Interviews Archives - Page 38 of 57

Washington DC Startup: Review Signal Launches More Trusted Review Platform

Washington DC startup Review Signal launched last week after 19 months in the making. Founder Kevin Ohashi has developed a product review platform that can be more trusted than traditional platforms like Yelp or Google reviews. Review Signal analyzes data points across social media to gauge the pulse of what people think about a particular product or service.

While there are hundreds of verticals that Review Signal could be applied to Ohashi has started with web hosting reviews as his first full on demonstration of how the system works.

Review Signal mines the data across social networks, and then separates the “mentions” for a specific product or service into good or bad. As Ohashi tells us in the interview below, if there are 100 tweets about a product with 50 being positive and 50 being negative, the raw review score would naturally be 50%. Now people aren’t forced to read long, sometimes biased long-form reviews.

One of the biggest problems we’ve seen with traditional reviews stems from the reason the average person would write a review anyway. Aside from career reviewers and those types that have to review absolutely everything, the bulk of the rest of reviews on review sites come when a customer is raving about a company, product or service after having a great experience or after they’ve had a bad experience.

You don’t get a lot of “average” everyday folks that take the time to write a review about a run of the mill or average experience.

For example say you went to a decent (not exceptional, just decent) restaurant and had the best chocolate cake ever. You’re much more likely to tweet “had this awesome chocolate cake” with a photo, rather than write a 5 paragraph review on the restaurant itself or, heck, even the chocolate cake.

One of the most fascinating parts about this story is how it came about in the first place. Ohashi actually based Review Signal off the idea he used for his masters thesis.

Check out our interview with Ohashi below. He does a really great job of explaining how the system actually works.

Give Your Photos A Voice With Orlando Startup Picvoice INTERVIEW

Now that I’m in my 30’s it seems that every time I go home to visit my parents I go through photo albums and unless the photo is blatantly obvious, you know like the Magic Kingdom castle is in the background, I have no idea the context for the photo. Mom did a decent job of handwriting notes on the back but that still doesn’t give the photos a real good back story.

Fast forward to the internet age and I’ve got digital photos going back to the mid 90’s. All in all I probably have near 100,000 photos. I’m a big picture taker. The problem is, just like with those traditional photo albums, I have no idea the context on lots of them.

Imagine if the photos talked? Well they can now thanks to Orlando startup PicVoice. Currently PicVoice is a web application that allows you to sign in through Facebook, upload photos and then add up to 30 seconds of audio to accompany the photo. Now your photos can really tell a story.

As we learned in our interview below with Founder and CEO Matt Andrews, they’re working on a mobile app right now. They aren’t alone in this space though. Atlanta startup StoryMark also allows you to add audio to photos. They went the other route and put together a great mobile app first, without a web app. That makes StoryMark great for taking photos and posting them with audio. PicVoice on the other hand is great for people who have thousands of photos that are just waiting for a story.

Check out our interview with Andrews below:

Hong Kong Startup: DataField Lets Your Field Workers Go Paperless

Do you run a business with lots of workers in the field? Are they coming back from collecting data with clipboards full of paper? Well Hong Kong startup DataField is hoping to help change that for you and your company.

DataField is a SaaS startup that helps businesses and enterprise with field workers collect data on forms or surveys quickly, easily and digitally. DataField is the perfect solution for route drivers that collect orders while on their route. It’s also perfect for those workers out there collecting data from customers completing surveys. DataField could also be used for political canvassers that are out door to door trying to get easy questions answered.

No matter how big or small the data sample is, DataField offers a paperless way of collecting that data which then also gives companies the option of getting the data back wirelessly in real time.

DataField solves several pain points which all lead to increased productivity. Say for instance you own a food delivery company. Route drivers could use DataField instead of traditional order sheets. When the delivery person is at the customers home delivering their current food order and taking the next, the minute the new order is complete in the DataField system it can be processed back at the warehouse while the driver is on their way to the next customer.

Traditionally, before systems like this, the warehouse wouldn’t see the order sheets until the end of the day when the route driver returns.

We got a chance to speak with Antoine Dercoche co-founder and CEO of DataField. Check out the interview below.

London Startup FlatClub: AirBnb Meets Couch Surfing Meets LinkedIn For College Students

So what do you get when you take two Israeli guys, move them to London and mash together AirBnb, CouchSurfing and LinkedIn? You get London startup FlatClub.

FlatCub is a network for college students and alumni to find temporary housing situations amongst their friends, friends of friends and trusted acquaintances. FlatClub connects college students from all over with each other to offer spare bedrooms, couches, and even apartments. Say you have a year round lease on an off campus apartment and you’re not going to be at school during the summer, you could use FlatClub to find a trusted renter.

FlatClub utilizes the social web, requires users to be college students, and provides a safe and secure payment system for taking the payments for booking.

The growing startup closed an undisclosed Series-A round back in May from a syndicate of non-traditional VC’s. They are also a product of the London Business School Incubator. But even with the security of a Series-A round and the backing of an incubator like the London Business School co-founder and CEO Nitzan Yudan is far from done the hard, sweat equity type grunt work.

Yudan is planning a US expansion to the top 30 universities and plans to do it with a road show across the country. He’s looking to generate as much buzz as he can. Yudan feels that FlatClub offers a safer more secure way of finding temporary accommodations. By requiring users to be college students or alumni there’s an element of security already in place.

FlatClub also provides an element of real social interaction. Students and alumni renting accommodations will see how they are socially connected to potential renters and vice versa. Also for those students and alumni that are renting rooms, they’ll get the in person interactions that you can’t find with similar services.

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

San Diego Startup: The Tip Network Is PayPal For Servers

Although restaurant and hospitality industry technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the years, one area where it still falls short is tipping. That’s where San Diego startup The Tip Network comes in.

With the economy the way it is these days restaurant owners and managers are mice-managing their shift schedules even more than they ever have before. Owners are managers are quick to make cuts to their wait staff the minute they can. This causes a major pain for servers. In a lot of restaurants servers either need to stick around after getting cut or at the end of their shift, come back at closing time or wait until the next day to reconcile their tips and tip out. This can be a major pain point for servers.

The Tip Network offers solutions for problems like that and other problems that plague proprietors of tip based businesses.

Tip Network is a cloud based tip management solution for independent and chain restaurants. We enable managers to easily track, allocate, and distribute tips digitally to their staffs Tip Network. Each staff member has their own unique Tip Network profile that allows them to (1) send money to any account, at any bank (2) send money to anyone in the network, (3) and many other things down the road .

Using the Tip Network, servers take ownership and management of their tips over, instantly. Now, from the comfort of their own home, or device they can tip out to support staff, move tips to their bank accounts even pay back loans to other servers. Like PayPal, with The Tip Network users get their own ID and can move their tips around anywhere in the network.

Founder Greg Crisci has first hand experience as a server and knows the pain that his startup hopes to solve. He’s busy these days looking for integration partners and preparing the implementation of his new tipping alternative. He did take a few minutes to talk to us though. Check out the interview below:

New York Startup: Greatist The Go To Place For Health & Wellness Info INTERVIEW

I’m one of those people that thinks in order to be the best you need to think like you are the best, it’s a motivational mantra that’s driven me since my childhood. Such is the case with Derek Flanzraich and his health and wellness, socially driven info startup Greatist. This New York based startup is a destination site for original, amazingly good health and wellness content. It must be because they’re currently seeing 1.5 million uniques a month, which according to Flanzraich makes Greatist the fastest growing site in the health space.

Whether you’re looking for great healthy recipes, workout tips or even how to get over a hangover, Greatist offers a great variety of wellness and health related content.

While the content on Greatist.com is overflowing, the team at Greatist encourages their users to take it slow, one week at a time. The startups mission is to inspire and inform the world to make at least one healthier decision per week. Whether you want to lose weight, eat better, get stronger, get motivated, relieve stress, or just start working out, greatist.com offers the content you need, in an easy to read format for all of their users.

Flanzraich has been an entrepreneur since his first “lemonade stand” startup dog walking business. All the while friends, family members and new acquaintances would ask him what drove him and one of those main ingredients was health and wellness. That’s why he created Greatist.

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

Manage Your Personal Web With Michigan Startup: backstitch INTERVIEW

Imagine if HootSuite allowed you to go out of the “social sphere” and customize all the content you wanted across the internet. In a nutshell, that’s exactly what Michigan startup backstitch does. And, they do it well.

Husband and wife co-founders Jordan and Stefanie Warzecha describe BackStitch as a clean and consistent user experience for managing your personal web. Your personal web includes your social media feeds, your favorite news and blog sites and even your favorite daily deals sites. Now with backstitch you can take all of that content and instead of having an unorganized hodge podge of browser tabs open, everything comes together in a nice aggregated dashboard.

Moreso than just organizing all of your favorite web content backstitch actually saves the user a lot of time. Typically everyone has an internet routine. Although most people start their web routine on a smartphone or tablet, once you get to your computer for the day the routine picks up. For me I open up Hootsuite, Google Reader, Nibletz.com, about five other blog sites and a ton of email screens. This is all before 8am. With BackStitch a lot of that content is in one easy to find place.

backstitch comes out of the box with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Appdotnet. They also have a variety of popular new sites baked in along with all of the popular daily deals sites. They’ve also thought about people who read blogs and sites outside of what BackStitch offers, and allows users to add any site with an RSS feed (although they should add nibletz.com to the catalog).

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

UK Startup: SurveyMe Offers An Easy To Use Mobile Survey Platform INTERVIEW

Business owners are constantly looking for the best way to get customer feedback with the best possible return. According to many surveys, comment cards, even ones that offer incentives, see around 1% return or engagement. Surveys that print out on receipts and direct patrons to websites aren’t very effective either. That’s why many companies have found the need and desire to take their surveys to the mobile device.

UK startup SurveyMe solves the problem of creating surveys just for mobile devices by offering an easy to use platform for business owners to design mobile surveys. In fact, even business owners with minimal web experience can create good looking, easy to use and easy to navigate surveys. SurveyMe has tried to make their platform easy enough to use, so that if you know how to use the internet you can create a survey.

SurveyMe is another great startup with a husband and wife co-founders, Lee and Nicola Evans. While this is the Evans’ family’s first internet startup they’re no strangers to owning a business. The Evans were the original owners of The Bear Factory in Ireland, a brand that was eventually bought out by St.Louis giant Build A Bear.

While they’re not making bears, they’re making their survey platform as easy as letting a three year old create a bear, and the UI as appealing.

We got a chance to talk to Lee Evans. Check out our interview below:

Interview With Mark Cuban Backed LA Startup: Mention Mobile

Shark Tank season 4 kicked off two weeks ago with Indiana University, Kelley School Of Business graduate Derek Pacque’ turning down a $200,000 investment offer from Dallas Maverick’s owner and billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban. Pacque’ turned down the investment because of the equity stake Cuban wanted in exchange.

That wasn’t the case with Mention Mobile founder Ryan Ozonian. Ozonian took a one in a million shot and sent Cuban an email with a two year old blog post. According to Ozonian in just 8 minutes Cuban replied. That single email exchange led to Cuban investing $250,000 back this time last year. Cuban followed that investment up with another undisclosed investment in April of this year.

Mention Mobile is a social gaming company that already has a handful of titles under the belt utilizing the popular Facebook platform. Some of their titles include: Trivia Friends, Doodley, and Zombie Bash: Christmas Attack. Their about to launch a new game, partnering with Chillingo as the publisher, called Word Derby. They expect to get that game out to users later this fall. It will be the first asynchronous word game for Chillingo.

We got a chance to talk with Ozonian about what he and MentionMobile are doing in the interview below:

Interview With Techstars Boulder Startup: Birdbox One Place For All Your Photos & Video

A few years back I had stored all of my digital photos on the sonystyle photo sharing website. At some point in the last part of the 2000s Sony decided to shut the site down. Unfortunately, I had used an older email address when signing up for the Sony photo sharing site and missed their 20 or so warnings that the site was shutting down. My photos from that time, were gone forever.

Because of this experience I was reluctant to try any of the newer services like Flickr or even Photobucket. I stored most of my photos (and still to this day) using iPhoto. The problem with iPhoto is if you take a ton of photos the space is eaten up quickly. I love what Apple has done with Photostream but that’s only good for your 1000 most recent photos. As you import more and more photos to Photostream the older ones get pushed out.

These are some major pain points for me personally that TechStars graduate, and Boulder startup, Birdbox will solve. BirdBox is a service that aggregates all of your photos and videos from over a dozen services both local and in the cloud. Once BirdBox imports all of your photos it keeps them in “nests” for you. Birdbox claims to do all the “heavy lifting” for you and they do. What’s even better is they make it a cinch to recall a photo later based on event, hashtag or whatever other cataloging you put into it.

All these features came about after founder Ben Nunez tried to find one single photo to send to his mom on his phone. Unfortunately the photo was tucked away on an external hard drive and he had to wait. Between SD cards, USB flash drives, external hard drives, iPhoto, Picassa (Google+) and now even Flickr, it’s sometimes a pain in the ass to try and find that one photo. Birdbox will make it easy for you.

We got a chance to interview the guys from Birdbox. Check out the interview with this exciting TechStars Boulder grad below:

Keep An SOS In Your Pocket With Seattle Startup React Mobile INTERVIEW

In this day and age personal safety is a very important issue to many people. There are a million different factors that play into a persons personal safety. Did you just get attacked by someone? Are you feeling unsafe because someone is following you? Are you diabetic and feeling light headed? Are you allergic to bees and just got stung?

Any of these situations, and countless others, could result in the need to make a distress call to someone, and time is almost always of the essence. Well Robb Monkman and Grant Wallace, two Seattle based entrepreneurs with backgrounds in safety and communication have created a startup called React Mobile. React Mobile functions as a distress or SOS signal right in your pocket.

With React Mobile both Monkman and Wallace figured out that the best safety device, and distress signal device was already in most people’s pockets. Of course that device is their smartphone. React Mobile is an iOS and Android app with three distinct safety abilities; alerting via email, text and social networks; GPS location sharing; and emergency reporting.

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

Los Angeles Startup: myRight Looking To Become the WebMD For Legal Issues INTERVIEW

When you’re not feeling well and have a definitive set of symptoms most people these days take to the internet. Even with health insurance, people seem to find it more convenient to consult with webMD or Dr. Google, before they waste their valuable time at the doctor’s office. WebMD is often credited as one of the big survivors of the first dot com bubble. The site, which has been around since the late 90’s, is a great place to get preliminary information.

While there are a variety of legal websites out there, there isn’t one that mimics what WebMD does. Sure there are a million places to find and complete legal forms, like Legal Zoom, but most of the websites out there for people to bounce legal questions off of, typically go right back to a lawyers office who will give you the information you need to know after a “free” consultation.

myRight is hoping to become the webMD of legal services. The Los Angeles based startup wants to be the preliminary go to place for people with legal questions. Some may even realize they don’t need to see a lawyer while others will jump on the phone with a lawyer right after their search of myRight.me.

Could Nikhil Jhunjhnuwala, Keval Amin and Michael Niu, the founders of myRight be onto something? Frank Monestere, the founder of LegalZoom thinks so. Monestere sits on myRight’s advisory board. To keep things legal myRight has two other lawyers on their advisory board too.

We got a chance to talk to Niu about myRight. Check out the interview below.

Vermont Startup: Popngoseek An Event App For Mobile & Pop Up Events

Food trucks, pop up stores, pop up restaurants, and pop up fire sales seem to be increasing in popularity. It’s like the old days of the mystery rock concert where an artist would come and play a show and then they’d have some mystery show and you’d have to listen to the radio station to get clues as to where to go.

Well nowadays these kind of secret pop up businesses tend to take to social media to spread the word. Washington DC, New York, San Francisco and other major cities have had an outbreak of “pop up” restaurants. A lot of times chefs will take over an abandoned or closed down restaurant location for a very limited time. This can be a week, a weekend or possibly a month. They do this to either test the waters with their restaurant idea or just as a temporary way to make people crave even more.

Apple, Samsung and other major electronics manufacturers have been known to set up “pop up” stores at major events. Apple set one up at SXSW in 2011 when the iPad 2 was released. Samsung set up pop stores at the Olympics.

Popngoseek is about unique experiences in unique places. They aren’t looking to be your everyday check out the app and see who’s playing platform. They want to be the go to app to find the really cool once in a blue moon events.

Now when your girlfriends call you and tell you about the awesome pop up store or trunk show a designer did, you won’t miss the tweet or the Facebook post.

Popngoseek has taken to indiegogo for their first round of crowdfunding so if you’re one that doesn’t want to miss out on unique events, you should support these guys here.

We got a chance to interview the team behind Popngoseek. Check out the interview below:

Montreal Startup: GigTrip Social Meets Music Tourism INTERVIEW

Canadian serial entrepreneur and startup aficionado Jean-Pierre Levac is working on solving the pain points involved in musical festivals, tours and shows. To do this right, Levac found early on that all three stake holders would need to be involved. Musicians, fans and venues. Without all three pieces in the process one stakeholder would end up with an unfair advantage, while another may be left out in the cold.

Levac has spent much of his career in the IT Industry, with the last fifteen years spent in startups. He’s always been interested in the music business, but not necessarily the way everyone else is. Levac wants to take his skill sets and those of his co-founder Artem Mindrov, and fix the back end of the music industry.

Levac and Mindrov are attacking the fan angle first. To that end they are looking for beta testers, especially people who attend music festivals and make travel excursions out of them. To us it seems that there are so many people out there attacking the event discovery problem from the aggregation side, Levac and Mindrov seem to be on the right track to integrate all three stakeholders before the events pour into search engines and aggregation apps.

We got a chance to talk with Levac about what they’re working on at GigTrip. Check out the interview below: