SXSW Virgins: Columbia MO Startup Digital Talent Agents

This week starts our 12th South By Southwest, the last four have been spent as a tech journalist and before that I attended the music portion during my radio career. SXSW can be intimidating for a first timer, especially a first time startup, that’s why we’re featuring some great SXSW Virgins, seek them out, find out more about them and help them out if you can.

Digital Talent Agents, a startup based in Columbia Missouri has a rockstar team all working on an awesome goal, to help build credibility for experts through thought leadership and content marketing by getting them consistently published in online reputable publications.

In addition to being an agency for credible content the crew at DTA are passionate about startups and often write themselves on things that matter most to startups. In fact it was DTA’s John Hall, who called everywhereelse.co a “Must Attend” startup conference at Forbes.com.

Kelsey Meyer, the company’s Senior Vice President, offered these tips on promoting your startup.

DTA is making their way across the country and networking with startups of all kinds every chance they get. They were in Memphis for everywhereelse.co and several events in between then and SXSW. This is their first time at SXSW.

1) What is you startup? Digital Talent Agents is an agency that builds your credibility through thought leadership and content marketing.

2) Where are you based? We’re headquartered out of Columbia, Missouri but have remote locations in St.Louis, Mo and Dallas, Tx.

3) What do you do? We help clients leverage their expertise by getting consistent content placed in reputable online publications through by-lined articles and interviews to build thought leadership and credibility for the client and the companies their representing.

4) Is this your first time to SXSW? Yes, its our first time.

5) What are your plans at SXSW? It’s always exciting to see what other startups, brands and varied artists are doing. It’ll be a great place for us to network, create relationships and see what cool things companies are doing. I can’t forget to mention the amazing parties and concerts that are being held at SXSW that I’m sure you’ll see several of our team members. :)

6) How can people connect:

Twitter: @DTAgents

Website: www.digitaltalentagents.com

Natalie Stezovsky (Vice President): natalie@digitaltalentagents.com

We’ve got even more SXSW13 coverage here at nibletz.com the voice of startups everywhere else.

Baltimore Startup Woofound; Psychology & Personality Based Discovery

Discovery apps are nothing new. There are hundreds of event discovery apps, career discovery apps and even people discovery apps. Most of them simply match your interests with other interests. They may take your social graph into consideration or a short survey. Discovery apps were hot last year at SXSW.

Glancee was one of the hot apps going into SXSW 2012. The people discovery app matched people based on things they liked on Facebook. While the company was later acquired by Facebook, it failed miserably in real life applications. For instance at one point I had liked a picture of Mark Zuckerberg’s dog Beast. When I powered up Glancee at SXSW it matched me to 20 or so people who had also liked Beast.

Baltimore startup WooFound is doing things differently, and more efficiently. Their personality driven platform is built on psychology and personality assessment.

“It all started when co-founder Josh Spears had a blind date and realized he had no way to determine what kind of things he could do with his date that they would both enjoy. Spears and Sines agreed that it would be great if there was a way to match people based on their interests based on common personality traits.” Daniel Waldman, the startups PR guru told nibletz.com in an interview.

The company has launched two products and a mobile app to date: “We recently launched Compass and Compass Lite, a web application with Facebook integration that offers personalized career recommendations based on the user’s personality. Both are image-based personality assessments that deliver a personality profile within minutes and instantly make recommendations. Compass is our private-label solution for colleges and university career centers, while Compass Lite is free and open to use by anyone. Last summer, we launched a mobile app last year called Woofound Explore, which matches people to places and things to do based on personality.” Waldman said.

The personality assessment tool is extremely accurate, according to Woofound they give accurate results in “98.5% of all cases”.

The company has raised $2.2 million dollars to date including a $75,000 investment from the Maryland Technology Development Corporation. They aren’t the only startup finding success in Charm City,

“Baltimore has a thriving startup scene. There are a lot of new companies that have sprung up in recent years with a handful of highly visible successes such as mobile ad platform Millennial Media. Baltimore also sports some highly venerable technology companies, such as Bill Me Later (which was acquired by PayPal) and AOL (formerly Advertising.com). Additionally, there are an amazing amount of networking events for startups locally, and with our proximity to DC, Philly and New York, Baltimore in many ways an ideal location for startups. ”

So what’s next for Woofound?

Woofound’s ultimate goal is to provide a personalization platform for our day to day lives. We have a few other projects cooking to expand the use of our personalization technology to other verticals and we are always looking to add new features and expand our current applications. We are preparing for a major update of our Explore application that will really skyrocket its relevance and open up its usability to people everywhere.

We covered Woofound earlier here. You can also find out more about them here at woofound.com

Italian Startup FileRock, Protecting You In The Cloud

FileRock aims to bring complete security to cloud storage. Cloud storage is getting more and more popular since it can save a lot of money, but concerns about security are growing, particularly in the enterprise world. FileRock’s focus is the complete security of data, meaning both the confidentiality and the integrity of data. Our technology effectively allows individuals and enterprises to store files and databases in the cloud, while keeping security under their own control.

With FileRock, you can store data in the cloud without having to trust the cloud provider. Cloud providers cannot access your data, and if they delete or modify some of your data (by malfunction or deliberately) you will notice it immediately, before the data enters your business process. Bottom line: enterprises can save a lot of money by storing their data in the cloud, without having to worry about security.

So how do they do this?

“Our technology is implemented in two different products: FileRock Client, a backup/sync client (Dropbox-style, to be clear) aimed mainly to professionals and small-medium enterprises. And FileRock for Enterprise, a software layer to be integrated in enterprise software environments.” Daniele Arena CEO of FileRock told nibletz.com in an interview.

Bernardo Palazzi, Maurizio Pizzonia, and Giuseppe Di Battista round out the founding team hoping to ease the security concerns of everyone using cloud storage.

These Italian entrepreneurs are building FileRock in Rome a city associated with romance and not necessarily startups, but Arena tells us that’s changing:

“There’s quite a few things going on in the startup world in Italy. There are several startup events (we just participated to the 2013 final of TechGarage Roma, a showcase/competition of startups that has been held for several years) and a growing community of startuppers (the Facebook group Italian Startup Scene, for example, has more than 10,000 members). Obviously, we are not at the levels of Berlin or Silicon Valley: there are still limited options for startups to get funding. But the culture is growing: for young Italian graduates, a few years ago it would have been a crazy idea to get a job in a startup. Not anymore.”

So far FileRock has started a private beta and revealed the source code for the File Rock client at GitHub. Their hoping to get feedback from the user community on GitHub and they’d also like to see users customize FileRock for their specific needs.

So what’s next for FileRock?

“We are currently looking for a Series A Round of 1 million Euros, that we will use to radically scale operations, marketing and sales. We are also looking for partnerships with system integrators and software vendors who would be interested in integrating our technology in their solutions, both in the form of FileRock Client and FileRock for Enterprise. Meanwhile, we’re working hard on building traction and adding features to our software.”

Find out more about FileRock here

Nibletz is back on our sneaker strapped startup road trip, find out more here.

Interview Spotlight: New York Startup Problemio

” We hope to decrease the failure rate of new companies.” That’s the goal Alex Genadinik has for his startup Problemio. It’s a lofty goal of course but with his suite of four apps designed to help educate new business owners he may actually be successful at it.

The four app business starting series, that makes up Problemio, is based on data collected from over 10,000 businesses. The app suite is available for iOS, Android, Amazon Kindle, and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet. They focus on skills every founder needs like 1) Business ideas 2) Business planning 3) Fundraising and 4) Marketing.

If learning from apps isn’t enough there’s also a live chat feature that allows users to chat about the topics covered in the apps.

We got a chance to talk with Genadinik check out the rest of the interview in our interview spotlight below:

What is your startup, what does it do?

Problemio is a 4-application business-starting guide available on the following mobile platforms: iPhone, iPad, Android, Amazon Kindle and the NOOK device from Barnes and Noble which. The apps focus on 1) Business ideas 2) Business planning 3) Fundraising and 4) Marketing.

The apps are based on the 10,000+ businesses planned on the original business plan app which also happens to be one of the highest ranked business apps on Android

Users of the apps are able to get expert help in chat form, access to planning tools, as well as numerous articles curated especially to cover the common concerns of entrepreneurs who came before them.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

Alex Genadinik is the single founder of Problemio. Alex is originally a software developer. In his past independent projects he found that without proper advice or mentors, it was difficult to avoid serious mistakes with his projects, which ultimately made it very difficult for those projects to be successful. That experience inspired the building of the planning tools to help others prevent similar mistakes.

Where are you based?

The company is based in New York, NY.

What is the startup culture like where you are based?

I find New York to be very vibrant with people generally embracing technology. The biggest difference between New York and any other place where I worked in the past in terms of being a startup hub is that during any given weekday, people come to Manhattan from hundreds of nearby cities and few neighboring states. That creates an extraordinary density of people sharing and collaborating on what is next. Additionally, since New York has such a deep business culture, people understand the value of networking here much more than other places where I have lived before, including San Francisco and parts of the Valley.

What problem does your startup solve?

The main problem Problemio is solving is helping entrepreneurs get support, mentoring and advice to help their businesses. We hope to decrease the failure rate of new companies.

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

Not only did I have to learn native Android and iOS programming to create the apps, but I also had to figure out how to market the apps and make the apps into a financially viable business. Since I am the only founder, every day is filled with balancing tech, app ux, marketing, and many other things that need to get done. Balancing all that and still making sure there is quality in everything I do has been the biggest challenge so far.

What are some of the milestones your startup has achieved?

At the time of writing this, we have had over 65,000 combined downloads across all the Problemio apps, and over 10,000 businesses planned on the apps. Most recently we released the 4-app series across all the major devices which took quite a bit of work.

What are your next milestones

Our next goal is to grow the 4-app series and making it the premiere business apps across Android and iOS. By user reviews, we are already the best. Now it is just a matter of conquering the app stores, which will be our biggest focus this Spring. I will also be looking for various companies who work to help entrepreneurs to advertise directly on the app.

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

I found that the New York tech hub is easier to navigate because everyone is pretty close. The Valley is made up of a number of places which are pretty far from one another. For example, there is San Francisco, Berkeley across the bridge, Palo Alto and San Jose a long drive away. And in New York, I can just about walk to the next tech thing in midtown!

What’s next for your startup?

I am always looking to make the product better. I will be looking to add video and phone support in addition to the current chat-based help that the entrepreneurs get. Additionally, I will be focusing on growing app sales and doing more marketing. I doubt I will be raising money as I rather focus on improving the fundamentals on my business. One thing I might do is actively look for mentors.

You can download Problemio for your device here.

The nibletz, nationwide sneaker strapped road trip continues, more here.

Miami Startup SocialTyer: It’s What Happens After KickStarter

Kickstarter has become quite the phenomena as of late. Over $319 million dollars was pledged using the crowdfunding platform, across a myriad of products. After a company gets funded on KickStarter, what happens next?

Companies that reach their funding goals begin shipping their products. Those that have received a lot of traction may quickly land distribution deals, but those that don’t may have a hard time kickstarting again after their crowdfunding campaign.

That’s where Miami startup SocialTyer comes in.

“SocialTyer is a social-commerce website that helps entrepreneurs sell their early-stage products with the help of the powerful social media community. Inspired by the recent success of crowdfunding, we wanted to offer a way for entrepreneurs to make a direct impact immediately after getting funded for production. Apart from spending thousands of dollars on traditional marketing or getting absolutely ripped-off by wholesaling away, there aren’t many ways to do so in a fast and efficient way. . To do so, we came up with the idea of empowering the social media community and offering them the opportunity to become modern-day salesmen: they introduce these products to their network and get commissioned when a sale occurs. Entrepreneurs trusting our service pay us absolutely nothing to sign up and don’t have to worry about that until we actually create a sale for them.” Jonathan Gosper, co-founder of Social Tyer told nibletz.com in an interview.

Gosper, along with co-founder Girish Alwani, met at the University of Miami. Both young men come from vastly different international backgrounds. Jonathan grew up in France and was introduced to the entrepreneurial world after co-founding hi-tech luxury brand Colibri. His occasional struggles to market his products and the study of advertising greatly inspired him to come up with SocialTyer’s concept. Girish grew up in the Caribbean and studied finance. His belief that everyone should get a chance to be a micro-entrepreneur has fingerprints all over SocialTyer.

So far, spreading the word and communicating the idea behind SocialTyer has been the biggest challenge for Gosper and Alwani. The idea has started picking up steam after being in stealth mode for over six months. ” We had numbered goals for entrepreneurs to contact and sign up for beta listing, beta sign up requests and a people joining our social media accounts. Although some thought we were being too optimistic in our projections and goals, those milestones were all reached with 1/3 of the time we allowed us.” Gosper said in regards to their traction.

They hope to launch the full website atsocialtyer.com next month. Until then you can keep up with SocialTyer on AngelList.

The nibletz and everywhereelse.co team is doing a little crowdfunding of our own, more here on how you can help us on the sneaker strapped nationwide startup road trip part deux.

David Cohen, That Ideas Market Startup Has Arrived And It’s Called ThoughtMarket

I’ve seen a handful of interviews where Techstars founder talks about ideas being worthless without follow through and execution. He’s absolutely 100% right. I’ve seen him throw a reporter for a loop in an interview where he gets all hyper about a startup that sells ideas, and when the reporter asks him the name of the startup, he confesses it doesn’t exist, again, because ideas are worthless.

Atlanta startup ThoughtMarket is actually more in depth than just a place to hash out and sell ideas, it’s about creating and being creative even if you aren’t the person taht executes.

“The Thought Market is a unified platform for the exchange of all forms of creative media and intellectual property. We believe that the human mind truly is the most valuable resource in existence and seek to create the modern, technologically advanced equivalent of the ancient Greek agora for the trade of this resource.” Ben Burger co-founder of ThoughtMarket told us in an interview. “By this, I mean that your imagination has the potential to create things that can change the world – but it has always been limited by technology’s ability to spread and share your creation. An author could have the best idea ever for a book that would sell millions of copies and change the world, but without a pen and paper, it is only a story in their mind that gets spread by word of mouth (even the mouth can be interpreted as a technology). With every advancement that technology makes, the mind’s potential to create advances as well. From the mouth to the pen, to the printing press and now the Internet – every advancement had enormous implications on the ability of an individual to become wealthy or change the world just by something they write. Every day, people use technology to create. They create music, books, code, businesses, inventions and numerous other unique works on an ever-growing list of things that technology has enabled. There are so many of these works or pieces of content being created that the Internet is flooded with them and an unknown number of magnificent and valuable things go completely unnoticed – while cat memes go viral. But the important thing is that entire industries rely on these intangibles because they are immensely valuable to them, and more people than ever are creating today than ever before – both amateur and professional. ”

To sum that all up Burger says “what the Thought Market will do is create the World’s first unified and all-inclusive trading platform for these intangible resources of value.”

So the concept seems intriguing, are you actually selling anything?

“We are not directly selling anything, just like stock exchanges don’t sell anything. The trading happens between the users of the site. We have adopted many of the same tools and concepts that modern investment trading sites implement to give their users total control over their investments. So for instance, you can see how many android apps have been posted within a given period of time, how many of them sold, what they sold for, what the asking price was for the ones that didn’t sell, what the rating was for a given sale price etc. Anything you could possibly want to know relating to the value of your investment in intellectual property will be made available to our users/traders.”

Ok so now that we’ve got that down, how does ThoughtMarket actually work?

“So let’s say that you are a musician. You might have a day job and do it as a hobby or you might just not be a good performer – for whatever reason, you aren’t in a band for a living. But you have just written the best song ever and you know that it would be a hit, making someone a lot of money. So you go and post your song on the Market in its respective category for sale (this is the basis of how the econometrics aspect works). Audio -> Music -> Country music -> etc. There are many security measures we are implementing to help assure the value of your creation, but for this example, we’re listing it unrestricted so anyone can listen and rate it. All of the users of the site may listen to it, rate it, comment on it, and most importantly, make you an offer. So you are selling your song for 50k (Country music is infamous for song buying and songs often go for hundreds of thousands of dollars) and it has been given a good rating by the other traders of 9.2/10. So someone wants to buy the rights to your song. They can pay you the full 50k, or negotiate an offer with you. ”

Burger has also explained that ThoughtMarket isn’t just about music, it can be for book ideas, like starts to manuscripts, website ideas, even business ideas. So the site is just as it suggests, a thought market, with a whole lot more.

And how does ThoughtMarket make money?

“As far as our revenue, we are still refining our model because we want it to be as conducive to all trading as possible. We are considering up to a 10% commission of the initial total sale price of an item (taken from the seller. They get 90% of the sale price.) For trades involving no money, we will take a $5 fee from both parties. Advertising will be bare minimum if at all and custom designed to fit the design scheme of the Market. ”

Burger is a native of Atlanta Georgia and returned there after three years at the University of South Carolina. He agrees that the Atlanta startup scene is on fire.

“It’s amazing. Earlier this month I attended an entrepreneurial event called Startup Rally. I think I saw your tweet about the coverage so you know about the event. But in general, Atlanta really is a growing community for entrepreneurs. Hypepotamus sounds like the shit. I haven’t had time to get involved there yet but I am very excited to do so.”

So how did you come up with this idea?

I was actually watching a TED talk last summer while taking summer classes at USC. It was an unbelievably hot day, something like 109 degrees and humid. Needless to say we were indoors. But I was relaxing and watching Don Tapscott’s Four Principles for an Open World. http://www.ted.com/talks/don_tapscott_four_principles_for_the_open_world_1.html

The talk is about how all of humanity is becoming connected into a system via technology. “Humanity is building a machine” I think was what he said that kind of sparked the whole idea. If humanity is building a machine, who is making the parts? And how are they being compensated? So that’s kinda how it happened.

ThoughtMarket plans to go into beta later this spring. You can learn more at thoughtmarket.net

We’re sneaker strapping it again across the country, on our nibletz sneaker strapped startup road trip part deux. Learn more and help us out here.

Twelfer Is The Self Curated Photo Sharing Platform

Lately there’s been a lot of talk about Jon Oringer and his startup Shutterstock. Business Insider ran a story the other day talking about how Oringer took 100,000 photos to launch his latest startup.

With all that hard work Oringer was able to take Shutterstock public this year. It was the first New York tech company to go public in the last two years.

Shutterstock is one of many photo sharing sites that encourage folks to go out, fill up their memory cards and share until their hearts are content. With Netherlands photo sharing startup Twelfer, the idea is just the opposite.

“Just imagine that you want to shoot some photos but instead of using a memory card, able to hold more than 1200 photos, you only use one roll of film of 12 shots. We bet you’ll be more focused before shooting a photo, thus at Twelfer, we bet you’ll be more focused before showing a photo.” Edwin Janssen, co-founder of Twelfer told nibletz.com in an interview.

Their platform requires self curation. When DSLR cameras have made it easier than ever to shoot 1000 photos at one event, picking your 12 best is a task that’s much harder than it seems. It’s not only good for the photographer it’s good for the viewer as well.

“Do you think it’s easy to mark your absolute best photos from your good ones if you can show a couple of hundreds? If not, go to our website and show your 12 best photos. In addition, your viewers will never fall asleep again due to browsing through your portfolio endlessly.” Janssen said.

Janssen is himself a perfectionist, at least when it comes to photography. Being overly critical of his own work made it possible for him to win first place in the Photo Academy Awards (Netherlands & Belfium) and several International Photography Awards and honorable mentions.

Twelfer’s technical co-founder is Senno Kaasjager. Kaasjager has been programming since he was nine years old, starting out on a Commodore 64. When Janssen explained the idea around Twelfer “…he was immediately interested, since he also believes, that the “information age” is more and more becoming a “non-information age”, because of the lack of filtering of content that is being put online nowadays”.

While Janssen refuses to use the word lazy, moving from film to digital allows photographers to have multiple chances to get the photo right. Digital can actually help photographers get the absolute best picture, but that’s no reason to upload 50 shots of the exact same pose.

Twelfer solves two fundamental problems:

Maintaining your focus on your absolute best photos that you want to show – instead of trying to fill up your ‘online storage’, not removing your good photos from your best photos.
Giving a very clear focus to your viewers – instead of them browsing through your portfolio endlessly, processing large chunks of information and therefore naturally losing their focus.

They have no real secret sauce other than the fact that you can only post 12 pictures, making it more of a gallery rather than a photo sharing site. “Flickr and other photo sharing communities are more like ‘storage solutions’ instead of them being a platform for you to show your best work only. “

For more information you can sign up for early access to Twelfer here at twelfer.com

The nibletz team is back on our sneaker strapped nationwide startup road trip, part deux, here’s how you can help!

Even Startup Chicks Love Bacon, Grit Design Introduces SizzlePig

It seems that there’s only one thing that goes wild for bacon more than the dogs in the bacon bits commercials, and that’s geeky startup founders. Bacon and pigs for that matter, isn’t just about dudes, the women have it too. A love, an attraction, to pigs and bacon.

Andrea Livingston, the co-founder of Grit Design, showed off their new SizzlePig product at the recent everywhereelse.co 2013 event. SizzlePig gets a double bonus because not only does it mention pigs, but it’s also a startup born out of an existing business’ tool like Xtrant and ShortStack.

So what is SizzlePig?

SizzlePig is the by product of Grit Design, a small Detroit based shop that specializes in web and mobile design. Over the past four years, Livingston along with her co-founders; Mark Stewart, Eric Livingston, Carrie Thorpe, Michelle Shoan and Brendan Colley, created SizzlePig to handle photos on web and mobile projects.

“We had to resize large numbers of images, over and over again. We’ve made tools for ourselves over the years and developed our own platform which we named Bacon (BCN – Basic Content Network). We decided to use Bacon to help us with the batch image resize issue. Our little tool worked better than we had expected. We thought, hmmmm, I bet others would want to use this…so we put a UI on it and began to test it out.

sizzelpig™ was born. sizzlepig™ is cloud based software (can also live client-side) that pulls an entire folder of images, and allows you to visually resize, crop, change compression to an unlimited amount of sizes for each image, all on the same page. We call it ‘fine-tuning’ the images – which is very helpful for sites that are built to be responsive. . One of the problems we have had in the past is that we couldn’t see our final edits until the scripts had finished running. This could take time – as in hours if the files were large.

We have seen a 70%+ decrease in time spent on initial resizing of batch images and over a 90%+ decrease on time spent for batch images to be re-worked. This literally equals hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars and that’s for each time folder with large amounts of images are processed.

We love how we can manipulate how each image will appear and it is very fast. There are no file size restrictions, so even original files coming from the photographer don’t need additional prep work before being processed.

This isn’t simply an alternative to scripts or other tools, this is a whole new wave of digital creation.” Livingston told nibletz.com in an interview.

She continued; “We didn’t make sizzlepig™ for the sake of launching a product, we made a tool to help us resize an entire folder of images to an unlimited number of sizes and fast. These images needed to be able to live in many places and on multiple screens, and, we wanted complete visual control over each crop and every last pixel. We needed a higher quality and faster solution and were tired of settling.”

Sure there are batch scripts available but what you get with SizzlePig is a way to move the images through faster. We’ve been using SizzlePig inhouse here at nibletz and the greatest thing about it is you can set up a blueprint for the way that you need photos. We need a small 150×150 thumbnail and a 280×280 photo for our stories. We can upload as many photos as we want and that blueprint resizes all the photos at the same time and spits them back out.

SizzlePig is perfect for photographers, brand managers, designers and enterprise. With it’s simple to use interface and wide variety of customers it’s no wonder that Killerstartups.com called SizzlePig a “game changer”

You can try SizzlePig for yourself here

Nibletz is back on our Sneaker Strapped Startup Road Trip Part Deux, you can support us here.

Chicago Startup Hummingbird Is The Rotten Tomatos For Anime

Chicago startup Hummingbird has created a platform that anime fans have been looking for for years. The startup, founded by Josh Fabian and Vikhyat Korrapati is the first database and recommendation engine just for anime. “Think Rotten Tomatoes had a baby with Netflix’s recommendation engine, and that baby is a huge anime fan.” Fabian told nibletz.com in an interview.

“Users rate the titles they’ve seen in the past and, based on their tastes, Hummingbird gradually ‘learns’ what you like and don’t like, enabling it to make extremely accurate suggestions on what to watch next. Users are able to properly determine if the anime suggested is something they’d like to watch by making use of our comprehensive database featuring trailers, screenshots, plot summaries and much, much more for every anime you could imagine. Because some users lead very busy lives, we’ve also integrated a simple to use episode tracker to help keep you organized, no matter how many titles you may be watching at a time.” Fabian explained.

Fabian is based in Chicago while Korrapati is based in Hyderabad, India. Fabian says he loves the Chicago startup scene and has found that it’s extremely easy to get the help he needs in Chicago.

“It’s seems no matter where you turn in this city, there’s a community of designers, developers and entrepreneurs learning from each other, encouraging each other and giving a helping hand when you need it most. I can’t think of a better place to launch a business.” He said.

Hummingbird came to life after Fabian, a huge anime fan, found himself without something to watch next. “I hit a roadblock.. I had no idea what to watch next. All of the ‘popular’ choices that come to mind I had already seen, in some cases, multiple times. I did a lot of googling but after a lot of searching, I couldn’t find anything to completely solve my problem. ” So he created it.

Korrapati, a developer, saw Fabian’s first landing page for Hummingbird and reached out to help. “I can honestly say that without Vikhyat joining the team, Hummingbird wouldn’t be nearly as great of an idea as it is now”, Fabian said of his cofounder.

Fabian is bootstrapping it for now but has ambitious plans to try and get into YC or 500 startups. With Hummingbirds unique platform that may not be as difficult as it sounds.

They’ve been launched for about a month and have already picked up nearly 10,000 users. Their next goal is getting to a critical mass of at least 50,000 users but with no other recommendation engine for anime that shouldn’t be so tough. They were also named by TNW as a startup to watch.

You can find out more about Hummingbird here at humminbird.ly

Starter Pad Is A Collaborative Online Community To Build Startups

Lithuania has a bubbling startup community and Lukas Gediminas Sukys, the founder of Starter Pad, is hoping to broaden his reach way beyond his home country.

He bills his startup, Starter Pad, as a new way to build startups online. It’s a collaborative platform for entrepreneurs to reach other entrepreneurs, create ideas and then build them remotely.

“…I was thinking about ways to improve Startups building process and make new connections with entrepreneurs. After some tries to achieve these goals, I understood that Startup people using computer as main tool for building startups, so that means website would be ideal place to begin from” Lukas told nibletz.com in an interview.

For those new to starting up, Starter Pad has four main objectives to helping founders find each other and build.

Connect.

We bring all Startup specialists to one place with fully completed profiles. It’s so easy to find your CoFounder or research to hire these startup specialist. Just what you really need.

Learn.

You can learn from our community of specialists every day by watching their activity in groups, startups, questions page and other places. Give direct questions to them and ask for feedback.

Build.

If you have your startup idea, you can add it to our Startups list and begin to search for a cofounders, mentors, advisors or even investors at our Pad. StarterPad Advocates and our community are at your disposal to get the feedback you need.

Grow.

The final step after being successful of building your Startup: We help you to grow your business. get specialists which will help you to grow. Experts from every IT business role, working on the biggest StartUp hive-mind on the internet to help you grow responsibly.

Starter Pad also provides resources and ideas for legal issues, pitch development, marketing and business development.

Lukas, along with co-founder Joseph Martz, are hoping that Starter Pad can become an international place for startups to launch. As for Lithuania though, the startup scene is growing.

“Lithuania is a small Baltic country, with a population of about 3 million. Our entrepreneurial culture is relatively young: Lithuania has only 20 years out of the Soviet Union, so its a too short timeframe to have a strong entrepreneurial base. However, it seems to grow very fast. Here are based international startups like YPlan or GetJar. Lithuanians specialists are known because of their high productivity in addition to their technical skills, but our roots are a bit conservative” Lukas said.

Starter Pad isn’t alone in the collaborative, connect a founder space. There are other startups that we’ve written about here like LaunchTable, FounderSync and Cofounders Lab just to name a few.

To that end Lukas says; “Our secret sauce is to connect Startup people. There are a lot of specialists living in smaller cities and countries, who can’t attend to startup events easily. StarterPad gives an opportunity for them to connect with specialists from the biggest Startup stages and gather their experience. For Startup rockstars, it is a great way to find talents.”

What else can we expect from Starter Pad? “Our focus now is to make Startup building process more social. So we are planing to make feed for every startup, where you can post what your team is working on. We think this will engage to check StarterPad every day to see progress of Startups you are following.

“For Startup teams, it should give more motivation to build things. Community responses always trying to help to stay motivated and choose the right way for your Startup.”

You can find out more about Starter Pad here.

NY Serial Entrepreneurs Danny Nathan & Chuck Masucci Are Bringing Date Night Back

Last April we reported on New York startup Iwannanom, a cookbook startup that was revolutionizing the online cookbook. Founded by Danny Nathan and Chuck Masucci Iwannanom took a different, more efficient spin on online crowdsourcing recipes.

“I Wanna Nom is a reinvention of the cookbook for the digital world. It’s a recipe bookmarking and discovery tool that allows the user to keep track of recipes they discover anywhere on the internet and easily share them, rate them, comment on them, and find new recipes and dishes by following friends and fellow foodies.” Nathan told us in an interview.

Nathan and Masucci met five years ago while working at POKE New York a well known innovation company that worked with clients like 19 Management, the firm that represent American Idol artists.

Masucci eventually left to join the team at Skedj, which we interviewed back in November. Now Nathan, and Masucci are back together again, along with Joni Goldbach to launch DateNight a new New York startup that’s designed to take the monotony out of dating, post honeymoon phase.

Goldbach met Nathan on a date where they bonded over discussing great marketing ideas. They’ve been together ever since, and admit that they will use their own startup to keep date night alive and well.

“Date Night is a million things to a million different couples. But there’s one common thread we’ve discovered across couples everywhere. Once you’re dating – once you’ve reached the point in your relationship where you start talking about us and we – you stop going out on dates. Candle-lit dinners become take-out containers and theatre tickets become DVD mailers. Date Night gives way to the ease and simplicity of routine” Nathan said of his latest venture. “We believe it’s time for an evening out that was actually planned in advance. It’s time to try something new together – something that fuels your sense of adventure and discovery. Hire a babysitter. Take a class. Party on a school night. Dress to kill, for no good reason but that you can. We believe it’s time for couples to start dating one another, again.”

Nathan, a designer by trade, has turned to advice from Ben Pieratt, one of his role models saying Pieratt “…is always one of the first people who comes to mind for me when someone asks this. I’ve been a fan of Svpply from the early days, and started following his personal blog, etc. to learn more about how he did it. His discussions about transforming himself from designer to co-founder and CEO of a successful startup have always been inspiring to me. He’s a totally down-to-earth guy who made it happen. I respect him for that immensely. ”

Right now the trio is bootstrapping out of their apartments where they are admittedly keeping the cupboards stocked with the simple startup things like Ramen. They plan on iterating quickly and adapting to the community that they’ve started to form.

Sure there are sites out there that recommend things to do, there are also plenty of dating communities but most are targeted towards couples still in that “honeymoon phase” no one has really thought of the post honeymoon phase period. All three founders hope that Date Night can take off and that couples that use the service will continue to have date night with each other for years and years.

Date Night is bringing Date Night back to couples everywhere, find out more here at datenight.is.

iGrabber Is The Kayak For Car Shopping

iGrabber, Virginia starutp, dc startup, everywhereelse.co

iGrabber team shows off at everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference (photo: Allie Fox, for NMI)

When it’s time to shop for a new car there are hundreds of websites to go to and a handful of sites that everyone trusts. When it gets down to comparison shopping though, your web browser, or multiple browsers can turn into a huge, unorganized mess. If there was a simpler way to comparison shop for cars, similar to the way you can shop for travel through Kayak.com, it would make the hassle of finding the next automobile much easier.

That’s the idea behind Northern Virginia based iGrabber. Founded by Khurrum Shakir, Abdul-Malik Ahmad, Deepak Pillai and Ronald Fraser, this talented group of tech savy car aficianados, knew there was a better way. In fact, Shakir, told nibletz.com earlier this year that he was surprised no one had tried to do a search engine, comparison platform like this before.

“iGrabber.com takes the frustration out of searching multiple sites for your next car, truck or SUV. We’re the only True Vehicle Search Engine on the web. Taking the Google and Kayak approach we’ve made the process of searching for your next vehicle much easier. Unlike a lot of the Auto sites on the web that only show vehicle listings from within their database we will show you everyone’s vehicle listings in one site.” Shakir said.

iGrabber is built around the fact there are currently 7.7 million duplicate unique visitors every month searching for a vehicle of choice. These numbers account for repetition across up to 6 different sites. With iGrabber one site grabs all of the possible car choices and then lets you compare them the way you would compare cameras on bestbuy.com or travel on kayak.com “We have what some have coined as the Kayak of vehicle search.” Shakir told us.

Building iGrabber hasn’t been easy. To date the startup hasn’t raised any venture capital, bootstrapping it through launch. Shakir added, “We have been completely self-funded, mainly working out of a small home office and jumping from local coffee shops to local pizza restaurants within the Northern Virginia area holding our team meetings. ”

If iGrabber can get the word out to the over 7 million people searching multiple sites to comparison shop for cars, this could be a lucrative business. What do you think?

Visit iGrabber online here.

iGrabber was one of nearly 100 exhibitors at everywhereelse.co 2013, don’t miss next years conference at this years rates, more here

London Startup Wants To Know What Float’s Your Goat

File this under: startups with kick ass names. What’s more is that London based startup Float Your Goat has already attracted over 350 freelancers to their network that connects freelancers to their powerful social network.

Float Your Goat is a social workplace where creative people can network, build teams, grow ideas, and earn money. To date there are 367 freelancers in the network and some of them have been rates as part of the top 100 designers in the UK by The Drum.

The site connects graphic artists, illustrators, photographers, web designers, copywriters, animators and more, not just to each other, but to businesses and other colleagues that have projects that need a designer now.

Float Your Goat was founded by Emeline Wraith who appropriately took the title of “Chief Goat Herder”. The idea for Float Your Goat came up in 2010 as part of “Dragon’s Den” (American’s think Shark Tank) style competition called Dream Big.

“The dream was to create and promote fair, honest and open relationships between clients and freelancers, encouraging the idea of remote working and offering a social media platform for freelancers to share their ideas, tips and tricks as well as showcase their work.” Wraith told nibletz.com in an interview. “We are keen advocates of the idea of remote working; internet access, a laptop and a creative mind is all you need to freelance, and this is something we wanted to promote. Equally, we wanted to be able to cut out the middle man and offer affordable and fair services for all parties involved!”

With a variety of free lancers at different levels and rates, Float Your Goat is perfect for small businesses, large businesses, individuals, and of course startups. Since it’s 2013 and everyone is using the internet anyway, it’s very easy for a startup in Boise Idaho to connect with a designer on Float Your Goat. In fact that startup plans on growing without geographic borders.

Float Your Goat is just as effective for recruiters and those with projects as it is for freelancers.

“For recruiters, With the site’s search engine and rating system in place, clients can easily browse freelancers’ portfolios, testimonials and references, and so find the right person with the right skills to fulfil their needs. Perfect for any ad hoc work!” Wraith said. She’s also hoping that Float Your Goat will become agency executives’ “little black book”.

Now with a solid community growing Float Your Goat is launching a campaign geared towards startups.

“Float Your Goat have just founded a new campaign called Startups 4 Startups (SUSU), a meaningful network of creative startups that, together, delivers selective areas of expertise to nurture, collaborate and develop new business propositions into a working reality. We want to demonstrate the development of a startup from inception to launch, taking a fledgling company and making it fly.

Startups 4 Startups (SUSU) consists of five partners which, when combined, provide a 360 degree service and the necessary elements to help a new business succeed, from business development and financial management to design, print, PR and online presence. Float Your Goat, Incisive London, EML Wildfire, Print My Pixel and People Of Print each offering a different angle and a different skill set to be used both within and outside the creative community. Together we provide the knowledge and ability required for business to business propositions and supply the creative services needed for success.

Each of the partners is either a start up themselves or a collaborator with startups. Through Startups 4 Startups, each will give an understanding of how the startup process works as well as offer sound advice and best practice in terms of the startup journey.”

We will be reporting on this as it launches next month.

You can find out more about Float Your Goat here

Reno Startup ShortStack Does The Grunt Work So You Can Make Apps Sexy

Everyone needs an app these days. Whether it’s a web app, Facebook app or Mobile App, without an app your company seems behind in the times. People love showing off features and making their apps and presence look sexy, but before you can get to that, someone needs to do the grunt work. That’s where Reno startup ShortStack comes in.

ShortStack was created by Jim Belosic and Doug Churchill while Belosic was running a successful web design company. ShortStack was actually a toolset his own in house people developed to make some of the backend grunt work on design quicker. The pair quickly realized they were onto something and rather than just using ShortStack in house, they could offer it as a DIY software as a service, and make some money while helping business owners.

The response they got when the first rolled the product out was more than they ever expected. They amassed 80,000 users in year one and added another 100,000 users the following year. Now ShortStack alone is a multi million dollar business.

ShortStack allows business owners to create all kinds of different apps on a variety of platforms including the web, Facebook and mobile. It’s being used to create contests, sweepstakes, newsletter signups and integrations with Instagram YouTube and Twitter.

Belosic isn’t a flyby night developer either. He gets design and social media and contributes regularly to Mashable, Social Media Examiner, CMS Wire, PR Daily, and Smart Brief. He was also named the Technology Entrepreneur of the Year by the Nevada Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology. That’s not such an easy feat with Las Vegas’ thriving tech scene just miles down the road.

Making the move from in house agency tool to SaaS wasn’t easy. ” It was a challenge because we needed to continue to do both businesses at the same time. ShortStack was bootstrapped so we needed revenue from the agency to support the new endeavor. The biggest challenge was figuring out how to double the workload with essentially half the revenue. It was a huge balancing act, but luckily we had the luxury of a product that was making money from the beginning. Without that early revenue, we would have had to look for investors. ” Belosic told nibletz.com in an interview.

After several years at the helm of a profitable web design business, taking the plunge into the startup world wasn’t an easy task either. Reno’s startup scene isn’t nearly what it is in neighboring Las Vegas.

“The startup culture in Reno is pretty non-existent and haphazardly organized. People get good ideas, get really excited, and recruit other people to work with them … and then they just burn out. Or businesses do really well and are too busy to contribute to the startup culture. There’s not a lot of steady startup activity here and there’s not enough support for regular continued efforts.” Belosic said.

But raising a startup in Reno has it’s benefits as well. “The cost of doing business is a huge advantage. Nevada has no state income tax and the business tax climate is extremely beneficial. Business licenses are inexpensive and the cost of talent is inexpensive. Rent is also insanely cheap. When it comes to my monthly expenses, rent comes in at number 18 on my expenses list. The quality of life is also an advantage for my employees. Housing is inexpensive and there’s no traffic. Reno is also close to awesome outdoor activities like skiing, hiking, fishing, Lake Tahoe, San Francisco, hunting, etc., so it’s a desirable place to live and raise a family.”

Bootstrapping it to revenue probably explains why Belosic is such a fan of Atlanta startup Mail Chimp’s founder Ben Chestnut.

“I have a big man-crush on Ben Chestnut from MailChimp. I read his blog regularly and feel like we are in a very similar industry. We’ve been through a lot of the same stuff when it comes to our previous experiences. I was reading about their company history and realized that they too began as an agency. The MailChimp platform was created as an internal tool at first, but was later released to the public. I feel like every time I have a question, I can read Ben’s blog and he’s either had that same problem or offers some insight that is relevant to me.”

ShortStack now includes more than 40 tools and 70 templates, you can check it out for yourself at shortstack.com You can keep up with Belosic and Shortstack on Facebook