Interviews Archives - Page 32 of 57

Meet Indian 500 Startups Company TradeBriefs, Email Newsletters Making People Experts

Sree Vijaykumar, the founder of Indian startup TradeBriefs, has turned an email newsletter business into a bonafide startup with big upside potential. Some may think that email newsletters are old school, and that in this age of mobile first startups and apps, apps and more apps, how could there possibly be room at the 500 startups lair for an email newsletter startup?

TradeBriefs is in the current class at 500startups so obviously there’s more than meets the eye with these email newsletters.

“We have managed to silence our naysayers. People didn’t think an email newsletter business could thrive, but we have successfully demonstrated that our formula works.. Our subscribers and advertisers are both happy, which is great and now we are ready to scale.” Vijaykumar told us in an interview. Scaling is what they are focusing on while they are in Mountain View participating in the 500 startups accelerator program.

TradeBriefs is part human editor and part learning algorithm. They say that their newsletters are helping professionals in their concentrated fields become industry experts.

TradeBriefs began with an industry newsletter for India’s retail industry and quickly expanded to four other verticals including; Telecom, Finance, IT and FMCG. They are planning on adding verticals and expanding out of India.

In the US, Fierce has been able to make a viable business out of email newsletters, turned into websites, within the tech industry. Now, in addition to their websites, and newsletters Fierce also hosts major industry events in the telecom, mobile and tech industries. Is it possible for TradeBriefs to do the same thing? Obviously 500 Startups thinks so.

Check out the rest of our interview with Vijaykumar below.

Washington DC Startup: MBA Project Search Connects MBA’s & Businesses For Short And Long Term Projects

We’ve reported on several job and recruitment based startups. Most of these startups are attacking problems with hiring and recruiting with technology like video and social media. Some employment based startups, like Memphis startup Work For Pie, are honed in on specific markets like developers. A new Washington DC startup, MBA Project Search, is connecting businesses of any size with MBA students or alumni.

MBA Project Search is getting it’s start out of the Washington DC area and is tapped into the MBA scene at Georgetown University. They’ve also secured relationships with every Ivy institution as well as MBA equivalents internationally.

On the startup side, MBA Project Search is great for startups that need MBA caliber talent but don’t want to hire someone on full time or do some kind of equity for work scenario. With MBA Project Search startups can hire MBAs for short term projects at an affordable rate.

Currently MBA Project Search is free for both businesses that need to hire an MBA and for MBAs to apply for projects and positions. There are no other hidden costs involved either.

The MBA Project Search team says that for students, it gives them the kind of hands on experience a doctor would get from a $100/hr residency or a lawyer would get from a $50,000 internship. They’re giving MBA students and graduates another resource to find post graduate work that encompasses the degree they studied long and hard for.

We got a chance to talk with MBA Project Search co-founder Rasheen Carbin, check out our interview below.

Startups Need A Product Model Rendered? Try Romanian Startup Renderstreet

If you’re a startup, or any company, looking to have a 3d product rendered than Romanian startup Renderstreet may be just what you’re looking for. This is the latest startup for Romanian startup serial entrepreneur Sorin Vinatoru who was also behind the Romanian startup Pagepeeker, that we profiled back in August.

RenderStreet is an easy and affordable render farm for 3D projects. The startup is also priding itself on great customer support so when you turn to RenderStreet for a project, they will hold your hand through the development.

Vinatoru has already had some success raising money for RenderStreet. He’s looking to announce a seed round in the coming weeks.

3D rendering requires immense amounts of computing power that isn’t often available to just anyone. That’s where render farms like RenderStreet come in handy.

We got a chance to talk with Vinatoru about RenderStreet. Check out the interview below.

Swedish Startup Truecaller Global Directory App For Anyone In The World

A startup based in Stockholm Sweden, called Truecaller, says they are the global phone directory linking you to anyone in the world. If you get a call from a number you don’t know you should be able to tap into Truecaller and find out who is actually calling you. In addition to traditional reverse directory information, Truecaller also says they have millions of prepaid phone users in their directory as well.

By coupling existing directory information and crowdsourcing their user-bases contact lists (opt-in) they create a hybrid of publicly available data and crowdsourced information to put together the TrueCaller directory.

Truecaller is a great way to prevent spam from sales calls and others that users don’t want to talk to.

The founders of Truecaller originally started the idea as a side project. They were tired of missing calls from people who were important but necessarily in their contact list already. As they tell us in the interview below, they released the original, rough version of the app and saw over 10,000 downloads immediately. That’s when they realized they should push forward and turn Truecaller into a real startup.

This is the third startup for founding duo Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam who met while studying at the Royal Institute of Technology.

We got a chance to interview Mamedi, check out the interview below:

Dartmouth Startup: Square One Mail Is Your Personal Email Assistant

A Dartmouth startup called Square One Mail wants to help busy people sort their email in the most effective ways. Rather than combing through pages and pages of email Square One Mail will put everything in an easy to view dashboard, automatically sorted out into zones.

Square One Mail is starting out with an iPhone app which is currently in private beta. They plan on adding a web-based interface and an Android app soon.

There are a lot of email alternatives available but most of them, like Sparrow, that still sort email in rows, almost the same way it appears on the iPhone’s original email program. While this may work for some people, the Square One Mail dashboard let’s you take a quick look at what’s come in before scrolling through pages and pages of messages.

“SquareOne Mail is a personal email assistant for busy people. We automatically sort out all of the commercial newsletters and social notifications, and present these in a digest view. The rest of your incoming messages are presorted into Zones, which represent different communication areas in your life, such as different projects at work, or Family, College Buddies etc. Instead of a cluttered inbox list, all your zones are presented in a Dashboard. The Dashboard is the main interface for interacting with email – you get a bird’s eye view of all new messages sorted into Zones, so you can prioritize and focus on what’s important. All messages are displayed in an in-line conversation view, which makes even reply-all conversations with multiple recipients easy to navigate. The user has control over which zones prompt email notifications in what contexts (time of day, geographical location).” Square One Mail co-founder Branko Cerny told us in an interview.

If you’re constantly sorting through hundreds of email messages, Square One Mail could be for you, especially if you want to eventually read all of your email but you just need to prioritize it, easily.

Check out the rest of our interview Cerny below.

17 Year Old Russian Entrepreneur Launches Startup: Hippflow

When you think of people to give you startup advice or to model your startup after you typically think of either high profile VCs or people who’ve had eight to nine figure exits. They must know what’s good for you because they’ve either invested in big deals or had a big deal themselves. That makes perfect sense.

Well a 17 year old entrepreneur by the name of Kirill Chekanov from Moscow has developed a startup called Hippflow which will hopefully help other startups.

How?

Chekanov tells us in the interview below that Hippflow will help entrepreneurs input and track resources, plan work, measure progress and celebrate milestone achievements.

Chekanov knew that for something like this to work he needed to go global from the beginning. He’s already inked partnerships in the US, England, Singapore and China. His latest partnership, is with Chinaaccelerator one of the largest startup accelerators in China.

Internally, his organizational startup has kept him focused and hitting his milestone goals while simultaneously finishing his last year in the Russian equivalent of high school.

Check out the rest of the interview with Chekanov below.

Toronto Startup CountMeIn Is The Next Generation Of Wish Lists & Gift Registries

While it’s not as explosive as the reward and loyalty space, we’ve profiled a handful of gift registry and group gifting startups here at nibletz.com, the voice of startups everywhere else. Monday we brought you the story of a new feature from our friends at Buyvite that allows people to pay back someone on a group gift purchase, socially. This Toronto startup called CountMeIn merges all of that together.

Toronto startup CountMeIn is the next generation of wish lists and gift registries. CountMeIn’s co-founder Israel Schachter, who goes by Yummy (don’t ask), tells us that he came up with the idea for CountMeIn after getting a friend and business associate a $1500 gas grill at Home Depot as a housewarming gift.

Schachter had no plan of action, except getting a commitment from 14 of his closest friends for $100 a piece for the gift. Once he arrived at Home Depot he found the grill and decided that was the gift. Then, he needed to figure out how to get the grill to his buddy’s house in his sedan. Needless to say it was a huge headache, and two years later he’s still collecting money. He thought there had to be an easier way.

While he calls coming up with a startup to solve your own problem “selfish” most of us call it innovative.

Rather than tackling the problem of group collaboration on a gift, executing the gift and collecting on payments separately, he and his team went all out and tackled all three problems in one.

Check out our interview with Schachter below.

Ottawa Startup Suprpod Is An Online Collaborative Space For Marketers

I’ll bet if you were to do the research you would probably find thousands and thousands of conferences and conventions for marketing folks. I seem to get invited to a new marketing conference every other day. But can you believe there’s no social network, community or collaborative space online just for marketers? That was until Ottawa startup Suprpod came along.

The online portfolio and collaboration site exclusively for marketers takes it’s name Suprpod from Dolphins. In an interview with nibletz.com co-founder Jennifer Butson says:

“Superpod is the term given to large groups of dolphins who travel together. Because dolphins are brilliant communicators in the animal kingdom, the term lends well to the group of expert communicators in the human world!”

Which is why their logo is also a dolphin. You should see the tricks their team can do with rubber balls on their noses.

All kidding aside though, collaboration between left brained marketers can be healthy, creative and produce some amazing results. That’s why it’s hard to believe no one had thought of this before.

The site has three basic function areas, browse, share and create.

The browse section is home to curated portfolios from some of the industry’s hottest minds. It’s ripe for the taking right their at Suprpod. PR, and marketing people can check out Suprpod for some of the best marketing ideas out there.

Share is where questions are asked and answered about anything related to PR, marketing and social media.

Create, will allow users to display their work like they’ve never seen before.

Butson has a lot of experience in both marketing and startups. It was working on a different startup that helped he find, hone and craft the idea for Suprpod. We got a chance to talk with Butson, read the rest of the interview below.

Complete Your Lifelong Goals With Help From Bangkok Startup Bucketlistly

It all started when Pete, the founder of Bucketlistly went to Beijing for a Mobile Monday event. While at the event he was intrigued by everything going on around him. He was speaking at the event and wanted to figure out a way to share his own achievements and help others share their achievements as well.

Of course with that and seeing the movie starring Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson, Pete had an idea.

He calls Bucketlistly a social bucket list. The platform allows users to list all the things they want to do in their lives, crowd source ideas on how to achieve those goals, do the impossible and share all of that.

When it’s time to conquer those life long goals users can write stories about them and even include pictures. The website than chronicles the achievements and archives them so the user can reference them later and inspire others.

We got the entire skinny from Pete, check out the interview below.

Baltimore Startup: SickWeather Is Crowdsourcing The Sickness Forecast INTERVIEW

What if you could forecast sickness? What if you could find out what illnesses were going around just as easily as you could find out the weather? Well that’s what Baltimore startup SickWeather is all about.

The concept is a great idea, and while the two co-founders behind SickWeather are smart guys, it’s not like they have some magical powers that allow them to forecast what areas are going to get sick and when. What they have done though, is taken huge amounts of data available via public API’s and turned them into a startup that can tell you what’s going around near you.

It all started when co-founder Graham Dodge was sick with a stomach virus. It was a wicked bad virus and he wanted to see if anyone in his circle of friends was experiencing similar symptoms. Perhaps he wanted to track down the source of the stomach virus, or more importantly, get in contact with someone with the same symptoms and find out how much longer he would be under the weather. Whatever the reason, the idea immediately seemed scalable. With that, SickWeather was born.

Social networks have gigantic heaps of data available via public API. Through proprietary algorithms, SickWeather combs through those mountains of data for status’ like “Just got back from the doctor”, “Can’t get this flu to go away”. When the status on a social network is accompanied by a location marker, it will be plotted on the map. As they continue to work on the data, the team behind SickWeather could even plot out how long people have been sick.

They regurgitate all this data in much easier to read graphics that will ultimately provide valuable information to end users. Is that hacking cough coming from an allergy to a cat, or are you coming down with something?

We got a chance to talk with Dodge about SickWeather. Check out the interview below.

With The Animated Gif Back, DC Startup MyFaceWhen Is Ready

Way back in the 90’s (saying that is so wrong), animated gifs were typically banners that someone who was building a website would use to attract attention to something or another. The more popular animated gifs were dancing bears, christmas lights, and even cars driving along in the middle of the web page.

Nowadays banner ads are fading fast and the animated gif is actually coming back.

Thanks to mobile usage and social networks animated gifs are almost, if not more popular than meme’s. If you want to get your point across in a cute, happy, or even angry way, you can say it with an animated gif. Technology has vastly improved over the past two decades as well, which means better animated gifs.

Of course there are places that are stockpiling cute, one off animated gifs that you can use to send to your friends and family but just like meme’s witty people want to create their own. That’s where Rodney Curl and his startup MyFaceWhen come into the picture.

The Howard University graduate has gotten the creation of animated gifs down to a science. In fact from start to finish you can get an original animated gif ready to send out in under 10 seconds. Curl also tells us if you want to use a stock gif MyFaceWhen will take you out to Reddit where gifs are a plenty.

We’ve seen a vast variety of startups come out of Washington DC. Cur’s MyFaceWhen is a fun mobile app and a nice break from the traditional tech startup.

We got a chance to talk to Curl. Check out our interview below.

Colorado Startup SeedLauncher Joins The Online/Offline Crowdfunding Space

Crowdfunding could have very well been the most popular startup space in 2012. Crowdfunding startups came out of the woodwork for every industry and everybody. Even the porn industry got it’s own crowdfunding startup which we actually covered here.

One of the niche’s within crowdfuding that’s heating up right now is hybrid crowdfuding sites. These are the crowdfunding sites like SockStock and SeedVille, that fit in this hybrid space.

So what’s a hybrid crowdfuding site?

Crowdfunding sites that most people are familiar with function like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. These are sites where people can post whatever project they are working on and the crowd funds those projects. The project creators can be anywhere in the world because everything is done online.

In exchange for funding or a donation if you will, the entrepreneur getting their project or startup crowdfunded, gives the donator, or funder, some kind of perk. The more money that gets donated, the better the perk.

To us, a hybrid crowdfunding site is one that utilizes the internet for the funding but the business is local. Say you have a favorite ice cream shoppe around the corner from your home. The owner of the shoppe wants to expand but doesn’t have the money. He can go to a hybrid crowdfunding site and raise the money, and instead of sending perks in the mail, contributors can come to the local business and get their perk.

That’s exactly what Colorado startup SeedLauncher does. We got a chance to talk with SeedLauncher’s co-founder Jeromy Sonne about crowdfunding and the Colorado startup scene.

Check out the interview below.

Toronto Startup TelChamp Puts Your Existing Phone System On Steroids

When you picked out your phone system, if you didn’t get the features you wanted, there’s no need to worry. Toronto startup TelChamp puts existing phone systems on steroids adding features that everyone wants.

TelChamp is a unified communications system that adds SMS, call forwarding, conference calling, follow me, auto-attendant, web based faxing, and more to your existing phone system. You can try it all out for free.

Two Pakistani brothers, Mustafain (Musti) and Murtafain (Murti) Nasser, are the founders of TelChamp. Both were educated in North America and now Musti manages the North American part of their business from Toronto and Murti handles their Karachi business from Dubai.

Through an alliance with Los Angeles based Allcom TelChamp has been able to come up with the Genie system. This is the cloud based system that provides all of these telecommunications features through a personalized, web based dash board. Genie is also the TelChamp user’s personal, virtual assistant.

This technology allows small business people and even startups, to have a larger more professional phone presence on a laser thin budget.

We got to talk with the TelChamp team. Check out the interview below.

Charlotte Serial Entrepreneur Unveils Soccer Startup Social Network KYCK

Mac Lackey and Ross Saldarini are serial entrepreneurs in Charlotte North Carolina, they’re also soccer enthusiasts. The pair have started several startups and even had a few exits. Their most notable exits were selling internetsoccer.com to a public European media company, and selling Mountain Khakis to Remington.

Now they’re back at it again, infusing their love of startups, social media and soccer into one new company called KYCK. KYCK is a social network, and community for soccer enthusiasts connecting them to each other and an abundance of great soccer related content.

Through a proprietary content delivery system that Lackey calls “media layers” they are able to offer even the most scrupulous of soccer fans the best possible experience through their own personal soccer focused dashboard.

While we’re all familiar with how popular soccer is overseas, a poll conducted by ESPN earlier this year showed that soccer has climbed to the second most popular sport in the United States behind football among those age 12-24 which is one of the most important demographic for professional sports.

(source: ESPN)

With the vast amount of soccer related content, pouring in from across the globe, and the increase in popularity for the sport, KYCK is poised to become the destination for soccer fans around the world.

We got a chance to talk with Lackey about soccer, KYCK and raising a startup in Charlotte, North Carolina. Check out the interview below: