Interviews Archives - Page 33 of 57

Maryland Startup CoFounders Lab Is Connecting CoFounders

When Shahab Kaviani sat down and had some time to reflect about his previous startup, HyperOffice he quickly realized that the cofounding team behind that startup drove it’s success. He admits that they bootstrapped almost the entire project. He also says in hindsight their timing was lousy, but the cofounding team kept the startup together.

Finding the right cofounders should actually be at the top of the priority list in any startup. CoFounders lab is one of many startups that look to match people with cofounders. FounderSync is one of those startups that uses an online approach. FounderDating uses a hybrid online offline approach merging an online community with in person events.

CoFounders lab also blends online and offline through in person events. We hope that he’s not too late to this party as well. Of course we all know that when the Dodge brothers went to build cars they weren’t worried that Ford was already doing the exact same thing.

Kaviani was fortunate enough to get selected into the Fort accelerator in Washington DC. After graduating from the program the company moved to Rockville Maryland where they are currently based now. They recently pitched the “Pitch Across Maryland” bus as part of Startup Maryland back in September.

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

Australian Startup Releases New Dual Screen Video Platform For Event Organizers

If you’re throwing a big event, like we are, than you know that the audience at home is just as valuable as the audience on site. Event organizers are constantly looking for the best way to stream their events online and give at home viewers a similar experience to what those on site are seeing.

Australian startup Cogent has launched an exciting new video platform, primarily targeted towards live events. The platform called Eventer, is a dual screen video platform. This allows viewers at home to partake in the direct feed video from the stage and possibly watch the audience or a slide presentation at the same time. There are currently other video startups working in a similar space, but none so focused on events themselves.

Eventer has already been tested in Australia and in the United States. The San Francisco Music Tech event was the first US event to test out Eventer. The event’s co-founder Brian Zisk said that the event saw viewers at home staying engaged for 40 minutes at a time. In Australia, the Sustaining Women In Business conference also tested out the technology and it worked well for them too.

The unique platform delivered by Cogent and Eventer allows viewers to see everything in real time. Viewers at home can see the slide transitions and any special effects that may be happening on stage.

We got a chance to talk to the team from Eventer, check out the interview below.

Build Your Own Video Games With UK Startup Construct 2

Have you ever wanted to build your own video game? Maybe you’re a gamer and thought you’d love your own game but didn’t know an ounce about programming? Well there’s a UK startup that’s come up with a do it yourself platform for creating video games. The startup is called Scirra and their product is Construct 2.

Through Construct 2’s easy to use interface you’ll drag and drop your game characters, game play moves and more to make a fully workable video game via HTML5. After that Construct2 gets you ready to export your new game to a variety of devices and a variety of platforms.

The system that Ashley Gullen and has brother have created makes it possible for people with no programming experience whatsoever to produce “awesome games”.

Construct2 creates Windows based games and was the follow up to Gullen’s 2007 game creation tool now dubbed “Construct Classic”. The classic version allowed people to create games in the DirectX 9 platform.

We got a chance to talk with Ashley’s brother Thomas Gullen. Check out that interview below.

Paris Startup AIRTAG Is All About Mobile Shopping INTERVIEW

A startup in Paris called AIRTAG is offering a complete suite of mobile shopping tools for retailers and e-tailers. The startup was founded by Jeremie Leroyer and Cyril Porteret who also cofounded Haiku which was sold in 2004 for $10 million euros.

AIRTAG’s complete suite of products has every facet of mobile shopping covered. AIRSHOP enables shoppers to order and pay in advance for groceries and fast food using their mobile phone. AIRFID is the rewards and loyalty card arm of the company. AIRPASS is a mobile wallet of sorts adding loyalty cards, gym keytags and even transportation passes. AIRTAG kit is the companies development tool kit for developers to interact with their PayPass applications.

The company’s stable of clients already includes McDonald’s, McCafe’, Reebok, Dior and many other globally well known brands. This has prompted AIRTAG to deploy offices throughout the world including a recently opened office in New York. They plan on adding partnerships in both the US and Canada from the New York office.

Mobile shopping and payments have grown into a huge industry and right now it’s still anyone’s game. Google got off to a very rocky start with Google Wallet. Three of the four major US wireless carriers teamed up to help create ISIS an alternative to Google Wallet which was supposed to have seen a larger national footprint heading into this years holiday season.

According to the co-founders of AIRTAG, Japan is light years ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to allowing smartphones to manage people’s lives. Since selling their first startup to Japanese investors both Leroyer and Porteret have spent a lot of time in Japan where they noticed everyone used their phones for everything including bus fare, key locks, and payments. AIRTAG’s hope is to help replicate that system across the world.

We had a chance to interview the AIRTAG team. Check out the interview below.

Florida Startup: Residency HQ Is your One Stop For All State Residency Requirements

These days there are a whole lot of people living in at least dual residencies. When thinking about dual residencies the most common thought is about snowbirds. This group of people is usually older and migrates south to Florida, for the winter, from their normal homes up north. We’re even in a dual residency scenario ourselves right now.

People who live in dual residences have a hard time keeping up with the residency requirements, laws and taxes surrounding multiple places. Florida startup, Residency HQ keeps up with that for you.

Residency HQ bills themselves as the premiere resource for all state to state residency requirements. It’s a knowledge base of information for the types of people described above and for those looking to possibly relocate to another state. Residency HQ will also help users determine which state is the most advantageous to claim primary residence in.

We got a chance to talk with Residency HQ co-founder Mat Franken. Check out the interview below.

The Kolo Project Is Building A Startup Community In Saskatchewan, Canada

There’s been a lot of talk about startup communities these days. Most of it has been fueled by Brad Feld’s latest book in his startup revolution series “Startup Communities”. In the book he outlines what it takes to build great startup communities like the one found in Boulder Colorado, where Feld is based.

Of course communities across the country are taking heed. Most of the startup community stake holders I know personally were either downloading or buying Feld’s book back in September when it was published. What’s great about Feld’s book and startup communities in general is that they are popping up everywhere.

When most people think about startups and startup communities in Canada we look to Toronto, Ontario, Calgary and even Vancouver. Well the Kolo Project is a startup in itself, that is laying the foundations for a startup community in Saskatchewan.

Taunya Woods-Richardson is just one of the entrepreneurs that’s leading the efforts in Saskatchewan and she refuses to consider herself the founder. After all it’s a community they are building.

We got a chance to talk with Woods-Richardson about the Kolo Project and what’s going on in Saskatchewan. Check out our interview below.

Connecticut Startup Deets: Create And Interact Groups From The Best Place Possible

Everyone likes groups. Whether you’re old enough to remember the days of MMC groups on AOL or you came along at Yahoo Groups or even Google Groups, groups make it easy to keep like minded people together to share important information, and nowadays photos, events and content.

I love what you can do with the groups that are automatically built around Facebook events. You can communicate with those people going to an event, plan the event, interact with people at the event and then after the event. You can share videos and photos with these people and share your important contact information with the entire group or individually.

A startup in Connecticut with a great entrepreneurial/startup pedigree has set out to build a mobile platform that lets you take those same qualities that make Facebook groups and events so great and productive, and applied it to the most important list of people that you have, your contacts.

Deets was founded by Linda Miller who was the first in at Priceline and Hotwire where she was instrumental in building the foundation that we all use today to book hotels. The other co-founder is Luke Scott who has a creative background with top clients like Kraft, Bob Greene and HobNob Wines.

When you put the two together you get a very robust, but aesthetically appealing app and web based platform that is intuitive, and easy to use.

Deets breathes the same life and functionality you get from Facebook groups and other popular social sites right into your list of contacts. It basically gives your contact list/address book a new life, a new purpose and a new meaning.

Now you can set up groups of family members, friends, colleagues or event attendees. If you’re getting married and want to set up a group for the bridal party, go for it. If you’re releasing a record and want to set up a list of fans and promoters, done. Not only are these groups set up for sharing the same way you can socially, but it’s done from the privacy of your computer or smartphone and from there you can set up your degrees of privacy. It’s one of the most robust platforms for sharing we’ve ever seen.

Forget about the 850 friends you have on Facebook, we’re going to go out on a limb and say that you actually know the contacts in your contact list and now you know your deets.

We got a chance to talk with Scott about deets. Check out the interview below.

Toronto Startup Tagtivate: Follow Any Content By HashTag

After checking out Toronto startup Tagtivate for a little bit we thought the best way to describe it is a Digg or Reddit for 2012. If Digg or Reddit had come out this year, it may be organized and searchable via hashtag. Everyone is using hashtags these days on Twitter, Instagram, heck even Facebook.

The hashtag is a peculiar little thing, you simply but a # sign in front of something and it’s easily searchable on any of the existing social networks.

What Tagtivate has done is taken the socially driven hash tag and put it on a content recommendation site for organization.

The Tagtivate team does a great job of providing examples in our interview below, the concept is fairly simple though.

Instead of a bunch of html links that can look like jibberish or instead of trying to come up with that all important Reddit, Digg or Hacker News headline, you simply find the content you want to share and hashtag it. If I wanted to post good startup stories to the Tagtivate platform I would simply add a #startup to the piece of content.

Check out our interview with Tagtivate below.

Denmark Startup: Story Planet Wants To Become A Global Story Telling Platform

At this day and age there are several different platforms to get your own content out to the internet. There are social media outlets like Twitter, that allow you to post short form content. There are places like Facebook which allow you to share longer, more intimate content. There are self blogging platforms like Tumblr. And, for those who like to write a lot on a specific topic there are full form blog platforms like Blogger and Word Press.

A new Denmark startup called Story Planet, is hoping to become a global platform for story tellers to mesh all of their media together and tell their story. From what we can tell Story Planet rests somewhere between Tumblr and Blogger/Word Press. It’s going to be the perfect place to have longer, more media rich blog or content offerings without the formality often associated with a Blogger or Word Press blog.

Story Planet is taking their idea to become a global story telling platform seriously, they already have a team presence in Copenhagen, Singapore, Brighton, and New York City. This gives them an accurate pulse of several startup areas and a way to push their product out on not just multiple countries, but multiple continents.

We got a chance to talk Bjarke Myrthu co-founder of Story Planet. Check out the interview below.

Miami Startup: RentJiffy Simplifies Life For Landlords INTERVIEW

Continuing with the series of features about each of the impressive Startups Incubate Miami 2012 has been able put together this year Startropica sat down with Jonathan Addison, Founder and CEO, ofRentJiffy, a real estate management platform that makes life easier for landlords and property managers. This is our interview with him:

How the thought of creating RentJiffy came about in the first place?

It came out of my own Real Estate practice. I am from Washington DC, one of the busiest, and one of the most legally complicated real estate cities in the country, the most obvious example of this is the license property owners need to have in order to be able to rent that specific property, that’s for every single property they own, with all the different regulations for each type of building of course. So RentJiffy was conceived in 2010 originally to make life easier for DC Landlords offering to facilitate this type of licensing. Basically they go to RentJiffy and hire us to process the license for them, but we are about to launch a host of additional features as well on a national level, that’s why we came here to Miami.

So Rentjiffy started by offseting a huge need in the DC Real Estate market, I am guessing it grew fast.

Thankfully yes it has been a success. Since January of 2010, we have doubled our revenue every year, that’s 3 years in a row. In 2011 we did $175.000 and to date we are approaching $300k in sales for 2012, enough to keep the team going and to help us put in place the next step which is to make RentJiffy a national platform

Continue reading at Startropica.com

Funeral Director & Mayor Of Bowling Green VA On His Comfort Food Startup TLC Kitchen

David Storke has been a funeral director in Bowling Green Virginia for over 25 years. He’s also the Mayor of Bowling Green and has been since 2006.

It was in his position as funeral director where Storke came up with an idea for a comfort food startup. Being in the funeral business he was well aware that friends and loved ones like to console those with a loss in the family with food and meals. Outside of flowers and donations, preparing food for those who’ve suffered a loss, is something that’s easy to do and typically needed during trying times.

So in 2007 Storke created Sympathy Food. Sympathy Food takes the hassle out of preparing a meal for someone going through a hardship and grief. The company creates delicious, chef prepared meals to feed 4-6 or 8-12. The meals are prepared in a USDA approved kitchen and then shipped anywhere in the continental United States.

After introducing the Sympathy Food concept the company grew in popularity and Storke came up with other occasions where prepared meals would be appropriate. In April of 2012 he added Get Well Meals for illness and The Meal Stork to congratulate parents of a newborn. While both themes are perfect gift giving occasions they are also times when people could use a hand with cooking and preparing meals.

Now for the cost of a flower arrangement anyone can send the gift of food. Meal gifts arrive within 1-3 days of ordering. The meals are flash frozen and put into styrofoam coolers with dry ice to preserve freshness. The only day they don’t deliver is Sunday. TLC Kitchen uses FedEx for delivery,

With Storkes background as a funeral director, Mayor and now startup founder, we couldn’t wait for the chance to interview him. Check out our interview below.

Calgary Startup: TypeWhale Connects Journalists To Expert Sources

Over the last decade the 24 hour news cycle has quickly sped up to less than 15 minutes. Heck in the age of blogging, and specifically tech blogging, 15 minutes can be a luxury. That makes it extremely hard, or time consuming, to go out and vet expert sources. Most journalists, myself included, have a stable of 10-20 sources we can call on, on a regular basis, to vet out stories, but when a topic goes beyond our inner circle of sources journalists need experts.

This is a major problem in the online news and blogsphere. It’s the problem that Calgary startup TypeWhale aims to fix.

TypeWhale is a community where academic experts from top universities and journalists can collaborate on media queries. In the beta phase, TypeWhale is focusing on the education sector, as a “natural pool” of credible expert sources. Universities are identifying their expert sources and connecting them directly to the media via TypeWhale.

“TypeWhale is not about who has paid a PR rep to pitch their story, it’s about who is the most qualified to answer the media queries,” explains co-founder, Kylie Lakevold. “TypeWhale came from a passion for getting expert voices heard. This is what encouraged us to build a community where journalists and experts can collaborate live on the web.”

TypeWhale aims to take the media manipulators out of the equation. Lakevold came up with the idea when she came across a service that many journalists use where they can put a question out there and any “expert” can comment for a piece. The problem is that popular system has no way of vetting the “expert source”. You could get a response from someone who has no idea what they’re talking about. Or even worse, a PR hack on a mission to drive just one client.

We got a chance to interview the TypeWhale expert, Lakevold, directly. Check out the interview below.

New York Startup Skedj Makes Your Schedule Social, And Really A Lot of Fun

If you’re a long time reader of nibletz.com The Voice Of Startups Everywhere Else, you know that we’re a little under enthused about “event discovery” and “social calendar” startups. Our good friend Danny Nathan at iwannanom a New York startup we profiled earlier this year, knows how we feel about “event discovery” and “social calendar” but still brought us Jason Horowitz and Skedj. We’re glad he did.

Horowitz is no stranger to startups and no stranger to the fact that we need another event discovery startup like Governor Chris Christie needs another extra large pizza. To that end Horowitz told us:

“I know event discovery, event sharing and social calendaring don’t sound like new territories to conquer. We believe Skedj takes a unique approach to these challenges and, consistent with the way we plan our lives, strikes a balance between personal and social. The result is one personalized stream of your plans and possibilities, making discovering things you want to do, and keeping track of the things you need to do, easier than ever before.”

After checking out Skedj ourselves we agree. One of the things about Skedj that resonates with me from the start is that Skedj is learning my schedule not suggesting I go see every country music show just because I happen to like one song by Sugar Land. Of course many of you know the story about one “social/event discovery” app that suggested a bunch of great dog parks because at one time in my life I had liked Mark Zuckerberg’s dog.

Whether it’s the intent or not, Skedj takes into consideration the primary user FIRST and the social discovery/sharing part second. That’s why nearly 300 words later we’re still talking about it. In fact, we interviewed Horowitz. Check out the interview below.

Know The Score Before You Dine With Baltimore Startup HDScores

Baltimore and Maryland as a whole have a thriving tech scene. We recently reported on the Startup Maryland “Pitch Across Maryland” bus tour which yielded 168 startups pitching on video, check that story out here. We’re kind of partial to Baltimore as well since it’s my hometown and all but people love Baltimore.

One of the things people love about Baltimore is the food. Naturally if you’re into shellfish and crabs, Maryland crabs are second to none. There are a lot of other great food eateries in Baltimore as well. Heck there are great restaurants everywhere.

When all you can smell in a city like New Orleans, Baltimore, Boston, and even Chicago, is great food, you may not think about how clean a restaurant really is. Over the summer I had made a trip home to Baltimore and was struck with some hellacious food poisoning from a restaurant I used to frequent as a kid. After spending three days at the Baltimore Washington Medical Center near Glen Burnie, I found out that the restaurants latest health department score was a low B.

That’s where the fine folks at Baltimore startup HDScores come in. Chef turned entrepreneur Matthew Eierman along with William Sanford, cofounded the startup that makes it super easy to access a restaurants health department scores on the go. If a restaurant smells delicious and looks a little shady, HDScores can quickly tell you if it’s somewhere worth visiting.

HDScores blends big open data with social integration and even the ability to have video reviews, accessible to the end user on an easy to understand user interface.

We got a chance to talk with Eierman. Check out the interview below.