Prime Real Estate Among The Prizes For Valparaiso’s First Startup Weekend

When you hear “free office space” as a perk for something startup related, it’s typically an accelerator, and it’s also typically for the term of the accelerator. There are some accelerators, like Cincinnati’s The Brandery, that actually allow teams to take up residence for almost a year, until the next annual cohort moves in.

Well the folks putting on the first Startup Weekend in North West Indiana (Valparaiso) next month just revealed a nice catch of a prize from the Purdue Research Foundation. The Startup Weekend organizers and the foundation have partnered to offer one free year of office space at Purdue Research Park in Northwest Indiana.

That office space comes with fiber optic network connectivity, a receptionist with telephone answering services, VoIP, free parking, secure facilities, and even lab space. They also offer a convenient location just 45 minutes away from The Loop in Chicago.

The Purdue Research Foundation will offer the free office space lease to one of the winning startup teams at Valparaiso’s Startup Weekend, which starts on Friday, October 11th and runs through Sunday, October 13th. Purdue Research Park Director Kathy DeGuillio-Fox will also serve on the judging panel for this Startup Weekend event.

Official Startup Weekend events are 54 hour, build-a-startup, hackathon weekends. They begin on Friday evening with dinner and a chance to meet the other attendees. From there ideas for projects/startups are given in 60 second presentations. The ideas to build are voted on by the entire group, and by Sunday the new teams present their startups to the audience and a panel of judges.

There are still a few spots left for Valparaiso’s Startup Weekend. You can register here.

Apple Leaves Finger Print Scanner, TouchID Untouchable To Developer’s And Startups

Apple, iPhone 5S, TouchID, developers, startups, mobile wallet

(photo theverge.com)

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, alongside executives Jony Ive and Phil Schiller, took to the stage today at their Cupertino headquarters to unveil the new iPhone 5c and the iPhone 5s. If you’re a frequent reader of technology blogs, you’ll notice that most of the leaked specs actually came to fruition.

Normally when we are building up to an Apple product release there are several “features” that may seem a little outlandish. Often times they don’t actually pan out. In fact there were 127 rumors of Apple changing phone sizes over the years. Only one time were they actually correct.

One of those rumors this year was a “finger print scanner” that would somehow be baked into the new iPhone. Many pundits said no-way was Apple going to put a finger print scanner on their phone. Well they have. Which actually makes a whole lot of sense after seeing leaked photos of a new home button.

As you can see from TheVerge’s photo above the home button now dubs as a fingerprint scanner. When talking about it on stage, Apple execs said that it provides a new layer of security for those who feel a 4 digit code is too “cumbersome”. Of course a finger print scanner also provides an extra layer of security for people who typically use easy to guess four digit codes.

The finger print scanner, dubbed “touch ID,” can work with multiple finger prints, and with any kind of human finger print it takes into account arches, loops, and whorls. CSI Las Vegas fans, you know what I’m talking about.

In this generation of the iPhone, the TouchID is seen strictly as a security layer for the walled garden within your iPhone. Apple did say you will be able to use your finger print to authorize purchases from the iTunes store. They didn’t say whether you would be able to use it to validate in store purchases with the Apple store app, but that is very possible.

What Schiller was very specific about, though, was that the TouchID information would not be available to other software. Period. It’s never uploaded to Apple’s servers or backed up to iCloud. The Verge’s Dieter Bohn reported in their live blog.

What is possible is that Apple’s Passbook and future apps designed around security and purchasing will most likely benefit from access to the TouchID, but for now startups hoping to disrupt the mobile wallet with a tie-in to Apple’s Touch ID will find it, well, untouchable.

Wait, So Co-Working Isn’t Great?

Co-working is all the rage these days, and for good reason. Many co-working spaces geared towards startups are really hybrid incubator programs. While co-working isn’t new, it’s definitely grown in popularity.

Today’s co-working spaces are often colocated with other startup programs. Those that aren’t housing an accelerator often host small workshops and other curriculum based activities for their members. Of course spaces like 1871, 1776 in DC and The Nashville Entrepreneur Center all house coworking space, incubation space, and accelerators.

Ok so if you’re not familiar, co-working spaces are office space where you can rent a desk or desk space through membership. They’re ideal for those entrepreneurs, startups, small businesses, and remote workers who work out of the house and either need some real interaction with human beings or want to keep their work life and home life separate. Most co-working spaces offer a variety of plans whether it be a few days a month, weekly, monthly, or annually.

Most co-working spaces throw in all of the necessities for work as well. Coffee machines, fax machines, internet, copiers, and other business tools are often included in rent or membership fees. Many co-working spaces also have lecture rooms, meeting rooms, and conference rooms available for their members to either claim, reserve, or rent.

Bigger cities usually have multiple co-working spaces, and there are several startups like DC based Speek and DC based CONT3NT which actually work out of two locations (1776 and Fishbowl).

