Comments Off on Kauzu Targets Entry Level Job Seekers With Smartphone And Basic Phone Apps0LikeLike 2,038
With all this innovation and startups targeting the job market there’s one job market that still remains horribly under served. The entry level or basic jobs market hasn’t had its own app or platform until now.
Chicago startup Kauzu, is taking advantage of the open space in the entry level jobs market. Grocery stores, retail jobs, call center jobs, fast food, crew work and other types of jobs can connect to local employees using one of two apps created by Kauzu.
Kauzu offers a smartphone app that allows users to view jobs on a map and find jobs in close proximity to their homes. They’ve also created a basic phone app that allows job seekers wuthout smart phones to text their zip code and get job listings close to them as we’ll.
We got a chance to interview Mitch Schneider, the founder and CEO of Kauzu. Check out our interview below: Read More…
Comments Off on CES 2013 Preview: zoomStand To Launch Giving Your Device More Positions Than Karma Sutra0LikeLike 2,728
Laptop and Tablet stands are great. They can keep your laptop or tablet propped up for movie viewing, set at a good angle for typing, or they can sit your tablet upright for displaying. A Phoenix startup called zoomStand is about to rock the stand world that allows you to set your tablet or laptop in more positions than the Karma Sutra.
The zoomStand is extremely flexible because of its unique build and telescoping legs. It’s height adjustable guaranteeing your workspace, no matter what it is, is what you need.
“zoomStand is the first modular and portable laptop and tablet stand that doesn’t sacrifice ergonomics or comfort in the name of simplicity. zoomStand fills the need for a singular accessory that can hold any device, in nearly any position and is easily portable. Coupled with the dire need to be able to get out of a chair and still be able to comfortably use a mobile device is where zoomStand fills the void. A single zoomStand can be used as a desktop riser for a laptop, as a standalone desk or as a theatrical holder for your favorite tablet while lying in bed or on the couch while watching a movie. The possibilities are nearly endless. ” co-founde Chris Piper told launch.it
Piper and his team are set to debut the first manufactured prototypes at Eureka Park the startup zone at the 2013 International CES. They plan to finish manufacturing in time for a spring 2013 release.
What makes pumpup.co so great are a number of things. For starters the three founders behind pumpup.co know their roles and do them well. In an industry that can run a little top heavy on the ego side they have the entrepreneurial founder, the sales, marketing and bizdev founder and of course the athletic trainer founder. You couldn’t have a fitness startup without one.
The UI is intuitive and it’s made for the average person, not the overly buff set that don’t need the gym as much as us normal folks.
Now, to make things much easier to manage PumpUp on the go, they’ve released an iOS app for iPhones and iPod Touch, both devices that make it into the gym while you’re working out.
With over 40% of new gym memberships cancelled in less than a year, people are looking for an easy-to-use solution that gives them the guidance and motivation needed to get fit. By asking a few simple questions about people’s fitness goals, where they want to work out and the equipment they love to use, PumpUp automatically builds a highquality workout designed specifically for each user.
PumpUp is meant for people who want to get started with a fitness routine but don’t know what to do, or those who want to take their fitness to the next level. PumpUp shows users what to do, how to do it,and over time, adapts their plans to ensure they continue to improve.
“People aspire to be fit and live a healthy life but most people find difficulty in reaching their goals,” says Phil Jacobson, co-founder & CEO of PumpUp. “We’re simplifying the experience by asking you what you want and taking care of the rest. Getting fit doesn’t have to be tough; people just need to be shown what to do. With PumpUp, that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
The PumpUp App is available as a free download on the Apple App Store on iPhone or iPod Touch at http://itunes.com/apps/pumpup. PumpUp is free to try for 30 days and costs $4.99/month on an annual subscription. To celebrate the launch and New Year, an annual subscription for PumpUp is only $2.99/month for the rest of January 2013.
Comments Off on CES 2013 Preview: Indian Startup Emo2 To Launch Large Touch Screen OS0LikeLike 3,392
An Indian startup called Emo2, or Emotional Squared Technologies is set to launch what looks to be a great operating system and large multi user touch screen tablet. The device itself is 42″ and allows multi user input at the same time.
The 42″ touch screen surface is great for hotel lobbies, operating rooms, electronic casino gaming, retail environments and collaborative work spaces. The underlying operating system is designed to support the hardware without any hiccups, lag or delay, making for a pleasing user experience no matter what the application.
The company based in Chennai India, has been working on the technology since 2010 under the leadership of CEO and cofounder Mir Abid Hussain.
Emo2 is venture backed with an early stage investment from Indian firm Blume Ventures. Although the exact funding has not been reported Blume Ventures specialized in angel, and seed investments between $50k and $250k. Rajan Anandan, Zafar Baig and other angels also contributed to Emo2’s angel funding.
To date emo2’s technology has already been deployed in a coffee shop chain with 30 locations.
Although they weren’t specific early on, Emo2 has officially announced that they will launch Tuesday when the International CES show opens in Las Vegas. Before returning back to India they will be showing off their technology in Silicon Valley and New York the weeks immediately following CES.
Comments Off on $9 Million Raised By Wisconsin Startup Study Blue For Digital BackPack0LikeLike 2,102
Madison Wisconsin startup Study Blue has raised $9 million dollars for their digital backpack company. Study Blue helps students store and organize their class study materials and turns them into digital flash cards and quizzes. The platform also allows the study materials to be compared with other students that are taking the same subjects.
Study Blue is cross platform which allows students to pick up where they left off whether they’ve moved from a laptop or desktop to an tablet or smartphone.
The $9 million dollar Series A-1 funding round was led by Great Oaks Venture Capital, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation also participated as well as existing investors. This new funding will allow them to continue building on their existing user base which is already 2.5 million users strong. Those users have created and shared 100 million study materials across the web and their mobile apps.
“We are experiencing rapid growth. This financing allows us to further expand our community and platform to help students master their course material faster, said Becky Splitt, StudyBlue’s CEO. “Our online, mobile and social tools connect students to a comprehensive crowd-sourced library of content on nearly any subject, and to each other, in a highly relevant way.
“We are really excited to be a part of the StudyBlue movement,” said Andy Boszhardt, Partner, Great Oaks Venture Capital. “The entire edtech industry is seeing tremendous growth and StudyBlue has particularly impressive traction in the space with over 2.5 million registered users who use its platform across a myriad of devices. They are in a perfect position to expand the audience of students they serve and we’re really pleased to be a part of that.”
“We see Great Oaks as a perfect complement to our efforts” said StudyBlue Founder Chris Klundt. “Their breadth of experience across consumer, mobile and online businesses as well as a commitment to the edtech industry makes this a great partnership.”
Comments Off on TipBox Makes It Easy To Share Tips On Your iPhone0LikeLike 3,031
An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Brush your teeth at every meal. Don’t feed the bears at the national zoo. All of these are short little tips and people love sharing them. That’s why Dubai startup TipBox was created.
TipBox makes it easy to share little tidbits or tips of information with anyone using an iPhone.
Tipbox founder Ali Razzouk tells nibletz.com “It’s an ever-growing collection of short, simple & personal tips, posted by people just like yourself from their everyday experiences on anything you can think of. Tipbox makes it easier to discover & share tips that are actually useful.”
Once you’ve left your tip by category in the TipBox, it’s archived for anyone else with the TipBox app to go and search for it by category. If you’re looking for travel tips, computer tips or just little anecdotes you’ll find them on TipBox. Sounds easy enough right? So why hasn’t anyone else thought of it? Because these guys did.
Check out the rest of our inteview with Razzouk below.
Comments Off on Awesome Contest: Signal Wars Is Back As We Travel To CES 20130LikeLike 3,614
Some of you may have been followers of our previous well known mobile tech site. If you are, you’ll remember “Signal Wars” a contest where if you get crappy cell phone signal you can win. Well we weren’t sure if we would do it again over at nibletz.com The Voice of Startups Everywhere Else, but alas we’ve teamed with Wilson Electronics to bring you Signal Wars Part Three.
This weekend we’ll be traveling across the country from Atlanta Georgia to Las Vegas Nevada for CES 2013. Along the way we’ll be looking for our loyal readers who suffer signal problems. It sucks having the latest greatest 4G (and sometimes 3G) smartphones and not getting the most out of them because you live in a crappy area for signal. Well fear not, we’ve got a contest for you.
From Friday at 5pm (Eastern Time) through Sunday at 7pm (Pacific Time) simply tweet us the following message:
“Help @wilsoncellular and @startuptechguy my #signalsucks, I’m in XXX XXXX” where xxx and xxxx = your city and state. If you live along the route 40 corridor going across the country and we see your tweet it could be your lucky day.
We’ll do a short video with you talking about your bad signal, we’ll check out your bad signal on the video and voila you’ll be the recipient of a brand new Wilson Electronics Wilson Sleek. You’ll get to choose whether you want the 3G or 4G version and you’ll see a vast improvement in your cell phone signal in the car.
Wilson Sleek signal boosters aren’t little stickers you put on your phone. The dash mounted cell phone holder connects to a signal booster and a small antenna you put on the top of your car, that actually increases your voice and data signal significantly.
We’ve traveled across the country with Wilson electronics 10 times over the last few years and every time we’ve had continuous cell phone signal except for one teeny tiny portion of Arizona.
Again it’s this easy tweet the message:
“Help @wilsoncellular and @startuptechguy my #signalsucks, I’m in XXX XXXX” where xxx and xxxx = your city and state. If you live along the route 40 corridor going across the country and we see your tweet it could be your lucky day.
We’ll DM you or have you email us to arrange the meeting, shoot the video and if you’re selected, you’ll win. (allow 2 weeks for delivery).
Comments Off on Continuously GeoTag Video With UK Startup RouteShoot0LikeLike 3,982
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.
Comments Off on CES 2013: Nibletz Will Be Rawportering From CES 2013 And Eureka Park0LikeLike 2,482
Imagine if you could make money by simply taking video of something newsworthy with your smartphone. This new form of reporting is called citizen journalism and startups like Charlotte NC’s Rawporter are at the forefront of this wave of crowdsourcing the news.
Rawporter was founded in 2011 by Kevin Davis and Rob Gaige two marketing executives who left their cush office jobs to to dig into the trenches of startup life and make everyone, potentially, a Rawporter.
The idea came to Davis and Gaige after they were eating at one of their favorite local Uptown Charlotte restaurants. While they were dining there was a rather big car accident right in front of the restaurant. Naturally smartphones were up in the air taking video and pictures at the scene. What Davis and Gaige noticed was that the official news stations didn’t arrive until the accident had cleared.
They, along with several others, sent their homemade videos into the news stations but none of them actually aired. Sure there some of the national cable stations ask people to send in their videos but localized rawportering hadn’t broken through.
Now Rawporter has become a platform that allows bloggers, journalists and even tv stations to crowdsource news footage and has a mechanism for citizen journalists to get paid for their videos. For small one to three man blogs, Rawporter is a great way to get video coverage of events they can’t otherwise attend or report on.
We’ll be sharing a lot of our CES video coverage on Rawporter for free. Other blogs are welcome to use the video coverage that we supply via Rawporter, all we ask is that you credit nibletz.com with a source link.
While we’re giving our videos away, if we wanted to we would be able to sell them for whatever we would like.
On the flipside if we needed video from CES or any other event we could put out a call for an assignment, let the community know how much we were willing to pay and voila we would have our video like we were there.
Check out our Rawporter CES coverage once CES officially gets rolling. We will link to it here on nibletz.com on the right side bar.
Comments Off on Revestor Is Simplifying Real Estate For Investors On The Web And Mobile0LikeLike 2,963
If you’re in the market to buy or sell your home in a traditional way there are plenty of resources for you. When it comes to mobile we immediately think of Zillow. On the web there’s hundreds of websites that will easily access MLS listings for you and make it easier for you to do your own work on buying or selling your home before bringing a real estate agent into the mix.
For those looking to buy or sell real estate as investors though, the tools are quite limited.
San Diego startup Revestor is all about real estate from the investors perspective. The tools out there today allow investors to sift through hundreds of thousands of listings but they don’t take into consideration the important information for investors when it comes to looking for the best deals.
“Revestor is a multidimensional patent-pending real estate search engine that finds homes-for-sale by the highest potential cash flow based on the average rents in the area. Revestor can be accessed for free on the web or on the iPhone as a free App. Our goal in 2013 is to be the #1 ‘must have’ tool for real estate investors and real estate agents who work with real estate investors. Revestor solves one of the hardest problems in real estate investing: finding deals in the first place. Instead of spending hours sifting and sorting through multiple websites and archaic spreadsheets, Revestor does all the heavy lifting by presenting potential listings/opportunities to our users so they can go out and do their due-diligence. We simply give investors and agents a better place to start from. Users can expect User Profiles, Foreclosure Auctions, Advanced Searching, Alerts, and Advertising to be released in 2013.” Founder & CEO Bill Lyons told us in an interview.
We talked in depth with Lyons about Revestor, check out the interview below.
Comments Off on DC Hot Tech Startup Gryphn Finding New Problems They Solve Every Day0LikeLike 6,084
One of Washington DC’s hottest startups is Gryphn. This mobile security firm released their ArmorText secure text messaging application for Android users last summer and they’re constantly hearing from customers that they’re solving a new problem every day.
“we are still discovering all the problems that Gryphn solves. People come up to us at events and tell us how our products can be used for public notaries, insurance resellers, journalists… you name it. We are staying focused to solving regulatory compliance problems for Healthcare, Finance, Government, Law Enforcement, First Responders and Defense.” Gryphn’s CEO and co-Founder Navroop Mitter told us in an interview.
Back in June the team had grown enough that they took over the space of fellow DC Startup JESS3 which relocated to Los Angeles.
Much of their success is coming from innovating in the security space in the sectors where security matters most.
We got a chance to catch up with Gryphn. In the interview below they reveal how they got their name Gryphn. Check it out:
Comments Off on Joist Helps Contractors Be More Efficient On The Go0LikeLike 8,767
Contractors spend a lot of time on the road and working on various projects. Typically they have to keep hand written notes in notebooks and on clipboards and then either they transcribe all that information themselves into Excel or Word, or take it back to the office for someone else to do. For some smaller independent contractors that typically means their significant other is spent doing data entry instead of savoring what little time they have outside of “work”.
A Winnipeg startup called JoistApp is looking to solve that problem. JoistApp is a mobile app that contractors can use on their iPad, iPhone or Android device which allows them to manage their business on the go. Contractors can create invoices, create estimates, send invoices, manage projects and accept payments on the go. Sure there are plenty of business management apps out there but JoistApp was created specifically for contractors.
We got a chance to talk with Brendon Sedo, co-founder of JoistApp, check out the interview below.
Comments Off on 500 Startups Launching New York Co-Working Space0LikeLike 1,901
500 Startups New York based partner Shai Goldman announced on Twitter earlier today that the popular seed fund and accelerator program is opening up a new co-working space in New York. TNW reports that the co-working space is open to 500 Startups portfolio companies and early stage startups.
While 500 Startups in based in Mountain View California (Silicon Valley), founder Dave McClure and partner Paul Singh are very committed to startups outside the valley. McClure is known, for among other things, his Geek On A Plane adventures which get entrepreneurs to build companies in planes flying above far off exotic places.
The 500 Startups accelerator cohorts are always a good mix of companies from across the country and around the globe. We’ve featured interviews with many of the current class here on nibletz.com.
If you’re interested in working at the 500 Startups co-working space, it will cost you $500 per month per desk. In addition to portfolio companies they are looking for startups that are either: bootstrapped, angel/seed funded or series A funded. They have space for 40 people. You can apply here at wufoo.
The space is located at 27th & Park Avenue South and here is a video of the space:
everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference will feature several 500 Startups backed companies from “everywhere else” including a kick ass panel called “Kick Ass Female Founders From Everywhere Else” led by Markerly’s Sarah Ware.
Comments Off on Startup Weekend Company Breadcrumbs, Lets You Know Where You’ve Been0LikeLike 4,686
A San Diego startup, called Breadcrumbs is helping people keep track of where they’ve been using their smartphone. It’s like automated checking in but could be more useful later on. Maybe you want to keep a journal of the places that you’ve been. Perhaps the next time you’re in a city or town you want to easily be able to recall a place you ventured into on your last trip. We travel so much around here that it’s easy to mistake some downtown areas with others.
Breadcrumbs is innovating at the EvoNexus incubator in San Diego, alongside other great startups like Nulu Languages, TomNod, Antengo, Barc, and Fashinoning Change. The company also received a $50,000 seed investment from Qualcomm Labs.
Breacrumbs is another success story out of Startup Weekend. Founder Joel Drotleff had pitched the original idea at San Diego Startup Weekend, citing the fact that he could never remember how long he spent at the dog park. The other co-founders joined him for the weekend project and now today they have a product in the Google Play store for Android and the iTunes App store.
Breadcrumb’s Sean Dominguez told nibletz in an interview:
“It’s a pretty cool story. We all met at Startup Weekend San Diego back in June when Joel, our CEO, pitched an idea for creating a self-tracking application since he never knew how long he was spending at the dog park. We all thought it was a cool idea, joined the team for the weekend, and ended up taking the Qualcomm sponsored prize that weekend – as well as another prize at Qualcomm’s event Uplinq two weeks later.”
Obviously they caught the most important eyes at Qualcomm who has continued to support the venture. We got a chance to have a more in-depth discussion with Dominguez check out the rest of the interview after the break.
Kyle
Molly McCarrick
Mike Hoffmeyer
Nibletz Staff
