Wisconsin Archives - Page 2 of 2

Madison Startup: Moxe Health Applications – Triage.me

Triage.me is a solution for one of the biggest issues within the U.S. healthcare system – unnecessary trips to the Emergency Room. At the Milwaukee BuildHealth Hack-a-thon this idea was born from the challenge: “Reduce the number of ED (Emergency Department) visits for non-emergent care in Milwaukee County.”

We recently finished the second leg of our “Nibletz Sneaker Strapped Nationwide Road Trip.” We met Moxe Health’s CEO Dan Wilson while in Madison, his CTO was not available but I was able to find his description about how Triage.me works:

Providing people with the tools they need to find appropriate care everywhere saves everyone, hospitals and patients, money and time. Patients receive a SMS from triage.me post emergency room discharge. By sending a text to triage.me with their problem and current address, we route the person towards the nearest clinic, providing the address and a link to directions (for smartphone users). Many clinics that work with the underinsured also often have variable hours and locations. We’ve made it easy for these clinics to update their hours and location via SMS so that we can better route triage.me users to locations.

This is a huge issue that faces the current health care system, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) estimates that 50% of the 121 million emergency room visits in 2011 could have been handled in a primary care situation. The typical emergency room visit costs an average of $700 versus $150 for a primary care physician possibly reducing costs by $550.

We met Moxe Health’s Dan Wilson (CEO) while we were at Murfie HQ in Madison Wisconsin (coverage coming soon). He began explaining where the idea for triage.me began and where they’ve presented so far. It began at BuildHealth and a few weeks later they presented at Health Data Initiative: Health Datapalooza

A mere 50 days separated the two events and Dan blogged a few times about the experience:

Blog post 2…We’re now full steam ahead on triage.me and have some exciting things in store. Exactly 50 days after conceptual, triage.me will launch on June 5 for public use in Milwaukee and DC. We’ve started mapping out ways to expand triage.me to make it even better.

Blog post 3…So, we had 4 weeks to design a booth and rewrite an entire product. Oh, and Mark was already committed to working 30 hours a week in Chicago. We called in whatever favors we could muster and got some wonderful help from Abby Larner reworking the front-end design. Aurora stepped in to help with the booth and drove one of their display boards across the city so we could pick it up.

Where are we now? Mark and I are fully committed to building triage.me into the platform we know it can be. We’ve received a lot of positive feedback and guidance over the last few weeks and there ia a lot of thanks due.

Stay tuned, this ride’s just getting started!

Triage.me was presented at the Health Datapalooza (video below). Descriptions of both BuildHealth and HDI can be found below.

triage.me [Moxe Health] from HDI Forum on Vimeo.

BuildHealth is a context design for enabling collaborative conversation, engagement and accountability around the idea of good health.

Our definition of health is holistic: it is being physically, mentally, emotionally, economically, environmentally and socially balanced. With such a broad definition, the mission is currently focused on the Greater Milwaukee area in order to be effective. The core functions of the BuildHealth organization are facilitation and community alignment. Our intent is to avoid duplication of services, to overcome silo-ing and territorialization and to empower community at its most basic level. We believe each community already has what is needs to become accountable for its state of health.

Health Data Initiative’s: Health Datapalooza

The Health Data Initiative Forum III: The Health Datapalooza was held June 5 and 6, 2012, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. The event brought together a diverse group of more than 1,500 data experts, technology developers, entrepreneurs, policy makers, health care system leaders, and community advocates to support innovative applications of health and health care data.

Links to Everywhere Else:

Moxe Health Applications triage.me

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Wisconsin Startup: DateCheckPro Keeps Your Inventory Fresh, INTERVIEW

One of the things I always bring up here at nibletz.com is the fact that sometimes the most useful startups aren’t the sexiest startups. Such is the case with DateCheckPro. DateCheckPro is a startup based in Whitewater Wisconsin and their main objective is to help keep store inventory fresh.

