Everywhere Else Archives - Page 83 of 145

everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference Announced February 10-12th 2013 In Memphis Tennessee

MEMPHIS TN, & EVERYWHERE ELSE- “everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference” has been announced for Sunday February 10, 2013 through Tuesday February 12, 2013 and has already attracted an all star line up of speakers, panelists, investors,startups and entrepreneurs. The conference will take place in the heart of beautiful Memphis Tennessee at the Memphis Convention Center.

The three day conference will feature over 30 panels, keynote addresses, roundtable and fireside chats geared towards the challenges that entrepreneurs, startups and even investors face outside Silicon Valley. The conference will also include three signature networking events as well as a three day startup exhibition featuring 100 startups from “everywhere else”. Startups from every stretch of the country, and as far away as Israel and Romania have already committed to exhibit in the Startup Village.

Startup America CEO and founding CTO of Priceline Scott Case will keynote at the event. Best selling author and motivational speaker Tracy Myers,Rohit Bhargava,Bill Harris former CEO of Paypal and Intuit and many more, will also speak at the event. everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference will continue to announce speakers over the next two months.

Startups, startup founders, accelerator heads and investors will round out three fun filled and educational days in Memphis Tennessee on topics ranging from “raising money everywhere else”, “what I learned in an accelerator”, “what investors outside the valley expect”, “startups: life after hip hop, music and sports”, “kick ass female founders from everywhere else” and more.

There will also be three startup pitch contests with finals taking place at the conference; “The Best of Everywhere Else”, “The Startup Village People Awards” and the “Top of Tennessee” startup pitch contests will have their finals take place at the conference in front of a panel of well known angels, VC’s and celebrities. With the three startup contests over $100,000 in cash and prizes will be given away.

The Best Of Everywhere Else contest will begin with video pitches on November 1, 2012.

The Top Of Tennessee pitch contest will be open to startups throughout the state of Tennessee and will begin during Global Entrepreneurship Week.

In the Startup Village People Awards, Startup Village companies will compete for $25,000 in cash and prizes by audience participation vote via the official conference app.

“everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference” has made both exhibiting and attending affordable for even the boot-strapping startup from “everywhere else”. Attendee tickets are $60 with an early bird rate of $39 for all three days. Startup Village booths are $480 with a few $295 pre-sale booth spaces still available. An earlybird rate for Startup Village booths of $350 will continue through October 31st.

Linkage:

Check out everywhereelse.co

Attendees get your attendee tickets here at the special early bird rate

Startups, here’s a link for $295 startup village booth space that ends Tuesday at 11:59pm

San Diego Startup: The Tip Network Is PayPal For Servers

Although restaurant and hospitality industry technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the years, one area where it still falls short is tipping. That’s where San Diego startup The Tip Network comes in.

With the economy the way it is these days restaurant owners and managers are mice-managing their shift schedules even more than they ever have before. Owners are managers are quick to make cuts to their wait staff the minute they can. This causes a major pain for servers. In a lot of restaurants servers either need to stick around after getting cut or at the end of their shift, come back at closing time or wait until the next day to reconcile their tips and tip out. This can be a major pain point for servers.

The Tip Network offers solutions for problems like that and other problems that plague proprietors of tip based businesses.

Tip Network is a cloud based tip management solution for independent and chain restaurants. We enable managers to easily track, allocate, and distribute tips digitally to their staffs Tip Network. Each staff member has their own unique Tip Network profile that allows them to (1) send money to any account, at any bank (2) send money to anyone in the network, (3) and many other things down the road .

Using the Tip Network, servers take ownership and management of their tips over, instantly. Now, from the comfort of their own home, or device they can tip out to support staff, move tips to their bank accounts even pay back loans to other servers. Like PayPal, with The Tip Network users get their own ID and can move their tips around anywhere in the network.

