Texas Archives - Page 3 of 3 - Serious Startups

Interview With Austin Startup: NOOM, Next One’s On Me

Late last week we brought you the story about Baltimore startup BeerGivr which allows people to buy their friends beer using their mobile phone from a remote location, at participating beers. The concept is easy, if you can’t join your friends at the bar you can still pick up a round or buy the birthday girl/boy a shot or beer. You sign into the app, and let it know how many beers and voila its done. BeerGivr has partnered with bars in their hometown for testing. If you buy a friend a beer and they’re not at a participating bar or restaurant they can have that beer converted into Paypal dollars.

Well an Austin startup has taken a similar concept and expanded it to a wide variety of offerings primarily in the under $10 arena. With NOOM (Next One’s On Me), you can buy a gift for a friend using your mobile phone. Ideas include cupcakes,coffee, beers, lunch etc. You simply send your friend a virtual gift certificate through NOOM and they actually get the gift.

NOOM co-founder Sara Rodell gives us a great use case example in our interview below. Say you just met a great new friend or business colleague, it would be very awkward to shake hands and give them $5 or $10 and say “hey the next coffee is on me”, but with NOOM it’s a gesture appreciated, and used.

Right now NOOM is available in the Apple iTunes store and exclusively for Austin area merchants however they are expanding quickly and plan on bringing Houston on in the very near future. NOOM currently has 20 Austin area merchants participating including bakeries, ice cream shops, coffee shops, restaurants and bars.

Check out our interview with Rodell below

Startup Weekend Hits Houston Next Weekend July 27th

If you read nibletz.com or any other startup focused website for that matter than you’re familiar with Startup Weekend. The official Startup Weekend events are held in conjunction with Startup Weekend an organization in Seattle backed by the Kauffman Foundation. Over 200 Startup Weekend organizers can be found around the country and the world.

There are two startup weekends next weekend, Houston and Cincinnati. The Houston event is being held at Start Houston, 1121 Delano Street, Houston TX 77003. The event starts at 6pm on Friday and ends on Sunday at 9:00pm after the final pitches.

If you’re not familiar with an officially sanctioned Startup Weekend event, they kick off on Friday with pitches from anyone registered. You don’t have to have a team or be from a company. After all the initial presentations finish everyone votes on the ideas that will be built over the 54 hour weekend. Teams will be organically picked and everyone is encouraged to join a team even if their idea isn’t picked. Some startups, like Zaarly for instance, have come out of Startup Weekend. Zaarly is now a funded startup and their investors include Ashton Kutcher.

There’s no guarantee where the startup will go after Startup Weekend, but people who pitch and leave after their idea doesn’t get picked, could be leaving an opportunity of a lifetime.

Saturday the teams develop their idea, work on a proof of concept, code code code, and work with the mentors for Startup Weekend. In Houston the mentors are: Bryan Guido Hassin, CEO of Smart Office Energy Solutions; Jeff Reichman, Principal at January Advisors; Nathan Eror, Founder at Free Time Studios, and Mark Stretch a Startup Advisor.

On Saturday, and part of Sunday team swill pick the coach’s brains and the coach’s will pick apart their ideas, all in preparation of Sunday pitches.

Sunday the teams will pitch their final ideas to a group of judges who will provide vital feedback on the ideas, and sustainability and ask great questions that the startup teams will need to focus on to get to the next level. The coaches, minus Mark Stretch will all be judging the pitches on Sunday.

Startup Weekend events are fully catered and plenty of caffeine will be on hand.

If you’re ready to go hit the link below.

Linkage:

Startup Weekend Houston event information

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Houston Startup: JobPlotter Geographic Job Searching INTERVIEW

If you live in a big metro area or one of those areas like Hampton Roads Virginia that’s like nine cities built into one, than a job search can be painful based on the geography alone. Take Houston for example, a quick internet search revealed hundreds of jobs in Houston, most of the ads without addresses. Hmmm, what is someone to do, especially someone that doesn’t drive.

Never fear, a Houston entrepreneur has set out to solve that problem with a very interesting startup that meshes job searching and Google Maps. The startup, called JobPlotter, does exactly what you’d imagine with the background info we’ve provided, it plots available jobs on a Google Map.

Why didn’t you think of that? That’s easy because Paul Chittenden did. After experiencing the pain of looking for a job and then locating the job prospects on a map, in Houston.

In the interview below the break, Chittenden explains how he came about the idea for JobPlotter and how they are integrating job data into a Google Map. Now, JobPlotter users can find jobs, and then find where the job actually is.

Austin Startup: Top5Foods Is A Scoreboard For Restaurants

Alex Zwernemann, the founder of Austin based startup Top5Foods, created an easy to understand ratings/scoreboard style platform for restaurants. Top5Foods was the Statesman’s featured startup over the weekend. It takes a totally different approach to the food app and food site.

While apps like Urban Spoon serve up restaurants one at a time in a ratings based model, Top5Foods does exactly what the name suggests and serves them up according to the top 5. The data is crowdsourced across the network of Top5Foods users.

Top5Foods shows the restaurants and their local rankings but if you would prefer to see how they do across the entire network you can do that as well. If you’re a die hard foodie Top5Foods could serve as a great starting point for a trip to discover the best restaurants in the US. If your favorite restaurant in Austin is outranked by another restaurant in San Francisco, it may be worth the trip to San Francisco to try it out.

Zwernemann told the Statesman in an interview that the concept was born after a 2009 trip to San Francisco. He set out to find a couple great restaurants to go to and it took over 2 hours of research. Naturally he thought there was an easier way.

Top5Foods is unique because the user base is constantly moving restaurants up and down the scoreboard similar to a way a story moves on reedit or hacker news.

Top5Foods is already operational in Austin, Houston and Dallas. Zwernemann hopes to bring Philadelphia and Washington DC on soon as well.

He hopes to continue improving Top5Foods by adding more and more categories like top 5 lunch spots, top 5 happy hour spots etc.

Linkage:

Check out Top5Foods here at their website

Source: Austin Statesman

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5 Trending Angel List (Angel.co) Startups From Everywhere Else

Chances are if you read nibletz.com regularly, you are a startup, accelerator,incubator or angel from “everywhere else” just like us. So I’m sure you’ve probably noticed in your daily check to angel.co that all of the trending startups are almost always from Silicon Valley.

We’ve decided to highlight some of the trending startups from “everywhere else” that can be found on angel.co. So here’s our first list of five.

NetPlenish (Los Angeles)

NetPlenish is an innovative way to keep track of the things you regularly buy from the store, albeit razors, gatorade, coffee, socks, diapers etc. It hold all that information in a list for you in the cloud. NetPlenish then finds the best prices for everything on your list. This could be at K-Mart, WalMart, Target, Wahlgreen’s or which ever NetPlenish merchant partner has the best price.

Then, once a week you’re notified by NetPlenish either with a push notification or email, that they’ve done the research and found the best prices for the items you need. They get each item at the vendor with the best price and then voila in a few days your items are at your doorstep.

Talk about the king of convenience.

Find out more about NetPlenish here.

FormLabs, Boston

FormLabs in Boston is hoping to make 3D printers actually attainable. Right now companies like Makerbot and others have 3D printers that they can sell to you but they are often thousands of dollars.

The FormLabs 3D printer is going to be low-cost and print in 3D right out of the box.

Co-Founders Maxim Lobovsky and David Cranor are hiring right now and we’re hoping for a roll out soon because I want to start making action figures in my basement.

Find out more about Formlabs here

Mile High Organics, Boulder

We all know that Boulder has a thriving tech scene. In fact TechStars is based there and it’s like a little metropolis of all the next best ideas.

Mile High was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch section as the Nation’s First USDA -Certified Organic Online Grocer.

Mile High Organics is America’s First Certified Organic Online Grocer. Members order online and receive convenient, scheduled home or office delivery of local, organic, non-GMO (non-genetically modified) produce, dairy, meat, seafood, groceries; health, home and beauty products. We have over 500 SKUs and growing.

Mile High is backed by Dave McClure and 500 startups.

If you’re into organic food, now you can order from Mile High, get your every day supplies from NetPlenish and never have to leave the house again, where we know you’re incubating that next big startup.

Dallas Startup: Ustream’s Brad Hunstable Joins GuideHop’s Advisory Board

Texas native and co-founder and CEO of the world’s most popular live streaming network Ustream has, Brad Hunstable has joined the advisory board for Dallas startup Guidehop.

Guidhop allows users to create and market custom tours and experiences and share them with an online community.

For example, Aaron B, who is a founding member of Guidehop, offers a scooter tour of Austin. One of his tours on Guidehop is “Ride With a Scooter Gang”. For $40 a person he will take people on a scooter tour of downtown Austin. His tour is flexible, you can ride with him on his scooter, or he’ll get you your own to rent and lead you on the tour. If you don’t have any experience on a scooter he will take you to a school parking lot first to practice before hitting the sites. Not bad for $40 a person it’s comparable to what you would pay to rent a scooter in Miami without the tour.

In San Francisco, Ligia C will take you on a legends of Rock tour for $100 a person. The four hour tour includes the homes of Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia and Jimi Hendrix.

These aren’t professional touring companies these are user generated experiences, which makes Hunstables appointment to GuideHops advisory board even more meaningful. Hunstable’s Ustream is all about user generated streaming content.

More after the break
Read More…

Best State For Business In 2012: Texas Worst: California

Chief Executive Magazine has released their best and worst list for business in 2012 list in the latest issue of their magazine. The great news for “everywhere else” is that Texas topped the list.

Texas topped the list for the second year in a row. Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana, and Virginia followed behind Texas. One of the contributing factors to the success of Texas and Florida is that both states have the highest migration of people to their states from 2001 to 2009. On the bottom of the list New York (49) and California (50), have lost 1.6 million and 1.5 million respectively during the same time.

650 business leaders responded to the survey, which was 100 more than the previous year. The extra 100 survey respondents didn’t help California that’s ranked last on the list for 8 years. Here are some of there respondent comments about California, that Chief Executive posted to their website:

California is the worst! They are doing everything possible to drive a business out of their state. If it were not for the climate, they would have lost half their population.
California regulations, taxes and costs will leave only tech, life sciences and entertainment as viable. If you aren’t an elitist, no room here for the middle or working classes.
California treats business owners like criminals. California has different overtime policies for its own employees vs. private sector.
California’s labor regulation is a job killer. We will be moving our business out of the state, which will lose hundreds of jobs simply due to the poor regulatory environment.
California should secede from the union—it is like doing business in a foreign country, it has its own exchange rate, and its regulation is crazy.

In some ways this survey contrasts what’s going on in the startup world. We all know that the largest area for startups is Silicon Valley however Texas has thriving startup communities in Austin, Dallas and Houston. Most of the tech startups in the Valley area aren’t producing hundreds of thousands of jobs which is a driving force behind this survey.

Take Texas for instance. While many credit June 2009 for the end of the actual recession, the country as a whole. From June 2009 to July 2011 Texas added 328,000 jobs. During the same period there were 697,000 new jobs nationally. This means that the state of Texas accounted for 47% of the national net job creation.

Indiana received a lot of praise by the magazine for breaking into the top 5. They suggest that Indiana becoming the 23rd right to work state helped fuel that rating and could help them climb even higher in the future. One respondent said about Indiana “Indiana is like a breath of fresh air,” they told Chief Executive. “I have operated on both coasts, the Southeast and Chicago, and Indiana is where I will keep my manufacturing operations.”

Indiana’s startup community is heating up. They recently launched their StartupAmerica partnership to a packed house.

Linkage:

Read the whole report at Chief Executive’s website here

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Texas Startup: Stripper Turned Entrepreneur Creates “Naked Maid Service”

You may have caught a glimpse of this story as it’s been all over the net the past month or so. Melissa Borrett, a Lubbock Texas based former stripper has turned into an entrepreneur with a new startup that is turning heads. The company is called Lubbock Fantasy Maid Service and according to Borrett business is booming.

“We actually had problems with our phone lines, because they were so busy for a while,” Owner Melissa Borrett said.

Lubbock Fantasy Maid Service even came up as part of Jay Leno’s Monolog a couple of weeks back. Is it something to joke about? Not according to Borrett. She has 5 maids to date and they are of course quite popular. This isn’t some kind of escort service or in call prostitution. The maids do whatever work they are assigned to do which is asked in the online “order form” on the company website.

Some maids do a full house-cleaning just as their fully clothed counterparts would do. Maids have also been hired to serve drinks and food at parties as well. The maids did so well that Borrett also launched a male version of Fantasy Butlers. The butlers do housework, handyman work and yard work.

Borrett offers three types of maid services, lingerie, topless and nude. She goes to great lengths to outline safety policies as well as mentioning quite a few times that physical contact is not acceptable. She reminds users that the maids are there to be maids. Also, maids that are nude or topless will not work and will leave if there is anyone under 18 in the residence, and of course, like with an in-call escort service, security is standing by.

Borrett says she is doing well however she also reports that they do about five bookings per week. If all of the bookings were completely nude that would amount to $750 so we’re not sure how “well” they are doing.

What do you think about this startup idea? Let us know in comments:

Linkage:

Fantasy Maids website

Source: 14news.com

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Texas Startup Incubator Receives $6 Million And Takes A Name Change

A startup accelerator in Texas has just received a huge cash infusion and changed it’s name to honor it’s donor. Texas Venture Labs at the University of Texas, Austin, has just received $6 million dollars from Texas millionaire entrepreneur Jon Brumley.

Brumley made his fortune in energy, having founded six publicly traded oil and gas companies in the oil rich state of Texas. He also led the merger of Fort Worth Children’s Hospital and Cooks and was the chairman of the Texas state board of education in 1985. In 2005 Forbes named Brumley and his son, Johnny, “Enrepreneurs of the Year”.

“Texas Venture Labs is a gem in the Texas entrepreneurial ecosystem,” Brumley told The Statesman. “It provides critical, hands-on experience for aspiring entrepreneurs who learn as students the effort required to get a new venture through the financing process. For me, this gift is an opportunity to build our capacity to grow the economy of Texas, while giving a leg up to young entrepreneurs.”

Brumley is a University of Texas Alumni. Texas Venture Labs, which is part of the McCombs school of business, hopes to expand the program to other UT campuses with Brumley’s gift. UT has renamed the accelerator the Jon Brumley Texas Venture Lab.

The announcement comes on the heels of the annual “Global Venture Labs Investment Competition” which was held on the campus this week.

Linkage:

More on The Jon Brumley Texas Venture Lab here at their site

Source: The Statesman

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Houston Startup WhimseyBox To Take Up Residence At Excelerate Labs Chicago

Alicia DiRago, a Houston based entrepreneur is packing her bags for the windy city. Thank goodness it’s the spring and soon to be the summer as we’re not sure how well the climate change would effect a Texan. DiRago’s startup is Whimseybox. You’re probably thinking it’s another subscription box club. You are absolutely right, however the subscription box club keeps taking on different spins, this time the theme is crafts.

Every month Whimseybox (well Alicia) sends out a box of great craft samples. The box costs $15. Now she is careful to mention that the boxes aren’t “kits” in other words there are no instructions, just the samples and your imagination.

Now if you aren’t as creative as you’d like to be DiRago posts craft ideas on Whimseybox’s blog and at least 4 full tutorials every month in the project gallery.

But now it’s time for DiRago to focus on business and take Whimseybox to the next level. Admittedly she can’t send out as many boxes as she would like. Hopefully after her experience at the Excelerate Lab in Chicago she’ll have not only some capital but more know how to turn this great idea around.

DiRago and Whimseybox will join 9 other companies in this 2012 class. She will give up a small equity stake (last year it was 6%) in exchange for cash, working space, and mentorship. She will also get a convertible note from Chicago’s New World Ventures (last year candidates got a $50,000 note).

All of this will culminate with a DEMO day on August 29th where all the participants will show off their startups to Chicago’s thriving tech community.

Excelerate is moving this year to the swanky new 1871 startup center.

Linkage:

Find out more about Whimseybox here

Find out more about Excelerate Lab here

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Source: ChicagoBusiness.com