back in January 2010 along with my twin brother Robert Jaege (COO) and Adam Albright (CTO). Prior to starting the company, Robert and I were both working in Finance in New York City, and Adam was completing the first year of his MBA at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. Robert and I connected with Adam through mutual friends.

How did you come up with the idea because it’s brilliant?

Robert and I came up with the initial concept back in 2008. We were both frustrated after spending countless hours trying to track down kayaks and bikes to rent for weekend trips from small rental shops all over New York City. At the time, we were both living in a high rise building and knew there was a good chance that someone in our building or at least in our neighborhood had what we needed. However, there was no organized system to easily connect people who had stuff with people who wanted access to that stuff on a temporary basis. Our company solves the need to connect renters and lenders in a better way.

More after the break
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Nashville Startup: Taigan Lets You Shop The World From The Comfort Of Your Own Home

The days of wandering the halls of a mall in search for rare shops with cool, exquisite, beautiful things are long gone. It’s rare that you find an independent shop keeper who is willing to put in the overhead it costs to be in the nicer malls typically anchored with a Nordstrom, Neimans, Bloomingdales or Crate and Barrel. Boutique shops can be found on the strips of the more popular touristy towns but more often than not you find yourself paying 2 to 3 times more than you should because of the address.

If you’re one of those people that enjoys shopping boutiques and loves a good treasure hunt at a store off the beaten path, then you need to pay attention to Taigan and how they let you shop the world from your computer chair, or smartphone.

Taigan is like an online mall comprised of boutiques and individually owned shops. Maybe you’ve shopped at a handmade jewelry store nestled into a backstreet in Georgetown. Perhaps you found nice cashmere sweaters and artisan designer clothes at a shop on Main street in middle America. Those kinds of stores and more are curated and then added to the wide array of merchants you can find at Taigan.com

As you will find out in our interview with Taigan’s CEO Elizabeth Nichols, this unique, well curated online community of shops is the brain child of Mary Catherine McLellan and Mark McDonald. Nichols was a hired CEO who had built her own shopping center development company from start to going public. In our interview Nichols highlights how Taigan is uniquely different and an amazing experience.

The other thing that sets Taigan apart from anything even remotely similar is that they vet all of their merchants, you can’t just sign up and have a store front at Taigan. The Taigan team travels around the country, and the world to see the merchants using their service. If they can’t get to a merchant they require a chance to review the products in hand to make sure that they are good quality and that the merchant isn’t fly by night.

One other thing we will touch on in the interview is how when we began working on this story I noticed that while the items in the merchant stores may be on the high end of the quality scale, the Taigan team isn’t snobby or snooty and just about everyone feels like they belong at Taigan and can find something they like using Taigan.

Interview after the break
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Nashville Startup: Justapinch Wins Two Big Honors; Validates Series A Round

Justapinch, is a Nashville startup in the coveted recipe space. Although it may seem it’s the average recipe repository, they do boast the largest online collection of user submitted recipes in the world. In fact they have over 90,000 recipes available on the site.

Justapinch is a subsidiary of two year old American Hometown Media. As the company name suggests they like to build communities, like justapinch, that focus on user submitted content. That’s been a recipe for success so far for AHM and it’s CEO Dan Hammond (you see what we did there?).

How successful has AHM and justapinch been? Well they were recently named one of Nashville’s 25 most innovative technology companies by the Nashville Post. While that’s an honor in itself, Hammond was named Nashville’s Entrepreneur of the Year by both the Nashville Post and the Nashville City Paper.

Just five months ago the social media startup received a series A round of 4 million dollars. Nashville Capital Network’s Tennessee Angel Fund and affiliated angels, Tennessee Community Ventures, Limestone Fund, and Solidus Company participated in the round.

“The site’s fast growth, engaged user base and proprietary programming were key factors for our group’s investment decision,” says Sid Chambless, Executive Director of Nashville Capital Network. “We were also drawn to the strong management team and their successful track record in previous business ventures. These recent awards only reaffirm our group’s decision to support Just A Pinch.”

More after the break
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