Norfolk’s Hatch Startup Accelerator Reveals New Class

Back in July we interviewed Zack Miller, the director of the new startup accelerator in Norfolk called Hatch. Miller, a Hampton Roads native, decided to start an accelerator program for the region. He decided to put it in Norfolk which is the epicenter for Hampton Roads. Hampton Roads already has three accelerators in Innovation Research Park, Hampton Roads Technology Center and James City County Incubator.

They’ve just unwrapped the latest class which started a few weeks ago. This new class of startups includes:

RoboCent enables small business, non-profits and political campaigns to easily send call and text notifications to their subscribers, starting at 1.3¢ per message. Through RoboCent’s streamlined and user-friendly platform, clients can receive feedback from their customers, monitor their calls and texts in real-time and send out urgent notifications to subscribers within 5 minutes.

Go Wedding Pro is a tool built by photographers for photographers. GWP will help wedding photographers stay on top of their clients’ needs by organizing wedding day details and client info is easier to maintain and access on the go. Go Wedding Pro will make it easier to stay on top of client info, contracts, invoices and tracking post production . From booking to delivering images GWP is the wedding photographer’s best friend.

CampusWise is a college classified company catering exclusively to college students. Our aim is to provide a safe and friendly environment so that students are able to trade both goods and services strictly amongst each other. Each school will have a customized page that will only be accessible to those students who share the same university email.

uVest is the first personal investment application designed for casual investors who do not have the knowledge, desire, or time to do complex market research and analysis to discover trading opportunities. uVest is designed specifically for mobile users who want to casually browse and enter trading opportunities from verified, high return traders at their convenience.

These four startups are going through Hatch Norfolk’s intense 12 week program which includes mentoring, business development, team building and product building. Their applications were evaluated based on team, product, market, pain point and execution.

To find out more about Hatch Norfolk click here

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uSwapia Trading & Bartering Even If You Don’t Want What They Have

Rehoboth Beach Delaware startup, uSwapia, is the latest to tackle direct and indirect bartering. Many sites have tried to replicate and improve upon the bartering model provided on Craigslist.com. uSwapia has found a way to barter, or trade, services and goods with someone even if they want what you have but don’t have what you want.

Rather than being stuck with a service or item you don’t want uSwapia has a better way as Kevin Clark the company founder explains:

“So I’m an acupuncturist, and have listed myself on the uSwapia site. I state that for 1 token, I will offer somebody an acupuncture service. Fred the baker pulled his back lifting a bag of flour and wants some acupuncture. I don’t want any baked goods, because I’m still holding onto a little bit of holiday weight, but that’s ok. Fred comes in, the site transfers a token from Fred’s account to my account after the trade is completed, and then I can use that token to go hire Suzy the personal trainer to help get me back into shape in time for summer. Tokens are really just placeholders for trades, and basically everything is traded for 1 token. (We find that most trades would retail for between $50-150, but by taking dollar amounts out of the equation, we are trying to shift the emphasis to building community in one’s neighborhood, while operating under the premise that sometimes we are ahead, and sometimes we are behind, but that it all evens out in the end.)”

In essence not only has Clark provided a new way to barter and trade online but also a better one that solves one of the main problems that people have with trading and bartering in the first place. When you take to Craigslist for example you see what everyone has to barter and what they want but sometimes you don’t have anything close.

Check out the rest of our interview with Clark below.

Cariloop The Expedia Model For Geriatric Care

Elder care and geriatric care are on the rise. As the baby boomer generation starts turning towards assisted living and geriatric care, the industry continues to grow. In 2013 we’re starting to see a new trend of somewhat computer savvy seniors, and their kids, turning to the internet to help find care and services. We’re also at a time where more and more seniors are trying to prolong their independence by living at home. However, they still need resources.

Austin based Cariloop is a startup that is applying an Expedia like model to finding elder care and geriatric services.

Cariloop’s co-founder Michael Walsh tells us in an interview:

:Cariloop is a web-based platform designed to help geriatric care and service providers digitally market their capabilities. Cariloop’s search engine then allows anyone – healthcare professionals, consumers, patients – to get a more current, accurate snapshot of the providers in their area, reach out to them directly, or share their information with others…all in real-time.”

This gives users access to information that used to take months and months and hundreds of brochures to sift through. Now it’s all accessible at your fingertips and easily comparable.

Check out the rest of our interview with Walsh about this exciting new trend in elder care:

Uber Introduces Uber Taxi In DC Ahead Of Inauguration

Black car hailing service Uber is no stranger to Washington DC. The nibletz.com team got a chance to hang out at the Uber DC offices in DC’s Dupont Circle over the summer and learned then that DC loves Uber.

Last year for President’s day the creative Uber team had their customers hailed around in actual motorcades which was quite a site inside the beltway.

Over the summer when Uber had some trouble with members of the DC city council everyone from tv news celebrities to members of congress actually took to Twitter to have some legislation that would have halted Uber’s DC efforts, squashed. Eventually the city council backed down.

This time around it’s another good piece of news for Uber as they are unveiling a new form of Uber-ing just in time for the Presidential Inauguration next week. Uber has unveiled the new Uber Taxi feature.

With Uber Taxi customers will be able to use the same app to hail a traditional DC cab. No worries Mr. T won’t be pulling up to cart you away but what you will have as the opportunity to save a little change over Uber’s traditional black sedan and limo services, and also you’ll be able to hail a cab in DC without getting passed by.

“Just like with our black car service, open up your Uber app and you can easily request a DC taxi, pay with your credit card, and do it all with just the tap of a button. In a nutshell, UberTAXI offers the reliability and convenience you expect from Uber at a lower cost, so you can pick exactly what kind of ride you need, whenever you need it.” Uber said in an email to their customers.

They continued “Thanks to the pro-innovation, pro-consumer legislation passed last month by the DC Council, we know that Uber is here to stay, which is why we are rolling out new transportation options like UberTAXI. But make no mistake: it’s still an experiment, and we will continue to improve on UberTAXI as more people use it.”

Uber does warn that their traditional sedan service will be the default when Uber-ing in DC but the Taxi feature will be there after you take the latest update.

We’ll warn you from experience that it may take a little while longer than normal especially based on their service in Charlotte during the DNC. However Charlotte was a pop-up market for the convention while Uber in DC has been running now for over a year.

There are plenty of great DC startups coming to everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference, over 2000 tickets sold but a limited number are still available.

This Amazing Hat Called Cynaps Lets You Hear Music From Your Phone Through Your Head

We saw the most amazing hat at CES 2013 in Eureka Park. The hat is called Cynaps and the startup that created it is called MaxVirtual.

Cynaps, uses bone induction technology which when connected to a smartphone or other music player, lets you actually hear the music through the vibrations in hour head. No headset, no earphones and no earbuds required. The sound is conducted directly into your inner ear through vibration.

Our cofounder Nick Tippmann was able to try the Cynaps out and says that it sounds just as good as headphones. The company spokesperson that we interviewed said that it’s perfect for anything requiring headphones. You can listen to music, watch movies, even take a call or skype with the Cynaps hat.

There are a couple buttons built onto the brim that allow the user to end and start calls and playback.

The South Carolina startup is already up, running and selling the Cynaps hat for $60 here.

Cynaps offers a new level of safety when it comes to hands free operation. While you’re hearing the sound coming through your inner ear with the vibration, you can still hear other sounds as well. The main sound source becomes the focal point but if you were driving or biking with your Cynaps hat on you would be able to hear a car horn or other important noises.

Check out Nick’s interview with Max Virtual Below:

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Tony Hsieh Considering ZBoards For Downtown Project? Check Out Their Pitch! CES 2013

The problem is simple, you want to get from point A to point B and the distance is just a little too far to walk, and a little too close to drive. Sure you can take a bike but then you need to worry about keeping your bike safe, and the fact that you could work up a little sweat and soil your clothes for the rest of the work day.

California startup Zboard has the answer. Zboard is an electric skateboard that works fundamentally the same way a regular skateboard does. Well at least it kind of sort of looks like a regular skateboard.

The Zboard seems to be powered by the same kind of technology that Segway’s use by moving your body forwards and backwards or leaning.

If you lean forward while riding the Zboard it speeds up and goes forward. You can move your feet, applying pressure to the left and right sides to make the Zboard turn. It also comes with a brake that will stop you when you lean back.

It’s a new wave of hipster transportation. So cool in fact that Zappos CEO and Downtown Project founder Tony Hsieh hinted in a fireside chat at CES that he may be considering getting Zboards for the downtown Las Vegas community. For Hsieh, the Zboard answers the question “How do you connect where you don’t need a car, possible electric boards that are electric”.

Check out Zboard’s pitch from the Launch.It event at CES 2013.

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Popchilla The Robot For Autistic Children Shows Off At Eureka Park, CES 2013

Raising children can be both hard and a blessing. Raising a child with autism is a lot more challenging. Autistic children often times have problems communicating even their simplest needs sometimes.

Parents of autistic children are constantly looking for “more tools to put in their tool chest” Michael Knight the founder of Popchilla, told nibletz.com in an interview.

Popchilla is a fun loving robotic stuffed animal that also has an app to go along with it. As an example Knight showed us a portion of the app where the Popchilla would tell the child to get his or her toothbrush and tooth paste from a virtual house on a tablet, and then brush Popchilla’s teeth.

Knight knew early on that Popchilla would be a success. His company used to make animatronic robots. He wold get questions from parents of autistic children all the time, asking when he was going to make a robot for them. He learned that sometimes children with autism actually interact better with robots rather than humans.

Popchilla was one of the most innovative things we saw at Eureka Park. Not only is Popchilla a cool robot, but when you couple that with the app you have a recipe for success, and definitely another tool for the tool chest.

Check out our video interview with Knight here:

Check out Popchilla at popchillasworld.com

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CheckOutTheLatest Lets You Check Out The Latest Videos Just About Everywhere

A New York startup called CheckOutTheLatest lets you do just that. The video aggregation and search startup populates over 250 million videos from the top video sites like Youtube, Vimeo and Dailymotion to give you access to one site that can find just about any video on the planet, that you may be looking for.

“The idea came to us a year ago while on twitter. People were always tweeting @ us hoping to get us to “Check out” their latest Youtube videos or go watch their vimeo vids.” co-founder Deni Belanich tells us about how they came up with the idea for a super video search engine.

We got a chance to interview Belanich, check out the interview below.

Continuously GeoTag Video With UK Startup RouteShoot

Geotagging is nothing new, we’ve been able to do it on our iPhones and Android devices for the past few years. You can geotag a tweet, a Facebook status message, Instagram photo and photos that you post to just about any social network. Geotagging allows the creator to mark where their photo was taken or their checkin was made.

Videos can be geotagged as well, however it’s typically one geotag at the beginning of the video or associated with the link for the video.

UK Startup RouteShoot has developed away to use your smartphones gps in conjunction with it’s video camera to continuously geotag a video. Say for instance you are hanging out in South Beach and start a video at your hotel, if you keep the video going down the A1A and then onto the beach, RouteShoot would allow the geotags to change to correspond with the different locations you were at while the video camera was rolling.

What’s more is once the video is uploaded the route is tracked in a line. A viewer can click the line on the geo mapped route and pick up the video based on the location if they wish, or watch as the locations change throughout the recording of the video. The video also shows a “you are here” symbol on the map as the video is playing.

RouteShoot was created by co-founders; Gary Wilson, Adam May and Andy Pym. Wilson and May have years of experience in the highway maintenance field while Pym has experience in highway engineering. We got a chance to talk with Wilson about RouteShoot. Check out the interview below.

What To Do After School? DC Startup Activity Rocket Has The Answer

As the parent of a kindergartener her father and I are swimming in mountains of ideas of things for our daughter to do after school. There are a lot of programs out there but not one central website to go to where we can check out everything. We’re just getting started and have a good 10-12 years more to plan for.

Parents in the Washington DC metro area won’t have to worry about this problem, especially going forward in 2013. Washington area startup Activity Rocket wants to be the Urban Spoon, or Flixter for after school activities.

Two ex-attorney’s and frustrated moms in Washington DC, Lisa Friedlander and Ilene Miller have created Activity Rocket to serve as a portal to the after school world for busy parents. Between the two women they have five children between the ages of 6-11 and before Activity Rocket, they had no place to start.

Now, their startup is filled with activity and program recommendations, referrals, expert written blogs, parent ratings and even calendar tools. Friedlander and Miller have made their system extremely easy to use. A parent searching for activities can go to their website and search as wide or narrow as they would like for the activities they want their child enrolled in.

Whether parents are looking for soccer, baseball, ballet, math club, computer clubs, cub scouts, girl scouts, or tutoring classes, Activity Rocket is the place to search. Right now they are solely focused on the DC metro area, but we’re willing to bet that demand will mean expansion in the coming years.

In between code revisions, meetings, car pooling, and holiday decorating we got a chance to talk with Miller about Activity Rocket, the DC startup scene and what it’s like for busy women to launch a new startup. Check out the interview below.

Berlin Entrepreneurs Trying To Curb Facebook Fatigue With Flowsee

A new Berlin based startup called Flowsee is hoping to take advantage of Facebook fatigue by offering users a social network with a local angle and curated multimedia. Flowsee is a mashup of Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit.

The Flowsee social network has multiple category pages like music, tech and photography. In each of the categories users can upload photos and videos that are relevant to that category or whatever other categories they like. Pictures, links and videos are then voted up or down in a way similar to both Digg and Reddit with the most “likes” getting to the top of the page.

While the site is stating out and focused on Berlin, the company feels that it’s readily scalable. Back in late October they told us that they had already surpassed 10,000 users per month.

Like some other social networking projects, while Flowsee has a definite infrastructure to it, they are letting early adopters use the social network the way that they want to. For instance, vendors at the Mauer Park Flea Market has started using the platform to post their handmade and vintage goods for sale. Co-founder Olivier Jarfas told Silicon Allee that it didn’t take long for the vendors to start adding photos and even videos to their pages.

We all know that Facebook isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, they past the billion users mark last year and continue to move forward despite the fact that their stock market price is a lot lower than they had hoped. Nibletz co-founder and CEO Nick Tippmann also reported earlier this week that Facebook may be perceived by teenagers as “for older people”.

As a result more and more social networks are popping up. Most of the newer social networks are finding verticals to launch in like food, academia and careers.

As for Flowsee, we got a chance to talk with the Berlin based team. Check out the interview below.

MyMzone Bringing London’s Street Markets To Life Online

Etsy, the crafter’s online marketplace has been around since 2005 and is one of the most visited sites for homemade wears. A new London startup called MyMzone is hoping to disrupt that, at least across the pond.

MyMzone is hoping to become the curated online market place showcasing unique and authentic items handmade, handcrafted and designed by merchants selling in local markets in London. That’s actually the part that differentiates the platform from Etsy.

Back in August we interviewed Nashville startup Street Jelly. The premise for the company founded by Frank Podlaha is to take street performers and put them online to make real money for virtual tips. MyMzone is hoping to provide an avenue for street and market merchants hawking their ways in London, and put them online as well.

MyMzone co-founder Ravi Jay says he’d describe MyMzone to his Grandma by saying: “Grandma, Remember going to Portobello Market in 2006 and not buying that gorgeous handmade sweater from that lovely young woman because we did not have any British Pounds on us? You know what, she is still there and continues to hand made amazingly beautiful sweaters. Finally, you can see her online along with all the other goodness from local markets of London.”

It’s an interesting proposition for a city that has upscale street markets with handcrafted items you could find on Rodeo Drive in the United States.

Check out the entire interview with Jay below.

Vancouver Startup: iWishfor Is Making Gift Giving Easier

With the holidays behind us, gift giving isn’t on the minds of many. However when we go back to work next week there’s going to be some people undoubtedly worried whether they got someone the wrong gift. Typically you can read the fake smile but sometimes you can go all year, or at least until someone’s next birthday, to find out that they didn’t really like the last gift you got for them.

There are startups trying to solve this problem and Vancouver startup iWishfor is one of them.

The idea behind iWishfor is pretty easy. People can take their smartphone and scan the barcode of any item they may want to receive as a gift. From there they can sign up their friends and family members to see the list of the things they want. All of those people become the list follower.

As a follower you can see the list your friend created and you can cross the item off the list if you pick it up. You can also add your own suggestions to the list which the other followers can see but your gift recipient cannot. This way, not only are you getting a gift that your friend or relative really wants but your also getting a gift no one else is getting for that person.

Everyone has heard of a wedding registry or a baby registry, apps like iWishfor allow people to create virtual registries for any occassion.

We got a chance to talk with the team behind iWishfor. Check out the interview below.

Seattle Startup: XSync A Safer Way To Share Files On Mobile Devices?

Imagine if you were at a park or another public place and you snapped a shot of your child playing with another child. Perhaps you befriended the parents for just a few minutes but you don’t know them well enough to share phone numbers or email addresses. A new Seattle Startup called XSync has a solution that could work for you.

Xsync uses a QR code technology to securely link two smartphones for file transfer. Since the technology is using the QR code to establish the secured bridge, there’s no need to swap email addresses, phone numbers or Facebook accounts. Any kind of file can be sent using Xsync’s technology.

Right now there are several ways to send files between two phones, there’s NFC “bumping” like on the Galaxy Nexus phones, there’s email, SMS, Facebook, Drop Box, the bump app, and others. Is there even room for Xsync?

According to Xsync co-founder Bryan Leeds the company is already in negotiations with OEM’s and carriers to have the Xsync system pre-installed on future mobile devices. While Xsync exists in an app today, if it does go the pre-install route it would be a feature instead of an app. It would also give the startup a significant boost as they try to build scale.

Being based in Seattle could prove fruitful for this mobile centric startup. In addition to the obvious, like Microsoft, Samsung, HTC, Clearwire and T-Mobile all have significant presence in the city.

We got a chance to talk with Leeds about Xsync and growing a startup in Seattle. Check out the interview below.