Incubators Archives - Page 3 of 4

Chicago Startups: Catapult Chicago Announces Freshman Class

A new startup accelerator/incubator has announced it’s freshman class. They have 7 startups in this first round, that were selected out of hundreds of applications. According to FoxBusiness, the 7 startups were chosen by their peers, founders of startups themselves.

Catapult Chicago will furnish very reduced rate office and common space, access to resources and mentors as well as equipment and other services that startups need. The seven companies in the first class will also work in a collaborative setting so that they can bounce ideas off of other founders in like minded situations.

The first seven companies have a six month tenancy with the option to renew at the end of the period.

“We interviewed over 100 companies and the caliber of the new startups speaks well of our peer- selection model,”Catapult Chicago Co-Founder Ryan Leavitt told Fox Business. “These companies will add to the spirit at Catapult which, in many ways, acts as one collective startup with 12 different business lines.”

The startups in the freshman class at Catapult Chicago have good pedigrees as well. Mixed in the bunch are graduates of Chicago’s own Excelerate Labs, Techstars Cloud in San Antonio, and BluePrint Health in New York.

Here’s the class:

Dabble, a platform for users to sell in person classes for $20 with a wide range of curriculum available.

Buzz Referrals a marketing promotion platform.

Bucketfeet, an artist designed footwear company.

Kula, a peer to peer mobile market place.

Shiftgig a networking site for the service industry

Temp a Big Data startup.

Precured Health, a Health 2.0 startup that helps hospitals discover and evaluate medical devices.

While a lot of the attention in the Chicago incubator/accelerator scene has been on 1871, Catapult Chicago is a welcomed piece of Chicago’s thriving tech scene. They occupy 12,000 square feet of Class A office space in the River North Area which is the focal point of Chicago’s startup scene.

Linkage:

Find out more about Catapult Chicago here

Source: Fox Business

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Arizona Startups: BioInspire BioTech Medical Device Incubator Taking Applications

Earlier this month we reported on a brand new biotech/medical device startup incubator opening up in Peoria Arizona. BioInspire, a partnership between the city of Peoria, BioAccel and Plaza companies, is looking to fill the incubator with early stage companies in the biotech/medical device field.

BioAccel announced at the AZBiz Expo last Thursday, a call for applications to identify companies that can advance medical device development and popular BioInspire. Tenants will get office space, access to labs, mentorships and up to $300,000 in seed funding.

“We want to build on our significant health care footprint” said Scott Whyte, director, economic development services, city of Peoria. Nearly 19% of the jobs available in the city are in health care. Whyte added “The new facility provides a unique focus, including resources for medical device development that will hopefully attract attention across the US and bring the best technologies to Arizona.”

Bioinspire is managed by BioAccel, a Phoenix–based non-profit that works to accelerate the commercialization of life-science technologies. BioAccel partnered with the City of Peoria to leverage its assets to provide Bioinspire with a sound foundation, comprehensive infrastructure and significant experience needed to launch the new enterprise and to drive positive economic impact and job creation. BioAccel’s commercialization programs are embedded in Bioinspire’s operations, which provide for ongoing deal flow and new company formation.

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Washington DC: Carlyle Group Founder David Rubenstein Gives $15M To Duke For Innovation

One of Washington DC’s top investors and philanthropists, David Rubenstein has given $15 million dollars to his alma mater Duke University for innovation.

Rubenstein recently donated $7.5 million dollars to repair cracks sustained in the Washington Monument during last years freak east earth quakes. Rubenstein’s $15 million dollar donation to Duke University makes it his largest single donation to one institution.

Duke University just recently completed a $50,000 startup challenge. A health and life sciences startup called Nanoly was the recipient of the $50,000 award. Their startup has found a way to chemically preserve vaccines outside of refrigerators, and make them easier to administer in developing and third world countries.

Another great startup emerged from the Duke University Challenge called Mobile Foods which is entering the food truck tracking space. Their technology will allow customers of their favorite food trucks to track their location and find them easier using existing mobile phone technologies.

Rubenstein is the founder of the Washington DC private equity from, The Carlyle Group, which recently went public.

Rubenstein said today that the money will fund courses, mentoring and an incubator for students and faculty to develop new startup ventures through Duke’s innovation and entrepreneurship initiative which is also the backbone to the annual startup challenge contest.

Linkage:

source: WGME

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Greenville Startups: 12 Software Startups Headed To Greenville SC For NEXT Big Thing

Greenville’s startup community is looking to make their place on the map more defined this summer as 12 software startups head there for the NEXT Big Thing. The three month incubation program will happen at Greenville’s NEXT Center. Journalwatchdog is equating it to ” a sort of a Rocky Mountain Boulder, Colo., in the Blue Ridge foothills”

Kevin Survance former Chief Technology Officer for MapQuest is heading to the NEXT Big Thing to work on a new mobile app for smartphones this summer. Survance told journalwatchdog.com “It has all the marks of putting Greenville on the map as a technology hub…But it won’t happen overnight”

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Arizona Startups: Peoria Getting New Biotech Incubator “BionInspire”

Peoria Arizona is preparing for a new biotech incubator called Bioninspire. The incubator will launch next month and is a partnership between the city of Peoria and BioAccel and Plaza Companies a real estate firm.

BioAccel is a Phoenix Arizona based non profit that works in life science technologies. Plaza Companies specializes in medical and technology real estate. BioInspire will focus on medical device technologies. The incubator will operate out of 6800 feet that will encompass office space, lab space, conference rooms and more.

The city will support BioInspire with an aggressive marketing campaign.

For selected biotech startups BioInspire could provide up to $300,000 in seed investment along with free office space, free lab space and mentoring. Mary Ann Guerra, Chief Executive of BioAccel said that she hopes to bring in the right people that want to succeed and plans to do this with a vigorous vetting process.

The Bionspire Incubator will have an advisory council that includes; Russ Yelton, President of Northern Arizona Center for Emerging Technologies; John Lineham, a biomedical engineer professor at Northwestern University; and Enrico Picozza, director of SensAble Technologies.

The city is hoping that the incubator will help fuel the local economy and that the companies incubated there will stay in the area and continue to grow.

Linkage:

Source: AZ Central

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Startups Cincinnati: UpTech Accelerator Announces Inaugural Class Of 8 Startups

Cincinnati area, UpTech is a rather new accelerator. It was formed in January of 2012 and they’ve been working diligently over the past 5 months to build their business, their space and solidify their inaugural round of startups. Each of the 8 startups selected will receive an investment of $100,000, along with mentorship, support services and research assistance from Northern Kentucky University.

“We are thrilled to finally announce to our region UpTech’s first round of winners,” said Bill Scheyer, President of Vision 2015 and an UpTech co-founder. “Our ultimate goal is to fund 50 of the best and brightest early-stage informatics companies from the United States and abroad. These eight companies will complement the foundation of a growing informatics cluster in our region, an important business sector in a 21st-century economy.”

The contest was judged by a panel of business analysts, executives and investment experts from companies like CBS, Dell, Proctor & Gamble and more.

Some of the ideas the selected startup companies are working with are untapped markets.

7 Moose games, founded by Brett Carter and Susie D. Roth, specializes in the gamification of complex and sometimes dangerous business training simulations. For example they may produce vide game style training modules for the public safety sector that could include fire safety, or even hostage negotiations. They also have had interest from oil and gas companies that can’t provide real world training on some of the more risky aspects of their industries.

Our goal is to use game engine technology to create extremely effective simulations which illustrate inherently complicated and/or dangerous subjects,” the company said in its UpTech application. “Oil and gas, public service and health, armed forces and game industry professionals are a few examples of the industries which have expressed interest in our products.”

Citilogics, founded by Jim Uber and Stu Hopper, is developing realtime data fusion software for water utilities. Their software will help reduce energy costs, reduce water leakage, improve service reliability and the quality of tap water.

Founder Jim Uber has had twenty years of experience in the water industry including developing water security software and a multi-species water quality simulation package.

“We develop models, analytics and software that help our clients better operate and manage their large-scale urban water infrastructure investments, and deliver a wide range of services from complex engineering and data analyses, to full functional software custom software solutions,” the company said in its UpTech application. “Our current focus is data fusion software that will revolutionize efficiency and effectiveness in the water industry by reducing energy costs, controlling leakage, improving service reliability and enhancing water quality.”

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L.A. Startup: BuzzMob Is First Company In MWW Ventures

MWW is one of the largest PR firms in the country with a global presence. Their client list includes some of the top tier companies in their industries. Nikon and Samsung Mobile are both represented by MWW among a long list of familiar brands.

MWW just announced a new venture capital project spearheaded by their global head of technology and digital content, Ephraim Cohen. MWW ventures is incubating startups that advance media, marketing and public relations industries by investing firm resources in exchange for equity.

Cohen told Nibletz.com that MWW Ventures was developed by he and MWW Group CEO Michael Kempner who is a serial entrepreneur. With the verticals that the MWW Group is involved with Cohen says they come across great startups all the time. With MWW Ventures, the MWW Group will invest and incubate companies that will help them stay on “…the cutting edge of technology”.

Buzzmob, a Los Angeles startup was announced as MWW Ventures first portfolio company last week. Buzzmob is a mobile app for live events that forms location based social networks in real time and on the fly.

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Everywhere Else Beats The Valley In Forbes Top 10 Incubator List

Nibletz is growing a lot faster than we could ever imagine. We thank every one of you that’s come to the site to check out a story, or two, added us to your RSS feed and shared us on social media. Despite the rate we’ve been growing (500% month over month), we still find ourselves explaining “everywhere else” at least once a day.

Nibletz is the voice of startups everywhere else. We’re proud to bring news, interviews, and resources to those startups that are “everywhere else”. Monday Forbes posted their list of the top ten start up incubators across the country. Y-Combinator, in the valley, topped the list with $7.8 billion in value.

If you take a closer look at the Forbes list, you’ll quickly notice, like we did, that the number of incubators “everywhere else” trumped the number of valley based incubators 6-4. In fact TechStars, with offices in Boulder, Boston, New York, Seattle, and San Antonio, came in second place.

TechStars has had 114 companies through the program with 98 still active. TechStars has a franchise model of sorts, and is headquartered in Boulder Colorado. TechStars founder David Cohen has hired directors for each of the other locations. TechStars selects 1% of about 4,000 applications into their program.

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Colorado Startups: RockyNet Launches Program For Tech Startups Interested In The Cloud

RockyNet a big data and cloud based technology company in Louisville Colorado has announced a new program that will be useful for Colorado area tech startups. The new program is called RockyNet Thrive is aimed at early stage and emerging technology startups that rely on big amounts of bandwidth and collocated facilities in their business models.

Through the new program, Colorado startups will have access to mentoring on the cloud, consulting on how to leverage the cloud and a host of cloud and big data services for free. RockyNet also plans to continue consulting and supporting the startups as they emerge into profitability.

RockyNet defines startup as any Colorado registered business who has been in business for 3 years or less and has less than 15 employees.

RockyNet’s President Paul Mako said: “RockyNet Thrive is our way of leveraging our cloud and collocation infrastructure to help new businesses grow into the rebounding economy. If these companies are given the chance to thrive, we will all thrive.”

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Baltimore: Betamore Plans To Launch Charm City’s 3rd Tech Focused Co-Working Space

Co-working spaces are hot. With the rise in startups and entrepreneurship cities everywhere are finding themselves home to these new centers. We’ve visited a bunch of co-working sites up and down the east coast as part of our sneaker strapped start up road show.

Three Baltimore entrepreneurs, Greg Cangialosi, Mike Brenner and Sean Lane have teamed up to bring Baltimore’s third tech focused, incubator, accelerator co-working space to life. The space is called “Betamore” a rather clever name don’t you think. Betamore joins the Emerging Technology Center and a forthcoming space which is a partnership between Loyola and Wasabi partners, now that’s hot (you see what I did there).

Betamore is part Hybrid Accelerator, Incubator and co-working space says the website Citybizlist Baltimore.

The space is 8,000 square feet and will feature two large classrooms, dedicated office space, conference room space and a co-working space. If you’re not familiar with co-working spaces, think the lunch table at your high school, just much longer with plugs and internet. Oh and of course toss out the gossipy drama because one thing is proven about co-working spaces and that is that people love to talk about startups and people actually help each other.

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Rawporter Roadshow: We Stop In Chattanooga, TN To Talk Gig City And Gig Tank

Chattanooga TN is quickly becoming know for a lot more than just their “Choo Choo”, there is a tech scene forming in their close-knit community that plans to disrupt the rest of the U.S. One of the backbones to their tech scene is “the gig”. That’s how the Chattanoogians refer to their 1gb fiber optic internet that already covers 150,000 homes and businesses and 600 square miles. It’s big and it’s fast.

The “Gig” gives Chattanooga a one up over many other areas. In fact San Francisco doesn’t even have 1gb internet yet.

That’s why they’ve formed “The Gig City” and this summer they are hosting the “Gig Tank”. The Gig Tank is part summer camp, part startup contest and it’s open to entrepreneurs and students. There are two tracks and cash prizes for both.

Last month we wrote about the Gig Tank here on Nibletz. Check out the video, we talk with Brian who sits on the Gig Tank committee and is planning on a great event. Nibletz will be on hand for the kick-off of the Gig Tank and then we’ll check in with participants halfway through and the wrap up demo day event at the end of the session.

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Like what we do? The Nibletz team is a true new media startup “sneaker strapping” it like the rest of us. If you like what we do, we could really use some gas money to continue with our road trip around the country bringing you coverage of startups “Everywhere Else” hit the donate button on the right of the page.

Rawporter Roadshow: We Talk With Ric Fleisher about Urgnt.ly And The DC Startup Scene

As the Rawporter Roadshow continues we got a few minutes to sit down with serial entrepreneur Ric Fleisher about his latest startup urgent.ly. Fleisher has had several successful exits and is proudly working on his current startup that came about out of necessity.

Fleisher found that as more and more location based service startups came out they were all focusing on what they believe people want. Urgnt.ly is a new kind of location based app that focuses on what people need.

As the story goes it was a Friday evening and Fleisher had just finished doing the dishes. Before he went to bed he set the dishwasher to run overnight. He was awakened Saturday morning by his son that told him there was water in the kitchen. Fleisher got dressed and went downstairs expecting to find a puddle of water. Instead he found that his entire kitchen and surrounding areas in his home had been completely flooded by a dishwasher that was still spewing water.

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Rawporter Roadshow: We Talk With Venga At The Fort In DC

We’re still going strong on our Rawporter Roadshow stopping in and talking with tech companies and startups from “everywhere else”. We spend some good quality time at Fortified’s “The Fort” accelerator in DC. We already brought you our interview with NexGame and now we’re spending some time with Sam from Venga to talk about Venga and what it’s like to startup outside of Silicon Valley.

We actually felt like it was more important to spend more than just 3 hours in the nation’s capital to really get a feel for the scene. We also got to spend a lot of time with Kendrick and Carl from inthecapital who lent us some of the co-working space they were borrowing from canvas.co the largest co-working space provider in DC and a great friend of startups.

Check out the interview video above. We covered Venga earlier on here as well. If you like what we are doing we could sure use some gas money for the trip hit the donate button on the right side.

If you’re a startup from literally “everywhere else” send us an email at startup@nibletz.com and we’ll get you covered.

When Hollywood And A Tech Incubator Have A Baby They Called It io/LA

Just steps away from the famed Hollywood and Highland intersection is LA’s newest Startup Incubator io/la. Mixing Hollywood and Tech like never before, io/LA tries to infuse old Hollywood with new Tech in a way we’ve never seen. In an attempt to break the stigma that the Bay is where you want to be io/LA invites those with a Hollywood aspirations and a Tech way of thinking. The newly launched Incubator is the brain child of former MySpace CTO Aber Whitcomb, Donovan Leitch and Chris Gartin.