Date Check Pro is a cloud based solution for grocer’s to keep up with the ever important expiration dates. Andrew Hoeft the founder of Date Check Pro has done a great job of creating an easy to navigate cloud based platform and native apps for both iPhone and iPad.

Grocer’s can keep up with their expiration dates now. Date Check Pro reminds the grocer when products are coming up to their expiration dates which enables them to rotate stock or possibly put products on sale to get them out of the store before they expire and their money is wasted.

Hoeft is a student at UW-Whitewater, in between that and starting Date Check Pro we got a chance to interview him. Check out the interview below:

Madison Wisconsin Hosting User Experience Conference UXMAD July 19-21st

Seasoned business and technology event planners Jim and Jennifer Remsik have brought some great events to the city of Madison Wisconsin. Now they’re venturing out for another new conference which we’re sure is going to be a hit. The UXMAD conference is being held at the Overture Center on July 19-21 and is all about user experience.

Day 1 which is Thursday July 19th will feature a day filled with hands on workshops provided by top user experience talent including Ben Reinhart and Todd Larsen. Their workshop, which runs all day with a lunch break in the middle, is on Javascript. The other all day workshop is “Guerilla Design & Research Methods”.

Day 2 and 3 will feature top notch speakers including Andrew Maier, Founder of UXBooth; Jina Bolton, Product Designer at DO; Dale Sande, User Interface Engineer at Getty Images; Jeanne Carpenter, Founder of Wisconsin Cheese Originals; Carl Smith, Chief Keeper Upper at nGen Works and Jessie Shternshus, Founder of the Improv Effect.

Of course the conference also has great after parties on all three nights.

In an interesting twist the Remsik’s want attendees to experience all that downtown Madison has to offer. Instead of a traditional brown bag or boxed lunch, or even a catered lunch, UXMAD will have an extended lunch period and attendees will be given a food allowance to experience the food carts and restaurants in close proximity to the conference. Jim Remsik said: Madison is a city that is easy to fall in love with, all we had to do was play matchmaker.”

On our recent trip to Madison Cameron and I had great food from restaurants like Merchant and the Dane and we were even able to take in a few food truck delights because our trip to Madison was during their first concert on the square of this summer season. Madison is indeed one of the coolest and nicest cities we’ve been too.

It’s not too late to get signed up for UXMAD. The entire conference package is $299 which is a far cry from what a conference of this type would typically cost. Also the organizers tell us there are easter egg tweets available for $50 off, if you check out the speaker list. Links are below.

Here have some links

For information on the UXMAD event click here

To find those easter egg $50 off tweets go to the speaker page here

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Madison Startup: SeatSwapr Facilitates That Airline Seat Swap For You

Last week, when we stopped in Madison Wisconsin as part of the Nibletz sneaker strapped, nationwide startup road trip we took office hours with 10 hungry entrepreneurs and startup founders. One of those founders was Thomas Mueller who is hoping to take something that happens on lots of airlines, streamline it and execute it through an app.

Seat swapping is nothing new. A lot of people get on an airplane and realize for some reason or another the seat that they picked or have been assigned isn’t going to work out. At that point, if the plane is full, the passenger is stuck. Sometimes when this happens you’ll hear people trading seats or even selling their seats. In fact I’ve done this a number of times. I often select an exit row seat and then someone really tall comes along and wants the seat with the extra leg room. More often than not I’m offered between $20 and $60 to swap seats. (as long as they’re coming from an aisle seat I typically do it. I don’t do window seats, you get out of the plane quicker on the aisle).

Well Mueller is also very familiar with this practice. Every now and then you’ll see seat swap requests on major flights happen on Twitter. Typically the bi-coastal NY/SF or NY/LA flights have the most traffic on Twitter. Tweets will read “I’m on NY/LA Flight XXX and need an aisle seat $50”.

Interestingly enough the flight attendants don’t seem to care as long as you don’t delay them starting their safety instructions, and of course don’t interrupt the flow of other passengers getting to their seats.

Well Mueller realizes that websites like seatguru and seatexpert already know which seats are the best. Other sites like tripit know what flight your on and of course all the airlines offer viewable maps online of the inside of the plane so you can see where your seat is.

When you put all this information together and then tie it in with a mobile app you have the opportunity to create a seat swapping app.

Now it’s not as easy as it sounds and Mueller is ready to face the challenge. Of course with any mobile app the first thing a founder wants to do is build scale. Mueller has to build tremendous scale because for the app to work, two people need to be on the same flight. In addition as Mueller told us “If a plane is half full there’s no market for us”.

That doesn’t seem to be a problem though because since 9/11 airlines have reduced their number of flights and have tried to fill every plane to capacity. The load factor right now is 83% full while some of the more popular flights like New York to San Francisco are 98% full. Those are the flights where people would really benefit from an app like SeatSwapr.

Mueller is hoping to partner with some of the other travel sites to implement his technology.

Linkage:

Check out SeatSwapr here at SeatSwapr.com

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more stories from our sneaker strapped nationwide startup road trip

We could use your help, we’re a startup helping startups!

Chicago Startup: Red Meat Market Connecting People With Meat, Socially! Video Interview

Did you know that meat could be social? Of course you did, how many times have you socialized over burgers, hot dogs (is that meat) or great steaks? Well a new startup in the Chicago area is connecting people socially over meat. This time though, it’s about buying meat.

Red Meat Market, like Kansas’ AgLocal, connects people in Chicago, Madison and Milwaukee (for now) to the freshest, farm raised sustainable meat. Red Meat Market has a website and a mobile app which makes it a cinch to order meat in boxes, by dollar amount, choosing the cuts that you want.

With Red Meat Market you tell their platform what you want to spend and it tells you what you can get in your “box of meat” you can get a variety or one choice cut but this way you always stay in the budget that you want, each and every month.

There are actually a couple of social components to Red Meat Market. The first is the ability to split your “box of meat” up with friends, within the site and the app. Red Meat Market handles the payment distribution and everyone gets the meat they want. The meat box can be delivered to your door, or you can opt to attend one of Red Meat Market’s Meat Ups (clever huh). At their Meat Ups, Red Meat Market supplies the beer and the sides and everyone gets the box of meat that they ordered.

By holding a meat up you can meat or meet other Red Meat Market users and socialize or swap cuts of meats between boxes.

Red Meat Market is in a great part of the country to start a business like this. Co-Founder Mark Wilhelms blends his 18 years of digital and marketing experience with his love of meat for a new way to not just sell great, quality, grass fed meat but to connect people who love meat together.

Check out our video interview below:

Linkage:

Check out RedMeatMarket here at their website

Here’s more of our Chicago TechWeek coverage

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Wisconsin Startup: WhiteWilly Launches, Barter At The Speed Of Light

A new bartering startup has launched in the great state of Wisconsin. WhiteWilly.com is the newest startup from serial entrepreneur John Bialk who, according to his angel.co profile, has been an entrepreneur since the age of nine.

Bartering is hot these days, in fact it’s so hot that A&E has started a new series called “Barter Kings”. We’ve even featured another bartering startup in Arizona called Kwiddy with the idea behind it to help facilitate actual in person bartering.

Whitewilly is a little different. Whitewilly addresses the biggest problem with bartering. That problem in it’s simplest form is:

John wants the item Tom wants, Tom wants the item that Scott wants, and Scott wants the item that John has.

Before WhiteWilly that typically meant that the barter deal was over. Scott couldn’t get to John’s item because he didn’t have the item John actually wants. However WhiteWilly facilitates all three trades in one click and then tells each member of the trade where to send their item.

So for a little more clarity lets put items with the example:

John has a new iPad but really wants a macbook. Tom has a macbook but doesn’t want the iPad he already has one. What Tom really wants is a DSLR camera. Scott is looking for an iPad but has a DSLR camera that John doesn’t want.

Does that sound confusing enough for you? It is, but here’s what WhiteWhilly does. WhiteWilly allows each member of the transaction to see what items each person is bartering. With one click of a button. So with one click, Scott is told to send his DSLR camera to Tom. Tom is told to send his Macbook to John and John is told to send his iPad to Scott.

You see John didn’t want the DSLR camera that Scott had he wanted the macbook that Tom had. With WhiteWilly everyone ends up happy and the transaction is done.

There are other barter sites out there and of course there is the barter heading on Craigslist.com however with those traditional sites, and with Craigslist, you need to wait for that one in a million opportunity that your exact trade comes up, or settle for something else.

Bartering is free (except for shipping) and can put good used items to use and make many people happy.

Linkage:

Check out WhiteWilly here

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We Talk With Madison City Councilman Scott Resnick About Open Data

By day Scott Resnick is the Vice President and partner in Hardin Design & Development in Madison Wisconsin. The company is a creative app powerhouse with a client roster that includes Mercedes, Toyota,Coleman Campers and Fedex. Hardin Design & Development continues on a trajectory of explosive growth and is currently expanding to Chicago.

After that Resnick is also an influencer in Madison’s thriving tech startup scene. There are a great bunch of people that seem to know everything going on in Madison, and that’s not because it’s a small town. They have a lot of centralized startup events and even shoulder groups that meet every month who are focused on things like health tech and hacking.

The list of resources for Madison startups would be reminiscent of a city with a million people. Madison has just a quarter of that. On our two days of office hours in Madison we learned about Capital Entrepreneurs, Madison Startup Weekend, Build Madison, Forward Technology Festival and some shoulder groups. Resnick is involved with almost all of these.

If that’s not enough to keep one man busy he’s married and he’s also a Madison Alderperson or CityCouncilman (depending on what PC hat you’re wearing today).

There are a lot of causes that Resnick supports and ran on including keeping the safety, alcohol, landlord tenant laws and open data.

The first three platforms are pretty self explanatory. As for open data, Resnick wrote the legislation for Madison to open up their public data so that developers could develop apps around it. Resnick said that any record that can be requested by open record requests can be available via open data.

Once he was able to get the data opened Madison went to work holding a Startup Weekend event to develop startups and apps surrounded by the data.

He gave us a couple examples of projects that came out of the open data hackathon. One was a startup that wanted to do pet health records. The entrepreneur went to work using pet license data available from the city to start developing the pet health records product.

Resnick told us that vendor carts are a big part of downtown Madison. Most recently the vendor cart licensing data and location for where they’re allowed to vend is kept on note cards. They have someone interested in producing an app to locate vendor carts and if this data goes electronic they can.

Madison was the second city in the nation to have their public data opened like this. New York as the first. Resnick told us there are many municipalities who have started toying with the idea but haven’t fully adopted it yet so they don’t have to necessarily give access to all the records.

Resnick is hoping the next step for Madison is to allow city API’s to go from “pushing the data to pulling the data”. When that’s available entrepreneurs will be able to create apps and startups for things like reporting a problem to a city. Resnick says many municipalities do this wrong. Most city’s use some kind of form emailed to a city manager or engineer and then the city manager or engineer uses their internal system to communicate job tickets and distribute projects.

When Resnick’s next vision for data is set in motion developers could develop an app that would allow resident’s to add their job to the queue, all of this done of course, by third party applications.

Linkage:

Check out Resnicks Day Job Here

Article from Capital Entrepreneur’s on the open data initiative

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Madison Startup: My Fashion Assistant, Is Well, Your Fashion Assistant

Nibletz spent Tuesday and Wednesday holding office hours in Madison Wisconsin. The startup scene is thriving as a matter of fact, our good friend Brad at Trinker in Madison helped organize a healthy sized, last minute meet up at the beautiful Union Terrace at UW.

Wednesday we spent some time with the co-working startups at Murfie’s office in downtown Madison.

One of the startups we met with was MyFashionAssistant and co-founder Louie Penaflor. Penaflor has a lot of great stories to tell about his work life in Manhattan at magazine publishing powerhouse Conde Nast which was actually the inspiration for MyFashionAssistant.

At first glance Penaflor does not look like he would be one of the founders of a fashion app for iOS and Android that has over 50,000 users. But boy he knows his stuff. Not only that but like many of the people we met in Wisconsin he is very excited about the Madison startup scene.

As for MyFashionAssistant, it’s a three panel slider app that allows users to take pictures of their wardrobe and then mix, match and mash them up in three sections which are shoes, pants (skirts etc) and tops. Now the beauty of MyFashionAssistant is that since right now most of the content is user generated, a fashion conscious man could easily use the same app.

Penaflor told us that he came up with the idea on many of his subway rides in New York. He noticed that everyone in New York is so laser lined focused on what’s right in front of them. “No one really looks at each other, but they do look at their phones and iPads” Penaflor told us.

On more than one occasion he would see groups of friends breaking the no looking rule to hover over someone’s phone or iPad and flip through pictures. It was that flipping through pictures that made a bell go off in Penaflor’s head and think about what if they could flip through their wardrobe.

Deciding what to wear is a major pain point for some folks. They spend hours thinking about what they’re going to wear. Colleagues of Penaflor’s at Conde Nast would bring up in conversation three days early what they might wear going out Saturday night.

Another major pain point is sometimes people forget exactly how this shirt or blouse matches that pair of pants, but not with MyFashionAssitant.

Users take pictures and catalog as much of their wardrobe as they want. Now when they’re at the mall or a new store they can easily see if something is going to look good on them. They can even open up the app while they’re flipping through magazines.

Right now MyFashionAssistant is supporting itself as it’s a paid app. Penaflor is weighing all of his funding options. He could use MyFashionAssistant’s treasure trove of data and market research as a revenue stream. He could partner with other companies, or even white label the technology for name brand stores.

Penaflor admits there are some apps that match fashion the way his does but he started MyFashionAssistant back when there were just 2000 apps in the Apple app store. Also, most competitors are name brand manufacturers who of course only feature their clothes within the app.

MyFashionAssitant supports thousands of different brands across their user base. Penaflor says he could see possibly doing advertising but not in the traditional way. Brands could pay to have their newest lines included in the app so that potential customers could try out the company’s new designs with the users current wardrobe.

Penaflor likes his app to a virtual fitting room. He said Steve Jobs validated the need for MyFashionAssistant by saying iPhone (smartphones) is a lifestyle device and of course fashion is all about lifestyle.

Linkage:

Check out MyFashionAssistant here at their webpage

Download for Android

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Wisconsin Startup: Trinker Lets You Party Around The World INTERVIEW

If you’re stuck at home and can’t go out with your buddies who may have just hopped a plane to Atlantic City or Las Vegas, never fear Trinkerapp is here. Trinker is a multi faceted social app that lets you join in the social drinking fun whether you’re down the street or miles and miles away.

According to the startups founder Brad Orego, you can keep up with all your friends and even frenemies no matter where their at and socialize with them via mobile app. You can even make challenges with them centered around social (responsible) drinking. Orego gets into more about how the app works and starting up in Madison Wisconsin in our interview below the break.

Trinker is a free app that makes going out, or missing out, more fun!

Milwaukee Startup: The Good Jobs Wins Startup Wisconsin Contest On Kick-Off Day

Startup Wisconsin launched last Thursday as part of the Startup America Partnership. They didn’t waste anytime either, and kicked off their kickoff party with a quick pitch contest with a quick $1750 in prizes. The prize money was furnished by the law firm of Michael Best & Friedrich.

A new employment website startup called The Good Jobs, was victorious in the quick pitch competition. The woman owned startup from Milwaukee is creating a jobs site that will launch this summer. Their spin though is that they are matching people up to jobs based on lifestyle badges.

For example, companies that are hiring use proprietary badges to identify things like their commitment to the environment and the planet, or flexible scheduling. All of the things that an employment candidate would be looking for as far as “lifestyle” or “quality of life” are concerned in a new job.

Too often you go into a job interview because you really need a job and forget to ask the important questions. That cruise you have scheduled in two months with your 90 year old grandparents could be in jeopardy if you don’t know ahead of time how a company is about prior family appointments. The office closes at 5pm, does that mean you can still make your sons soccer practice at 6:00? Quality employers know these things are important.

More after the break
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Wisconsin Startup: Planduck A Social Network Based On Schedules INTERVIEW

A new Wisconsin startup was pitched at last weeks Startup Weekend in Madison Wisconsin as Schedule Link. Now they’ve changed their name to Planduck. The company has been recruiting developers and plan on doing something that doesn’t appear to have been done before. Planduck is launching a social networking platform based on scheduling and events.

To start off PlanDuck will cater to college students, faculty and staff by being a centralized location to plan, and share events. With PlanDuck it won’t be just one singular event like a Facebook event but all of the events that people are having in their lives and that they want to share across the social network.

When we were preparing for this interview I didn’t exactly get the concept, as you’ll see I asked him was it just event sharing, was it like Path. PlanDuck founder Mike Walsh admitted that Path founder (and former Facebooker) Dave Morin is one of the people that he looks up to and hopes that PlanDuck will one day be able to integrate Path APIs.

So let’s talk with Walsh about PlanDuck and launching a startup in Wisconsin.

What is PlanDuck?

PlanDuck will be a social networking platform that helps people find, share, and create all the events in their lives. It will start with the University of Wisconsin – Madison and immediate surrounding community.

More after the break
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Startup Weekend Heads To Madison Wisconsin

While most people intone with the startup scene are well aware of “startup weekend”, the 54 hour hackathon style startup marathon, people in Wisconsin have never had an event quite like this. That’s why entrepreneurs and startup types are heading to Madison WI this weekend, the home of their first ever startup weekend.

“We want to foster and encourage people who are doing startup companies and get more people involved,” said Forrest Woolworth, one of the organizers of the event and brand director at Per Blue,told madison.com. “We want to continue to make Madison known as an awesome place to start a company.”

According to startupweekend.org there have been over 500 official “startup weekends” with over 45,000 participants to date. There have also been “unofficial” and similar events structured around the same model, like Hack Omaha. Great things have come out of startup weekends all over the country and all over the world. This first event in Madison will let entrepreneurs from a state widely known for cheese and the Green Bay Packers show off their tech scene.

Startup Weekend Madison will be held this Friday through Sunday at Madison College West Campus 302. S. Gammon Road in Madison.

“Younger startups are now growing to become a cornerstone of the Madison economy,” Mayor Paul Soglin said.

Madison’s startup weekend is part of Capital Entrepreneur’s Week which kicks off tomorrow with speakers, mentors, bootcamps and more for local entrepreneurs.

source: madison.com

Madison WI Based Digital Estate Planning Startup Entrustet Acquihired By Largest Competitor SecureSafe

A big problem that many of us will face in the next 50-60 years is one that hasn’t been around before. That is, what happens to all these accounts, all these cloud stored files and all this data when we pass away. Nobody likes to face mortality but it’s definitely something you want to keep track of.

That masterful idea you’ve been working on your whole life, will it be buried with you? Will your legacy be carried out? What about all those passwords for your bank accounts and credit cards? What if you use online desktop office software like Google Docs. Heck I haven’t used Office since the beta of Google Docs. What if my life was cut short, where does the data go?

Companies like Madison Based WI startup Entrustet have been working on that. Entrustet was founded by Jesse Davis and Nathan Lustig with a vision to give users a piece of mind when it comes to your data. They want to allow people to quickly, easily and securely prepare last wishes for their digital assets.

More after the break
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