Interviews Archives - Page 51 of 57

Dutch Startup: MeeChannel One Dashboard For All Your Media, INTERVIEW

The Netherlands apparently has a much bigger startup scene than we had first imagined. On Friday we brought you an interview with the Dutch startup “ShowDates” today we’re talking with the founder of MeeChannel.

MeeChannel is a new aggregator that brings all of your photos,videos, rss feeds and other online content into one simple, easy to navigate dashboard. Once you have all of your “channels” in one place you can share your favorite content from any channel, be it vimeo, YouTube, Flickr, Picasa or any one of hundreds of other sources that you subscribe to, and share them with your friends.

MeeChannel is currently in Beta and still entirely in Dutch, however the user interface makes it such that you may have no problem navigating it even in a foreign language. Pieter Havermans, MeeChannel’s founder and managing director is looking forward to expanding the service globally, after the initial beta version is released to the public and they start building scale.

They’ve actually done a really great job with the ux on the site. The concept has been done before but as with a lot of startups it’s now all about the execution.

We got a chance to talk to Havermans, check out our interview below:

Interview With California Startup: RewardMe

Loyalty and reward is the hottest space for startups right now. Within a years time (probably by the next sxsw) many of the loyalty and rewards startups out there will have disappeared and only the brightest and best will survive. One of those is California based startup RewardMe.

RewardMe was founded by four friends that were college buddies from UCLA. The company provides a point of sale based loyalty and rewards program that provides great information back to the business owner. RewardME rewards those loyal customers but it can also assist in bringing lost customers and sales back into the retail store or restaurant.

One of the unique things about RewardMe is while you can get incentives, messages and discounts via your smartphone or regular mobile phone, a smartphone isn’t required.

RewardMe’s merchant dashboard is available to any user anywhere. This is great for when the owner or manager goes out of town or if you’re managing multiple locations from one centralized office.

RewardMe has thought of everything that should be built into a solid reward and loyalty program. We got a chance to interview the guys behind RewardMe. Check out the interview below:

Interview With Aaron Gray Founder Of Atlanta Startup The Legacy Movement

As a youngster growing up almost Asian (Hawaiian) I sort of fell into a minority category. As my career in media, first in radio and then later in tech media, flourished I was no longer in the minority. Especially in the tech scene. However in our plight to cover startups “everywhere else” we also try and highlight those startups that are women owned, black owned and latino owned, because those entrepreneurs are underserved.

In fact, when we did office hours a little over a week ago in Memphis Tennessee we met the co-founders of BioNannovation a startup currently participating in the zeroto510 incubator in Memphis. The companies co-founders, Charleson Bell and Andre T Stevenson are both in their twenties and black. Both of them appeared similar to any of the other young black guys I have hung out with near my home in Baltimore. However they may both have been the smartest two guys I have ever had the chance of meeting. Bell, a Phd candidate, had discovered a nanoparticle that could change the way doctors find, track and treat virus’ and infection and Stevenson had discovered the biomarkers for cancer, before it manifests. (see what I mean BRILLIANT). Now these two on smarts alone should have no problem bringing their ideas to market, but that’s not the case for everyone.

Take another good new friend of ours, Harold, his startup Yadoog is one of the best photo-sharing ideas we’ve seen in years. Harold is really friendly, outgoing and has ideas pouring out of his brain at a mile a minute. He’s also in his twenties and black, and admittedly a little rough around the edges. He’s got another great startup as well.

This is where Aaron Gray and his Atlanta based startup “The Legacy Movement” comes into play. Gray, like many

Aaron Gray founder of Atlanta based Legacy Movement

entrepreneurs, fell into the world of corporate America early in life but had an itch that needed to be fixed. Actually, two itches, that Gray is hoping to solve with one startup.

The Legacy Movement, he hopes, will become the Linked In for anyone who wants to do deals. Anyone who wants to buy or sell a company, or launch a new company will come to the Legacy Movement they way you go to LinkedIN for talent.

His second itch, helping the underserved entrepreneur ecosystem in America, will also be solved by the same startup.

Gray filled us in on The Legacy Movement, check out the interview below:

Wisconsin Startup: DateCheckPro Keeps Your Inventory Fresh, INTERVIEW

One of the things I always bring up here at nibletz.com is the fact that sometimes the most useful startups aren’t the sexiest startups. Such is the case with DateCheckPro. DateCheckPro is a startup based in Whitewater Wisconsin and their main objective is to help keep store inventory fresh.

Date Check Pro is a cloud based solution for grocer’s to keep up with the ever important expiration dates. Andrew Hoeft the founder of Date Check Pro has done a great job of creating an easy to navigate cloud based platform and native apps for both iPhone and iPad.

Grocer’s can keep up with their expiration dates now. Date Check Pro reminds the grocer when products are coming up to their expiration dates which enables them to rotate stock or possibly put products on sale to get them out of the store before they expire and their money is wasted.

Hoeft is a student at UW-Whitewater, in between that and starting Date Check Pro we got a chance to interview him. Check out the interview below:

New Startup WarSocial Is A “Risk” Like HTML 5 Game, Interview Here

If you spent hours as a kid, or even a teenager planning, strategizing and taking over the world in the game Risk then you’ll be happy to know that two entrepreneurs have started something called WarSocial which is an HTML 5 game based on the fun, and strategy behind the game Risk.

The game was born out of another game that Bill Franceschine and his co-founder Dustin had played but was pretty much abandoned by it’s founder. They put their heads together and expanded that idea to form WarSocial. Now with one game out under their belts they may continue to develop other group played social games using HTML 5.

As a kid I played a lot of Risk, after graduating from Stratego. While many think of big multiplayer online and mobile games being fantasy, or science fiction based, it’s nice to see a startup bringing back a real thinker’s game.

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

What is warsocial?

An HTML5 social game inspired by Risk.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

Bill: Serial web entrepreneur with a deep background in poker. There is your hint about what our next game might be!

Dustin: Software engineer who was previously CTO of a venture backed startup.

Where are you based?

Distributed team: Bill in California, Dustin in NYC, contractors in Canada and India.

How did the idea for WarSocial come about?

Dustin and I met playing a simliar game. A game the creator has all but abandoned the last few years but which still has a very loyal following who play it many hours per week for years. We both saw the potential for the game to be very popular if done correctly so we decided to do it.

Briefly tell us how the game is played?

2-7 players can play. Each is randomly assigned lands on a map and those lands are randomly assigned dice. Players attempt to win the whole map by attacking the lands of other players.

Can people win prizes? Money? Virtual goods?

We are currently giving away $500 per season (roughly six weeks) in cash prizes to the top ten on our leaderboard.

Tell us one of the challenges you faced in the startup process?

Our biggest challenge thus far has been onboarding additional programmers. The game is very popular with engineers so recruiting talented developers is easy. Indeed many people reach out to us volunteering to help. However since we use a number of cutting edge technologies onboarding them has been a challenge. They have to setup a Ruby on Rails environment to work with Redis, Heroku, Pusher, HTML5 and in the near future probably also Node.js. This isn’t an easy task.

Whats next for War Social?

Continue quickly iterating based on user feedback and growing the community. Bringing the game to Facebook, iOS and Android are also top of mind. Once we are ready we’ll be using our platform to launch additional games as well. We could easily launch most turn-based games.

Linkage:

Wanna play? Check out WarSocial here

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more stories from “everywhere else”

We’re on a sneaker-strapped,nationwide startup roadtrip, check out how you can help us here

NY Startup: Emotish Lets You Share Pictures With Emotion INTERVIEW

Emotish is a new mobile app startup in New York City. They’ve taken a twist of the standard photo sharing app and added an element to it that makes this app special. The element is emotion.

With Emotish you take photos of yourself or you and your friends and you can tag it with what you’re feeling at the time and then share it via Facebook and Twitter. Users will soon be able to keep tabs on the photos and tags and see what feelings are trending, how everyone was feeling in a given area, favorite photos and contextual tags.

Emotions bring a whole new life into photo sharing. Instagram is great with it’s filters and likes but with Emotish not only will you see photos and a smile but you’ll have a better context of what the smiles about, or even what the long face or frown is about.

What makes Emotish even cooler is this isn’t just about great coders or a cool mobile app development startup. Emotish Co-Founder Ryan Wegner is actually a PhD candidate in the clinical psychology program at Columbia University. So like Smurks in Chicago, there is actual real psychology behind this app and what emotion brings to the table in people’s every day lives, in context and in photos.

We got a chance to talk to Wenger in between saving the world and developing great apps, check out the interview below:

Canadian Startup: Growple Challenges You To Grow Together Interview

While things seem to be falling apart for Waterloo Canada’s biggest company RIM, a new startup wants people to grow together. Their startup Growple is all about making challenges over anything and everything and either challenging yourself, your friends or new acquaintances using Growple’s mobile platform.

The challenges can be anything from “I challenge myself to lose 30 pounds” or I challenge Mike to pick up the girls number across the bar. Challenges are more fun when their done together. Making new friends and growing socially is more fun when it’s surrounded by challenges.

The team behind Growple is frustrated about how people claim to be “social” and how they try hard to stay connected rather than actually being connected. It’s another one of those startups that takes the virtual world and brings it to the real world, bringing the online world off line.

We got a chance to interview Growple’s co-founder Kevin Kim. Check out the interview below.

Chicago Startup: Red Meat Market Connecting People With Meat, Socially! Video Interview

Did you know that meat could be social? Of course you did, how many times have you socialized over burgers, hot dogs (is that meat) or great steaks? Well a new startup in the Chicago area is connecting people socially over meat. This time though, it’s about buying meat.

Red Meat Market, like Kansas’ AgLocal, connects people in Chicago, Madison and Milwaukee (for now) to the freshest, farm raised sustainable meat. Red Meat Market has a website and a mobile app which makes it a cinch to order meat in boxes, by dollar amount, choosing the cuts that you want.

With Red Meat Market you tell their platform what you want to spend and it tells you what you can get in your “box of meat” you can get a variety or one choice cut but this way you always stay in the budget that you want, each and every month.

There are actually a couple of social components to Red Meat Market. The first is the ability to split your “box of meat” up with friends, within the site and the app. Red Meat Market handles the payment distribution and everyone gets the meat they want. The meat box can be delivered to your door, or you can opt to attend one of Red Meat Market’s Meat Ups (clever huh). At their Meat Ups, Red Meat Market supplies the beer and the sides and everyone gets the box of meat that they ordered.

By holding a meat up you can meat or meet other Red Meat Market users and socialize or swap cuts of meats between boxes.

Red Meat Market is in a great part of the country to start a business like this. Co-Founder Mark Wilhelms blends his 18 years of digital and marketing experience with his love of meat for a new way to not just sell great, quality, grass fed meat but to connect people who love meat together.

Check out our video interview below:

Linkage:

Check out RedMeatMarket here at their website

Here’s more of our Chicago TechWeek coverage

Nibletz is the voice of startups everywhere else

Chicago Startup: Matador Transforms How People Invest INTERVIEW

What are the two ingredients for making a successful investment? Answer: Knowing what to buy and when to buy. Say its late 2004, knowing that Google’s stock was going to skyrocket beforehand and timely buying some GOOG shares would seamlessly make you rich (and also mommy proud). But how would you know what to buy (i.e. Google) and when to buy a stock or commodity? That’s where Matador comes in.

Matador is a advisory messaging platform that empowers investors to be informed from financial advisories and act on this information by messaging a broker.

Example, Yahoo! Finance recommends to buy gold or treasuries because the economy is tanking. Using Matador’s web and mobile platform, an investor can receive an instant recommendation from Yahoo! and then accordingly email or call their broker within the app. Hence, Matador streamlines the slow and boring process of manually receiving information from an advisory and communicating that time sensitive information to your broker.

Matador has real potential to innovate in the investing space that hasn’t particularly seen many successful apps. We like the value they offer to users, advisories and brokers. Plus, it doesn’t hurt to have a rockstar team including serial entrepreneur Jared Steffes, founder of Tap.Me

Co-Founder Andy Guinn gave us a sneak peak of how the app would work. Check out the video interview below:

Links we’ve got em:

Signup for Matador’s private beta

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more stories from “everywhere else”

Nibletz could use YOUR help click here

Florida Startup: Coach Crowd Helps Connect You To Private Coaches INTERVIEW

Before this year I had no idea that private coaching was such a big thing across the country. Back in May we brought you the story about Jordan Fliegel and his Boston based startup CoachUp designed to help find and vet private coaches.

CoachCrowd, a Florida startup (with one founder in Austin) is about to launch their platform to connect athletes with private coaches. They’ve even gotten the endorsement of the Offensive Coordinator at Texas A&M Kliff Kingsbury who said:

“CoachCrowd is perfect for former athletes everywhere to turn their talents and experiences into a fulfilling way to help young athletes in their community and make money.”

CrowdCoach was founded by Branndon Stewart who is a former quarterback at Texas A&M and the University of Tennessee, Allan Branch who is a former D1 offensive lineman and Steve Bristol who is co-founder of Less Everything, along with Branch.

The three combined are promising an easy to use, easy to navigate, web platform to connect youth athletes with private coaches.

We got a chance to interview Branndon about CoachCrowd.

Video Interview With Chicago Startup ReGroup Therapy

ReGroup Therapy is a new Chicago startup that brings group therapy into the digital age. The service puts together people with common conditions in a video chat style group support session. The sessions are moderated by licensed professionals.

ReGroup Therapy can be applied to any number of conditions. Say you’re looking for a support group to quit smoking or an eating disorders support group. Now you can confidentially attend a group therapy session from the comfort of your own home.

One of the best parts though, is because it’s done over the internet and via video, you don’t have to miss your session if you travel out of town. You can access ReGroup Therapy from a laptop or a tablet and have the same experience.

Co-Founder David Cohn tells us that right now they are working with women with maternal depression and anxiety and plan to expand to a number of other group support offerings.

Cohn and his co-founder Sari Nass Ziv are two friends who met during their MBA studies in 2010. Cohn had developed an interest in the way technology can change people’s lives while volunteering in the Peace Corps in Guatemala. That passion stuck with him through more traditional positions in technology.

Nass Ziv started patients with mental illness as part of her psychology studies but then pivoted to the business world. That passion for helping people also stuck with Nass Ziv.

In 2011 as Nass Ziv was pregnant with her first child and Cohn’s wife Ana was pregnant at the same time, they started the idea for ReGroup Therapy which launched earlier this year.

Check out our video interview with Cohn below.

Linkage:

For more info visit ReGroupTherapy.com

Here’s more of our coverage from TechWeek 2012

Nibletz is on the sneaker strapped, nationwide startup road trip and could use a hand

Indianapolis Startup: Blab Bubble Is A DIY Platform For Pay Per Click Social Media Advertising INTERVIEW

If you haven’t noticed advertising is moving away from traditional online pay per click models of years past. Advertisers are reaching out to both mobile and social media channels for advertising.

Companies like Ad.ly,MyLikes and Sponsored Tweets allow individuals with good social media followings to capitalize on their tweets, likes and recommendations by offering cash based incentives. Blab Bubble is a new startup that’s coming into the same space with a new spin that may work out even better in the long run.

Blab Bubble spent a lot of time and money researching the market to find out where social media advertising is breaking down. They found two key areas that had the biggest pain points.

The first was that many advertisers felt that traditional social media advertising sites were too cumbersome when trying to create campaigns. The other area that needed improvement was in the startup and small business arena. Most social media advertising companies targeted big brands and enterprise. Of course, with that, they were pricing small businesses and startups out of the market.

Blab Bubble has created a simple, easy to use interface for businesses of any size to set up social media campaigns. The process takes just a few minutes and the campaign is off and running. Blab Bubble also offers very easy to understand pricing, how about $.40 per click no matter who you are.

We got a chance to interview BlabBubble to find out more about this Indianapolis startup and their spin on social media advertising.

Video Interview With Memphis Startup Paytopia Making Payments Safer & Easier

There are a lot of payment startups out there today. There are consolidated payment solutions and mobile payment solutions coming out of the woodwork. None of them though are focused on convenience and safety, the way that Memphis startup Paytopia is.

We originally met Mike Hoffmeyer CEO and founder of Paytopia a few weeks back at 48 Hour Launch in Memphis. Hoffmeyer, like many others in Memphis isn’t just a local founder and CEO but he regularly gives back to the local startup community by mentoring, helping with pitches and pitching in at events like 48 Hour Launch. In fact when we met with him at our office hours in Memphis we were talking about the the startups he is helping at ZeroTo510 a medical device and biotech incubator in Memphis.

Hoffmeyer, a graduate of the most recent class at Seed Hatchery, loves helping other startups and of course working on Paytopia.

Hoffmeyer spent most of his career in the payment business. He worked with credit card processing and ACH processing (direct debit and checking account payments). Over the years he figured there had to be a better way then filling out these long, sometimes un-secure forms with all of your important information. Hoffmeyer set out to develop a system that was both easier and faster. That system is Paytopia.

In a nutshell Paytopia works like this.

If you buy something at an online merchant that uses the Paytopia system you will only need your email address and Paytopia pin. From there the merchant will ping your bank via the Paytopia system. Paytopia will send you a message with an authentication code for that transaction either in-app or SMS. You’ll then enter the authentication code into the transaction and voila, paid via your bank account.

Paytopia effectively takes a big bite out of payment fraud in the online environment by having a two step authentication system. The only way that a Paytopia customer could be defrauded was if the person committing the fraud had both the customers Paytopia pin and the authentication code delivered by app or SMS message. If someone tries to make a fraudulent Paytopia purchase the worst that can happen is the customer will get a bunch of text messages with authentication codes. Without that code, the fraudster can’t finish the transaction.

Check out more about this great new way to pay in the video below:

Linkage:

Find out more about Paytopia here at Paytopia.com

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more stories from “everywhere else”

Happy Fourth Of July, Help us cover the startups “everywhere else” in America here

Interview With Indiana Startup BizProps VIDEO

During my nearly 20 year radio career I had one of the ultimate secret weapons, it was called American Hole In One, this company is the company that sponsors the gigantic birthday game heard on many radio stations across the country as well as those hole in one for a million dollar contests that are held often at golf tournaments of any size.

The great thing about that company was that it allowed radio stations of any size to perform gigantic promotions which of course are the catalyst to generating new business and new leads.

An Indiana company by the name of BizProps is doing something very similar with companies and their online marketing. Now we’re not talking about badly written flashy banner ads that say “You’re our millionth customer click here”. We’re talking about a real promotional company with a solid marketing background that works.

Bizprops will help you generate leads, validate your message and amplify your reach through social media channels. To demonstrate the effectiveness of BizProps Tony Monteleone from BizProps ran a campaign surrounded by this past Thursday’s Verge Startups meeting, where they were presenters.

With very little social effort he was able to garner 1000 signups, lot’s of genuine Facebook likes and social media amplification. While Verge Indy startup meet ups sell out and have over 1000 members, they’re relatively small compared to BizProps newer clients like national consumer electronics chain HH Greg and Ford. So as you can see BizProps is making headway with their company.

Don’t let the big names scare you away though BizProps can scale their product to any sized company and they work with small companies all the way up through giant enterprises.

For more information check out the video interview below:

Linkage:

For more on BizProps click here

Check out our video interview with Verge Startups founder Matt Hunckler here

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more stories from “everywhere else”

We Need Your Help