Interviews Archives - Page 36 of 57

L.A. Entrepreneur Launches Social Network Startup For Film Makers In Post Production

Unless you’re one of those award winning notorious film makers like say Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, or even Aaron Sorkin these days, it can be hard to find others to collaborate with, share feedback and share ideas. As L.A. entrepreneur Cosmo Scharf discovered, it’s even tougher at the post production level. That’s why he created Blosmo.

Scharf, a student at the University of Southern California, decided he wanted to start a social network for film makers. As he tells us in the interview below, after collaborating with his buddy Corey, they narrowed down the social network to those in post production.

Blosmo is as much a collaboration tool as it is a social network. Right now, independent film makers don’t have many avenues for feedback, ideas and suggestions. YouTube comments, when they aren’t spam, are immature and not very helpful. Even though Vimeo has a more professional audience, the comments aren’t very useful either.

Blosmo gives their community members access to a higher level of feedback from likeminded, professional or semi professional film makers. Comments on Blosmo are incentivized through a point system where users can actually receive prizes and rewards sponsored by film companies. The points also give film makers access to discounts on gear and equipment.

Check out our complete interview with Scharf below.

Wisconsin Startup Bad Donkey Creates A New Hybrid Text Language

Bad Donkey, a startup in Madison Wisconsin with a really funky name, has created a new hybrid cyber language of sorts. “Enriched Text Content” or ETC for short combines personal digital imagery with traditional alpha numeric text to create a new and fun way of sending text messages. To break it down for you, this new “Enriched Text Content”, mixes letters with emoticons and images for a fun new way to text.

Interesting is probably the first word that comes to mind when diving into Bad Donkey’s ETC cyber language. The product seems like it would appeal to the youngest set of texters. Older more affluent texters are constantly looking for the fastest and easiest way to send text messages. However, the combination of pictures, images and text may make it easier to get a point across than traditional texting.

Alongside their “ETC” cyber language, Bad Donkey has created an app and closed social network that supports the technology. BuzzMsg is a messaging platform that takes advantage of the hybrid language. The messages within BuzzMsg are called BuzzMarks and are organized in easy to read and understand lifestyle folders.

We got a chance to talk to Bad Donkey’s head jack ass Bill Towell about his new startup and cyber language. Check out the interview below.

San Diego Startup Expeerience Crowdsourced Event Photos For Everyone

There are a few startups out there vying for the position to be the platform that allows people at an event to all upload photos from the same event. San Diego startup Expeerience is one of those companies.

Expeerience allows users to share videos and photos at events. When individual Expeerience users upload their photos at any particular event they are put together with all of the photos and videos from other users at the same event. Essentially, Expeerience is crowdsourcing photos and videos from their users at events, creating one big gallery of event photos.

With many of the other photo sharing apps available today people take photos and videos and upload them to their existing social networks. If they’re at a big event there’s a good chance time lines will be filled with similar photos. However, as co-founder Stephen Boyd explains in an interview with nibletz, after the event everyone goes their separate ways. Social networks begin filling with the next big event.

Expeerience keeps an ongoing record in a “collection” with all the photos from the same event that users can go back to over and over again. Expeerience users can also save event photos from other users. At a small event like a wedding, users can easily save the bouquet toss and dancing photos from other users. They can do the same thing at a football game for big plays and touch downs.

Boyd compares Expeerience to a “Pinterest style Twitter”.

Check out our interview with Boyd below.

Boston TechStars Startup: Saverr Offers Coupons From Receipts, You Know The Things You Actually Buy

The intuitiveness of the algorithms used to deliver Google adsense and Amazon suggestions can seem eerily close to home, but even as good as they are they still sometimes miss grasping what you are really looking for and what you really want to buy. Proximity based coupon apps are great but unless they are generic in nature it’s hard to say what you’re going to buy.

That’s why Boston startup, and Techstars alum, Saverr offers the best couponing proposition to the coupon user. Saverr gives you coupons based on what you actually buy based on what you actually bought using your receipt.

You know those machines that set next to the register tape at Target and the grocery store? You know the ones that spit out the coupons at the end of your visit? Well Saverr is giving you that machine, inside your phone. Pretty bad ass huh?

Saverr uses your actual receipt, the entire receipt, to give you coupons on the items that you just bought. Most likely you are going to buy them again right?

