Interviews Archives - Page 34 of 57

500 Startups Company From Buenos Aires, Wideo, Is The Easiest DIY Video Animation Platform

When it comes time for pitch day there’s something that everybody wants, and that’s a good video. Sure most startups will work for weeks on end on the pitch deck, but going to the slide in the deck that has cute little fuzzy things hacking away at computers, the sunshining and little puppies dancing because your go to market strategy is so great, puts you above the rest.

While most startups, businesses and just your every day people, wish they had great animated videos, most aren’t that creative. That’s why animated video houses make the big bucks,and animated videos don’t fit in the lean startup budget.

Have no fear 500 startups startup, Wideo is here.

Wideo is a do-it-yourself animated video platform. You choose the characters, fonts, backgrounds,lighting, color, sound and more. You put it all together on a very easy to use creation tool, share your computer three times and voila, instant animation. You’ll be producing hit Saturday morning cartoons in no time.

All jokes aside though, Wideo is one bad ass startup and anything that can make my life as a startup founder easier, and at very little cost, is something that I like.

Dave McClure must have liked it to because those guys are creating millions of quick animation videos in the top secret 500 startups lair.

Check out our interview with Agu De Marco one of Wideo’s co-founders, below.

Interview With Atlanta Startup StockClout A Communications & Social Media Platform For Public Companies And Investors

Investors have a lot of tools out there to do research on companies both public and private. There are tools like Bloomberg, Hoover and other mega research sites for companies. One of the problems with these sites though, is that they all stopped at different points in the current digital evolution. They also don’t factor in tools that business professionals in 2012 use, like social media.

That’s why Tony Golden, a seasoned Wall Street stock professional, came up with StockClout. Golden is no Wall Street wannabe, he spent 15 years with firms like Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns and Smith Barney, back before the big investment banks went belly up. Golden has spent the last 17 years as the CEO and Founder of a successful investor relations firm in Atlanta. It’s this experience dealing with investors and helping them find information that led to the creation of StockClout.

Through StockClout you can create your own free profile and then add your portfolio companies to it. StockClout will do the rest bringing you the most up to date information on the public companies you have your money in. You’ll get updates from traditional sources and social media as well.

StockClout is free for anyone to use and sign up for. Golden says that StockClout actually gives their users the most precious commodity back, and that of course is “time”. StockClout cuts out hours of research and provides everything to you in easy to read updates, and it’s all free.

We got a chance to talk to Golden about StockClout. Check out the interview below.

Kansas City Startup: Growing Gratitude Say Thanks With A Video

Do you remember back in the old days when breaking out the nice stationary to write a thank you note was common practice? I certainly remember my hand hurting back in the late 80’s after personalizing and handwriting a thank you card to everyone who had given me a Bar Mitzvah present.

Well now, thanks to technology, thank you cards are much easier.

Amy Marin Carlson spent years in education as a school administrator and a spanish teacher. She also spent some time in her career as a bakery owner. Now, she’s founded Growing Gratitude, a Kansas City based startup that encourages people to get personal and creative by sending short video thank you notes.

Marin Carlson is finding that there are many uses for Growing Gratitude, from traditional gifts, to client thanks. Marin Carlson said she wished that Growing Gratitude would have been around when her husband wanted to thank sponsors for his MS 150 bike ride.

This hard working entrepreneur came up with the idea when her oldest son turned 2. After his birthday party she was wondering just how to thank everyone. Obviously her son was too young to send cards himself and cards from her seemed to impersonal. A video card of sorts would get the point across. She could easily take a quick video of him playing with a new toy or present or wearing that sweater Aunt Greta sent. That kind of video would be worth more than 1000 words.

Marin Carlson went back to work, but two years later when she was at home with her second son she had some time to flesh out the idea that has become Growing Gratitude.

We got a chance to talk with Marin Carlson, check out the interview below.

LA Startup FindHire Hopes To Be The Next Generation HR Software INTERVIEW

Los Angeles startup FindHire is hoping to be the next generation HR software. The startup, founded by Michael Dennis and Ryan Herman, blends contact management, project management and sourcing software for recruiters. Their web based solution makes it easy to access anywhere, across multiple locations or just one in home office location. The scalability and features give FindHire a serious advantage over other similar platforms.

Dennis and Herman were childhood friends. Dennis went on in recruiting and Herman got into development. They came back together as adults to create FindHire.

We asked Dennis how he came up with the idea for FindHire and he said:

“With my HR industry knowledge, I wanted to make an impact on HR technologies. With so much time-wasting software available, I realized I needed to fix this broken process and help people enjoy recruiting again. This intrigued Ryan who is a programming guru, and with this notion, we started building the next generation of HR software. Our hope is to alter the way companies hire and make the process fun and easier to manage.”

Check out the rest of our interview with Dennis below.

Indy Startup: Adproval Putting More Money In Blogger’s Hands INTERVIEW

As bloggers, any startup that’s purpose is making bloggers more money, of course catches our eye. Such is the case with Indianapolis startup Adproval.

Most full-time bloggers know that adsense is great but it’s tough to live off of when it’s your sole source of revenue. Sponsorships and the ability to sell direct/static advertising play a key role in the overall monetization strategy of a full-time blog.

Matthew Anderson and his startup Adproval have come up with a platform for bloggers that they claim is the easiest way to sell and manage sponsorships. Rather than setting up a blind network like adsense, NetShelter or even Say Media, Adproval lets bloggers sell their sponsorships to advertisers or sponsors that they approve of.

Adproval lets bloggers combine the power of traditional display advertising with other add-ons like sponsored posts, product reviews and social media.

Adproval lets bloggers manage their blog’s sellable inventory in ways that they couldn’t before. The idea for Adproval came to Anderson as a senior project in his last year at college. Now the project has gone from simple business plan to actual product.

Breaking up with a college girlfriend led to the idea for Adproval. How? We asked Anderson who said:

“Well. Funny story… I dated a sweet Chinese gal in college and, right after we broke up, a ridiculous amount of the ads showing up on Facebook and around the Internet were for things like “Find Single Asian Girls.” Not only were Facebook and AdSense kicking a dude’s broken heart while it was down, but they were creeping me out. Then, I was on a DIY crafting blog and an ad along the lines of “Meet Asians Near You” was displaying in the sidebar. It kind of clicked to me that (1) there is no way that this blogger wants that ad showing up to their readers and (2) there is no way that ad space on a niche blog with a relatively small amount of faithful readers is making as much money with an ad for Lonely Asian Girls or whatever AdSense was showing other readers as it could with an approved advertiser that the blogger could support with more than just a display ad.”

Check out the rest of our interview with Anderson below.

Tampa Startup OBCIDIO Is All About Social Collaboration INTERVIEW

A new Tampa startup called OBCIDIO mashes up social networks to make one easy to use collaboration platform. OBCIDIO combines real time social communication with file sharing, content management and networking tools. It’s like Asana meets Facebook and LinkedIn to focus on working together with different people in your social networks.

In addition to your private feed that’s leveraging your personal social networks there is also a public feed where you can share whatever you would like with the entire OBCIDIO community.

When we asked co-founder Ryan Waier how he’d describe OBCIDIO to his grandmother he said:

“OBCIDIO is best described as a mash-up between Facebook and LinkedIn. By creating or plugging into different social communities, members can filter out the noise and focus on the communication, people and content that is relevant to them.

Every member that creates an OBCIDIO account also receives their own personal cloud to manage communication, contacts, files, tasks and schedules with the ability to create or plug into existing social communities.

Social communities on OBCIDIO can range from members creating regional networking groups for sharing referrals, to companies creating their own private social network for coworkers to share content, ask questions and crowdsouce feedback.

Our communities provide social communication, collaboration, and project management tools unlike other forums or groups you would find on sites like LinkedIn. The purpose of these communities is to give members both a voice and a medium to actively engage in solving problems, pooling knowledge and forging new opportunities.”

Check out the rest of our interview with Waier, below:

Boston Startup: BRIGHTdriver Has Mobile Games Even The Driver Can Play

Do you get bored in the car? Sure you do,everybody does. Now in a lot of states, it’s illegal to do anything on your smartphone that requires you to actually hold the phone. Playing Angry Birds at a stop light is a little too risky, you don’t want to get a ticket, or cause an accident.

Well there’s got to be a way to play games in the car without actually holding the phone. A Boston startup incubating at Dog Patch Labs, called BRIGHTdriver has the answer, audio games.

BRIGHTdrivers unique and fun games are audio based and don’t require you to actually hold the phone to play. BRIGHTdrivers audio games are as safe as talking hands free on your mobile phone or yelling out the answers to the dj’s trivia question on the radio.

Currently BRIGHTdriver offers three titles. Volley, is their pub style trivia game. Careoke is BRIGHTdriver’s sing-a-long Karaoke game and Best Mile is a game that challenges you to drive your best (and safest) mile. They have plans to introduce more games as the platform gets off the ground.

BRIGHTdriver’s platform is set up to allow you to play by yourself or against others on the BRIGHTdriver network.

The BRIGHTdriver team has taken to Kickstarter to help fund their official launch. You can donate to their Kickstarter campaign here and get cool perks like early access to this exciting new platform

We got a chance to talk with BRIGHTdriver founder Matt Albrecht about his unique new spin on mobile gaming. Check out the interview below.

Forget Seeing In The Data Center, Albuquerque Startup ProCog Lets You See In The Data

Last month Google made a historic move and let reporters in to see some of it’s many data centers. These data centers manage search, gmail and all of the many other pieces of data that Google stores. In the photos (like the one on this page), showed very colorful pipes, wires, and stacks upon stacks of servers.

Now imagine if Google let you see what it was like inside the data. More specifically, imagine if you could see how the results of your search were scrubbed and located throughout the vast internet.

That’s what Albuquerque start up ProCog is doing. ProCog is a full scale search engine which is totally transparent. ProCog users can see every little bit of information that ProCog uses to deliver it’s search results. Such open access to the data used in search can be very useful when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine research.

ProCog is short for “Proficient Cognition”. The site returns more data than you could ever dream of in a single search engine tool. Information you would need to scour the internet for hours to find, is all right there in your ProCog search results. Every entry has an seo report, scoring, duplicates report, site inlinks, traffic, cached data and reindex. All of it compiled together in one easy to use tool.

ProCog boasts 1 billion pages indexed so far and it continues to grow.

We got a chance to talk to Steve Cook, Co-Founder of ProCog. Check out the interview below:

We Talk Mobile Payments & Brazilian Startup Culture With 500 Startups’ UniPay

We’re continuing our series of interviews with the latest class of Dave McClure’s world famous 500 startups. One of the reasons we love 500 startups is because of McClure’s commitment to startups in and outside of the valley. Sure the top secret lair and command center for 500 startups is based in the valley but McClure targets startups anywhere and everywhere. He’s also known for his geeks on a plane startup events that are literally all over the world.

Fitting right into McClure’s rockstar requirements is a mobile payments startup from Brazil called UniPay. Mobile Payments definitely aren’t new. Brazilian startups aren’t new either, however when you put them both together it does become a new concept. This is partially because credit card payments in Brazil are a beast in themselves. Unipay’s co-founder Tahiana D’Egmont tells us in the interview below that because of bureaucracy, high fees and an ambivalence with trust that runs in the Brazilian culture, electronic payments are a tough nut to crack.

UniPay is addressing the needs of those smaller merchants that don’t have access to credit card processing. If Payfirma is the “Square” for Canada, than UniPay is aiming to become the Square for Brazil.

Check out our interview with D’Egmont below. She tells us all about UniPay but she also tells us about Brazilian startup culture. One of the things we found most interesting is that most Brazilians are deathly scared of their ideas being stolen, and “fail fast” doesn’t work in Brazil, just yet because Brazilians are afraid of failure.

Read the interview below, D’Egmont does remind us that she’s new to the states and he’s still learning English.

Romanian Startup Appscend Streamlines App Building For Performance

A Romanian startup called Appscend is already one of the most popular app development houses in the country. They have 250 apps published in the Google Play and Apple iTunes App Store already. The startup employs 12 people at their home office in Romania and they plan on expanding this year into the US (New York) and Latin America (Chile).

Appscend offers their app development customers a more holistic approach to app development with the ability to go multi platform/cross platform and native at the same time. They’ve also taken the best pieces out of over 100+ development tools and streamlined them with a focus on performance when building out apps on any platform.

Sebastian Vaduva, Appscend’s CEO and co-founder told us:

finding the right tools for each phase of the app’s lifecycle is by far the most time intensive and resource consuming process for businesses trying to embrace mobility. This is the reason most of them fail or they postpone the process.

Vaduva says that with his companies “Ignite Markup Language” they’re able to produce and develop apps up to ten times as fast with no learning curve. They also provide a cloud based content system that Appscend customers can access directly giving their customers the advantage of being able to update their app without needing the original developer’s help.

Check out our interview with Vaduva below.

It’s Tea Time At 500 Startups With Hawaiian Startup Tealet

Subscription startups are blowing up these days. It seems there’s a subscription service or subscription box for just about anything (and everything). We’ve reported on, or interviewed, quite a few here at nibletz, including KlutchClub, Bulu Box, FlavrBox and hip hop artist Nas’ subscription startup 12 society.

Today we’ve got Hawaiian startup Tealet. Tealet is about sampling tea just as much as it is about discovering tea. Tealet co-founder Elyse Peterson told us in an interview “Tealet tells the stories of tea growers around the world and allows tea drinkers to explore these teas through a bi-monthly subscription service.”

After the customer gets their tea bi-monthly tea samples they can go back to the tealet website and order larger quantities of the teas they like.

Tealet isn’t about mass produced coffee house teas or even the teas that you can pick up at your local Whole Foods or Trader Joes. Through Peterson’s personal experience, connecting with actual tea growers around the world, Tealet members are getting access to the most interesting and best tasting farm grown teas in the world. Check out the interview below to read how Peterson fell in love with farm grown teas and the farmers who make it.

Mississippi Startup YeHive Share & Attend Events Socially! Launches Today

Typically when we get an email or pitch that has the words “event” and “app” in the same pitch, we get skeptical. The event space is a crowded space and an extremely hard nut to crack. We were actually referred to YeHive by our lawyer who is one of the leads in the firms emerging technologies practice. In other words he sees a lot of startups. I told our lawyer of my ambivalence about “event startups” but he insisted we check it out.

So Thursday morning we got a walk through of YeHive from the startups co-founder Brad Fuller.

YeHive isn’t about event discovery, it’s about making events more social. YeHive combines photos, videos, comments and a timeline to any event. Users can easily create an impromptu event or participate in an ongoing event. When you log into your YeHive account and then an event on YeHive all of your photos and videos get uploaded to the event. You can comment on other users photos and videos and also comment on the events timeline.

YeHive then archives all of the photos, videos and timeline entries, right now “forever”, Fuller told us. If you’ve set up a YeHive for a wedding, birthday party or even a camping trip you’ll be able to go back and check out the memories. If you participated in a YeHive for a sporting event you’ll be able to replay all the action directly from YeHive anytime you want.

Fuller and his co-founders haven’t cut any corners in building out YeHive. The website is built and functioning and for mobile they are debuting in the Google Play store and the Apple iTunes App Store today, simultaneously insuring just about anyone who wants to try it, can.

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

Atlanta Startup Vir2o Sharing Everything In Real Time Improves In Person Relationships

Atlanta startup Vir2o, promises to be a whole new social experience. That’s quite a lofty statement, but after checking them out and talking with them, if executed correctly it will work.

Vir20 shares just about everything there is to share in real time, which improves actual in person relationships. You can go shopping with your friends on Vir2o. You can go to the movies with your friends on Vir2o. You can share photos with your friends on Vir2o. You can listen to and share music on Vir2o.

Anytime an entrepreneur wants to create a new social network or new social media outlet it’s immediately compared to Facebook. When Facebook burst onto the college scene and then opened up their doors to anyone over 13, no one believed they would overtake Myspace, but they did.

In an interview we did with Vir2o’s Founder,Kayode Aladesuyi, he mentioned sharing a lot. When we think of sharing and social media we naturally think of Facebook. Spaulding explains how Vir20 is different than Facebook “…doesn’t necessarily enhance social interaction between people, especially if there is physical distance between them. We wanted to bridge the gap between people who live in different parts of the world and provide them with a real-time interactive tool to bring them closer together”

Since Vir20 is all about live sharing, in real time, they consider themselves a “Live Community” versus a social network.

Check out the rest of our interview with Spaulding below.

Miami Startup: Clearci Simplifies Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence, a critical part of corporate strategy, and also one of the most misunderstood, has evolved tremendously since it was officially inaugurated in the mid 80’s. Now,clearCi, a company based out of Fort Lauderdale, FL, arrived to transform it by making information simpler and more accessible than ever. The practice, innocently confused by many as ‘spying’, consists of collection, classification and distribution of information about the competition in order to facilitate better strategic decisions.

The Internet changed the form in which secondary intelligence was collected since instead of retrieving it from supermarket aisles, pamphlets, books, and TV commercials, now it’s available online, and for the most part, what Competitive Intelligence (CI) professionals need to do is surf the Internet to gather information from numerous websites; still a time consuming proposition. Recently, with the evolution of search crawlers, some companies simplified the task, but now clearCi is making a big push by simplifying the process to unprecedented levels thanks to patent-pending algorithms and technology.

When asked to explain what the cloud-based SaaS platform does Co-Founder Joe Levy is reluctant to offer complicated explanations, rightfully using one sentence: “We offer software tools that help you keep track of your competition.” How so? The marketing team breaks it down further by saying that the technology works as an automated CI informant hired to monitor any competitor webpage or data source related to products, industries, markets, customers, vendors and even key partners. The tool cuts through the clutter caused by Big Data, and only relevant information is gathered and stored into an online portal that organizes data into channels, sharable folders, and reports, making data more manageable across an entire footprint.

Continue reading at our partner site Startropica.com