Celebrities Love The Startup The World Has Been Waiting For: Hater App

There are haters everywhere, or at least that’s how the song goes. Lord knows I have a bunch. That’s why Jake Banks created Los Angeles startup Hater. It’s the world’s first social network surrounded by things people hate.

The social network is alive and growing at a very quick rate. People are finding lots of commonalities over the things they hate. It can be anything from hating the New York Yankees to hating pickles on a Big Mac. It can even be hating your ex-girlfriend. But, co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer Andrew Batey says “It’s not about bullying”.

Hater App works on your mobile device. Download it from the app store and you can immediately start identifying the things you hate and identifying with the people who hate similar things. If a person becomes the subject of too much hate, or things get inappropriate (to a degree) they will get filtered out.

To date there’s been nothing available like Hater, and it’s caught the eye of celebrities like Teyana Taylor, Wiz Khalifa and Fat Joe who will feature the app in his next show. “Fat Joe’s people found out about Hater and reached out to us” Batey explained to nibletz.com at TechCrunch Disrupt NY.

Hate isn’t always used as a bad thing though. Batey explains that there are celebrities that are getting together over issues like global warming and getting users to say why they hate global warming. “Users may say things like I hate global warming because I can’t breathe” Batey said. It’s a great awareness tool and it’s blowing up.

Hater launched at SXSW and since then Batey and Banks have been hard at work promoting their startup globally. They recently did New York Tech Day, TNW in Amsterdam and now TechCrunch Disrupt 2013.

“You don’t always have to like something, and the option to hate or dislike has been missing out there. Everyone has something they hate; now you can and it’s better than therapy.” Banks said in a statement.

Mashable recently featured Hater in “8 standout apps from March” which is a particularly big honor considering how many apps were released at SXSW which fell during that month. They’ve also been featured on Wall Street Journal live. People are quickly beginning to see that Hater app is a lot deeper than you may think.

Check out our interview with Batey below.

More from TechCrunch Disrupt here at nibletz.

Swedish Startup Offers Cable TV With No TV. Interview With Magine. [video][disrupt]

Companies like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu have started making a dent in traditional cable tv consumption. More and more people, globally, are watching tv shows and movies on other screens like, laptops, mobile phones and tablets. This has caused most cable companies (especially in the US) to move to other sources for revenue like telephone lines and cable internet.

Hulu, Amazon, Netflix and other similar companies are offering shows and movies a la carte and on demand. You subscribe to one of these services for a nominal fee and you can access whatever programs you want to watch, when you want to watch them. This model is working very well for many consumers, but the space as a whole is gearing up for another disruption.

There are some startups like, Jacksonville startup whata.tv, that are hoping to reinvent tv by allowing users to subscribe to one channel a la carte and get the entire programming from that channel in real time or on demand. Many analysts have suggested that this kind of model is where tv is heading.

On the other hand, you have startups like Sweden’s Magine, which is a full fledged cable operator, delivering the same programming, and functionality as traditional cable companies, on multiple screens and with even more features.

Magine allows viewers to watch programs in real time or on demand, without the need for a dvr. Magine, of course allows you to watch the content on any connected device.

With the stranglehold that the US cable operators have, it’s not likely that Magine will ever find it’s way onto US soil, but people in Europe love the freedom that the service is giving them. Beta testers, including TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois, love Magine, and of course we see why.

Check out our interview with Simon at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013, below.

Check out these other awesome startup stories from TechCrunch

AppArchitect Could Be The Easiest Way To Build An App [interview][disrupt]

AppArchitect is an idea that was actually born at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2011. It was there, at the Disrupt Hackathon, where the first lines of code were written.

Over the last two years the team behind AppArchitect has been refining the product. They’ve also been through the DreamIt Ventures accelerator in Philadelphia and raised $325,000 from Actinic Ventures, BHV, DreamIt and other angels.

They finally went live just before 4:00pm on the Battlefield stage at Disrupt 2013. Co-Founder Ilya Zatulovskly took to the stage and showed off what could be the easiest platform ever to build a native iOS app. AppArchitect sets itself apart from other DIY app generators because it’s not template based and not just a “wrapper”.

Users who want to create a new app simply need to know how to drag and drop things, to create an app using AppArchitect. Zatulovskly says “if you can build a slide deck you can build an app”.

It’s such an easy platform that Zatulovskly created an app during the quick Battlefield presentation.

That may not have been enough to wow the judges in their Battlefield session called “Get Things Done”. The judges: John Frankel, Hilary Mason, Megan Quinn, and Sam Yagan seemed to take notice that the competitive landscape in the DIY app creation space were plentiful. They also weren’t exactly sure who the end user was.

Naturally, the end user is anyone who wants to build an app. However, design agencies and advertising firms are already employing developers and DIY app creation tools that have already been on the market. With over 1 million apps across all of the app stores, it’s getting harder and harder for any app to stand out.

AppArchitect could come in handy for mom and pop shops, small restaurants and small businesses who are looking to get into the app world with something specific for their business.

Regardless, Zatulovskly and the AppArchitect team are hoping to use this experience, coupled with the knowledge and experience gained at DreamIt, to raise another round of capital and continue building AppArchitect.

Check out our video interview below and for more info or to try it out yourself you can find AppArchitect here.

More startup coverage from TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 here.

Brazilian Startup Peela Is Gift Cards On Steroids [video][disrupt]

Brazilian startup Peela is getting some major traction in it’s native country. Peela is a reusable giftcard app and platform that allows users (buyers) to purchase physical or virtual gift cards that can be reloaded from the stores, restaurants and businesses that they were purchased for.

Peela patners with major merchants and vendors to offer the gift card, but more importantly, with reloadable gift cards, they offer a loyal customer. Perhaps your dad really loves the coffee shop he goes to every day, now everyone in the family can continually reload his card, it’s almost like a prepaid credit card for one place.

Peela has three main marketing channels, retail, e-commerce and businesses. So far it’s taking off, Peela’s Executive Director Guilherme Coelho, showed us a map detailing Peela’s penetration across every city in Brazil.

They are looking to expand the platform and were part of the Brazilian pavilion at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2013. Check out our video interview with Coelho below and for more info you can visit them at peela.com.br

We’ve got much more from Disrupt check out our startup coverage here.

Croatian Startup MediaToolKit Wins It’s Way To TechCrunch Disrupt, Here’s An Interview

Croatian startup MediaToolKit started as a social media monitoring web app targeted towards journalists. Journalists from blogs, newspapers, video outlets and other media resources can tap into MediaToolKit and discover trending content on Facebook and other sources from their competitors. Southeast Europes netocratic.com called it a “spy tool”.

Media Toolkit’s Ivor Bihar was on hand at TechCrunch Disrupt New York after the startup competed in the WebUp startup competition as part of the webfest.me conference last fall and won a trip over to the United States to present MediaToolKit to the US here at TechCrunch Disrupt.

Over the last few months MediaToolKit has continued to iterate. Now they offer a suite of tools for journalists, hence the name Tool Kit, including press clippings and alerts. The startup comes out of Zagreb based social media agency iStudio.

Check out our video interview with Bihar below and for more information you can check out mediatoolkit.com

And here’s more awesome TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 coverage here at nibletz.com

Israeli Startup Glide.me Is The Video Walkie Talkie [disrupt][video]

One of my favorite messaging apps is Voxer. Voxer allows me to send and receive voice messages, much like an old audio pager or Nextel’s two way radio function used to work. Now imagine if Voxer had a video element. That’s what you would get from Israeli startup Glide.

Glide allows multiple people to have two way video messaging over mobile device in extremely close to real time. You can have a two way conversation, ala Facetime or you can send a video message and the recipient can get back to you when it’s convenience for them. The big differentiator though is time.

Adam Korbl, the co-founder and CMO at Glide explained that these video messages and sent and received within fractions of a second. It doesn’t take that 8-10 seconds you will find trying to get a Skype going and the waiting you sometimes get from Facetime.

Being on the road all the time, I’ve found a new love for Facetime. When I’m on the road I’m constantly Facetiming with my five year old daughter. Glide will give us the option of having a two way conversation or if one of us is busy we can leave the equivalent of a video voice mail message.

According to TechCrunch Glide has raised seven figures to date from stakeholders including; Orey Gilliam, former CEO of ICQ and AOL IM and Philippe Schwartz the founder of ooVoo.

Check out the video interview with Korbl below and for go download Glide here.

Seriously there’s a whole bunch more Disrupt coverage here, brought to you by videojuice.co

Fliqq Partners With Artists Like Wyclef To Use Their Group Sharing Video Technology [interview][disrupt]

We’ve seen Wyclef get behind some great things. New York startup Fliqq is the latest.

Fliqq is a platform that allows people to “move in groups” around a piece of video content. It spun out of their original concept which was to move people around the internet in a group. Using Fliqq’s technology a group of friends, a class, a group of colleagues in the same industry or even a family could move across the web from site to site at the same time. Think screen sharing in a much better looking wrapper with a lot more features.

Fliqq’s CEO and co-founder Christian Bendixen explained to us that Fliqq had a great idea and people were using it, but what they found was that most people were using it for video. So they decided to make a half pivot and have Fliqq center around media. At the same time they saw the power in taking it to mobile.

While Bendixen admits they haven’t tested Fliqq to the limit, you could easily use it with groups as large as 50,000. This will make this a great service for concert-goers, people watching plays or fans of an artist, like Wyclef who will partner with Fliqq to use their technology.

Bendixen explains in the video that Wyclef’s fans will be able to get on the platform, and he will be able to share whatever media he wants with them, all at the same time. This could prove to be a very valuable tool.

Imagine going to a tech conference like TechCrunch Disrupt or everywhereelse.co and the keynote speakers could instantly share the slide decks, videos and other images with the entire audience. Or, you could go to a huge concert and the artist could share a sneak preview video halfway through the show. This is the foundation of what Fliqq us all about.

We got to talk with Bendixen in the Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2013. Check out the video interview below:

Check out all of our TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2013 coverage here, brought to you by The Factory in Augustine Florida.

DC Sartup DeJed Wants To Be Ebay For Digital Goods [interview][video][disrupt]

Daniel Kim and Bhupinder Singh were at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC’s starutp alley on day one. Their startup DEJED is a new digital goods market place that Kim describes as “ebay for digital goods”.

They are hoping to bring together creators, marketers and buyers in one platform that allows people to find the digital content they need and for creators, and affiliates to get paid.

In an untraditional model the duo are attracting third party people with social clout to help market the digital goods that the creators are selling. This may offer DEJED the biggest competitive edge over competitors. Singh is very excited about this aspect of the business, he told us during an interview that someone with tens of thousands of followers could easily make good money helping to bring buyers to digital goods.

DEJED hopes to become the go to place to buy and sell music, videos, ebooks, apps, plug-ins, code, models, icons, avatars, class notes, games, pictures, animations, how to’s, comics, coupons and any other good that has digital delivery.

On the buyer side DEJED will offer lifetime cloud access for all of the purchased digital goods as an archive to save everything someone buys using the DEJED platform.

Check out our video interview below and for more info visit dejed.com.

FourSquare’s Dennis Crowley On Running The Boston Marathon!

Before Monday April 15th FourSquare founder Dennis Crowley was looking forward to running the Boston Marathon with his girlfriend and family. They would take a quick jaunt up from New York, have a great time and get some great exercise. Obviously, as a co-founder of FourSquare, Crowley is a busy guy so he seemed to be looking forward to just having fun.

Also as co-founder of FourSquare he wanted to take advantage of their technology throughout the race. “I set up FourSquare to automatically check me in as I passed each mile marker”.

As the events of April 15th took a turn for the worst, Crowley was still informing his social media followers via FourSquare that everything was A-Ok. As we all know cell phone service was shut down, but luckily Crowley tells TechCrunch’s Colleen Taylor that he was able to get a few texts and tweets out.

Sure Crowey’s phone was still passing check points but people were worried about how he was actually doing.

Before Taylor and Crowley turned to talking about FourSquare and rumors of buyouts and their latest round of funding, they talked about the Boston Marathon. Check out our video below.

More coverage from TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2013, brought to you by videojuice.co here at nibletz.com

Crowdsource Video From An Event With NY Startup Crowdflik [DISRUPT][video]

Crowdsourcing is nothing new, neither is shooting video, however putting it all together in a beautiful format is new and that’s what New York startup Crowdflik is doing.

Crowdflik allows users who are signed in an at a particular event, to upload videos from that event. Then what happens is magical. Crowdflik stitches all the videos together to make one fluid video with lots of different movie clips shot from a variety of users.

Crowdflik users will be able to see all of the videos aggregated and stitched together or browse the variety of videos shot from different users.

We got a chance to interview Crowdflik’s Vice President of marketing Sarah McClutchy check out the video below. For more information sign up for updates at crowdflik.com

We’ve got more from TechCrunch Disrupt 2013, here at nibletz.com

Bad Ass Startup Chick: Mentor Me’s Brittany Fitzpatrick

Community service and helping people have been what Brittany Fitzpatrick’s life’s work have been about. But what makes this Memphian even more amazing is that she left a position with one of the most prestigious, well known brands in the non-profit space, Ronald McDonald House Charities, to start something of her own, again in community service.

As the communications coordinator for Ronald McDonald House Charities of Memphis, Brittany took the passion and drive she’s had since high school and through college at Howard University and Memphis University, and combined it with the tools available in recent day to double the groups social media reach. Ronald McDonald House Charities of Memphis works with the most well known children’s research facility in the world, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Over the last six years, Brittany has been a mentor and helped other mentor’s in a variety of programs. Through her work with Ronald McDonald House Charities and other stops along the way, she found that mentorship was a great thing, but flawed in many ways.

(Brittany’s first pitch at 48 Hour Launch)

When she first pitched the idea for her startup “Mentor Me” back in December at a women focused 48 Hour Launch, she revealed that most mentor orgranizations spend more money re-placing mentors and mentees than they do setting up original pairs. Brittanny quickly realized if someone could fix the initial matching proces than these programs could focus on their original goals and save a lot of money.

That’s where her startup Mentor Me comes in. Mentor Me is a mentor and mentee online matching service that uses a variety of information given from both parties and an algorithm to make more successful matches. While Brittany is hesitant about using the verbage “e-harmony for mentor”, at the core that’s what it is and that’s why it’s going to be so successful.

(Here’s Brittany’s second pitch from 48 Hour Launch)
But the biggest factor in the success of Mentor Me is going to be a combination of the technology and the founder. Brittany is a dynamic young woman. Back in December, the prize for the 48 Hour Launch competition was a startup village booth at everywherelse.co. When Brittany came in second place she decided to crowdfund the people in the audience so that she too could have a booth for her startup. Within minutes her mission was successful.

We got to interview Brittany as she prepares for demo day at SeedHatchery, where she tells us about her latest venture into crowdfunding and what she’s learning at the Memphis startup accelerator:

So tell us what is Mentor Me?

There are 3 million kids in the U.S. being mentored. Yet, there are another 15 million waiting for mentors. Sadly, half of all matches between mentors and youth end within months – which does more harm than no mentoring at all. One of the top reasons for these pairs falling apart is poor matching.

Mentor Me provides cloud-based mentor matching and management tools that make mentoring more efficient and effective for both programs and mentors.

How did you come up with the idea?

The idea came from my own experiences as a mentor. I’ve been mentoring for 6 years now and have been through the process of getting matched with a mentee several times. Through these experiences, I’ve learned just how much of an impact mentoring can have for both the kids who are being mentored and for the mentors themselves. But, as with any process, there are things that can be improved and there are ways to use technology to make the process better for everyone.

Who else is on the team?

My Co-Founder and CTO is Sean Lissner.

Sean has a Bachelor’s Degree in both Mathematical and Computer Science from the University of Memphis. Sean’s specialties include: mobile applications, web applications, web services, distributed computing, embedded systems, cloud architecture, machine learning, and wireless sensor networks.

Before joining the Mentor Me team, Sean worked with large-scale, enterprise level application development projects, including FedEx’s Android mobile application. In addition to his passion for improving communities, Sean brings more than a decade of coding experience and a usability-centered design focus to the Mentor Me team.

Our advisors are: Austin Baker, President and Chairman of the Board of HRO Partners and Co-Founder of the University of Memphis MILE Mentoring Program; Jenny Koltnow, Executive Director of the Memphis Grizzlies Charitable Foundation; Emily Yellin, Customer Experience Consultant

What made you decide to apply for an accelerator?

I knew that going through Seed Hatchery would give me the best chance for success. With accelerators, you’re given a strong network of support through the staff and through the network of entrepreneurs who have gone through the program before you. The support of one’s fellow cohort-members is also invaluable. And of course the fact that they are mentor-driven is also innately appealing to me.

What have been your three biggest take-aways so far from Seed Hatchery?

My three biggest take-aways from Seed Hatchery thus far have been:

The importance of investing in yourself: I left my job right before Seed Hatchery to go all-in on my startup

You have to practice how you play.

Iteration trumps perfection

While some accelerator startups just sit around and wait for investor day, you’re out there fundraising now, tell us a little bit about your crowdfunding?

We kicked off a crowdfunding campaign to match our $15,000 investment by May 16. We’re about 10% of the way there. Our crowdfunding page is at www.gofundme.com/MentorMe.

What’s the reaction to Mentor Me been so far?

The reaction thus far has been positive. We already have our first paying customer and we’re in the process of getting more organizations on board for our beta test this summer.

One thing you learned about yourself in the accelerator?

I’ve learned so much about myself through this process. I think above all I’ve learned how to push myself outside of my comfort zone. I actually look for those types of opportunities now.

What happens May 17th?

The grind continues. Investor Day is just the beginning.

Here are more Seed Hatchery startup stories at nibletz.com The Voice Of Startups Everywhere Else

This New York Startup Wants More Grandmas On Facebook

New York startup FamilyRibbon doesn’t think there are enough grandmas on Facebook. Actually what they are really doing is trying to make it easier for beginning users to learn how to use Facebook. Yes, there are still plenty of people out there without a Facebook account. Just think how much your buubie is missing by not being on Facebook.

FamilyRibbon isn’t just about Facebook though. Their suite of apps called the EasyFamily AppSuite, is a total 7 in 1 app solution for beginners which takes the complexity out commonly used computer apps that we take for granted like Skype, email, photo albums, reminders and yes of course Facebook.

The suite of apps includes:

Easy Skype, Albums and Call-Back Requests

Quick and easy launch of Skype, Facetime, Flickr, Picasa and Facebook photo albums in easy interface. Call back request emails and texts sent with just one click.

Easy Facebook and VideoEmail® with Security Features

Facebook app with ‘Safe Mode’ designed for beginners. Email audio and video messages in just one click. The email ‘whitelist’ feature offers extra security.

Medication & Appointment Reminders & More!

Make sure medication is taken as scheduled – if a reminder has been ignored a family member will be notified by text or email.

Remote Administration and Illustrated User Guides

Manage reminders, photos, contacts, websites and even view app screenshots, all from another computer! Print our easy-to-follow user guide.

We got a chance to talk to the team at FamilyRibbon, check out the interview below:

What is your startup, what does it do?

The goal of EasyFamilyApps.com is to develop easy apps for beginner users – such as grandma and grandpa. The goal is to enable your aging parents to start using Facebook within a short period of time, to inspire them, and to make them part of the online community.

Our easy-to-use apps allow beginner users to socialize on Facebook, check email, make video calls, view online photo albums, and browse web pages. EasyFamily Social® and EasyFamily AppSuite® apps make it easy and safe to stay in touch online.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

Ivan Osadchiy – founder, CEO

I am personally invested in helping seniors get online. When my father was admitted to the hospital, I found no simple tech solutions that would allow him to stay connected with the family. How could Dad see his newborn granddaughter thousands of miles away?

Mykola Komarevskyy – co-founder, CTO

I hope that our apps will help our parents to feel closer to us and have fun online. Apps like ours are especially important when there is distance between family members. For many years, I lived in a completely different time-zone than my mother and she really missed being able to contact me. She is now beta testing the app and is so excited that she can now keep in touch whenever she wants and she loves sending and receiving messages.

Where are you based?

The startup is based in New York City, New York and affiliated with PlugAndPlayTechcenter.com – a SF accelerator.

What is the startup culture like where you are based?

Fast-paced, time and focus demanding work. The three key success factors that must be embedded in the startup culture are (1) teamwork, (2) rigorous prioritization, and (3) communication. Teamwork ensures that things happen. Prioritization ensures that the tasks with the highest potential are executed, as there is always more work on the plate that can be “eaten”. Communication is vital to convince investors, build partnerships, and engage prospects and users.

What problem does your startup solve?

It allows any Grandma get on Facebook

⁃ In 30 minutes

⁃ Easy and Safe

Please also take a look at the video: http://GrandmaOnFacebook.org, and the infographic attached – for additional information, numbers, and sources. Separate slides are available at http://bit.ly/ZKQgFZ.

We conducted some research and found out that 40% of women over 60 live alone and 7 million U.S. seniors are not mobile and face isolation. In addition, multiple studies by top faculty at the University of Chicago, Harvard and Stanford have suggested that isolation significantly increases health risks.

We realized then there was a great need for an easier and safer set of applications for the older generation so that family communication – easy video calls, e-mail, Facebook, online albums, etc. – could flourish, and loneliness and isolation problems that strongly affect seniors could be reduced.

What is one challenge that you’ve overcome in the startup process?

The area that was surprisingly challenging was finding the most effective marketing channels for seniors and their families. This is where predecessors have failed.

Seniors rely almost exclusively on expensive traditional media and word of mouth, and that takes a long time to build. Their children – our generation – is nicknamed “sandwich mothers / fathers,” as we try to balance our careers with taking care of both our children and our parents. Competition for our time is fierce – being heard over clutter requires creativity and making products as viral as possible.

Some of the tools we’ve found effective include:

 Reaching out to B2B channel partners. We were approached by tech schools requesting permission to use and promote our applications with their students

 Piloting with a retirement community

 Direct-to-consumer marketing and the use of SEO/SEM (optimizing your website to improve your standing in search results)

We’re employing a combination of word of mouth, viral marketing, and traditional channels.

What are some of the milestones your startup has achieved?

We have raised seed funding and a follow-on bridge round from the existing investors. Thanks to this investment, the two apps EasyFamily Social® and EasyFamily AppSuite® for iPad and Windows computers were released. Remote administration is also available for the EasyFamily AppSuite®. Family members can manage user’s account from any device via easy web interface – they can update the address book, add and review medication reminders, upload family photos, view user’s screenshots etc.

What are your next milestones?

Our next milestone is to complete the Android version of the EasyFamily Social® app for Facebook – to make it the best Mother’s and Father’s Day gift for parents. The “17 Million Grandmas on Facebook” crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo will help us to raise the funds necessary to complete the job.

Several users and organizations asked when we were going to release the Android versions of our apps. Android tablets are the most affordable choice and are ideal for low income families, charity and educational organizations.

We hope that with the release of the Android version of the easy and safe Facebook app, many more Grandmas will join Facebook and will reach the 17 million mark sooner.

Readers can help us to achieve the milestone by supporting the “17 Million Grandmas on Facebook” campaign or by helping their Mom or Grandma to join Facebook!

Who are your mentors and role models?

Sir Richard Branson, our role model, supports the “17 Million Grandmas on Facebook” Indiegogo effort. He provided hand-signed “Elders Rock!” and “Screw Business As Usual” inscriptions, with which we’ll reward our backers at www.GrandmaOnFacebook.org.

Mary Furlong – MFA & SeniorNet founder, aging expert – is helping us to develop the right solution for grandparents.

Jim Tobias – Inclusive Technologies, Strategies and Stakeholders at RaisingtTheFloor.org; accessibility expert – provided valuable feedback on usability of our apps.

We also work with senior tech schools, including Jane Ratliff from Blue Hair Technology Group to polish user experience.

We are grateful to our mentors and are honored to work with them.

What are some of the advantages/disadvantages growing your startup outside of Silicon Valley?

Physical location of the team is less relevant these days. Silicon Valley would probably provide more opportunities to meet potential investors face-to-face and to hear more about experiences of fellow entrepreneurs and experts. However, in the era of LinkedIn, Skype, and broadband connections, entrepreneurs can meet the necessary people from any location to achieve its investment, business development and learning objectives.

What’s next for your startup?

Getting 17 million grandmas on Facebook! :-)

We hope that people will help their parents and grandparents to join Facebook this Mother’s day.

We’ll work hard to make www.GrandmaOnFacebook.org a success that will make the easy and safe Facebook app available for even more grandmas – on the affordable Android platform.

Where can people find out more, and what is your Twitter username?

Facebook @GrandmaOnFb Blog

Facebook shmacebook, these DC grandma’s have created their own startup, check out our interview with Quad2Quad here!

Contactually Study: Negative People Reply To Email 36% Faster

Email seems to be a pretty popular topic, especially on the weekend. Last weekend a lot of tech sites were talking about why they ignore emails and auto responder messages. Earlier this week I checked out the refresh of Microsoft’s outlook.com and the reinvigoration of Hotmail.

This week we’re first to bring you some pretty startling results about email. Our friends at Contactually, the popular email CRM startup from Washington DC, just published results from a rather interesting survey.

Engineers at the company recently analyzed over 1oo million email conversations looking at positive and negative words across the data set. What they actually found was that “On average, negative people tend to reply to emails 36% faster than their positive, bubbly colleagues.” Ousmane Mariko, community manager at Contactually reported on their blog.

For the study engineers looked at wording in emails. Words like “care” and “amazing” made their list of positive words. Words like “missed” and “stupid” were considered negative. After they counted up all the instances of multiple positive and negative words they calculated the ratio between positive and negative words across the data set.

Overall what they found was that people who were always positive in their replies responded to 47% of their emails within a day. 64% of people who were negative or unhappy in their email replies responded within 24 hours.

“It’s not immediately clear why positive people aren’t as good with email,” Jeff Carbonella said, CTO of Contactually. “Maybe the negative folks are more active online in general.”

Carbonella jokingly suggested that this may explain interent trolls. Another cause of this could be that sending a positive email reply takes a little more time.

The study also suggested that users of Contactually were much better at quickly following up with their top contacts, citing that they generated 44% more referrals for their business.

“We don’t necessarily have to be mean and cranky,” COO Tony Cappaert said. “Maybe we just need to use better software.”

What is Contactually, find out here in our startup interview.

Paul Singh Turning Backburner Project Into Bloomberg/Motley Fool Of The Private Markets

Paul Singh, the Washington DC based entrepreneur, who became a household name in many startup circles while he was a partner at 500 startups, has began sharing much more about his startup Dashboard.io. We had started hearing rumors that Singh was stepping down at 500 startups during SXSW and it was confirmed in March.

Singh returned to his DC roots to continue growing dashboard.io a project he says he started on the back burner. Dashboard.io quickly grew into a huge tool that 500 startups founders and other accelerator startups could use to reach investors, share information and talk with each other.

We recently took a trip to Silicon Valley and had the chance to talk with several 500 startups founders who found the dashboard extremely useful.

Singh explains on the dashboard.io blog how the idea came about:

It began with the innocuous “initial commit” and a pitch of “Let me peek at your traffic data. I promise to keep it private, and I’ll anonymously show you how you stand up to everyone else on the platform.”

Once he started the initial project and it made it’s way on to Hacker News over 300 startups started flooding the system and adding their data. Soon after that Singh “turned off the spigot” and went back to focusing on 500 Startups. 500 was still young at the time and they resorted to using Google Groups to communicate with founders and mentors.

“The turning point came when a well known founder and mentor had enough and, frustrated and angry, handed in their resignation. They couldn’t see through the clutter to mentor our community, and just like that, one of our best was gone. That same night I revived Dashboard.io with a renewed mission — to build a better platform for the 500 family.” Singh writes.

As 500 startups grew, so did the internal dashboard system. The dashboard system has allowed 500 Startups founders, and 400 accelerator companies to communicate internally with VC’s, Angels and Mentors. Sarah Ware, CEO and Founder at 500 Startups alum Markerly, told us “The dashboard system gives us access to people that may not necessarily correspond with us outside of the system.” Being a 500 Startups company certainly gives a startup credibility but Ware added “potential investors and mentors get back to us quicker when the message comes through the system.”

Fast forward to today and Singh seems motivated by the ability to really help young companies grow through the use of dashboard.io. The tool, coupled with AngelList provides an unparalleled resource for startups. The best part is it’s free.

Singh recently explained in a Facebook post how dashboard.io will make money.

“we give the software away completely free — and in a Yammer-like way. We use the aggregate anonymous data to create content and sell portions of it. Think of us as the Bloomberg / Motley Fool of the private markets. We give away a ton of content (soon) via our blog and then monetize on the extremes”

One of Singh’s biggest priorities is confidentiality and privacy making two big promises to the Dashboard community.

I will keep your information safe. I will never sell or share your data with anyone, including your investors.
I will use that data anonymously to benefit our entire industry and move it forward.

Check out Dashboard.io here.