The idea came about when the Israeli team was trying to create a shopping discovery app of sorts. What they quickly found wasn’t that the world needed another discovery app, but the world needed a money saving app. Their proprietary receipt scanning technology is the back bone of their app.

The best part for the consumer is since Saverr is working on the manufacturer coupon side of the world, you can get coupons based on receipts from all types of stores. You’re not relegated to the store that you’re currently shopping in.

We got a chance to talk to the Saverr team which relocated to Boston for Techstars and is staying around for a while. Check out the interview below:

Colorado Startup Employtown Says They’re Flip Flopping The Job Market

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Scott Balster co-founder of Employtown

Innovation in the job and recruitment space seems to be a weekly occurrence. The neat thing about jobs related startups is that every one of them knows that something different needs to happen.

Monster.com, the leader in jobs sites has become stale. It’s also become a breeding ground for recruiters, head hunters and agencies. It’s hard these days to sort through real ads verses cattle calls for talent pools. Entrepreneurs are attacking this problem from all angles. Some are crowd-sourcing and using social media, some are putting job markets into silo’d verticals, while others are putting an entirely different spin.

Colorado startup Employtown is one of those startups that’s trying to do things totally different.

Husband and wife founders Scott and Andrea Balster have taken the job market and turned it around. Now instead of focusing on open slots, they are focusing on human capital. Employtown is about the people and not the job openings. Dare we say match.com for job seekers looking for employers?

In our interview with Scott he talks about how with their startup, those looking for jobs set up profiles, showcasing their style, creativity, skill sets, and resume items. The next thing they do is where Employtown separates themselves from other startups. Job applicants put what they’re looking for in terms of a job. They let employers know their criteria, are they looking for a 100% smoke free environment, are they looking for flexible hours, are they looking for a cafeteria and a weight room? Are they looking for more creativity in the work place? Whatever the applicant’s criteria for a new job is they can place it in their profile and employers can sift through profiles and find candidates that match.

Check out the rest of our interview with Scott below.

Pittsburgh Startup Songwhale Born From Beowulf! INTERVIEW

A Pittsburgh startup with a funny name is engaging customers from brands across multiple touch points. SongWhale specializes in taking customer engagement to a new level using the web, text, pay and direct solutions.

The unique company offers multiple products to drive engagement and even a pay product of their own called PayWhale which offers the ability to text a payment. Paying via text is very popular in emerging countries but no one in the US has really embraced the technology. It’s actually one of the easiest ways to pay.

While interactive engagement may not seem sexy some of the things SongWhale is doing are. Not only that but the story about how Songwhale came about is one of the most interesting ones we’ve heard.

Songwhale’s four core business areas, Web, Text, Pay and Direct can be summarized like this:

Web: Songwhale can get a companies brand or message through the web on any screen; smartphone, tablet, or computer all optimized for each size.

Text: Songwhale offers engaging SMS campaigns including games, and interactives.

Pay: Songwhale’s Paywhale product offers a text payment solution that is possibly the easiest form of mobile commerce and one wildly adopted in emerging countries.

Direct: Songwhale offers direct branding and engagement campaigns that encompass web, text and pay solutions.

We got a chance to interview Songwhale. Check out the interview below:

Mother & Daughter DC Startup Dormify, Changing Dorm Rooms Everywhere

What can you do with the limited space of a dorm room, or shared living space while you’re in college? Well unless you’re an interior designer for Ikea you may think your options are limited. That’s not the case thanks to the mother and daughter team of Karen Zuckerman (mom) and Amanda Zuckerman (daughter).

The Zuckerman’s have created a new Washington DC startup called Dormify that looks to serve those college age students with ideas, and tools to help transform their living space for their four years of college life. Everything from crafty ideas, to room furnishings, trinkets and even college flair can be found on the Dormify site.

Dormify gives college students everywhere the freedom to stop combing the aisles of Ikea and Target in hopes to find some idea that all the other students aren’t using.

Towels, pillows, home furnishings even stylish school supplies and sweets can be found on the Dormify website.

As you can imagine Dormify came about when Karen was helping Amanda move into her first dorm room at Washington University in St. Louis. Both Zuckerman women have been known for their creativity throughout their lives and the neon colored towels, matching trash cans, rug mats and computer chairs on sale at Target weren’t going to do the trick.

After shopping for Amanda’s dorm room at a variety of boutique shops in downtown St. Louis, a look Amanda could live with was born. The Zuckerman women realized that there is no centralized place to build looks like this, so they did what any entrepreneurs would do and built it themselves.

We got a chance to talk with Dormify’s employee #1, Nicole Gardner, who tells us more about Dormify, below:

California Startup: Bubbs Connects You To Charitable Products INTERVIEW

A new Orange County startup called Bubbs is looking to become the go-to place to find products that are being sold to benefit charities and causes across the globe. When you go to mybubbs.com you’ll see a familiar online mall experience, except in this case all the products are benefiting some kind of charity.

Bubbs is somewhat similar to DoGoodBuyUs, a New York startup that we covered back in June. The main difference is that DoGoodBuyUs connects products that were specifically made for charity whereas most of the Bubbs products are more traditional in nature but somehow proceeds are benefiting charity.

Red Beats By Dre headphones, where $5.00 of the purchase goes to AIDS research, can be found on Bubbs. An iPad case which gives a week’s worth of HIV medicine to someone living in Africa can also be found on the page. Clothing, food, other gadgets and even makeup with a purpose can be found on the mybubbs site. Now you can shop for charity in one spot rather than scouring the internet looking for charity kick backs, site by site.

We got a chance to talk to Atila Lotfi the founder of Bubbs, check out the interview below:

Seattle Startup: WompMobile Promises Easy Web To Mobile Conversion

One of the most frustrating things for some web publishers is exactly how they’re going to get their sites onto mobile devices. Some choose to go with a native mobile app, meaning that a mobile app is created for each smartphone platform from scratch for the site. Others choose to use WordPress plugins or other competing platforms. We’re fortunate that our site scales to mobile nicely.

Seattle startup WompMobile is hoping to make the process much easier for their web publishing clients. WompMobile uses their own proprietary design engine to scale a desktop website to mobile maintaining the integrity of the desktop design. They promise to make “going mobile easy”.

While their process takes just under ten days, once the WompMobile team has run your website through their engine, every update the publisher makes to their website is instantly updated on the mobile version.

Madison Miner the company’s founder, says that their secret sauce is in their conversion engine. Things like fonts, styles, and branding remain consistent from web to mobile and the publisher doesn’t need to sacrifice their web presence by using a generic mobile format.

We got a chance to talk to Miner about WompMobile and the Seattle startup scene in the interview below.

Santa Monica Startup: DocRun To Challenge Legal Zoom, And Do It Better?

If you were to hear a pitch from a legal startup that planned to offer do it yourself access to legal forms, you would immediately think of LegalZoom right? Who would enter into a space crowded by a giant like LegalZoom? That would be as asinine as pitching an online auction site for collectibles, clothing, accessories and every day junk right?

Well Santa Monica based startup DocRun is doing just that. Of course their position is that they’re going to do it better.

DocRun has positioned itself to become the site to go to when small companies, and even startups need legal documents that may otherwise cost them thousands of dollars. When a user goes to the site they can create highly customizable, attorney level legal documents by answering a handful of relevant questions.

DocRun isn’t your run of the mill startup though. The company’s founder is Jennifer Reuting a nationally known expert on small business and corporate structuring. She is the author of the book “Limited Liability Companies For Dummies”.

This is also not her first foray into web platforms for small businesses. Reuting created InCorp.com the third largest registered agent service provider in the country and MyLLC.com a business entity formation service. Reuting has baked patent pending “artificial intelligence” into DocRun. This technology trumps LegalZoom’s one size fits all legal document service.

We got a chance to interview DocRun check out the interview below.

Chicago Startup: clickInterview The Latest To Join Video Interview Space

A startup in Chicago called clickInterview is the latest to offer a video solution to recruiters, HR folks and perspective employers. clickInterview, like PitchPick in Austin among others, lets job candidates answer pre-screening interview questions in the comfort of their own home or wherever they happen to be when they feel like answering.

Legacy human resources folks aren’t entirely sold on the idea of pre-screening or interviewing candidates with pre-recorded videos. Naturally the candidate will only do the video at the best opportunity for them and of course they can prepare for the interview. It takes out some of the spontaneity of the interview.

Now with clickInterview and the other startups in the space no one is suggesting that they completely replace the actual in person interview, but rather use it in the first preliminary phase, eliminating the need to accommodate on site interviews.

Max Sperando, founder of clickInterview says that his secret sauce is in the design and ease of use. One check of their site and you’ll agree that it’s pleasing to the eye and simplifies the process.

Sperando is also hoping to give the candidates a little more control of their interview situation, again the part that “old school” HR folks don’t like.

clickInterview definitely has a chance to take over the video interview space if they can scale right. We got a chance to interview Sperando, check out the interview below.

Israeli Startup Ringya, The First Collaborative Address Book For Smartphones?

An Israeli startup called Ringya has put an interesting new twist on the address book. They’ve taken, probably your most social set of data and added social functionality. Ringya allows users to share their address book, as much or as little of it as they want, as seamlessly as sharing a photo, video or other digital asset.

Sure you’ve always been able to share vcards and contacts via text, but Ringya groups contacts together any way that you like and than allows you to share them individually or in lists. Say you have a project management list, or a soccer team list, whatever list you have set up for contacts, if you need to easily share that list you can.

What’s even more interesting though is Ringya’s ability to turn paper lists into smartphone contact lists. Simply snap a picture of an actual paper contact list and Ringya will extract that information and put it into digital contact format and keep the list in tact.

In the interview below Gal Nucham, founder of Ringya, explains that all you have to do is snap a picture of a contact list and email it to a specific Ringya address, moments later you get the same list back, digitally. This would make migrating paper phone books, address books and black books a cinch.

It’s hard to believe that until now, no one has done this before. Check out our interview with Nucham, after the break.

Chicago Startup StageBloc Is A Content Creation Platform For Everyone INTERVIEW

A new startup incubating at Chicago’s world famous 1871, has set out to create a new content creation platform that’s perfect for anyone and everyone. If you want to start a blog, you can do that on StageBloc. If you want to create photo and video albums, you can do that on StageBloc. If you want to create podcasts, again you can do that on StageBloc. If you’re into short form posts like status updates, you can do that as well. In fact you can do al that and monetize whatever pieces of it you want.

Now suppose you want to mix them all together. You can also do that using StageBloc’s robust platform. But even better, you can do as much or as little of it as you want. It’s like an all you care to eat buffet of content creation tools.

StageBloc makes it incredibly easy to create content in any way that you want. StageBloc founder Tom Giles was convinced that while Facebook and other sites are great for exposure, StageBloc is more about developing your brand online and also monetizing that brand.

This all in one approach to content creation means that if you use StageBloc you don’t need a blogger account, flickr account, YouTube account, Twitter account and Facebook account. You get all of those services in one. Now being realistic no ones going to shun their Facebook or their Twitter account but creating content and then having to move to another site to embed pictures and videos is a pain in the butt.

If you’re only in the mood for a short form post, you don’t have to leave the StageBloc dashboard, likewise if you’re in the mood to write a long Tumbler-esque post, you don’t need to leave the platform to do it.

StageBloc also recently launched their Mirrorgram app into the iOS app store and it’s quickly become the 11th ranked paid app in the store.

We got a chance to interview Giles. Check out the interview below.

Walk Thru’s Made Easy With Israeli Startup WalkMe

By a show of hands how many people out there have “walk thru” still on their to-do list. Everyone wants to do a great walk thru for their company, business or startup but many people have the hardest time getting this project off the ground. Either they don’t think they have access to the resources to create great “walk thru’s” or they don’t think they can afford it.

Well a startup in Tel Aviv called WalkMe is about to solve both of those problems for everyone.

No matter how easy or complex your task is, WalkMe wants to provide you with the tool to create an easy step-by-step “Walk thru” guide to everything.

Walkme is a simple to use plugin. Once you have it installed you just move about your screen in the natural steps it takes to do whatever process you want to teach. As you begin to complete each step you write what the step is, how to do it and add your text balloon and move on to the next step.

You can easily create “walk thru” instructions while you’re creating your WalkMe walk thru.

Anything from how to complete an order, to how to change your password, can easily be explained using Walkme. If you want to show someone an easy to use trick on your own website, you can create a WalkMe “walk thru”. Basically if you can do the task you want to teach, and if you can use a mouse, than you’re in business.

We got a chance to talk to the team from WalkMe about their easy to use tool. Check out the interview below: