CheckOutTheLatest Lets You Check Out The Latest Videos Just About Everywhere

A New York startup called CheckOutTheLatest lets you do just that. The video aggregation and search startup populates over 250 million videos from the top video sites like Youtube, Vimeo and Dailymotion to give you access to one site that can find just about any video on the planet, that you may be looking for.

“The idea came to us a year ago while on twitter. People were always tweeting @ us hoping to get us to “Check out” their latest Youtube videos or go watch their vimeo vids.” co-founder Deni Belanich tells us about how they came up with the idea for a super video search engine.

We got a chance to interview Belanich, check out the interview below.

We Talk Starting Up At CES With Ian Bernstein CoFounder Of Sphero

Imagine you want to create something. In the case of Ian Bernstein and Adam Wilson, that thing was a platform to create robotics controlled by smartphones. It was that initial idea that set Bernstein and Wilson out on a mission to get into an accelerator program. They tried for most of the big programs but really wanted Techstars “primarily because of the mentorship”. Bernstein and Wilson are both techie software and hardware guys, and knew they needed help.

That was three years ago, and yes they got into Techstars. Back in August we brought you the story of how a brow beaten Wilson and Bernstein turned to startup community leader, mentor and investor Brad Feld. It was that meeting with Feld where they decided to create the Sphero ball.

I was first exposed to Sphero at the International CES in 2011. Wilson and Bernstein barely had a couple of prototypes but they were determined to show Sphero off to the world at an annual CES event called “Show Stoppers”. At that time I was still working on Thedroidguy and was amazed at how cool the Sphero ball was. Wilson and Bernstein were talking about freaking out cats and creating apps. That was 3 CES’s ago.

At last years CES (2012), Wilson and Bernstein were back, they had a product, and they had started selling it. Talks turned to apps and games that you could play with Sphero. Sphero had also been the center of attention at the previous years Google IO conference. Sphero had a section of the official Google after party where amidst pulsating music party goers could control Sphero around an obstacle course of sorts.

2012 was the year they really broke through though. Sphero attracted one of it’s biggest fans in President of the United States Barack Obama. Bernstein talks about that story in our video interview below.

Not only did they get the Presidential seal of approval on the Sphero ball, they had other big news just before the holidays. Back in October, it was announced that Sphero would be available in Target stores across the country.

It’s been a whirlwind three years for Orbotix and the Sphero ball. After covering the fun and cool factor of controlling a robotic ball with your smartphone, we got a chance to interview Bernstein on video about starting up. Check out the interview video below.

If you’re a startup everywhere else, you need to get to everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference, the largest startup conference in the U.S.

CES 2013: Inventor Jamie Siminoff Creates Christie Street, Crowdfunding For Inventors, VIDEO

When inventor Jamie Siminoff turned to Kickstarter for his latest invention he started realizing how flawed the Kickstarter model really was for inventors creating great products. Often times he noticed that inventors weren’t thinking the entire process through.

In an interview at CES 2013 with nibletz.com Siminoff told us that inventors sometimes go to Kickstarter with a great idea and a funding goal that barely covers cost. Their ideas get quickly validated by folks who oversubscribe on their project, but at the end of the day they go in the hole by netting down less than it costs to even make a product.

Other inventors may take a prototype product to Kickstarter that they had made at one factory but don’t take into consideration the factories that they may actually use when trying t scale a product up.

That’s why he created ChristieStreet, a crowdfunding site that is about inventors and their products. ChristieStreet uses a familiar crowdsourcing model once projects go live, however the team at ChristieStreet vets out the product answering questions like those above. Siminoff has real discussions with inventors before letting their projects go live, and even offers advice to young entrepreneurs with a great idea, on how to make the idea even greater and less costly.

To that end there are currently just three projects on ChristieStreet and each one has it’s own “cool” and “wow” factor. Right now there’s a wireless doorbell with camera that allows the user to view who’s at the door on their smartphone. They also have a bluetooth product that’s a headset with cool shapes like a skull and crossbones. The final project right now is a Powerbag type backpack on steroids complete with the capability of charging three devices at once, one of them being a laptop.

Siminoff says anyone with an actual invention can apply to ChristieStreet. In fact, in the video interview below he says how easy it is to get the product submitted and looked at. Siminoff and his team have seen their share of winners but also their share of products that most likely won’t make it out of the lab.

Check out our video interview from CES 2013 below.

500 Startups: Markerly Founder Sarah Ware Video Interview

Undoubtedly, unless you’ve been living under a rock, if you regularly read nibletz.com, than you’ve heard of 500 startups, startup, Markerly. The Washington DC startup is in the latest batch of companies being accelerated at 500startups in Mountain View.

Markerly makes easy to use, but robustly analytical publisher tools. Their tools don’t require a widget, great publishers can just insert one snippet of code and do things like share bits and pieces of content across social networks or comment on photos. The best part is that Markerly is free.

Nibletz.com, the voice of startups everywhere else, was the first blog to use Markerly’s tools and we’ve been the beta testing guinea pig throughout their entire experience at 500 startups. Recently they added the voice of Silicon Valley, PandoDaily as well.

The company was founder by Sarah Ware. The New Jersey native, Georgetown graduate and former employee at hot DC startup, LivingSocial, and longtime friend Justin Kline started Markerly as a way to share highlighted content. Since arriving at 500startups the team has found more refined ways to share. They also provide sharing analytics which can be invaluable to a founder.

We got a chance to meet up with the Markerly team at CES 2013 and #nmx Blog World. Check out our video interview below

Ware is one of the lead panelists in the “Kick Ass Female Founders From Everywhere Else” panel at the biggest startup conference in the US, everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference

NMX 2013 Interview With Boston Startup UberVu

Boston startup Ubervu is a new social media dashboard startup. Sure there are a lot of startups in the space however what sets Ubervu apart is their intelligence layer.

Ubervu finds what people are saying about companies across the social web. They take that information and convert it into easy to understand usable data to get companies engaged with their customers.

Ubervu’s VP of Marketing Dragos Llinca tells nibletz in an interview:”People talk about companies and products online every day. We monitor and analyze those public conversations. We then use smart methodologies to come up with ways for brands to send more relevant messages to more relevant and influential people, at the most relevant time.”

We caught up with Ubervu’s social media marketing & community manager Elisabeth Michaud at NMX 2013. Check out our video interview here:

Here’s the rest of our interview with Llinca:

Cardigin Gets To The Root Of Customer Loyalty For Their Loyalty Platform

Charlottesville Virginia startup Cardigin isn’t about rewards games, checking in, or loyalty cards. Their loyalty platform gets to the roots of what customers are actually doing in their favorite establishments and then allows businesses to play right into those trends to keep loyalty customers coming back for more.

In the past two years we’ve all seen that loyalty and rewards startups are literally a dime a dozen, however Cardigin’s founder and CEO Rob Masri saw that everyone was doing it wrong.

“We witnessed first-hand local establishments attempting a myriad of conventional approaches to their loyalty programs – buy-10-get one-free punch cards, keychain fobs, paper coupons, social media, check-in games and daily deals – none of which produced significant profits or customer retention.” Masri told us in an interview.

Cardigin has an iOS app and an Android app as well but Masri knows there are still a lot of customers out there that either aren’t using their smartphones for things like loyalty or are much more comfortable without fumbling with technology while grabbing a latte. That’s why businesses using Cardigan can sign customers up with just their phone number. Once the establishment has the customers phone number they can start earning loyalty rewards real rewards that they will use.

Check out the rest of our interview with Masri below.

Kauzu Targets Entry Level Job Seekers With Smartphone And Basic Phone Apps

With all this innovation and startups targeting the job market there’s one job market that still remains horribly under served. The entry level or basic jobs market hasn’t had its own app or platform until now.

Chicago startup Kauzu, is taking advantage of the open space in the entry level jobs market. Grocery stores, retail jobs, call center jobs, fast food, crew work and other types of jobs can connect to local employees using one of two apps created by Kauzu.

Kauzu offers a smartphone app that allows users to view jobs on a map and find jobs in close proximity to their homes. They’ve also created a basic phone app that allows job seekers wuthout smart phones to text their zip code and get job listings close to them as we’ll.

We got a chance to interview Mitch Schneider, the founder and CEO of Kauzu. Check out our interview below:
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TipBox Makes It Easy To Share Tips On Your iPhone

An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Brush your teeth at every meal. Don’t feed the bears at the national zoo. All of these are short little tips and people love sharing them. That’s why Dubai startup TipBox was created.

TipBox makes it easy to share little tidbits or tips of information with anyone using an iPhone.

Tipbox founder Ali Razzouk tells nibletz.com “It’s an ever-growing collection of short, simple & personal tips, posted by people just like yourself from their everyday experiences on anything you can think of. Tipbox makes it easier to discover & share tips that are actually useful.”

Once you’ve left your tip by category in the TipBox, it’s archived for anyone else with the TipBox app to go and search for it by category. If you’re looking for travel tips, computer tips or just little anecdotes you’ll find them on TipBox. Sounds easy enough right? So why hasn’t anyone else thought of it? Because these guys did.

Check out the rest of our inteview with Razzouk below.

Continuously GeoTag Video With UK Startup RouteShoot

Geotagging is nothing new, we’ve been able to do it on our iPhones and Android devices for the past few years. You can geotag a tweet, a Facebook status message, Instagram photo and photos that you post to just about any social network. Geotagging allows the creator to mark where their photo was taken or their checkin was made.

Videos can be geotagged as well, however it’s typically one geotag at the beginning of the video or associated with the link for the video.

UK Startup RouteShoot has developed away to use your smartphones gps in conjunction with it’s video camera to continuously geotag a video. Say for instance you are hanging out in South Beach and start a video at your hotel, if you keep the video going down the A1A and then onto the beach, RouteShoot would allow the geotags to change to correspond with the different locations you were at while the video camera was rolling.

What’s more is once the video is uploaded the route is tracked in a line. A viewer can click the line on the geo mapped route and pick up the video based on the location if they wish, or watch as the locations change throughout the recording of the video. The video also shows a “you are here” symbol on the map as the video is playing.

RouteShoot was created by co-founders; Gary Wilson, Adam May and Andy Pym. Wilson and May have years of experience in the highway maintenance field while Pym has experience in highway engineering. We got a chance to talk with Wilson about RouteShoot. Check out the interview below.

Revestor Is Simplifying Real Estate For Investors On The Web And Mobile

If you’re in the market to buy or sell your home in a traditional way there are plenty of resources for you. When it comes to mobile we immediately think of Zillow. On the web there’s hundreds of websites that will easily access MLS listings for you and make it easier for you to do your own work on buying or selling your home before bringing a real estate agent into the mix.

For those looking to buy or sell real estate as investors though, the tools are quite limited.

San Diego startup Revestor is all about real estate from the investors perspective. The tools out there today allow investors to sift through hundreds of thousands of listings but they don’t take into consideration the important information for investors when it comes to looking for the best deals.

“Revestor is a multidimensional patent-pending real estate search engine that finds homes-for-sale by the highest potential cash flow based on the average rents in the area. Revestor can be accessed for free on the web or on the iPhone as a free App. Our goal in 2013 is to be the #1 ‘must have’ tool for real estate investors and real estate agents who work with real estate investors. Revestor solves one of the hardest problems in real estate investing: finding deals in the first place. Instead of spending hours sifting and sorting through multiple websites and archaic spreadsheets, Revestor does all the heavy lifting by presenting potential listings/opportunities to our users so they can go out and do their due-diligence. We simply give investors and agents a better place to start from. Users can expect User Profiles, Foreclosure Auctions, Advanced Searching, Alerts, and Advertising to be released in 2013.” Founder & CEO Bill Lyons told us in an interview.

We talked in depth with Lyons about Revestor, check out the interview below.

DC Hot Tech Startup Gryphn Finding New Problems They Solve Every Day

One of Washington DC’s hottest startups is Gryphn. This mobile security firm released their ArmorText secure text messaging application for Android users last summer and they’re constantly hearing from customers that they’re solving a new problem every day.

“we are still discovering all the problems that Gryphn solves. People come up to us at events and tell us how our products can be used for public notaries, insurance resellers, journalists… you name it. We are staying focused to solving regulatory compliance problems for Healthcare, Finance, Government, Law Enforcement, First Responders and Defense.” Gryphn’s CEO and co-Founder Navroop Mitter told us in an interview.

Back in June the team had grown enough that they took over the space of fellow DC Startup JESS3 which relocated to Los Angeles.

Much of their success is coming from innovating in the security space in the sectors where security matters most.

We got a chance to catch up with Gryphn. In the interview below they reveal how they got their name Gryphn. Check it out:

Joist Helps Contractors Be More Efficient On The Go

Contractors spend a lot of time on the road and working on various projects. Typically they have to keep hand written notes in notebooks and on clipboards and then either they transcribe all that information themselves into Excel or Word, or take it back to the office for someone else to do. For some smaller independent contractors that typically means their significant other is spent doing data entry instead of savoring what little time they have outside of “work”.

A Winnipeg startup called JoistApp is looking to solve that problem. JoistApp is a mobile app that contractors can use on their iPad, iPhone or Android device which allows them to manage their business on the go. Contractors can create invoices, create estimates, send invoices, manage projects and accept payments on the go. Sure there are plenty of business management apps out there but JoistApp was created specifically for contractors.

We got a chance to talk with Brendon Sedo, co-founder of JoistApp, check out the interview below.

Startup Weekend Company Breadcrumbs, Lets You Know Where You’ve Been

A San Diego startup, called Breadcrumbs is helping people keep track of where they’ve been using their smartphone. It’s like automated checking in but could be more useful later on. Maybe you want to keep a journal of the places that you’ve been. Perhaps the next time you’re in a city or town you want to easily be able to recall a place you ventured into on your last trip. We travel so much around here that it’s easy to mistake some downtown areas with others.

Breadcrumbs is innovating at the EvoNexus incubator in San Diego, alongside other great startups like Nulu Languages, TomNod, Antengo, Barc, and Fashinoning Change. The company also received a $50,000 seed investment from Qualcomm Labs.

Breacrumbs is another success story out of Startup Weekend. Founder Joel Drotleff had pitched the original idea at San Diego Startup Weekend, citing the fact that he could never remember how long he spent at the dog park. The other co-founders joined him for the weekend project and now today they have a product in the Google Play store for Android and the iTunes App store.

Breadcrumb’s Sean Dominguez told nibletz in an interview:

“It’s a pretty cool story. We all met at Startup Weekend San Diego back in June when Joel, our CEO, pitched an idea for creating a self-tracking application since he never knew how long he was spending at the dog park. We all thought it was a cool idea, joined the team for the weekend, and ended up taking the Qualcomm sponsored prize that weekend – as well as another prize at Qualcomm’s event Uplinq two weeks later.”

Obviously they caught the most important eyes at Qualcomm who has continued to support the venture. We got a chance to have a more in-depth discussion with Dominguez check out the rest of the interview after the break.

CES 2013 Preview: Vancouver Startup moj.io Is Doing Amazing Stuff With Cars

As we prepare to bring you continuous round the clock team coverage of CES 2013, we got a chance to do a pre-show interview with a Vancouver startup called moj.io that’s connecting cars diagnostic, internal computers with the cloud and an app store. They are taking the up to 25gb of data that can be generated by a car every hour, and connecting it wirelessly first to the cloud and then to your smartphone.

Combined with info from moj.io‘s GPS and accelerometer, moj.io provides a connected car experience that can be accessed via your smart phone from anywhere, anytime. With moj.io, you can now locate your car on a map, track its movements and speed, govern how far and fast it is being driven(by your teenage son or employee), lock/unlock your car doors just by the presence of your phone, intelligently stop incoming texts and calls when your car is in Drive, be notified instantly when your car is being tampered with or towed, and a whole lot more.

moj.io also offers access to diagnostic information as well. The company provides an SDK so developers can write apps that will give users/drivers the ultimate connected car experience. Cars will be able to tell their owner and even the local service center when they need to be serviced and what needs to be fixed, all the while keeping a log on your smartphone. With the SDK the sky is the limit when it comes to what can be created for the connected car experience.

REV Technologies, the company behind moj.io has been building electric vehicles for the U.S. army.

“At REV, we were building electric vehicles for the US Army, (decoding entire car computers) and making it possible for them to control the direction and flow of electricity of these electric vehicles to use them as generators for their army bases. We did this wirelessly using SIM card-enabled hot sticks and were always seeking the simplest way to do this with OEM-produced electric vehicles like the Nissan Leaf. Eventually we realized that by going in through the OBD port, we were basically piping in the internet. It was a small step from there to imagining an entire ecosystem of apps, car-related companies and drivers of any kind of car interacting on an open platform.” Rev Technologies CEO Jay Giraud told nibletz in an interview.

Check out the rest of the interview below: