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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out our video interview below:

Linkage:

Check out RedMeatMarket here at their website

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Chicago Startup: Matador Transforms How People Invest INTERVIEW

What are the two ingredients for making a successful investment? Answer: Knowing what to buy and when to buy. Say its late 2004, knowing that Google’s stock was going to skyrocket beforehand and timely buying some GOOG shares would seamlessly make you rich (and also mommy proud). But how would you know what to buy (i.e. Google) and when to buy a stock or commodity? That’s where Matador comes in.

Matador is a advisory messaging platform that empowers investors to be informed from financial advisories and act on this information by messaging a broker.

Example, Yahoo! Finance recommends to buy gold or treasuries because the economy is tanking. Using Matador’s web and mobile platform, an investor can receive an instant recommendation from Yahoo! and then accordingly email or call their broker within the app. Hence, Matador streamlines the slow and boring process of manually receiving information from an advisory and communicating that time sensitive information to your broker.

Matador has real potential to innovate in the investing space that hasn’t particularly seen many successful apps. We like the value they offer to users, advisories and brokers. Plus, it doesn’t hurt to have a rockstar team including serial entrepreneur Jared Steffes, founder of Tap.Me

Co-Founder Andy Guinn gave us a sneak peak of how the app would work. Check out the video interview below:

Links we’ve got em:

Signup for Matador’s private beta

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Video Interview With Chicago Startup ReGroup Therapy

ReGroup Therapy is a new Chicago startup that brings group therapy into the digital age. The service puts together people with common conditions in a video chat style group support session. The sessions are moderated by licensed professionals.

ReGroup Therapy can be applied to any number of conditions. Say you’re looking for a support group to quit smoking or an eating disorders support group. Now you can confidentially attend a group therapy session from the comfort of your own home.

One of the best parts though, is because it’s done over the internet and via video, you don’t have to miss your session if you travel out of town. You can access ReGroup Therapy from a laptop or a tablet and have the same experience.

Co-Founder David Cohn tells us that right now they are working with women with maternal depression and anxiety and plan to expand to a number of other group support offerings.

Cohn and his co-founder Sari Nass Ziv are two friends who met during their MBA studies in 2010. Cohn had developed an interest in the way technology can change people’s lives while volunteering in the Peace Corps in Guatemala. That passion stuck with him through more traditional positions in technology.

Nass Ziv started patients with mental illness as part of her psychology studies but then pivoted to the business world. That passion for helping people also stuck with Nass Ziv.

In 2011 as Nass Ziv was pregnant with her first child and Cohn’s wife Ana was pregnant at the same time, they started the idea for ReGroup Therapy which launched earlier this year.

Check out our video interview with Cohn below.

Linkage:

For more info visit ReGroupTherapy.com

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Video Interview With Chicago Startup: Care Content

One of the more interesting startups at last week’s Startup City event, part of Tech Week Chicago, was CareContent.

Kadesha Thomas is the founder of CareContent at care content.com. The new startup is a library of content for hospitals and other medical services that publish websites, newsletters and other resources for both patients and consumers.

Thomas has a background in publishing content for hospital websites and newsletters. While working as an editor for a hospital’s patient facing online resources Thomas was constantly sourcing content to fill the gaps that she hadn’t already written for the facility.

After she left that job as an editor she became a freelancer where she would get commissioned for jobs at hospitals to write stories about procedures, after care, medical trends, new hospital developments and more.

Now with CareContent Thomas is making her personal library as well as the works of others within the CareContent editorial network, available to hospitals and medical facilities either as packages or ala carte.

If a hospital needs new content for a landing page, blog entries or newsletter content they can sign up for a subscription plan to CareContent where Thomas and her company will make sure that the facilities have the content they need when it’s time to publish.

CareContent had a lot of people visit their booth at Startup City. There are article depositories, newswires and other resources for most kinds of publications but not one quite like this for the medical field.

Patient facing content is a lot different than the types of stories published in medical journals. Thomas has to take that kind of content and make it easier to understand, and not so overwhelming or sometimes scary, for patients that have either just had a medical procedure done or are thinking about having a medical procedure done.

Even with the long hard hours involved in launching a startup, Thomas is very enthusiastic about CareContent and it’s prospects in the Chicago startup scene. Thomas is just beginning as well. They just launched the company last month after months of research and they are also participating in Chicago’s Lean Startup Challenge and Chicago’s Medical Tech Pitch Event later on this summer.

Check out the video interview below:

Linkage:

Check out CareContent here

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Chicago’s Wunderland Group Wins Best Service Provider To Tech Community

The Wunderland Group, a staffing firm headquartered in Chicago has a national presence with offices in San Francisco, Austin, New York and New Jersey took home the Moxie Award for Greatest Service For the Tech Community. The Moxie Awards recognize leaders in the Chicago Technology space.

Wunderland was selected out of 70,000 votes and were recognized in front of 800 people from all walks of life within the thriving Chicago tech scene.

Although, technically separate entities entirely, the Moxie Awards for all intents and purposes kicked off Chicago’s four day TechWeek 2012 Conference

Although most people may not think a staffing company makes sense to win an award to the startup and tech community, The Wunderland Group goes above and beyond in the cities they serve, especially at home in Chicago.

The Wunderland Group holds technology focused meetups, provides mentors to various Startups and organizations, invests back in the community and of course serves as a staffing resource to any sized company.

The three original founders were on hand at the Moxie Awards ceremony held at the Park West Theater in Chicago last Thursday. What made the event even more memorable was that they we presented the award by the evening’s emcee, Saurin Choksi. Choksi is a Ruby on Rails developer who also happens to be the first placement ever for The Wunderland Group, three years ago.

Linkage:

For more on The Wunderland Group, Click Here

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Interview With Chicago Startup: Swapidy

Swapidy is a brand new Chicago startup that just had it’s public launch Monday as part of Startup City at Chicago’s TechWeek 2012.

Swapidy is a pretty cool idea. The startup serves as the go-between for two people looking to swap, or straight up trade items of value or trade up if you want to and can find someone willing. For instance if you had an iPhone and you wanted to trade for the new Nexus 7 tablet by Google, you would be able to list your iPhone in an ebay style listing for trade.

Within the platform you would be able to describe the item, the condition and then say what items you would be willing to trade for. Once someone finds your iPhone and has the item you want to trade for, you set up the trade through Swapidy.

From there the two people trading items would send both items into Swapidy’s headquarters in Chicago. Their the Swapidy team would make sure that the listings matched, the both items worked and in the case of phones, that ESN’s were truly clean and the item was ready to go.

Once Swapidy approves the items for trade they are then sent to their final destinations.

That’s all well and good so far. It’s like an escrow system for trading valuable products. Swapidy brings a new layer of safety and protection to those wanting to trade something with someone not in their immediate area.

At launch though, Swapidy is having both traders pay for shipping along with a fee that gets paid to Swapidy. Swapidy uses that fee to facilitate the trade and then the final destination shipping. Swapidy founder Adam Ahmad suggested in the video below that the entire trade may cost both parties $25.

Now when you’re looking at acquiring an iPhone or a tablet, $25 doesn’t seem like that much money, but in the end it may be frowned upon since none of the money is changing hands from trader to trader.

On the other hand $25 may be worth the piece of mind that you’ll get from completing a trade on Swapidy and knowing that the item you are trading is exactly as it appears. When trading direct with shipping involved there are all kinds of factors that could leave one of the traders either empty handed or with a far inferior product.

We will definitely have to check in with Swapidy in a few months to see how the community of traders is growing and how many trades they’ve successfully enabled.

Check out the video below:

Linkage:

Try Swapidy now at swapidy.com

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Interview With Chicago Startup LineChop

LineChop Co-Founder Nishanth Samala is all smiles about getting rid of the wait list (photo: nibletz)

Being placed on a waiting list at a restaurant can be one of the most frustrating things in the world. You don’t want to stand around and do nothing, but you don’t want to leave the restaurant in fear that you may miss your call for a seat.

Earlier this month we brought you the story about Pittsburgh startup NoWait, and how they’re providing a turnkey iOS based system for restaurants to manage their waiting list. While at TechWeek in Chicago we met this young group of guys who are still in college, and plan on disrupting the wait list as well.

As LineChop’s co-founder Nishanth Samala told us though, LineChop is different form NoWait because it doesn’t require any specific hardware. The system, for lack of a better word, is cloud based. Samala was quick to point out that a host or hostess at a restaurant could run LineChop on their existing computer, an iPad or other tablet.

The other thing that sets LineChop apart is that they’re plan from the get go is to offer coupons and deals to those customers that are waiting in line.

LineChop has a text or messaging based feature which will allow patrons to be notified when their spot in line is available or they can get notified via the LineChop app.

Check out our video below with Samala who’s very excited about the prospects for his startup:

Linkage:

For more information visit linechop.com

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See All The Bathroom HashTag Signs From Tech Week Chicago

This past weekend at TechWeek in Chicago, startup ReviewTrackers had a very innovative guerrilla marketing technique to expose people to their company. What they did was give the TechWeek bathrooms a hashtag #twbr. This was actually the first thing we noticed when we arrived for TechWeek and started checking out the tweets.

The tweets were a mix of clean enough for tv potty humor blended with facts about reviews on Yelp and other sites, which are at the core of ReviewTrackers business.

Here we’ve assembled a collection of all the hashtag signs that were prominently displayed in the men’s bathroom. The custodian for the Merchandise Mart wouldn’t allow us in the women’s bathroom even after hours.

We’re familiar with companies taking to the bathroom to promote their message. At TechCrunch Disrupt in New York for instance, an Israeli startup left what looked like car keys in the bathrooms. If you found one you were directed to a treasure chest in the Israeli pavilion at Disrupt to see if your key opened the box.

Often times at other conventions you’ll see company stickers plastered to the backs of stalls and above urinals. In this case ReviewTrackers was able to expose their message in various tweet style signs and get traction going on Twitter during the four day event.

Here are the signs:

Linkage

Check out our story and video on ReviewTrackers here

Visit ReviewTrackers on their website here

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Chicago Techweek 2012: GoSoapBox Demo & Interview (video)

We met GoSoapBox here at Techweek Chicago 2012. They began with the idea of a Social Q&A service. Dave Mulder went to the Lansing Startup Weekend and walked away the winner with Social Q&A. Dave described it as, “socially-ranked questions and answers for the classroom.” This idea grew from Dave’s personal experience in college lecture halls and when he originally pitched the idea at the Startup Weekend it squeaked into the competition with the bare minimum requirements. Dave pitched the idea and captured the attention of John Pytel and Eduardo Serrano – who joined him to build out the idea.

John (who is now co-founder and CEO) described his reaction when he heard the pitch.

When Dave told me about his idea for GoSoapBox, it was an “Aha” moment for me. Give students a platform to contribute to class without a physical interruption and they’ll use it! I know I would have. What I love about GoSoapBox though is that its value isn’t limited to students who don’t feel like participating, it benefits the entire class….even the A+ students sitting in the front row.

Later they joined the 2011 Chicago Lean Startup Challenge – and won. Dave discussed this with me at length but explained (in a nutshell) that it stressed build fast, fail fast, build again, repeat. Don’t spend ages trying to “perfect” the app or idea only to find out that you’ve just blown all of the money in the bank and the users hate it. GoSoapBox built different versions of their app and let users test it, provide feedback, and then they went back and rebuilt.

Why were they at Techweek 2012? Part of the reason certainly must have included the fact that they work just four floors above Techweek at 1871. Primarily they decided due to the summer downturn by educators and schools it makes sense to look into other options for revenue. Notice I said other options. They are bringing in money already. Techweek seemed to be the perfect time for them to launch their solution for conferences.

GoSoapBox improves audience engagement at your event by giving your audience an anonymous platform to ask questions, and the ability to respond to polls using any smartphone, tablet, or laptop…. all in real time.

No more dealing with complicated clickers, running around with microphones, or hearing from THAT GUY over and over. GoSoapBox makes audience engagement more interactive, more efficient, and more enjoyable than ever before.

When I first heard what the original concept did I immediately thought of any number of conferences that I’ve attended that included a Q&A session. Typically, if the speaker is very popular, it can be absolutely impossible to have your question asked. I thought this would be perfect for those situations. The audience can vote up questions that appeal to the whole rather than just a single person, the speaker could track the crowds interests through live polling, and it can serve to help make it so the person who asked the tough question remains anonymous (giving those of us in the press an edge if we’ve already pre-written our story while betting on the answer we might hear).

Dave and I discuss GoSoapBox, Chicago, and 1871 in the video interview below.

Linkage:

Find out more about GoSoapBox here

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Startup Interview With Chicago Startup KlutchClub

One of the startups we were very interested in meeting up with in Chicago was KlutchClub. We featured this subscription box for health and wellness startups back in April here on nibletz.com. Even in that short time we saw Klutch Club exploding with growth.

The KlutchClub booth at Startup City during TechWeek was slammed throughout the exhibition. Their card jar was full, yet they didn’t win the People’s Choice award. (we have no faith in that card system). They are definitely one of the top Chicago startups in our book. And, KlutchClub is woman owned.

Founder and CEO Julie Bashkin created KlutchClub out of her own needs. She spent some time in her career in corporate America in a position where she had to trail 4 days out of every 5 day work week. She struggled to find quality health and wellness products that worked, fit her travel lifestyle and were cost effective.

Through her career in marketing she found that vendors weren’t getting to the customers they needed to and customers weren’t finding these manufacturers products. KlutchClub solves that problem as well.

After a couple of years of vetting the idea out, she finally launched KlutchClub to a great reception. Bashkin won’t say how many subscribers she has but she happily reported that they’ve shipped over 15,000 boxes.

Each monthly box contains a minimum of $50 in products and members pay $18 per month. As you’ll see in the video though, this months box is well over $150 with just one of the products retailing at $70. This is a win win for every household.

The original KlutchClub boxes are all geared towards women however with the feedback and subscribers Bashkin has already picked up she quickly set out to design a box for men as well. That monthly subscription will begin in August, and we are definitely getting on that list.

Check out our video interview with Bashkin below:

Chicago Startup: Benevolent One Of The Greatest Ideas At TechWeek

We scoped out Benevolent.net at TechCocktails mixer on Sunday night at TechWeek 2012. We didn’t learn that much about it and they quickly went on the shortlist for Monday. I’m really glad that we did get to spend time withMegan Kashner the founder and CEO of Benevolent.net because what she and her startup are doing is incredible.

Benevolent is a kickstarter like platform for low income people to get things that they need to better their lives. Kashner, a career long Licensed Clinical Social Worker, found that in her days of seeing low income clients that just one extra push like $100 for a pair of glasses and an eye exam, or $200 for a college credit course, could make or break someone trying to rebuild their lives.

Social Workers are always told to try not to bring their work home, and not to mix their personal lives with their work lives, but I know about 5 social workers who work with low income people or people in recovery who take themselves almost to poverty levels by just giving their clients that extra money for that thing that they really need (not want).

Well Benevolent makes helping people with these kinds of needs easier, however Kashner is no fool she has a very serious vetting process for the needs based kickstarter platform. First off, the user who “needs” something needs to be endorsed by a social worker or accredited 501 C3 organization. Kashner and her team make sure that each “endorser” or “sponsor” is fully vetted and that no one is trying to fraudulently rip off people by pulling on their heart strings.

Benevolent is already making a difference. Kashner showed me an example of a young lady who was trying real hard to interview for jobs and she was very self conscious about her thick glasses. She really wanted contact lenses but couldn’t afford the lens exam and that first box of lenses. Her story was endorsed and she quickly received enough donations for the contact lenses. Now at the end of the campaign the funds don’t go to the person that actually needs the item, but rather the social worker or non profit that is the sponsor. This provides an extra layer of security and insures the donators that the money was used exactly for what it was intended.

Check out the video below:

Linkage:

Check out Benevolent here at benevolent.net

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Startup Interview: Chicago Startup PrepHero

PrepHero is a new Chicago startup that bills itself as the premiere “social” development network for athletic training. While RocBob, another startup that exhibited at Chicago TechWeek, is about recreational sports, the team and “the game”, Prep Hero is about the athlete.

PrepHero allows the coach and the athlete to keep up with their training regiment, skill sets, areas of improvement and more. The coach can then use the PrepHero platform to keep up with his or her entire team and map the progress of their athletes.

What sets PrepHero apart from other scholastic athlete focused startups is that PrepHero is about the conditioning and developing of the athlete. It’s more invested in the person who is the athlete rather than how many home runs, RBIs, rebounds or free throws they have.

Where some platforms for athletes are about bragging rights and wins, PrepHero is about achievement and progress. In fact those who support the athlete, outside of the coaches circle, are called boosters. Boosters can be dad, mom and other family members, even your grandfather states away.

We got a chance to interview Barry Tarter the co-founder and CEO of PrepHero about this unique new idea. Check out the video below:

Linkage:

Find out more about PrepHero’s here

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Chicago Startup: Safe Snips Wins TechWeek Launch Competition

Monday at Chicago TechWeek was Startup City day. 34 Startups from Chicago and everywhere else participated in an expo day and Launch competition.

The competition included $100,000 I’m cash and business services for the winning companies. The prize package included six months free space from Catapult, services from Microsoft, Motorola Xyboard tablets from Verizon Wirless, a year supply of Diet Coke, $5,000 dollars in cash and more.

The finalists in the contest were narrowed down by their startup overall. The panel of judge combed the exhibit floor early on in the day and then selected four finalists. A fifth finalist came from popular vote by attendees. Attendees of the Startup City expo were given a card when they went in and told to put their card in the jar of the startup they liked the best. We thought it was a good system but apparently flawed in talking with over 50 attendees none of them had even seen the booth for Biz Inject the startup that had supposedly won the popular vote. Even worse during the judges Q&A the founder had trouble conceptualizing his concept in pitch form….

The other four startups selected were great by our standards. They were all fresh innovative ideas, with great pitches. The other four finalists were GDine, Mouse House, SafeSnips and Pretty Quick.

GDine is revolutionizing the way people dine in groups. Using GDines platform users can enjoy similar benefits to “Restaurant Week” year round. Groups can choose menus from participating restaurants, split the check and pay in advance. GDine has already received $650,000 in funding, and released last March, The service is already available in Chicago and Ne York.

The company founded said that with only 30 restaurants on board in New York as well as the fact that they’ve only been in New York a couple months, New York is pacing to pass Chicago,

Mouse House I love it when I learn cool totally off the wall things. With Mouse House I did just that. This startup has revolutionized the way Mice ponds are tracked and kept up with in labs,

Traditionally mice are kept in groups in cages with index cards on the front of the cage and data updated by hand. Mouse House puts the information in an iPad app. This new app greatly cuts down on the time of the administration of keeping up with the mice and frees scientists up to spend more time experimenting.

Pretty Quick

this startup was founded by a former employee of also Loreal who discovered the problem she was solving when a plane she was to take from France back to the states was delayed 2 hours. As she said in her pitch, she had two hours to be by herself and do something for herself.

She wanted to get her nails done and find somewhere in the airport or close by to do that, and book an appointment on short notice.

Now here new startup makes it extremely easy to find salons and book appointments with a variety of options. Again a really great idea.

SafeSnips would fall into the medical devices category. The team behind SafeSnips has developed a technology that will be implemented onto surgical cutting instruments. Using near infra red technology SafeSnips will make cutting safer and less likely to accidentally cut arteries which can be fatal.

SafeSnips had one of the most innovative ideas. Since they are incorporating their technology into existing medical devices they don’t expect FDA approval to take very long.

On top of their innovative technology they had a great and enthusiastic pitch. During the Q&A session during the finals the pitchman for SafeSnips didn’t miss a beat while answering the questions. Obviously these factors played into SafeSnips being the winner of the TechWeek launch competition.

Linkage:

Find out more about SafeSnips here at their website

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Chicago Tech Week 2012: Check Out Social Defender

If you need to keep control of your social media presence than you need a social media dashboard. While there are a lot of them out there, Social Defender has one of the best designs that we’ve seen.

Your first account through Social Defender is free and after that you can add more accounts and features with a premium.

SocialDefender also analytical tools that give you instant feedback and monitoring of Twitter, Facebook,YouTube, Google Plus,Tumblr Blogger and More.

The interface is easy to understand and can show you instantly where you need improvement on the media front.

For more information check out the video below:

Linkage:

Find out more about SocialDefender at SocialDefender.com

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