Many co-working spaces, including Nashville’s Entrepreneur Center, 1871, 1776, CoWork Jax, and The Iron Yard in South Carolina have generously allowed Nibletz to work out of their space while traveling.

The other underlying idea behind co-working is collaboration and collision. You may find your next great technical co-founder or a developer at the coworking space you’re working at. You may be able to provide some much needed business development help to another entrepreneur, and heck, just like school and college, you may make friends. Wow!

Most co-working spaces are available around the clock and many of them also have activities outside of general “work” like cookouts and even field trips. Several co-working spaces also facilitate mentorship or in-service days for local law firms, PR firms, and accounting offices. All in the name of spurring innovation, growth, startups and the economy right?

Well this past weekend Business Insider took a different look in a piece called Montessori Management. In that piece they explored the backlash that several entrepreneurs are having in the co-working space.

Some entrepreneurs feel that co-working is distracting. Others feel that co-working spaces are ripe for stealing ideas, and many feel like forced collaboration actually feels–well–forced.

Business Insider takes a much deeper look though, tracing the roots of Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page who had Montessori educations. An education that promotes democratic learning, collaboration where everyone has a voice. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales also had Montessori educations.

Knocking down walls and throwing in gigantic tables for everyone to work at seems like a good idea on the surface. Perhaps in the startup or small business “co-working model” it works. It seems to work whenever we work out of a co-working space, but for big corporations is it the way to go?

Some people believe that the forced collaboration and the atmosphere created by it can actually be detrimental to business. To some the “Kumbaya” approach to working and collaboration isn’t the way to go. “A focus on interpersonal harmony can actually hurt team performance,” Mark de Rond a Cambridge academic told The Economist. Sometimes there is so much collaboration and so many meetings on top of meetings that people are meeting and collaborating to decide if they are going to meet and collaborate, all the while getting nothing done.

Shifting back to the startup co-working space though, I am definitely still on the side that co-working is good for startups. With the failure rate of startups, co-working spaces give you an opportunity to meet like minded colleagues who may need you or who you may need down the road. In our experience, nothing bad has come out of co-working. In fact we got our Managing Editor after co-working at the LaunchPad in Memphis.

And, just so you know, here are some great coworking spaces around the country.

LA Startup Roometrics Wants To Be The GoTo Place For Roomates

Finding a bad roommate sucks. The sites out there to find the perfect roommate are far from perfect. Of course there’s also the newspaper and Craigslist, but you’re opening up yourself to a whole world of trouble. Often times when you find and interview a potential roommate from the classifieds or Craigslist, it’s much like a job interview. You get someone showing off their best, and when they move in the worst can kick in.

A Los Angeles startup called Roometrics is trying to create that perfect platform for finding a roommate. Call it the “match.com” for roommates.

And that’s exactly what they do. Roometrics allows users to create a roommate profile that encompasses many facets of living with someone. The answers users give to the profile questions are then securely saved and can be shared with potential roommates and compatibility scores.

We got a chance to interview the team behind Roometrics. Check out the interview below.

What is Roometrics?

Roometrics is a web app that lets users find roommates that match their lifestyle based on over 50 specialized criteria. Think of it as an eHarmony meets Craigslist meets Carfax, but for roommates. The company has spent over a year developing the algorithm that shows users how well they would get along with a potential roommate. The idea is to get rid of the guesswork that often comes along with roommate finding through the current services.

In layman’s terms, how does it work?

To put it simply, users fill out a series of questions that will be used to calculate a “roommate profile”. We ask questions regarding current lifestyle and personality. Users are given a link which they can share with potential roommates they find on services like Craigslist. On the site, users can see how well they match overall with a person as well lifestyle and personality. The answers users give for questions are NOT shared with anyone and are simply used to generate compatibility scores.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

Founders are Ardy Rahman and William Tran. Both are 26 and from Los Angeles, CA.

Ardy has an MSc in Developmental Neuroscience from University College London and completed a graduate fellowship focusing on addiction psychiatry at Yale University. He’s taken his experiences with neuroscience, psychiatry, and programming to develop the core personality metrics used in Roometrics.

Will has his BA from Pomona College and has spent his career in education as a high school English teacher and admission counselor. He’s mentored students at different stages of their development and has seen how the social dynamics of high school and college can impact that development. He and Ardy work together on developing the technology that drives Roometrics as well as marketing the service to befit our target demographic.

Where are you based?

We are located in Los Angeles, CA

What’s the startup scene/culture like where you’re based?

Relatively small (compared to SV), but hugely passionate. We have some strong tech startups out here and with a growing enthusiasm, we are moving closer to the tech renaissance that has graced places like Palo Alto, Austin, and Cambridge. There is tremendous talent in SoCal, it just needs to be given the opportunity to express itself.

How did you come up with the idea for Roometrics?

Through a mixture of bad roommate experiences and even worse roommate searching experiences. There has never been a “go to” place for people that need roommates. The services are all disjointed and our market research shows that many still rely on word of mouth. We decided that needed to change.

What problem does Roometrics solve?

Currently, to find a roommate, one can use a handful of services with Craigslist being the most used resource. But what about the intangibles; the things a CL posting doesn’t tell you. Like what kind of person they are, if you have similar living styles, or if you have similar outlooks on life, etc. Our research shows that even if you don’t know it, these are all important factors to consider when living with someone and will directly affect how comfortable you are at home. Roometrics gives you that extra tool when trying to find a roommate. A bit like when you ask for the Carfax, roommates can ask for the “roometrics” from people they meet on craigslist to see if they are compatible before ever signing a long term lease.

What’s your secret sauce?

We’ve developed both a unique assessment and algorithm which is used to specifically assess roommate compatibility. It’s based of empirical research that others have conducted as well as our own novel research on roommate dyads/triads. We’ve collected and analyzed data on over 200 roommates to construct the foundation of our technology. Combined with our user interface, we’ve created an easy to use system for roommate matching.

Why Now?

Our market analysis shows the 2008 economic crisis has had a horrendous effect on the housing market. The age at which people buy their first house has shifted to the right, resulting in a larger amount of the population renting apartments for longer periods of time. Moreover, because the economy had tanked, more people are looking for roommates to split costs of living in order to save some money. The process to find roommates is lackluster and the process to find GOOD roommates is even more discouraging. That needed to be changed and that’s what we’re doing.

Who are some of your mentors and business role models?

Ardy: I profoundly respect Bill Gates. If you want to talk about a man who had the brains and the tenacity to take an idea and change the world, he’s your guy. But what sets him apart from other insanely successful individuals is his compassion and down-to-earth personality. Both he and Warren Buffet’s insistence on social responsibility are commendable. In a time when we need to restore faith in the practice of business, they are setting amazing examples for their students and peers.

Will: I am a fan of education technology. Even though it’s not a longstanding crowd, individuals pushing the envelope with products like Khan Academy, Udacity, and Coursera are my biggest fans (hope I can join them). I may not wholly agree with the internet classroom but I think this innovation is integral to ed reform. I’ve taught classic novels written ages ago but I recognize that we can’t continue to teach students the same way we have in the last 100 years.

What’s next for Roometrics?

Launching our beta. We have a few key collaborations that we are developing and hope to introduce our technology to the public shortly. After that, growth!

Where can people find out more?

You can check us out at http://www.roometrics.com where you can sign up with your email. Or you can read up on us at http://blog.roometrics.com.

Whoa! Jeff Hoffman The Real “Negotiator” To Keynote Everywhere Else Cincinnati

Earlier this year at Everywhere Else Memphis, Priceline founding CTO and Starutp America CEO Scott Case took to the stage to spread the important gospel of startup communities and culture. Case has spoken at events across the country and in a lot of “flyover” states, focusing especially on the earlier stage startups.

This time around we are honored to have Jeff Hoffman as one of our main keynote speakers at Everywhere Else Cincinnati. Hoffman is best known as the co-founder of the Priceline.com family of companies. He’s also been the CEO of uBid and Color Jar. He’s a regular mentor for startups and pens a great column on innovation and entrepreneurship for Inc Magazine.

While he’s a very esteemed and successful entrepreneur, back in May at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress in Rio de Janeiro he proudly announced “I don’t spend time launching business plans anymore, I launch entrepreneurs.” That’s why he is one of the co-founders, founding advisors, and founding mentors for Indianapolis based VentureCamp. Hoffman calls it a “fully immersive startup ecosystem.”

After launching 7 successful companies (including Priceline and another travel company that was acquired by American Express), Hoffman has decided his life’s work from here on out is launching entrepreneurs. He’s been speaking for years on entrepreneurship but really enjoys getting into the nitty gritty with the young, vibrant, and disruptive crowd.

While speaking at that conference in Rio, Hoffman passionately spoke about the entrepreneur and how if the entrepreneur has a bad experience upfront “we could lose that entrepreneur.”

When Nibletz Co-Founder Nick Tippmann attended Venture Camp’s demo day earlier this summer, he noticed that the founders were talking about how VentureCamp focused on teaching them entrepreneurial skills, critical thinking, and decision making and not just how to put your plan on a business model canvas and make a Power Point. This focus came directly from Hoffman.

If you were at Everywhere Else in Memphis and saw Scott Case speak, you know he does an amazing job talking about startup communities and the value the community brings to the table. During Hoffman’s keynote we will hear about something equally as important: the entrepreneur.

For Hoffman’s full bio click here.

Get your tickets or Startup Avenue booth below.

Event registration for Everywhere Else Cincinnati – “Start Where U Are” powered by Eventbrite

Jeff Hoffman image, UnerasonableGroup Youtube.

Chicago Startup Dabble Trying To Save Itself With Honesty

Dabble is a great Chicago-based startup that’s trying to serve as a marketplace for people to take specialty classes on anything from guitar playing to bridge playing to designing websites. The market place for this kind of startup is getting kind of crowded, but the two women behind the wheel, Erin Hopmann and Jess Lybeck are doing whatever they can to chug along.

In all fairness Dabble is doing a little better than just dabbling. Mashable reports that they’ve raised $500,000 in two angel rounds. They’ve received a bunch of good press locally and regionally. In fact they are often compared to other startups with similar ideas as one of the first to market. Add to that the fact that they are on pace to double sales in 2013 and you may be wondering why the need to “save themselves”.

Well at one point, after closing their angel rounds, Hopmann and Lybeck took on a few more employees and salaries for themselves. At this point they’ve cut back down from 7 employees to 3 and also stopped taking a salary. It would seem sales aren’t sustaining the company and they are looking for another big round of funding to get it over the hump.

So they’ve decided to try something a little different. Both Hopmann and Lybeck are penning a blog called “30 Days of Honesty.” “What do you do when you’re struggling with a company you love” is the headline at the top of their blog. In it they talk about the trials and problems they are going through right now as they run out of runway.

The hope is to help other entrepreneurs, and at the same time maybe find that special investment that will get them to the next level.

The women told Mashable that they’ve already received responses from customers who offered to pay more to keep the startup afloat. Other entrepreneurs have written in with encouragement, ideas, and words of wisdom, and they also just set up an appointment with an investor who had read the blog.

Today (September 10th) marks day 16 of their quest.

What comes next? Hoppmann says she may have to find work if the company doesn’t turn around. “If it’s a month from now, and there’s not some hope for taking pay out of Dabble by the end of the year, I will go and seek out something that is a source of income,” she said in the interview

They aren’t the first ones to talk about a startup failing. There was an anonymous Tumblr called “My Startup Has 30 days to Live,” and even our good friends at WorkForPie penned a thought provoking post as they were running out of runway earlier this summer.

What happens next for Dabble? You can keep up with their plight here. Hopefully they will find both the knowledge and the money they need to continue. If not, hopefully they’ll dust themselves off and start again.

What’s it like to fail? Lucas Rayala, the founder of Minnesota startup Altsie, who chronicled the failure of his startup in TechCrunch will speak on that topic at Everywhere Else Cincinnati.

1776 Lands Partnership With General Assembly

With a name like General Assembly, you would think one of the most respected incubator organizations in the country would have a presence in Washington, DC. But that’s not the case. PandoDaily’s DC based reporter Hamish McKenzie reports that “A couple of years ago, entrepreneurial educational institution General Assembly scouted Washington DC and decided there wasn’t enough startup activity to warrant starting a program in the city just yet.”

That seems to have changed now that 1776, the DC startup hub and coworking space founded by Startup Veterans Evan Burfield and Donna Harris, is up and running on all cylinders.

Since opening this Spring, there hasn’t been a dull moment at 1776. They’ve hosted Startup Grind, TechCocktail events, several hackathons, startup launch parties, and several other startup activities. They’ve also announced major partnerships with top educational publisher Pearson,and others. They’ve even announced a global startup challenge that will bring startups from around the world to Washington, DC for a tournament style final next year.

Now, General Assembly has given the nation’s capital a second look. They’ve decided to take up residency on two lower floors of 1776’s space on 15th street in NorthWest Washington, DC. The space sits directly across from the Washington Post which is in the process of being acquired by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

McKenzie reports that DC’s General Assembly will begin hosting workshops and short form courses as early as next month with their long-term curriculum kicking off in 2014. This marks the 9th General Assembly campus. They also have locations in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, London, Sydney and Hong Kong.

Burfield and Harris were influencers with Startup America before founding 1776 a short seven months ago. Harris was a director with the Startup America Partnership, and Burfield was the founder of the DC region for Startup America. They’ve attracted over 100 startups to the 1776 space. In addition to serving as a hub for startups in Washington DC they are also linking startups from across the country and around the world to the federal government which happens to be the largest enterprise client in the world. 1776 sits just four blocks from the White House.

Find out more about 1776 at 1776dc.com and General Assembly here.

Several DC area startups and founders are headed to Cincinnati later this month for this huge startup conference.

5 Startups Get In Motion At NMotion Demo Day

There’s so much talk about startup accelerators. We report on a lot of accelerators, with an emphasis on the ones accelerating companies outside Silicon Valley. NMotion is one of those accelerators. I spent a bit of time talking with NMotion’s managing director, Brian Ardinger, throughout the course of the program. I also did a mentor session with the five companies in the program about a week before demo day.

Ardinger is one of those accelerator directors that knows the most valuable lesson already: Demo Day isn’t the end for the startups, it’s the beginning.

“When we invest in companies, we help them for life, not just for the summer,” it says on NMotion’s website. On the surface Ardinger is a tech-transfer guy. As the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at NuTech Ventures, Ardinger oversees the crossover from the University of Nebraska and the private sector. However, NMotion was by no means a “student program.”

Each NMotion team received a seed investment of $15,000 which is par for the course for a city Lincoln’s size. The teams also received over $100,000 in important business services and access to a mentor network, which Ardinger stresses doesn’t go away on demo day.

HipPocket, PaperTale, Cinnamon Social, SynserScan, and Alumni Labs worked around the clock as hard, if not harder, than startups at some of the most prestigious Valley accelerators. When the time came on Thursday afternoon, they were ready to show off their summer’s work in front of a crowd of nearly 200 (not too shabby for an inaugural cohort in Lincoln, Nebraska).

Cinnamon Social is a software for automated and intelligent social media content curation led by husband-and-wife founders Jason and Holly Petersen.

SynerScan is a software to digitize hospital operations offering better health care through data led by founder Brett Byman.

HipPocket is a software offering families better context and confidence for financial decision-making led by founder Mark Zmarzly.

Alumni Labs is a software that simplifies and manages the college selection and application process led by founders Martin Wolff and Steve Scharf.

PaperTale is a new software product founded by Dan Castagnoli designed to help manufacturers curb the $500 million dollar loss in paper coupons. Omaha.com reported that Castagnoli revealed in his pitch that people are using photo editing software to change coupons and dupe manufacturers and retail stores out of millions of dollars. In some cases these crooks change $5 coupons to $10 coupons.

While some accelerators immediately start taking applications for the next cohort the day after demo day, Ardinger is making sure that the teams that just graduated into the real business world adjust well. He’s also knee deep in Lincoln’s Startup Week going on all week long. NMotion’s demo day and then Startup Weekend were the official kick off events for Startup Week.

For more information on NMotion click here. Here a re some of our interviews with NMotion teams in our Startups In The Fastlane feature.

Harlem’s New Harlem Garage Puts Business In High Gear

“New York’s startup community is made up of several startup communities that come together.”

That’s what Startup Threads founder and New York startup activist Frank Denbow told us in an interview last May. Whether you’re in Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Dumbo District, or even Harlem, every area seems to have a vibrant startup community.

Last year we reported on Harlem incubator IncubateNYC. That effort founded by Marcus Mayo and Brian Shields was in response to a call to action for Harlem small businesses and startups by Mayor Bloomberg.

Now Harlem is getting a new hub for startups called the Harlem Garage.

New York co-working company MicroOffice is opening their newest location at 318 West 118th Street right in the heart of West Harlem. The company already has several small office and desk space options scattered across New York City. They aim to help small businesses and startups transition from the home to a more traditional office. Like most co-working companies, MicroOffice bundles all the needs of today’s workers into one easy-to-understand agreement. Things like power, faxing, conference rooms, and internet are all in the agreement.

The company also installs community managers at their locations, but they function as much more than just landlords. They try to ensure complimentary diversity within the coworking space. They also help facilitate programming that’s necessary for today’s growing companies. Legal, accounting, PR, and other workshops are a mainstay across the MicroOffice facilities.

The Harlem Garage is 5000 square feet of coworking space and will house a diverse community of 150 members according to Black Enterprise. They also plan to offer discounts to women and minority-owned businesses as well as hold annual contests for desk space.

“Harlem Garage is about the advancement of Harlem small businesses through the exchange of expertise,” Ryan Young, Harlem Garage’s Community Manager told Black Enterprise.

They plan to open in the coming weeks. You can find out more about Harlem Garage at harlemgarage.com

Sexism Takes Center Stage At Disrupt Hackathon, TechCrunch Issues An Apology

TechCrunch is known for pushing the envelope. They are also known for their sometimes snarky editorial and for breaking stories no matter how sensitive they are. They don’t play favorites, and in some circumstances a startup can live or die by the TechCrunch pen. Throw founder Michael Arrington back into the mix, and it’s no holds barred tech and startup journalism.

Sunday was no different, even when all eyes were on the AOL-owned tech site and its legendary Disrupt conference and hackathon.

The TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon typically starts the weekend before a TechCrunch Disrupt conference. We’ve been to several and out of their events comes amazingly good content. We had to sit this one out because we are too busy planning Everywhere Else Cincinnati.

In true hackathon fashion, hundreds of hackers spend the weekend seeing if they can solve the world’s problems with technology, or at least make life more fun. An Australian team that came up with an app called Titstare and another hacker whose app was called “Circle Shake” were attempting the latter.

Titstare was an app that showed off a woman’s cleavage, while “Circle Shake” was some kind of mobile sensor app that measured how many times you could shake your phone up and down in ten seconds. Titstare was obviously in bad taste and doesn’t really need more comment. When the hacker went to demonstrate “Circle Shake,” he proceeded to pretend he was masturbating the phone on stage.

This week TechCrunch Disrupt is home in Silicon Valley. Their late spring New York event is usually chock full of top notch investors, supporters, and even AOL executives. The Silicon Valley (San Francisco) event draws a similar crowd and some of the more notable Valley investors who often rely on and trust TechCrunch when judging a startup’s traction. In other words, both apps were quite an embarrassment for TechCrunch.

No worries though, co-editors Eric Eldon and Alexia Tstotsis jumped into action and quickly issued this apology to all of TechCrunch’s readers and supporters, ending it by saying:

“Trust us, that changed as soon as we saw what happened at our show. Every presentation is getting a thorough screening from this hackathon onward. Any type of sexism or other discriminatory and/or derogatory speech will not be allowed. You expect more from us, and we expect more from ourselves. We are sorry.”

What makes this story even more significant is the air of sexism in technology and startups, even hitting home with TechCrunch. Earlier this year a woman falsely accused TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington of sexual harassment and abuse. Last year, former Kleiner Perkins Partner Ellen Pao sued the firm for sexual harassment, a story that was widely chronicled by TechCrunch.

There’s also the notion of the startup/digital/technology divide and the unfair treatment female founders get when talking to VC’s, an issue which Box Group’s David Tisch and Sequoia’s Aaref Hilaly addressed on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC back in May.

For more info read this and this.

New York Startup Bringing The Much Needed NetFlix For Books

So far 2013 has been a big year for readers and technology. We’ve seen startups like Memphis’ ScrewPulp offering a new kind of self publishing platform. We saw Amazon’s Jeff Bezos add the digital download to traditional books, and now it seems everybody is talking about Oyster.

E-Book reading is a huge growing market. According to a recent report from the Washington Post, e-book sales in the US topped $3 billion dollars this year. That, according to TechCrunch, accounted for a 44% increase in e-book sales. The UK saw a whopping 134% increase from 2011 to 2012.

As more and more people switch to table devices or add a table device to their smart devices, e-books are becoming more and more popular. Amazon, iTunes, and others have made finding and reading books so easy that you don’t even have to set foot in a library or bookstore.

Eric Stromberg, Andrew Brown, and Willem Van Lancker are preparing to disrupt the e-book market again by offering a Netflix style “book renting” platform. Their startup, Oyster, lets the user download/rent unlimited e-books for $9.99 a month.

Oyster already has over 100,000 titles in their library and has scored partnerships with some big publishers in the world including Harper Collins, Houghton Mifflin, Worman, Rosetta Books and more.

In addition to its first to market rental platform for books, Oyster has also deployed a social layer on top of their reading platform so that users can share and stay updated with their friends on what they are reading.

With most e-book downloads ranging from $9.99 to $14.99 for one book, any one who reads should check out Oyster and get on their waiting list.

Vancouver Startup Wantering: Google For Fashion?

You’d be surprised how many data points there are when it comes to shopping online. When you take into consideration data across the web and then across the social web we’re talking about hundreds of millions of data points. While the normal shopper can’t analyze or look at all of those data points, sometimes shopping for clothes online can easily result in 30 or 40 open browser windows. This can get ugly, confusing, and slow your computer down.

A Vancouver startup called Wantering is hoping to help solve your fashion faux pas, by analyzing over 100 million data points for you in what they call the “WantRank” algorithm.

Whether you’re shopping by deal, brand, category, color, print, fabric, or any other category, wantering can help narrow down your search and point you to the best deal. Then, the web platform can take you to a destination to purchase.

The team behind Wantering all came from the online retail world and they’ve spent years combing through and analyzing data.

We got a chance to talk to Wantering Evangelist, Kathleen Ong. Check out the interview below.

What does your company do?

Ever try to shop online when you’re not quite sure exactly what you’re looking for? We’ve been there. Wantering helps shoppers find clothes they’ll love through our fashion search engine. Save yourself the wasted time and frustration of opening up multiple browser tabs, wondering if something is on sale or in stock, and trying to shop from tiny thumbnails.

You can shop for clothes by brand, category, materials, prints, and color across a curated list of boutiques, flash sales sites and major retailers all in one place. And if you’re curious about why something is at the top of a search result, it’s because of our WantRank algorithm. WantRank tracks and analyzes over 100 million data points across the social web and ranks products based on what’s getting the most social-love.

Who are the founders, and what are their backgrounds

The Wantering team are no strangers to online shopping. Wantering’s CEO is Matt Friesen, a technology industry veteran. Matt was previously the founder and CEO of Thirdi Software, a custom software development shop specialized in building eCommerce stores and web applications. Matt started Wantering in 2011 after Thirdi Software was acquired by Invoke Media (the creators of Hootsuite). Nick Cairns is Wantering’s head of UX and was previously the Director of User Interface & Design at Move Inc (the parent company of Realtor.com). Jesse Sherlock is Wantering’s CTO, and has experience building highly scalable systems for Reinvent (one of the largest domain owners in the world) and the BC Lottery Corp. Nicholas Molnar is the head of product, and was previously a web strategist at Thirdi Software. Nicholas sits on the board of directors of F Cancer and has been a speaker at numerous technology-focused events including TedxVancouver.

Where are you based?

Wantering is based in Vancouver and New York City.

What’s the startup scene like where you are based?

Vancouver is known as Silicon Valley North. There is a great startup scene here with a growing community of startups, investors and accelerator programs such as GrowLab, which Wantering went through in 2012.

In New York, we’re based out of General Assembly. Wantering was selected as one of six startups to be part of the Canadian Technology Accelerator (CTA) New York program this fall. We’re looking forward to meeting people and getting to know the New York tech community on a more intimate level.

We get the best of both worlds; participating in Vancouver’s growing tech scene is such a rewarding experience and travelling to New York, where the industry is much more mature, has been eye-opening.

What problem do you solve?

We’re solving some of the most basic problems in online shopping. Where do I look for a new pair of shoes? What’s on sale from my favorite designer? Where can I get a blue cocktail dress for this wedding I’m going to?

Wantering gives shoppers a beautiful platform to discover and buy clothing by pulling together the best e-commerce stores all in one place. Gigantic images, detailed descriptions, trending products, and up-to-date stock and sale information make shopping less time consuming and more fulfilling.

Why now?

We believe searching for clothes online has lost its way. The results you see in leading product search engines are typically paid posts by retailers. One look at Google Shopping and you’ll find a big notice in the corner explaining exactly that! Not to mention, they don’t understand my style taste, and they completely disregard current trends in fashion.

Can you name two new features in product search since the ’90s? Shopzilla launched in 1996, Yahoo Shopping in ’97, MySimon in ’98, and Nextag in ’99. They’ve barely changed since, and are somehow still billion dollar businesses.

We think this is an area ripe for disruption. On Wantering.com we put the best products first by using 100 million data points from the social web, and we aren’t going to sell our users out. There is tons of room for innovation in this space, and we’re excited to be building something really cool to help people shop online better.

What are some of the milestones your startup has already reached?

There’s been quite a few big milestones for us in the last 18 months. Releasing our search engine in spring 2013 was a one of the biggest moments for us; it’s both rewarding and motivating to see what you’ve been working on for months come to life. There is still more work to be done and we’re looking forward to what’s ahead.

What are your next milestones?

We have some cool product features in the works over the next while, so we’re excited to get those out!

Where can people find out more?

Shop for clothes you’ll love on www.wantering.com

St. Louis Startup Aisle411 Raises $6.3M Series A

The St. Louis startup that’s changing the in-store experience for everyone has just closed a massive series A round. Aisle411 is an interactive indoor mapping startup for grocery stores and other places where you need to locate things on an indoor map.

The St. Louis based startup has raised $10M since its launch in 2008.

This latest round of funding came from Google’s Don Doge, Plug & Play Ventures of Silicon Valley, Cultivation Capital and St. Louis ArchAngels. In addition to the funding the company already has some big partnerships in place including one with Walgreens, Home Depot, Schnucks, and Stop and Save.

While people immediately recognize the need for Aisle411, the company is still working on aggressively building scale and going global.

“We’ve seen a significant increase in demand from the retail market for our services,” Nathan Pettyjohn, founder and CEO of aisle411, said in a statement. “The investment round allows us to aggressively scale to a growing list of global retail partners.”

You can check out Aisle411 here.;

Chicago Startup Personify Merges Human Interaction With Digital Content to Make Presentations More Personal

We’re still far away from teleporting technology. In the meantime a Chicago startup called Personify has found a way to make remote presentations more personal.

Using depth sensing camera’s like the one found in the Microsoft Kinect, the company’s product called Personify Life, puts someone giving a presentation as close to being in the room as possible.

“Most remote presentations, including webinars and PowerPoint slideshows, lack the personal component that make in-person communication successful and keep audiences engaged. Personify Live brings those critical elements back by seamlessly merging human interaction with digital content,” a company spokesperson told Nibletz in an interview.

Personify boasts an incredibly well educated team of founders who are working on something that will make boring old meetings much more engaging. It’s almost like a hologram of the presentation giver is in the room.

We got a chance to interview the team from Personify. Check out the interview below.

What is your startup called?

Personify Inc.

What does your company do?

Personify is an immersive video communication company that bridges the gap between communicating remotely and talking face-to-face. Personify products create a deeper sense of presence while remote by seamlessly merging human interaction with digital content.

Personify Live, the flagship product from Illinois-based Personify, uses a virtual-green screen technology called User Extraction to visually immerse the individual in the content they are presenting, enabling the presenters’ body language, passion, enthusiasm and visual persona to dramatically enliven the experience.

With Personify Live, an individual can lead a virtual presentation from anywhere, in a one-to-one or one-to-many setting, and all presentations can be recorded and stored in the cloud. Users simply connect a depth-sensing camera, such as a Microsoft Kinect or ASUS Xtion Pro Live, to his or her PC. Personify Live’s technology was developed for sales and marketing professionals, however, its clients operate in industries ranging from online education to medicine. Personify Live has been adopted by hallmark enterprises and institutions such as SAP, Oracle, LinkedIn, Marketo and the University of Illinois.

The product’s technology is beneficial to a variety of industries, backgrounds and use cases.

Clients across all industries are reporting shorter sales cycles and more engaged audiences. One study found a 60 percent improvement in sales closing rates when online demos were used. In another case, a Personify Live client noted that 90 percent of webinar attendees reported being “more engaged” than with a traditional webinar. Furthermore, studies show a 400 percent increase in perceived learning using Personify Live vs. traditional online education tools.

By using Personify Live, organizations see a substantial increase in its business metrics, including close rates and ROI. Additionally, Personify Live works with WebEx, GoToMeeting, Skype and other traditional Web conferencing solutions for ease of use.

Who are the founders, and what are their backgrounds?

Personify might have the most well-educated group of co-founders of any startup on the planet. Of the five co-founders, four have Ph.D.s and one has a Master’s degree. Three are professors of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois.

Although academics do not have a history of correlating with entrepreneurs and startups, the University of Illinois, and its engineering department, is bucking that trend. The U of I is well known for startup and entrepreneurial successes including Netscape and YouTube. Personify is one of its most recent.

Sanjay Patel, Personify’s CEO, began his career as a chip designer in the 1990s, later becoming the CTO of Ageia Technologies, a company that developed chips to improve the graphics in video games. In addition to his CEO duties, Sanjay is also a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the U of I. Two other cofounders, Minh Do, Personify’s co-founder and chief scientist, and Wen-mei Hwu, one of the world’s foremost experts in parallel computing, are both professors at the U of I as well.

The depth-based rendering of video utilized for Personify’s two products, Personify Live and zChat, slated to be released this fall, was constructed based on Minh and co-founder Quang Nguyen’s research.

Personify’s fifth co-founder, Dennis Lin, holds a Ph.D. from UIUC, specializes in computer vision and is a leader on Personify’s development team.

Where are you based?

Personify, which is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, also has offices in Champaign and Ho-Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

What’s the startup scene like where you are based?

Personify benefits from the location in Chicago thanks to the city’s burgeoning tech scene. Chicago is home to 1871 and TechNexus, some of the most active and innovative startup incubators in the United States.

Why now?

Personify was founded in 2009 after the technologies needed, including depth-sensing, had developed enough to utilize in-product. Personify Live uses various types of cutting-edge technology to connect people instead of distancing them. The field of perceptual computing, thanks to a movement lead by Intel, has developed significantly and will continue to do so in the coming years. Personify, in fact, is a proud participant in Intel’s perceptual computing movement and was showcased on stage with Intel at the 2013 International CES in Las Vegas, Nevada back in January. Personify Live also utilizes gesture recognition technology which allows a presenter to advance a slide on his or her PowerPoint with just the swipe of a hand.

What are some of the milestones your startup has already reached?

Personify was named a finalist for the Illinois Technology Association (ITA) CityLIGHTS Trailblazing Award, which recognizes companies that have developed or introduced an ingenious, non-traditional and innovative way of doing business or creating a culture that produces significant value and growth for the company.

Personify Live has been adopted by a number of Fortune 500 companies that range in industries from healthcare to education.

Additionally, within six months of launching, Personify Live earned a position as an emerging market leader in the Web conferencing Industry by G2 Grid, a service of G2 Crowd. G2 Grid rates products and services algorithmically in real-time based on user reviews and analysis. Personify Live is currently considered an innovator in the Web conferencing segment, a category that includes Cisco’s WebEx, Citrix GoToMeeting and Skype – all products that integrate with Personify Live.

What are your next milestones?

Personify recently opened their new headquarters in the River North neighborhood of Chicago and announced plans to increase full-time staff by 50 percent in the next six months.

Personify’s consumer-facing immersive video chat tool, zChat, is slated for release this fall, which will bring perceptual computing to consumers and allow users to stay connected like never before.

Finally, in the near future, Personify hopes to be adopted by more companies, both large and small, across the world. Personify Live will hopefully be used to improve communication for these corporations, both internally and externally.

Where can people find out more? Any social media links you want to share?

More information about Personify can be found at personifyinc.com