Founder Greg Crisci has first hand experience as a server and knows the pain that his startup hopes to solve. He’s busy these days looking for integration partners and preparing the implementation of his new tipping alternative. He did take a few minutes to talk to us though. Check out the interview below:

New York Startup: Greatist The Go To Place For Health & Wellness Info INTERVIEW

I’m one of those people that thinks in order to be the best you need to think like you are the best, it’s a motivational mantra that’s driven me since my childhood. Such is the case with Derek Flanzraich and his health and wellness, socially driven info startup Greatist. This New York based startup is a destination site for original, amazingly good health and wellness content. It must be because they’re currently seeing 1.5 million uniques a month, which according to Flanzraich makes Greatist the fastest growing site in the health space.

Whether you’re looking for great healthy recipes, workout tips or even how to get over a hangover, Greatist offers a great variety of wellness and health related content.

While the content on Greatist.com is overflowing, the team at Greatist encourages their users to take it slow, one week at a time. The startups mission is to inspire and inform the world to make at least one healthier decision per week. Whether you want to lose weight, eat better, get stronger, get motivated, relieve stress, or just start working out, greatist.com offers the content you need, in an easy to read format for all of their users.

Flanzraich has been an entrepreneur since his first “lemonade stand” startup dog walking business. All the while friends, family members and new acquaintances would ask him what drove him and one of those main ingredients was health and wellness. That’s why he created Greatist.

We got a chance to talk to Flanzraich. Check out the interview below:

Share Your Docs With QR Codes Using Canadian Startup: TagMyDoc

Canadian startup TagMyDoc has introduced a new way to share documents. With the use of 2D tags (QR Codes), users can now share documents from DropBox,Box and Microsoft Office. The easy to use tagging system can be added to virtually any document including Word, Excel, PDF, Images, PowerPoint, Open Office and more.

TagMyDoc works exactly as you would expect it to. You add the tag to your doc and anyone who has access to the QR Code can scan the code and instantly retrieve a virtual copy of the document on their device.

TagMyDoc is perfect for offices. They can post signs, posters or memos with a group of TagMyDoc QR codes and then employees can download the documents when they scan the code. It’s also great for people trying to link information to others. For example a lost dog poster could now contain the important bullet points on the sign, with the QR code linking to more information.

Their system would also be great for events, conferences and even school assemblies where people could scan a QR code to get more information on a topic from a speaker. The QR codes could easily be added to paper event programs and eliminate extra paper for descriptions, white papers and other supporting documents.

Not only is TagMyDoc an greener way to share documents, it also makes documents social. End users who scan a QR code for a document can also elect to follow the document. Users can make comments on documents and follow the document to see additional comments. This is another great feature that could be utilized in big group settings where if one user had a question about the material in the document they could share that question and then the answer would be shared as well.

TagMyDoc is connecting readers, authors and documents in a whole new way. TagMyDoc is like the social network for documents.

Linkage:

Check out Tagmydoc here at tagmydoc.com

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Manage Your Personal Web With Michigan Startup: backstitch INTERVIEW

Imagine if HootSuite allowed you to go out of the “social sphere” and customize all the content you wanted across the internet. In a nutshell, that’s exactly what Michigan startup backstitch does. And, they do it well.

Husband and wife co-founders Jordan and Stefanie Warzecha describe BackStitch as a clean and consistent user experience for managing your personal web. Your personal web includes your social media feeds, your favorite news and blog sites and even your favorite daily deals sites. Now with backstitch you can take all of that content and instead of having an unorganized hodge podge of browser tabs open, everything comes together in a nice aggregated dashboard.

Moreso than just organizing all of your favorite web content backstitch actually saves the user a lot of time. Typically everyone has an internet routine. Although most people start their web routine on a smartphone or tablet, once you get to your computer for the day the routine picks up. For me I open up Hootsuite, Google Reader, Nibletz.com, about five other blog sites and a ton of email screens. This is all before 8am. With BackStitch a lot of that content is in one easy to find place.

backstitch comes out of the box with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Appdotnet. They also have a variety of popular new sites baked in along with all of the popular daily deals sites. They’ve also thought about people who read blogs and sites outside of what BackStitch offers, and allows users to add any site with an RSS feed (although they should add nibletz.com to the catalog).

We got a chance to talk with Jordan. Check out our interview below:

JustDecide Startup Dilemma Of The Week: When To Pivot

Every week we team up with New York startup Justdecide.com to bring you the Startup Dilemma Of The Week. In this feature we take dilemmas that real startups are facing and put them to the crowd using the justdecide platform to crowdsource advice for that startup.

This week’s dilemma is one that comes about naturally to startups everywhere. It can also be one of the most uncomfortable events a startup has to go through. Our startup dilemma of the week this week is “When to pivot”.

The startup that submitted this dilemma has been slowly, but steadily gaining users with their startup but they’re finding that users aren’t actively using their service. The user count goes up, and the clock ticks. A pivot is inevitable but the question that then comes in to play is when.

Pivots happen all the time, they happen in accelerators, before startups go live, in beta, in alpha, even after a startup has been established for a year or two. Facing the pivot is one of the hardest things cofounders go through. Many don’t want to abandon their original idea. Others know it’s the right thing to do but are scared about when to actually do it.

One of the biggest concerns when pivoting is will the startup lose their current user base while pivoting. Sure in the pivot you’re hopeful that you’ll gain more users but it’s scary as hell.

This week’s startup dilemma of the week offers three options:

Pivot Now

Wait a few months and make a decision

Don’t pivot for the foreseeable future.

What would you do? You can weigh in here.

Linkage:

Weigh in on this week’s Startup Dilemma of the Week

Check out previous dilemmas.

submit your own, email startups@nibletz.com

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UK Startup: SurveyMe Offers An Easy To Use Mobile Survey Platform INTERVIEW

Business owners are constantly looking for the best way to get customer feedback with the best possible return. According to many surveys, comment cards, even ones that offer incentives, see around 1% return or engagement. Surveys that print out on receipts and direct patrons to websites aren’t very effective either. That’s why many companies have found the need and desire to take their surveys to the mobile device.

UK startup SurveyMe solves the problem of creating surveys just for mobile devices by offering an easy to use platform for business owners to design mobile surveys. In fact, even business owners with minimal web experience can create good looking, easy to use and easy to navigate surveys. SurveyMe has tried to make their platform easy enough to use, so that if you know how to use the internet you can create a survey.

SurveyMe is another great startup with a husband and wife co-founders, Lee and Nicola Evans. While this is the Evans’ family’s first internet startup they’re no strangers to owning a business. The Evans were the original owners of The Bear Factory in Ireland, a brand that was eventually bought out by St.Louis giant Build A Bear.

While they’re not making bears, they’re making their survey platform as easy as letting a three year old create a bear, and the UI as appealing.

We got a chance to talk to Lee Evans. Check out our interview below:

Interview With Mark Cuban Backed LA Startup: Mention Mobile

Shark Tank season 4 kicked off two weeks ago with Indiana University, Kelley School Of Business graduate Derek Pacque’ turning down a $200,000 investment offer from Dallas Maverick’s owner and billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban. Pacque’ turned down the investment because of the equity stake Cuban wanted in exchange.

That wasn’t the case with Mention Mobile founder Ryan Ozonian. Ozonian took a one in a million shot and sent Cuban an email with a two year old blog post. According to Ozonian in just 8 minutes Cuban replied. That single email exchange led to Cuban investing $250,000 back this time last year. Cuban followed that investment up with another undisclosed investment in April of this year.

Mention Mobile is a social gaming company that already has a handful of titles under the belt utilizing the popular Facebook platform. Some of their titles include: Trivia Friends, Doodley, and Zombie Bash: Christmas Attack. Their about to launch a new game, partnering with Chillingo as the publisher, called Word Derby. They expect to get that game out to users later this fall. It will be the first asynchronous word game for Chillingo.

We got a chance to talk with Ozonian about what he and MentionMobile are doing in the interview below:

Interview With Techstars Boulder Startup: Birdbox One Place For All Your Photos & Video

A few years back I had stored all of my digital photos on the sonystyle photo sharing website. At some point in the last part of the 2000s Sony decided to shut the site down. Unfortunately, I had used an older email address when signing up for the Sony photo sharing site and missed their 20 or so warnings that the site was shutting down. My photos from that time, were gone forever.

Because of this experience I was reluctant to try any of the newer services like Flickr or even Photobucket. I stored most of my photos (and still to this day) using iPhoto. The problem with iPhoto is if you take a ton of photos the space is eaten up quickly. I love what Apple has done with Photostream but that’s only good for your 1000 most recent photos. As you import more and more photos to Photostream the older ones get pushed out.

These are some major pain points for me personally that TechStars graduate, and Boulder startup, Birdbox will solve. BirdBox is a service that aggregates all of your photos and videos from over a dozen services both local and in the cloud. Once BirdBox imports all of your photos it keeps them in “nests” for you. Birdbox claims to do all the “heavy lifting” for you and they do. What’s even better is they make it a cinch to recall a photo later based on event, hashtag or whatever other cataloging you put into it.

All these features came about after founder Ben Nunez tried to find one single photo to send to his mom on his phone. Unfortunately the photo was tucked away on an external hard drive and he had to wait. Between SD cards, USB flash drives, external hard drives, iPhoto, Picassa (Google+) and now even Flickr, it’s sometimes a pain in the ass to try and find that one photo. Birdbox will make it easy for you.

We got a chance to interview the guys from Birdbox. Check out the interview with this exciting TechStars Boulder grad below:

Dallas: Mobile Security Leader, NQ Mobile Introduces NQ Family Guardian

It’s no secret that smartphone adoption in the United States is growing rapidly. The fastest growing segment of new smartphone users are tweens and teens between the ages of 13-17. While parents want their teenagers to have the features, and independence that come with a new smartphone, this is also a risky proposition for some.

Responsible parents and guardians want their children to have access to the latest technology and at the same time keep them safe. While it’s hard enough to monitor your children’s whereabouts 24/7 it’s even harder to monitor their smart phone usage. You want to know if your children are accessing inappropriate websites, if they’re using the phone in school or in class, and if they’ve become the target of cyber bullying via mobile.

NQ Mobile, a global leader in mobile security has now released NQ Family Guardian to help protect children from those issues and a whole lot more. NQ Family Guardian was designed and crafted with the same attention to functionality and protection that all of their other products are known for. The comprehensive suite of tools protects children from harassing phone calls, allows parents to set up phone usage hours and more:

Browser Blocker: Safeguard your children by blocking inappropriate websites
App Filter: Make smart choices about which apps your children can access
Contact Filter: Help your kids fight spam text and harassing calls by adding numbers to their block lists
Schedules: Control your children’s mobile phone use by setting up times when they can unlock their phones to make calls, browse the Internet, text, and more
Monitors: Keep track of your children’s locations, messages, calls, browsing histories, app downloads, and photos
Geo-Fences: Set up a safe zone to for your children and receive a notification when they’re outside of this safe zone
Check-in: Get check-in messages when your children arrive safely at their destinations. You can also track their location if they forget to check in
Panic Alarm: If your kids are in trouble, they can send an alert message to your phone with their exact location

“Recent Nielsen research shows that 58% of kids aged 13-17 own smartphones, and that number is expected to continue to climb. While most teens admit they’ve been given rules to follow, such rules have been difficult to enforce – until now,” said Gavin Kim, Chief Product Officer, NQ Mobile. “With NQ Family Guardian, parents now have the ability to unobtrusively manage their kids’ mobile phone usage while also ensuring a safe and fun experience. ”

NQ Mobile Co-CEO Omar Khan told nibletz.com directly “NQ Mobile is extremely proud to extend our product line to include NQ Family Guardian. This is a suite of services which helps parents manage, monitor and protect their children’s mobile experiences. With this product, NQ Mobile is working to help parents raise responsible cyber-citizens.”

NQ Mobile’s NQ Family Guardian is available now in the Google Play store check out the link below.

Linkage:

Download NQ Mobile’s NQ Family Guardian here

Here’s more information on NQ Family Guardian here

Nibletz wants to see you here

Keep An SOS In Your Pocket With Seattle Startup React Mobile INTERVIEW

In this day and age personal safety is a very important issue to many people. There are a million different factors that play into a persons personal safety. Did you just get attacked by someone? Are you feeling unsafe because someone is following you? Are you diabetic and feeling light headed? Are you allergic to bees and just got stung?

Any of these situations, and countless others, could result in the need to make a distress call to someone, and time is almost always of the essence. Well Robb Monkman and Grant Wallace, two Seattle based entrepreneurs with backgrounds in safety and communication have created a startup called React Mobile. React Mobile functions as a distress or SOS signal right in your pocket.

With React Mobile both Monkman and Wallace figured out that the best safety device, and distress signal device was already in most people’s pockets. Of course that device is their smartphone. React Mobile is an iOS and Android app with three distinct safety abilities; alerting via email, text and social networks; GPS location sharing; and emergency reporting.

We got a chance to talk with Monkman. Check out our interview below:

Los Angeles Startup: myRight Looking To Become the WebMD For Legal Issues INTERVIEW

When you’re not feeling well and have a definitive set of symptoms most people these days take to the internet. Even with health insurance, people seem to find it more convenient to consult with webMD or Dr. Google, before they waste their valuable time at the doctor’s office. WebMD is often credited as one of the big survivors of the first dot com bubble. The site, which has been around since the late 90’s, is a great place to get preliminary information.

While there are a variety of legal websites out there, there isn’t one that mimics what WebMD does. Sure there are a million places to find and complete legal forms, like Legal Zoom, but most of the websites out there for people to bounce legal questions off of, typically go right back to a lawyers office who will give you the information you need to know after a “free” consultation.

myRight is hoping to become the webMD of legal services. The Los Angeles based startup wants to be the preliminary go to place for people with legal questions. Some may even realize they don’t need to see a lawyer while others will jump on the phone with a lawyer right after their search of myRight.me.

Could Nikhil Jhunjhnuwala, Keval Amin and Michael Niu, the founders of myRight be onto something? Frank Monestere, the founder of LegalZoom thinks so. Monestere sits on myRight’s advisory board. To keep things legal myRight has two other lawyers on their advisory board too.

We got a chance to talk to Niu about myRight. Check out the interview below.

Vermont Startup: Popngoseek An Event App For Mobile & Pop Up Events

Food trucks, pop up stores, pop up restaurants, and pop up fire sales seem to be increasing in popularity. It’s like the old days of the mystery rock concert where an artist would come and play a show and then they’d have some mystery show and you’d have to listen to the radio station to get clues as to where to go.

Well nowadays these kind of secret pop up businesses tend to take to social media to spread the word. Washington DC, New York, San Francisco and other major cities have had an outbreak of “pop up” restaurants. A lot of times chefs will take over an abandoned or closed down restaurant location for a very limited time. This can be a week, a weekend or possibly a month. They do this to either test the waters with their restaurant idea or just as a temporary way to make people crave even more.

Apple, Samsung and other major electronics manufacturers have been known to set up “pop up” stores at major events. Apple set one up at SXSW in 2011 when the iPad 2 was released. Samsung set up pop stores at the Olympics.

Popngoseek is about unique experiences in unique places. They aren’t looking to be your everyday check out the app and see who’s playing platform. They want to be the go to app to find the really cool once in a blue moon events.

Now when your girlfriends call you and tell you about the awesome pop up store or trunk show a designer did, you won’t miss the tweet or the Facebook post.

Popngoseek has taken to indiegogo for their first round of crowdfunding so if you’re one that doesn’t want to miss out on unique events, you should support these guys here.

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

Montreal Startup: GigTrip Social Meets Music Tourism INTERVIEW

Canadian serial entrepreneur and startup aficionado Jean-Pierre Levac is working on solving the pain points involved in musical festivals, tours and shows. To do this right, Levac found early on that all three stake holders would need to be involved. Musicians, fans and venues. Without all three pieces in the process one stakeholder would end up with an unfair advantage, while another may be left out in the cold.

Levac has spent much of his career in the IT Industry, with the last fifteen years spent in startups. He’s always been interested in the music business, but not necessarily the way everyone else is. Levac wants to take his skill sets and those of his co-founder Artem Mindrov, and fix the back end of the music industry.

Levac and Mindrov are attacking the fan angle first. To that end they are looking for beta testers, especially people who attend music festivals and make travel excursions out of them. To us it seems that there are so many people out there attacking the event discovery problem from the aggregation side, Levac and Mindrov seem to be on the right track to integrate all three stakeholders before the events pour into search engines and aggregation apps.

We got a chance to talk with Levac about what they’re working on at GigTrip. Check out the interview below: