New York Startup PaddleYou Has A Ping Pong Paddle For Your Startup

PaddleYou is a New York based startup that is, you guessed it, in the ping pong paddle business.

As startups grow up and move out of the spare bedroom or the garage they look to make their first office space more “startupy”. Often times you have to do it with a budget. So what does a bootstrapped startup do to give their new office the “startup feel” without breaking the bank on some full sized upright arcade machines, or the latest virtual reality gear?

Well the “rock some tags” of course, and go for the ping pong table.

Over the last 18 months, travelling on our “sneaker strapped road trip” I’ve become actually decent at Ping Pong. I think we’ve seen over a 100 ping pong tables at various startup spaces. It’s funny how HD Tvs and Nintendo Wii’s can sit dormant forever, but find a few developers and designers and when they take a quick work break it’s for a fast game of ping pong.

Well PaddleYou creates custom ping pong paddles. You can put a picture on a paddle or your startups logo. Our “N” will look great on a ping pong paddle.

What’s even greater about PaddleYou is that the startup founded by Table Tennis Nation and ping pong star Marty Reisman, actually pitched at the February New York TechCrunch Pitch off and came in second place. The company has also been nominated for an Edison award and they’ve been Men’s Journal approved.

Table Tennis Nation President Cooper Fallek will be in the hardware alley Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt showing off just how cool ping pong paddles can be.

If you’re jonesing for a paddle now, PaddleYou is up and running and you can get your customized paddle for just $29.99 with 10% off by using code tcdisrupt1 at paddleyou.com.

Check out some of our TechCrunch Disrupt coverage from last year, click here.

Startup Weekend Gets Refreshed With Coca Cola As Their Newest Corporate Partner

Startup Weekend announced this week that they have a new global partner in Atlanta based Coca Cola.

Since the first serving of Coca-Cola at Jacobs’ pharmacy more than 125 years ago, innovation has been a part of The Coca-Cola Company’s DNA. With over 500 brands in more than 200 countries, Coca-Cola develops new beverages, packaging, equipment, and content on a daily basis. Startup Weekend is extremely excited to welcome a new global partner to the family: The Coca-Cola Company. Besides being one of the most iconic brands in the world, The Coca-Cola Company is dedicated to spurring innovation, inspiring entrepreneurs, and supporting the world’s greatest innovators. Startup Weekend posted on their official blog.

Coca Cola joins the ranks of Amazon, Google, FedEx, Microsoft and countless other big corporate companies, stepping up to the plate to further innovation across America and around the world.

Internally Coca Cola has introduced a more environmentally friendly bottle called the “Plantbottle”. The current Plantbottle is made of 30% plant based PET. They have a goal of creating a bottle that is 100% plant based PET. They also recently introduced the Coca Cola Freestyle Fountain at many restaurant locations across the country. Customers can go into places like Moe’s and Firehouse subs and dispense over 100 brands in limitless combinations.

Coca Cola has also introduced the 5by20 program with a goal of empowering 5 million women entrepreneurs by 2020. They also have a clean water program called the Slingshot Vapor Distillation device.

Coca Cola also support entrepreneurship in other countries, like their Coca Cola Africa Foundation. This multi million dollar program helps youth in 12 African countries and is a joint effort with Junior Achievement and Students in Free Enterprise.

Startup Weekend says that Coke will help entrepreneurs “By sharing knowledge, resources, and assets like infrastructure, scale, and expertise, Coke wants to help entrepreneurs succeed faster. They hope to help inspire invention and prototyping, and to help people gain the practical skills that it takes to imagine and deliver ideas.”

Coca Cola is Startup Weekend’s first non “technical” sponsor. Startup Weekend organizers can request a Coca Cola representative at their next event.

Check out more Startup Weekend stories here at nibletz.com the voice of startups everywhere else.

Techstars Chicago Reveals First Class!

Techstars Chicago revealed their first class today. Back in February Techstars announced that Excelerate Labs the Chicago based accelerator that operates out of the 1871 space was becoming TechStars Chicago. They began taking applications at that time and announced the first cohort on Thursday.

This first official “Techstars Chicago” class will start May 28th and end on August 28th. TechStars Chicago participants will receive a round of seed funding, work space, an intense startup curriculum and mentorship from one of the best accelerator mentor networks in the world.

As with all the Techstars classes there is a wide range of startups across SoLoMo, healthcare, big data, analytics and even fitness.

Here is a complete list of the 10 startups that made it into the first Chicago cohort, as originally posted on the Techstars blog.

CaptureProof – The platform through which patients can securely and easily share photos and videos with their doctors.

HIPOM – A cloud-based solution that gives parents total control of the Internet access on all devices in the home.

Nexercise – A mobile app that makes fitness fun through the use of friendly competition, smart alerts and real rewards.

Pathful – A Web analytics platform that captures every visitor interaction with every element on a website automatically, making it easier for marketers and designers to understand visitor behavior.

Peoplematics – A cloud-based search platform that unlocks the data users store in the cloud with intuitive search and sharing across applications.

Project Fixup – A digital matchmaker that fixes people up on fun one-on-one dates.

SimpleRelevance – An analytics-driven email marketing platform that provides customized digital communication for every customer and every message.

SocialCrunch – The marketing data provider presents a new way to unlock the most provocative human insights for brands and their agencies.

Sqord, Inc. – The fitness platform that makes healthy, active play more fun for kids by allowing them to compete and earn points for everyday activities.

TradingView – A browser-based community for investors and traders to share and discuss their ideas.

Check out these other startup accelerator stories.

Ashton Kutcher Set To Return To TechCrunch Disrupt NYC

Coming through the pages of the startupmemphis blog by Commercial Appeal James Dowd I was pleasantly surprised to read that Ashton Kutcher would be returning to the main stage next week at TechCrunch Disrupt.

The annual Disrupt event held in New York City is one of the most talked about startup events on the east coast. Hundreds of startups vie for the opportunity to present in the highly coveted startup alley and even more apply to pitch on the Disrupt Battlefield. Startups lucky enough to be chosen to compete on the battlefield go up against some of the hardest judges that New York and Silicon Valley have to offer.

The battlefield startups are competing for a $50,000 prize but much more importan than the cash is the chance to say that your startup placed in the battlefield competition. For a startup closing a funding round down, that may be the extra push they need to make it over the top.

In the four years that we’ve covered Disrupt NY (once as Nibletz 3 as TDG) we’ve seen great startups on the battlefield stage and a collection of the best fireside chats in the world. Except for Disrupt SF 2011, some of the best have been hosted by Mike Arrington.

Two years ago at Disrupt NYC Ashton Kutcher sat down with Charlie Rose. This was right as he was making the transition to his new role on Two and a Half Men and questions about the show were strictly off limits. Instead Rose and Kutcher discussed his VC firm, which just two years ago, people were still concerned that actors were making a mockery of the venture capital model.

Since then Kutcher has proven himself. Through his A-Grade investments he’s backed startups like 2011 Disrupt battlefield winner GetAround, Sonic Notify, Fab and Tiny Chat. Through his own angel investments Kutcher has backed AirBnB, DuoLingo, Summly and Dwolla.

This year he returns to the main stage to chat about A-Grade’s investment strategy and portfolio. While Two And A Half Men was off limits TechCrunch Editor In Chief Eric Eldon says he may end up talking about his role as Steve Jobs in the biopic film that debuted at Sundance.

StartupTechGuy’s Air Travel Tips!

Our good friends at American Airlines have teamed up with Inc to give out some of the best travel tips for road warriors. What makes this smorgasbord of travel tips better than other “travel” sites is that American along with Inc have found people who are die hard road warriors, people who travel all the time. You can check that post out here.

I often get asked about my travel tips. Or if I host an interview in a hotel room on the road people ask me “how do you do it”. One of the cores of nibletz.com is our “sneaker strapped startup road trip” it’s being in the trenches with startups, like ourselves, chronicling them and telling their stories. Sure we could go out on the internet and sit in a spare bedroom and type all day but being on the road the better part of the last eighteen months has helped us connect in ways beyond our wildest dreams.

Having said that, I travel about 200-250 days a year. I’ve actually been traveling like this over the last 5 years, first with our previous media startup and now with nibletz. So here are some of the things that I do that may help.

When traveling by Air (we actually do a lot of travel by bus like Megabus and Boltbus, but we still travel by air as much as we can)

– Sign up for Startup America (it’s free) and then sign up for Business ExtrAA at American Airlines. American is one of the key sponsors and member benefits at Startup America. Check out the other benefits when you’re on their page, they will save the bootstrapping entrepreneur a lot of money that you can spend on more important things like development and iteration.

– Use American Airlines, use your Business ExtrAA account and book directly through aa.com one of the biggest quasi secret travel tips is that the airlines are now posting their best available online rates on their own websites. If you see a better price from a reputable website, a la Expedia, Hipmunk or Cheapoair then call American and tell them they can usually get you that same rate.

– Download the American Airlines app. Their App in it’s latest form, is a single mobile dashboard for your air travel including the ability to display your boarding pass on your phone.

Packing.

– No matter what you do and how long you’re going to be there pack a carry-on approved suitcase. Whenever you can use a soft suitcase not a hard shell suitcase. The idea here is to actually be able to carry the suitcase on the plane and not have to “gate check” it, especially if you have a tight connection. If you’re not connecting and you’re flying direct, there’s no real harm in gate checking.

– Make sure you have nothing in your carry on, purse, backpack or laptop bag that is not TSA approved. Unfortunately, even having that swiss army knife will get you delayed going through security.

– You have NO time for checked luggage. Carry on luggage doesn’t get lost, even when it’s gate checked. Gate checked luggage goes directly on and off the plane and skips the baggage handling process. (see above).

Check out these tips from the Inc Community of road warriors and American Airlines.

What to Pack.

– It all depends on where you’re going, what you’re traveling for and how long you are going to be there. Don’t overpack get everything in that carry on suitcase.

– I always pack a power strip and one of those extension cords with three outlets on it. Hotels are notorious for having just one outlet in a decent spot. When you can, put the power strip in your backpack or laptop bag, or at least the extension cord.

– Always pack an umbrella and a $2 poncho, just keep that stuff in your bag.

– Guys, a sport coat goes with everything these days and in the spring like this it can take the place of a bulkier jacket

– Go buy a Mophie juice pack or other battery charging device. I personally carry multiple things for battery charging.

At the airport
– wear slip on shoes if y ou can
– empty your pockets before you get to security except for your wallet and your phone (for your boarding pass)
– As you approach the security buckets start getting your stuff in place. You can always spot a rookie traveler based on how long getting ready for security goes.
– If the TSA agents have serious faces on, don’t crack jokes, but some are actually pleasant, I’ve done the Macarena a few times in the full body scan machine.
– Breathe, cooperate, repeat, remember everybody’s trip in their eyes is just as important as your trip. If you’re a heart surgeon with an open patient on the table then you really shouldnt even have time to read this blog post.
– Find your gate via the app but confirm your gate by the overhead screen
– Find the gate before grabbing a snack if you’re so inclined, and hungry.
– Sit as closely to the gate desk as you can and walk as briskly as you can when it’s your turn to board, the quicker you can get on the plane the better chance you have at getting that valuable overhead bin real estate.

On The plane
– Find your overhead bin and load it quickly
– get in your seat, put your iPad in the seat back pocket in front of you
– fasten your seatbelt
– You can use your phone until the plane leaves the gate
– Enjoy your flight
– If you didn’t check a bag you can turn your phone on when they touch the ground (and the crew says you can)
– Find your transportation app whether it be the rental car app, a taxi app or an uber app. Most rental car apps allow you to signal the rental car desk that you have arrived.

On Site tips
A lot of this comes from being a journalist but on site at startup conferences and events I pack as light as I can and recommend you do the same. When you can, leave the laptop in the hotel room, it’s a nice little way to have your main tool sitting ready to use after a long day. I’ve been amazed out how productive an iPad can be. To better understand it, 90% of the stories we posted from OneSpark and SXSW were totally produced and uploaded via iPad.

If your wireless plan dictates it, pick up a mifi device. We use Verizon and my mifi is on our shared plan. At big events and conferences, even when you can get onto an events wifi there are so many people on it that the connection is slow.

Try not to pick up too much swag. If you go to CES or SXSW you’ll have the opportunity to pick up hundreds of t-shirts, refrain if you can, t-shirts and other swag take up a lot of valuable space in your suitcase. Politely tell the swag peddler you don’t have room for it in your luggage.

My day back pack, when space permits, is a PowerBag sling bag, this bag has a 9,000 mah battery built in for charging my iPad and iPhone. On long events, battery drain is my single most frustration.

Perhaps this helped!

5 Startups In Alabama Competing For $100,000 As Part Of Launch Pad Competition

Alabama’s startup supporters have put their money where there mouth is as the current Alabama Launch Pad competition prepares to come to a close late next week.

Alabama’s Launch Pad competition began in 2005 and gives early stage startups and small businesses a chance to compete for much needed funding that can help spark a company to the next level.

The current competition saw 12 startups compete in a pitch off style competition on March 3rd which initially cut the number of teams down to 7. They then had another “market assessment” which narrowed the field to five. Those five remaining teams will compete in a finale on May 3rd which will determine how much of the $100,000 prize each team will get.

“Our goal is to really feed the pipeline for early stage startups. Having just one competition per year is not enough,” Angela Wier told the Birmingham Business Journal. “What we would like to do is run a pre-seed four times per year, but we can’t leap to that overnight.”

The Economic Development Partnership Of Alabama raises the Launch Pad prize money from the private sector, the Alabama Research Alliance and seven Alabama Universities.

Launch Pad Programs Director Greg Sheek is hopeful that they will raise additional funds to run another program this year, possibly targeting “speed up” startups.

One of the challenges that Sheek and Wier are working with is that 50% of the money coming out of the Birmingham based Central Alabama Angel Network is going to out of state companies. Both are hoping to curb that by giving more companies access to programming that will prepare them better for pitching investor.

“We want to get in a place where we’d like to prepare more and more companies to pitch to the investment community and keep them right here,” Wier said.

Alabama ranks as one of the friendliest cities to small business, read that story here!

Interview With Al Leston, On The Wall, A Community’s Digital Story Board [OneSpark]

Al Leston is the host of the popular NPR documentary series, State Of The Re-Union. The NPR documentary style show has Leston going into communities across the country and chronicling the world around him. The show highlights, what makes the community.

Leston was on hand at the OneSpark crowdfunding festiva showing the next extension of State Of The Re-Union, a gigantic, digital tablet based wall. “The Wall” is an installation piece that he hopes to have setup in busy, high traffic areas in a town or city.

“bus stops, court yards, plazas and downtown street corners” are locations that Leston has in mind for this gigantic piece of interactive story telling art.

Just like SOTRU, The Wall will open up dialogue between people with different ways of life and different perspectives, promoting understanding and encouraging conflict resolution. If we can be connected with others in different regions, with different cultures, we will have a better chance of creating solutions to pressing issues. We will become better listeners. We will increase empathy.

The Wall challenges how media inhabits our space. The Internet is an ether, as intangible as it is infinite. But we have trapped ourselves – become idle, passive voyeurs of media. The Wall will surprise us. The Wall will touch us. The Wall will change us. And we will have the power to change The Wall. – From the OneSpark profile page.

In meeting Leston he was genuine, concerned about communities and extremely creative. A video loop showing throughout the week at his OneSpark booth showed what he hopes to create with the end result of the wall. He wants people in cities, towns and community’s to take a moment and discover the stories that are being home grown.

The community aspect, creativity and merged use of technology, in “installation art” are what made The Wall the top vote getter in the technology category during the OneSpark festival.

Find out more about Leston’s State of The Reunion program here.

We’ve got over 30 startup stories from OneSpark here.

Kayak’s Programmers Feel Customer Pain, A Great Lesson In Customer Service

Kayak, the ultimate travel aggregator, was at one time a startup. Of course it was founded by Terry Jones the founder of Travelocity and the idea was the brain trust of Jones, and the founders of Orbitz and Expedia. Jones tells a great story about the formation of the company to Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson in this interview.

One of the coolest things revealed in the interview though, was Kayak’s customer service model. Now if you’re a frequent traveler, like myself, you’ve inevitably been on the phone with the customer service department of one of the big three (Travelocity, Orbitz or Expedia). Many of you may not realize, but Hotwire and Hotels.com are both brands of Expedia.

Because of my customer loyalty with Hotels.com (over 500 rooms booked since 2008) I get to talk to their top tier customer service, but even then that can be a bit painful.

Kayak has taken an entirely different approach to customer service. Jones reveals in the video interview that they decided not to have a call center and that most of the customer service would be handled via email. In that regard though, Kayak doesn’t even have a department to receive those emails. According to Jones they go directly to the programmers and engineers which make up 80% of their 200 person staff.

“It keeps staffing low” Jones told Carlson. He also mentioned that it makes the engineering team directly accountable to the end user and gets things done faster. Evidently engineers don’t like to be pestered more than once.

This actually speaks to the big email debate that’s been going on, on the pages of big tech this past weekend. If everyone approached email with the same veracity as engineers the results for any company, be it a big huge enterprise or a startup could prove very beneficial.

I’ve come to find over the past two months or so that even a quick “hey I got this message and I’m working on it” goes a long way with a customer, vendor, or reader.

Like many of my big tech colleagues, I receive hundreds of PR emails a day pitching new startups. Even sending them an email back that’s short, sweet and to the point, seems to make them happy.

Dear PR Person,

I’m sorry but the story you’ve pitched doesn’t fit into our current editorial strategy. Feel free to ping me back if there is an angle I’m not seeing and definitely keep me in mind for your other clients.

With that brief email I got a great story from a guest columnist and a different PR person sent another startup that was more in line with our strategy.

You can see Carlson’s full interview with Jones here at Business Insider.

Now read:

Vindicated: Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson deleted Mailbox too.

ReThreaded The Social Startup That Won The Most Votes At OneSpark [video]

ReThreaded,Social entrepreneurship,social startup,Florida startup,OneSpark,Kristin Keen

(photo: NMI 2013)

Last Wednesday OneSpark, the World’s Crowdfunding Festival kicked off in Jacksonville Florida. It was five days of creators, entrepreneurship, artists and startups. The creators, and entrepreneurs came from all different categories and all different walks of life.

During the opening ceremonies, led by voice of the Jacksonville Jaguars, Brian Sexton, we were given a glimpse of what was to come. Sexton invited random creators to raise their hands and come up and pitch their creation, business or startup to the crowd. Each of the five creators had 90 seconds to deliver an on the spot pitch. One of those pitches was Kristin Keen the founder of Rethreaded.

Rethreaded is a social startup that puts women who’ve suffered some of the worst abuse known to humans, sex trafficking, human trafficking and prostitution, and gives them a new sense of life, and worth through business, artistry and employment. Keen spoke to the crowd with a genuine passion. She had spent five years of her life in India where she helped empower women who had suffered the same kind of abuse through teaching them to sew.

Keen told Florida’s First Coast News that when she got back home to Jacksonville she couldn’t sit still she wanted to do something to continue her mission, and that she did.

She started Rethreaded, which crafts children’s clothes out of used t-shirts. So not only is she putting women who need a lift up a place to work and be creative, but she’s also upcycling t-shirts.

Little did she know when she pitched her company on Wednesday afternoon that she would be the runaway vote leader at the end of the week. She also didn’t know what was in store for her just a few moments later.

After all five creators had pitched, OneSpark volunteers handed out sealed white envelopes. Sexton informed the crowd that in those envelopes (which we weren’t allowed to look in) were $1 and $5 bills, $1000 dollars worth. The crowd was instructed to find the creators who just pitched outside of the creator lounge tent and hand over the envelope. Like me, many of the crowd didn’t even look in the envelopes.

I had made a core group of new friends at OneSpark and silently we all took our envelopes and walked over to find Kristin. We weren’t alone. She won that contest by a landslide.

The OneSpark staff did daily updates at 5:30pm each evening to inform the crowd of who the biggest movers in voting were and sure enough on Saturday evening Rethreaded was the biggest mover.

Their OneSpark booth was a hut constructed out of used t-shirts, which made a great make-shift shelter when the rain came pouring down Saturday afternoon.

Keen was one of the greatest creators we met. She was extremely kind and humble and we’re pretty sure she wasn’t even expecting the win. I caught a glimpse of Keen in her hut on Saturday afternoon, tearing up telling a group of passerbys that she never expected the outpouring of support she received at OneSpark.

Naturally I was gunning for a tech startup to win the overall vote during the five days of crowd voting, but I couldn’t be more pleased that the top vote went to Kristin Keen and Re-Threaded, a social entrepreneur with a heart of gold. With the most votes, Rethreaded took home $6,768.42 of the $250,000 crowdfunding prize. Event registrants voted for one creator using the OneSpark app and the money was distributed evenly among the top vote getters.

You can see how genuine Keen is in her 90 second pitch below:

Find out more about Rethreaded here.

Here’s over 30 more startup stories from OneSpark.

Email Is Ripe For A Disruption Is It Coming From HotMail & Microsoft?

Back in the mid 90’s you were too cool for school if you were using a free web based email service. Hotmail had surged to the top of the email providers that were called “web based” then, now of course it’s cloud based. Back in 1997 Microsoft acquired Hotmail for $400 million (that’s about a billion in 2013 dollars).

Around the same time there were other providers out there like Yahoo, Rocketmail and a host of quick up and comers but none had the market dominance of Hotmail.

In 2004 the tables were turned when Google introduced their GMail platform. The attraction was it’s clean look and virtually unlimited space. We’re all too familiar with the ticker that shows just how much data those Google servers are handling.

Now as everyone turns to mobile, it’s been a pretty safe assumption that the next email disruptor would be of the mobile variety. Mailbox app came out with a lot of thunder, despite the fact that I hated it. I like an app called TaskBox but it hasn’t had the big red carpet marketing push that Mailbox had. It was actually their great marketing stunt, making people wait in line, that attracted a ton of attention, a ton of early users and then a purchase by the folks at DropBox.

There have been a few other subtle email disruptions that have come up in the past few years like Sparrow but nothing has disrupted email the way that GMail did nearly a decade ago.

Until now?

This is how Hotmail looked in the 90’s (image: Business Insider)

Microsoft has just redone their cloud based email platforms. They’ve given a new look to all the various email brands available in the Microsoft cloud. Today, by going over to hotmail.com you can sign up for a brand new Hotmail email adress, a Microsoft live account or Microsoft’s new outlook.com service which was the big thing Microsoft was pushing at SXSW this year.

Gone is the clunky style 1990’s interface that plagued Hotmail and made them look decades behind when it came to competing with GMail. At first glance most users to the new Hotmail may get confused and think they are looking at GMail.

The new interface is extremely clean and the ads have been moved to non-obtrusive boxes on the right side of the page. Microsoft has also incorporated contacts, calendar and their cloud based Sky Drive as part of the new outlook.com/Hotmail experience.

It would take a lot for me to move off the totally integrated Google cloud that I’ve been chained too for the last few years. My contacts, calendar and mail have been managed by Google for at least the last 4 years. I’ve also been using Google Docs and now Google Drive since they were first introduced. It had actually been a solid 4 years that I hadn’t’ had a Microsoft product on any of my Mac computers (I recently purchased the latest version of Office for Mac).

One thing that could be a game changer for me is how long I can tolerate the newest “compose” screen for GMail. While you can still “temporarily” go back to the original compose style, the new style is extremely hard to manage when you’re trying to get through your GMail as fast as possible.

On iOS it seems that Microsoft accounts integrate just as easily as GMail accounts, however I haven’t used a native Microsoft mail app, nor have I even looked to see if one exists.

For now I’ve got the Hotmail account set up and we will see how it goes. All of my primary mail accounts are still GMail though.

What about you? Add your comment below.

Now Read:

So Am I The Only One On Earth Who Thinks Mailbox Sucks?

Jeff Bezos Just Crapped On Netflix, Roku,and Boxee: Developers, Startups Get Ready

Bloomberg has reported that Amazon’s stock price has gone up and then slightly flattened this afternoon and Netflix has definitely felt stemming from an announcement Amazon made today.

Amazon, the company that essentially created the e-commerce category, or at least heavily refined it, announced today that they are going to start offering their own set top box. In the same way that Google and other tablet manufacturers grew quickly concerned about the ramifications stemming from the Kindle Fire tablets, the set top box manufacturers now have something to worry about.

The Seattle based company will now offer a box that competes with the likes of Apple TV, Roku, Boxee, NetGear and even some options offered by console gaming system. Currently, several of these competitive boxes offer Amazon’s video subscription service that comes free for Amazon Prime members.

Just as Google has added a wide range of other services beyond it’s huge search platform, Amazon has continued to grow into a complete e-commerce ecosystem. Of course they want customers to continue to engage with their bread and butter, e-commerce business, but now they are able to engage customers in more intimate ways.

Amazon built their Kindle Fire tablet line based on the Android operating system and then created their own completely walled garden ecosystem that offers their tablet users access to apps,games, e-books, movies and music all through the Amazon e-commerce platform. Many analysts say this was a great move on their part.

This move also opens up a whole new platform for developers to get behind and support. Apple TV is an extremely hard platform for developers to get into and many feel that Android, and it’s hundreds of available devices and fragmented OS is tough to penetrate market share.

Developers and perhaps startups will now be able to work on the Amazon set top box ecosystem to offer apps, games and other downloadables to compliment the content platform that will be in place at launch.

Amazon has built up a tremendously loyal following over the last two decades. They have also been instrumental in moving some customers from books, to e-readers and now to tablets. With this huge set of customers, an Amazon set top box will be a much more comfortable platform, rather than going with the boxes that are currently on the market.

NetFlix, a huge content delivery company, will now have to compete with Amazon because it’s not likely the Amazon box will carry the NetFlix app. Also, first run movies and TV seasons tend to take longer to get into the NetFlix system than say Amazon’s video delivery service or even iTunes. This will give Amazon a huge competitive advantage.

Amazon also plans to create their own content, a model that’s proven very successful for NetFlix with their in house produced series like House of Cards and Hemlock Grove.

Have you seen our startup coverage from “everywhere else”

Indy Couple Getting Their Grit & Grind On At Memphis’ Seed Hatchery Accelerator

Memphis’ Seed Hatchery accelerator is less than a month away from demo day for their third cohort of startups. This years class has some major standouts and Boosterville is one of them.

Boosterville was founded as Sodbuster by married couple Pam and Tom Cooper. The Cooper’s hale from Indianapolis Indiana and they are the only “out of town” team for this years Seed Hatchery class. I met Pam Cooper on Brad Feld’s alternative to Hacker News, the Startup Revolution Hub. Meeting woman entrepreneurs is nothing new these days however Pam and Tom admittedly have adult children, sometimes older than the other founders on the Startup Revolution Hub, and the other founders at Seed Hatchery.

I quickly struck up an online friendship with Pam that resulted in her presenting at the startup conference and facilitated an introduction into the Seed Hatchery program.

What makes the Coopers even more interesting is that Tom is the founding CTO of Cha-Cha and has been a distinguished CTO for the last 30 years. While I wouldn’t call them “startup rich” the Cooper’s have done well. Pam founded a successful cleaning business. Tom has hit a few doubles and triples in his career. Tom enjoys flying his prop plane when he can pull away from the computer screen.

That’s what makes Cooper’s truly unique. They aren’t in the Seed Hatchery program for the seed investment (which of course helps any startup, Boosterville included), they are in it for the grit and grind and the whirlwind business training that happens during a three month, intensive accelerator program.

While Pam sometimes jokes about being the “class mom” with this year’s Seed Hatchery, they work with the best of them, until late hours of the night and back again first thing in the morning. Tom made arrangements with his development job in Indianapolis to work from Memphis every morning before working on Boosterville.

So what is Boosterville?

It’s a new platform that combines the mobile wallet with a loyalty and rewards type program that benefits local schools. Pam and Tom grew tired of neighborhood kids hitting them up with the same popcorn tins, wrapping paper and World’s Finest Chocolate bars. The school fundraiser was destined for a disruption.

Boosterville has partnered with Peabody Elementary in mid-town Memphis and merchants in the Overton Square and Cooper Young neighborhoods for their beta testing.

The Boosterville mobile app is tied in with local merchants and local schools who have agreed to give a kickback to the school of the user’s choice when they checkout with the Boosterville mobile wallet. The Cooper’s live on the cusp of new technology, and to that end, where others have used Paypal or Google Wallet for checkout, Boosterville uses fellow midwestern startup Dwolla as it’s wallet back bone.

Dwolla’s founder Ben Milne knows Tom well and is very enthusiastic about what Boosterville is doing.

Despite their age, and experience, Boosterville is treated the same way every other startup in the Seed Hatchery class is treated. They’ve been going up and down in the weekly rankings like every other startup and they went through a name change and a couple pivots during the past two months.

Boosterville will graduate from the Seed Hatchery program on demo day which is May 16th and will coincide with the Memphis in May festivities. For more info on Boosterville visit boosterville.com.

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Florida Startup Musical Math Number Line Has An Innovative Approach to Teaching Math

Florida teacher turned entrepreneur Deb Bowers has an innovative, musical way to teach students adding and subtracting positive and negative numbers. She’s put it all to music and song using one of FAO Schwartz most popular toys.

Long gone are the days that one has to travel all the way to New York City to see FAO Schwartz signature toys. You know the ones made famous by many New York based Christmas movies including Home Alone. Toys-R-Us has created an FAO Schwartz section in all of their stores and one of their most popular toys from the brand is a gigantic piano kids can walk and jump on.Think Nintendo power pad meets keyboard.

Well Bowers has created a way to use that piano toy, affix a number chart on top and teach kids to add and subtract positive and negative numbers, while performing a song.

Musical Math Numberline comes with everything a parent needs to teach this method at home, except for the piano itself. You can either order it from Bowers’ site via a link to Toys R Us or go to your local Toys R us and pick it up. The numberline comes with the overlay for the piano along with a song book that is filled not only with songs, but songs composed by performing math problems.

To get the entire gist of the idea you should watch the video below. Bowers said she got the idea from her students. She would put masking tape on the floor and have them move about the front of the room adding and subtracting positive and negative numbers. Some students suggested that there had to be a way they could add music to it, so Bowers did.

She just showed off the idea at OneSpark the World’s Crowdfunding Festival where she hoped to get a jump start on bringing the company out to a bigger market. She told us there were lots of interested people that came to see her at her booth and that she was going to continue with Musical Math Numberline regardless of whether she was one of the companies to get funded at the event.

Check out the video below. You can find out more at musicalmathnumberline.com

Here are even more startup stories from OneSpark!

Portland Startup AboutUs’ Founder Finds Greener Pastures In The TLD Space

Ray King, a life long technology nut and a prominent Portland entrepreneur is venturing out on his latest startup.

King is the founder, and still a board member for AboutUs. When the site launched it was an editable encyclopedia of websites across the world, somewhat similar to Wikipedia. With a great domain name and a successful entrepreneur at the helm AboutUs was able to raise $5.1 million dollars from backers including Voyager Capital.

Despite putting his best effort forth, and getting funding, King wasn’t able to find the sweet spot for a scalable AboutUs to become a sustainable business. It pivoted several times and now AboutUs is a service that helps businesses evaluate their online marketing strategies.

“We were never able to get the formula right,” King said to OregonLive.com. “I was not able to get it to break out in the way that I had hoped.” King continued, “I was gradually getting into a more conservative mindset,” and added, “and maybe not the right guy to bring it forward.”

King’s latest venture is a new company called Top Level Design. He is hoping to ultimately become a domain registrar for the new top level domains that are waiting for approval. King has applied for .blog, .gay, .photography and .wiki. Based on the success of these top level domains, we will probably see King’s company apply for even more.

“It’s going to change the complexion of the Internet,” he said, “at least the naming complexion of the Internet, quite a bit.”

Source: OregonLive

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