Interviews Archives - Page 46 of 57

Interview With Houston Startup: TheSquareFoot A Resource For Other Startups

You know here at nibletz.com, the voice of startups “everywhere else” we love writing about startups. What we love even more is when we can write about startups who in some way or another, are a resource for other startups. Such is the case with Houston startup TheSquareFoot.

Now on the surface you may think that TheSquareFoot is just another commercial leasing site, but it’s ten times more than that. When your startup grows out of that co-working space, incubator, or graduates from that accelerator, the last place you want to move is back into your parents basement. Truth be told, unless you undergo a major round of financing (and hopefully you will) companies like CBRE may be useless to you. Only a company the size of AirBnB needs 8 bajillion square feet. Having owned a medium to small sized business I know that large commercial realtors don’t take the time to talk to small businesses. The problem is there is plenty of small business real estate available for rent in just about everytown USA.

That’s where Thesquarefoot.com comes in handy.

TheSquareFoot is a startup themselves. They recently had a brainstorming session with Startup America Partnership CEO Scott

TheSquareFoot Team (photo: Startup America Partnership)

Case, we know how those sessions go and in that time with Case the team at TheSuareFoot was able to work on their value offering. They told the Startup America Partnership: “Our meeting with Scott Case at DEMO was extremely helpful in crystallizing our value offering. In addition, the Startup America network has been great as well as the webinars.”

Being that they are a startup themselves they built TheSquareFoot with all kinds of possible tenant scenarios in mind, from a company looking for huge warehouse space, to a team of two looking for 300 square feet. You can find that all at TheSquareFoot.com

Once you’ve found the perfect spot on the site then TheSquareFoot hooks you up with the resources that you need to actually move in and start using your new space.

We got a chance to talk with Aron Susman, co-founder of TheSquareFoot in the interview below:

Interview With Prague Startup: Pickerio A Community For Sports Picks

Sportspicks.cz is a Czech startup that offers sports picks for sports betting from some of the top betting professionals in Prague and the Czech Republic. The best sports pickers offer their picks in a premium package of 30 picks at a time so that those who bet on sports can get the best handful of picks to place their bets on.

According to their founder Jakub Chovanec, SportsPicks.cz has done pretty well but he wanted to branch out to the rest of the world. Not only that but he wanted the opportunity to crowdsource picks from the best amateur sports pickers as well. That’s why they created Pickerio.com

Pickerio is a social network of sorts for people that enjoy sports betting. As an amateur sports picker you can write blog posts and add your favorite sports picks to share with your followers and the community. As you prove yourself as a sports picker opportunity opens up for you to start selling your sports picks to other sports gamblers.

Chovanec is relying on the experience of sportspicks.cz to pave the way for a more community based site. While online sports betting is technically illegal in the United States, buying sports picks is not. You could equate this to the several traditional publications that exist out there for sports betters and folks who wager on horses use to base their decisions on.

Pickerio’s unique quality is the fact that amateur sports pickers can actually gain traction and start making money on the side by offering up their picks (provided they are panning out).

We got a chance to interview Chovanec about Pickerio in the interview below:

Pittsburgh Startup: Grail Takes Alcohol Discovery Table Side, Interview

Last week we brought you an interview with New York Alcohol Discovery startup Drynk.me. They provide an app that makes it easy to discovery new alcoholic beverages, snap pictures, jot down ingredients, and share with friends. This week we have an interview with Pittsburgh startup RhoMania who have just released a new app called “Grail” to restauranteurs to help restaurant patrons with their alcoholic beverage selection.

Grail is available in an iPad and web app version which allows restauranteurs to have servers bring an interactive alcohol menu which highlights the selection on site at that restaurant and pairs beverages with the food on the menu. Grail serves as an interactive wine and cocktail list which can be much more robust than traditional two sheet lists.

Where Drynk.me is a consumer facing app, Grail is designed to be utilized by restaurants. The hope is that the app will help increase liquor and beverage sales.

We got a chance to talk with the team behind RhoMania and the Grail app. Check out the interview below

UK Startup: Mapov Has A New Way To Find Hotels, INTERVIEW

Sure sites look HotelTonight and Hotels.com are awesome places to shop for hotels while on the go by price and features. The problem is you have to toggle between their apps and your maps app when trying to plan out your stay. Even with the ability to drill down on the hotels.com app for iPhone and Android, by address, or venue, to get real distance and directions you need your map.

Mapov makes it easier to find hotels, and the best deals on hotels by adding a hotel layer on top of your existing Google Maps. They also harness the power of TripAdvisor for reviews, and multiple sites for the best rates. It’s like Kayak, meets hotels.com, meets priceline meets Google Maps.

We got a chance to talk with the team behind Mapov in the internet below.

Kansas Startup: Lead Horse Technology Launches MedLoom Patient Safety Tool Interview

A Junction City Kansas startup called Lead Horse Technology has introduced a new patient safety tool that provides critical safety information to doctors providing patient care. Adverse reactions to medication can be life threatening in any setting, but especially in a hospital setting where doctors and nurses are charged with the care of several patients at one time. While the move to paperless charting is welcomed by all, it can actually open up risk factors such as adverse reactions to medication at an alarming rate.

Medloom, the tool created by Lead Horse Technology, is designed to be an add on for electronic health information systems and provides important medical patient safety information to doctors, nurses, technicians, pharmacists and anyone else who comes in contact with the patient and their electronic medical record (EMR).

Medloom provides pharmacovigilance (the ‘assessment and monitoring of the safety of drugs as used in the real world’) support to clinical decision-making. Unlike other “clinical decision support systems”, Medloom does not rely on published data but uses an advanced artificial intelligence algorithm to create ‘at risk’ profiles from the FDA’s adverse event reporting system, then cross-references these profiles with individual patient records to scan for those patients who match. Patient identity is never compromised or even an issue, because Medloom only looks at the patient profile (meds, background conditions, age and gender) and never captures patient ID.

In an initial clinical validation trial Medloom correctly identified 80% of the patients who were at risk for not just adverse reactions to medication but life threatening adverse reactions to medication.

We got a chance to interview Dr. Ramona Leibnitz, one of the co-founders of Lead Horse Technology about this exciting new medical startup. Check out the interview below.

Chuck Gordon & Mario Feghali Storage Warriors With Austin Startup SpareFoot

Chuck Gordon (L) Has recently lost the Justin Bieber-esque mop top (photo: forbes.com)

When you think about tech startup and storage nine times out of ten you think about cloud storage, or flash storage, RAM, DDR and any number of things. Well Austin Texas startup SpareFoot is about real storage.

Think Uncle Fred’s Storage on the side of route 40 or Grandma’s Attic storage facility tucked away behind the rest stop. Those storage facilities, the ones featured on Storage Wars, are what SpareFoot is all about.

It’s understandable at this day and age you don’t have time to go up and down the highway trying to find the best deal for your extra things. That’s why SpareFoot allows you to go to one website, figure out where you want to store your stuff, how much stuff you want to store and how long you want to store it for. After you input a little data the magical SpareFoot platform comes to life and serves up suggestions for the best self storage facility and option for you.

Two UCLA implants into Austin; Chuck Gordon and Mario Freghali are the brain power behind this startup that is firmly entrenched in the $22 billion dollar storage industry.

SpareFoot is an alumnus of the Capital Factory accelerator and is funded to the beat of $4.5 million, not too shabby, or as Dave on Storage Wars would say “yuuupppppp”. We got a chance to talk to the SpareFoot team in the interview below.

Romanian Startup PagePeeker Provides An Easy Platform For Screenshots INTERVIEW

As an Apple and Mac user for over 25 years I’ve never really had to go elsewhere to find a screen shot. My fingers just inherently go command+shift+4 anytime I need a screenshot and we tidy them up in photoshop. Apparently though, it’s not as easy for those of you using a Windows based machine. Thank goodness for startups like PagePeeker.

PagePeeker is a Romanian startup that makes screen shots and thumbnails a breeze. They bill themselves as the first commercial provider of full page screenshots. Now in all fairness full page screenshots can be tricky even for a Mac. They also offer a superior two step thumbnail generation. Everyone needs a great place to find thumbnails, just take one look at the train wreck of a slide show that our theme creates.

PagePeeker keeps things quick. In fact they are so quick that they keep a current graph on their website that shows the load time for their site, often times with very little load at all.

Does this mean no ones using the service? Well according to PagePeeker co-founder Sorin Vinatoru, they have plenty of customers and their process is so efficient the load time is often next to nothing. This is important in the fast paced blog and websphere.

We got a chance to interview Vinatoru in the interview below:

Recipes Find You With DC Startup Mor.sl INTERVIEW

Recipes find you with Washington DC startup Mor.sl. This new startup in the recipe space has turned the traditional recipe website model on it’s head. Sure they have hundreds of thousands of recipes but rather than have you searching and sifting through thousands of recipes, their intuitive algorithm matches you to recipes based on a quiz you take when joining.

The quiz is fun and practical. It’s multiple choice and you can answer questions about your cooking habits with answers like “the microwave is my best friend”. The quiz also mixes up a bunch of “this or that” questions, like tacos or creamy soup. At the end of the quiz it actually served up results that I would find appealing. With my “the microwave is my best friend” answer, the recipes that mor.sl offered were relatively easy to cook. They also asked how well stocked my pantry was. Indeed I need to do some more shopping but I think me and this mor.sl could get along.

We got a chance to talk with Milli Mittal one of the co-founders of mor.sl. Check out our interview below.

London Startup: GreenLight, Not Just Another Social Discovery App INTERVIEW

Everyone could use more friends right? Well now that finding friends has turned to social networks and everyone wants to be the match.com for friends, social discovery has become a common household phrase (at least in startup circles).

Most social discovery platforms use your social graph to determine who you need to meet. For instance, before being acquired by Facebook, Glancee would use your likes and interests on Facebook to match you with likeminded people close by. We quickly realized how faulty this process was.

Case in point, I signed up for Glancee, and used it at SXSW. Now for whatever reason, when Mark Zuckerberg got a new puppy named Beast, I liked him on Facebook. Shortly after that when I attended SXSW this year I was matched up with 30 people who also liked Mark Zuckerberg’s puppy. Maybe we should have started a fan club and had a drinking party or something but really that raw data algorithm is flawed.

Gaz Evans, one of the co-founders of GreenLight, tells us that their social discovery platform is better. They actually ask personality driven questions about each user in order to match them up with other users. They also tap the users social graph so some of their likes are built in, but overall this may be a good alternative to other social discovery platforms.

We got a chance to interview Evans and the team from GreenLight, check the interview out below. You better read it quick though, before the next social discovery platform comes along.

New Jersey Startup: Hublished Is The Virtual Convention Connection INTERVIEW

Webinars have quickly become a new and great way to continue education and get large groups of people to view and hear presentations that they may not otherwise get a chance to attend. Major brands, educational firms, consultants and business development experts have all turned to the webinar format.

One of the main problems with the webinar format though is without a marquee speaker or presenter it’s hard to distinguish the junk and hacks from good quality content. You can sometimes make a safe assumption that various organizations would only put their stamp of approval on the best webinar speakers, however, as many have found out the hard way, that’s not always the case. Once you’ve committed yourself to an hour, three hour or even five hour webinar, the time is gone.

Hublished is a startup based in New Brunswick New Jersey and New York that aims to take the pain out of webinar presentation and discovery. They hope to become the go-to place for webinar content that’s been vetted and reviewed so that your webinar experience is educational and great quality.

Hublished has two customers the publishers and the end-users. The publishers now have a place to go to place all their upcoming webinars. They can also archive their old webinars on hublished.

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

Interview With European Startup: Bookappo

Bookappo is a new European startup based in the Czech Republic. They provide an online software platform for booking and scheduling appointments using a “book now” button.

Bookappo is perfect for small businesses and even startups. The “book now” button can allow small businesses to let customers check availability and timing and then book their appointment off of the company’s website or Facebook page. The customer side dashboard allows users of book now to easily create their own booking form, email reminders and calendar.

The company has also introduced a mobile version that is accessible from an iPad, iPhone or Android powered device which makes it easy for anyone to set up appointment calendars or book appointments while on the go.

Everyone starts off with a free 30 day trial of Bookappo and then after that it’s just $19 for the lite version and $39 for the pro version. After looking over both offerings the only significant difference between lite and pro is the ability to manage the appointment schedules of “unlimited” employees. That feature is included in the pro version only.

We got a chance to talk with the guys from Bookappo in the interview below:

Tired Of Giving Crappy Gifts? Check Out Baltimore Startup: NoBadGift INTERVIEW

Nobody likes a bad gift. Receiving bad gifts can be a very uncomfortable experience. As you’re looking at that sweater that went out of style in 1990 you’ve got to smile and say thank you. Then you’re tasked with having to decide whether to hold onto that sweater for the next time your auntie comes over, return it, regift it or throw it away.

The other problem with gifting is that even though you know darn well what you want for your gifts most people just say they don’t. No one wants to feel like they’re asking for anything.

Enter NoBadGift. As the name suggests, this Baltimore startup insures you give a great gift. Why, because the recipient crowdfunds the gift that they really want from friends and family members. The Mike Washington, one of the co-founders of NoBadGift, came up with the idea for the startup when his father wanted an iPad for Christmas one year. After pooling the money for the iPad from his siblings he had an epiphany “why not do this online”.

We got a chance to talk with the team from NoBadGift in the interview below. They tell us about their gift funding system an Baltimore’s explosive startup scene. Of course being from Baltimore we love reporting about Baltimore startups.

Pennsylvania Startup: Gateskip Brings The Off Line Networking Model Online

Before you jump into this story thinking that Gateskip is just another LinkedIn wannabe, that’s not the case at all. LinkedIn is a great social network for business professionals. It’s also a great place to graduate from your Facebook existence, to just about the rest of your life.

LinkedIn has several non-intrusive ways of encouraging networking among it’s members, but they shy away from meeting new people. In fact when you want to connect with someone it asks you how you know them. If you’re familiar with traditional Chamber of Commerce business after hours, or breakfast before hours models, the purpose of the “networking” element is to meet new people.

That’s where Conshohocken Pennsylvania based Gateskip comes in. Gateskip, along with sole founder Dan Esposito, want to bring certain elements from business after hours, breakfast before hours and BNI events to the web through this new network.

While I’ve personally used LinkedIn to outsource some work and projects to people I had some kind of connection with, the ultimate purpose for LinkedIn is to serve as a social network for professionals. Gateskip is more of a business network. If you’re not sure about the difference, read on to the interview below.

While LinkedIn is connecting you to friends you may have had in high school or relationships you’ve formed through business, Gateskip is about generating leads for new found colleagues and exposing one users services to another user. Alas, it’s about actual networking.

Esposito talks to us in the interview below about Gateskip and Conshohocken which Esposito says is the Silicon Valley of Pennsylvania. It’s also home to startups like the new Scott Thompson led ShopRunner, half.com and OpenDesks just to name a few.

Yes Great Ideas Do Happen In The Shower, Interview With NY Startup Room Hints

If you like nice things, beautiful things, picturesque things but just need a little help with you’re interior design project, no worries there’s an app for that (soon). While there may be a few apps and platforms coming up in the interior design space that doesn’t worry Tiff Wilson and the team behind New York based Room Hints. In fact, they label themselves as weird, extreme and fearless, a combination that can only lead to impeccable style.

Room Hints iPhone app is currently in a private beta and you can sign up here to try it out. The app provides a host of ways to get recommendations on the latest fashions and trends in your homes. You can see what other Room Hints users are doing, you can share your ideas and designs with friends, and the app itself will suggest great design pieces as well.

Room Hints also has professional designers on board that can help you complete that interior design product. Imagine having a teen tiny interior designer at your beck and call on your smartphone. It’s like a private shopper but for interior design.

We got a chance to check in with Tiff as the team prepares for a more grand-scale launch.