Comments Off on Nibletz Teams Up With StarTropica For Strategic Content Partnership0LikeLike 1,303
Here at the nibletz world headquarters we are pleased to announce that we have entered into a strategic content partnership with Moises Szarf and StarTropica.
StarTropica, “cracking the startup coconut”, is the premiere startup and high growth technology website super serving southern Florida, specifically Miami.
Although just launched three months ago Szarf has been gathering and reporting on Miami area startup news continuously since then as both an outreach and traction tool for Miami’s fledging startup community.
We are particularly pleased to announce this partnership on the heels of the Startup America Regions Summit which served as a hyper advocate to promote startup communities working together and partnering for the good of the overall startup ecosystem across the country. Also, a strategic partnership with StarTropica at this time cements the foundation for our evolving plan for the nibletz.com brand and long term goals.
Our partnership with StarTropica will include story pick ups, custom content provided by Szarf and his staff as well as co-hosting events and meetups in Miami Beach (and who doesn’t want to partner when it means trips to Miami).
Nibletz.com content originating out of Miami Florida will either be diverted to the StarTropica staff, or cross posted from the Nibletz hub. Miami startups are encouraged to keep corresponding with StarTropica directly or feel free to email miami@nibletz.com
We look forward to increasing our coverage of the great startups in the sunshine state.
Comments Off on We Need Startup SWAG!!!!!0LikeLike 2,265
As many of you know we’re on a nationwide sneaker strapped startup road trip and it’s about to pick up for a long three month run. In the next three months we will be in Cincinnati, Austin Texas, San Diego, Portland, Nashville (again), Milwaukee, Columbus, Boston, Washington DC, Philadelphia, and most likely Florida.
We will be at accelerator demo days, startup weekends, 48 hour launch events, Global Entrepreneurship week events, CTIA MobileCon, SXSWEco and many more events.
What startup wouldn’t like to have their t-shirt in front of the thousands of people, startups and investors that we’ll see during this leg of the trip. Heck you may even be lucky enough to have your startup swag featured in one of our many videos that stay on YouTube forever.
So here’s what you gotta do. Send us your SWAG. Send an email to startups@nibletz.com and let us know that you want to send us SWAG. We’re looking for t-shirts (of course), hats, hoodies, shoes, whatever you’ve got. We need at least two if you’re sending shirts and XL and XXL are our preferred sizes. We actually have three co-founders, and our third insists he’s a medium (he’s lying so send a large along for him).
When we get your SWAG in the mail we’ll write a nice story about you, featuring your SWAG and if your SWAG really rocks we’ll do a video, and maybe even have Mr. Voice our voice guy do a little intro to your SWAG wearing video.
The cooler the SWAG the more we’ll wear it. Let me just clue you in a little bit.
I wear my “Why Combinator” shirt from Wahooly at least twice a week, more when we’re on “tour”.
I love the softness of my big green RentStuff t-shirt
We love the Justdecide t-shirts because it’s bad ass that it says “Born in Brooklyn” on the back.
We wear our dog tags from Rawporter and always pack Rawporter Condoms (LOL)
and so much more, but it’s time to re-up the wardrobe so if you’ve got SWAG and you want to be featured just email us. It’s that easy. startups@nibletz.com
Our laptops could probably use some sticker changing too. You probably know we have an enormous social audience (110k +) and get a lot of hits on the site, but on the road real people see us all the time, and now they’ll see your stuff too.
Linkage:
Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more startup stories from “everywhere else”
Comments Off on Nibletz Has News X3 Jobs, Interns, And Data Base0LikeLike 1,334
We’ve got some big huge news for Nibletz that we will be announcing shortly. In the meantime we’ve got these three BIG news items for you today.
Jobs
We are going to start a jobs section for nibletz.com as soon as we have enough jobs submitted (knowing how our community works that should be this week). Any startup “everywhere else” can send their job posting to jobs@nibletz.com and we will post it for you.
Please be sure to include contact information in the form of an email address, and or a direct applicant page. The listing can be as long as you would like. Each listing will get it’s own “page” on our site. We will list your job for FREE, however if you want to be part of our social media broadcast including our huge Twitter presence, Facebook, Google+ and AOL Radio (yes we own the AOL/Slacker radio station TDGN) then we ask for a $25 donation here to help with our outreach and road trip expenses. We will allow any jobs from any startup and YOU will be responsible for letting us know when the job is filled and to strike that page. Again you can email the listing here and submit the donation here. The posting is free and will live on our site until the job is filled. We will promote it heavily for the $25 donation, and we know you love what we do so help the cause.
Interns
We are looking for a few good writing interns. Perhaps you would like to highlight entrepreneurship and startups in your area. We want interns who can commit to a few stories (or as many stories as they would like) per week.
Interns will learn the ins and outs of writing and working on a daily startup and tech website (blog). They will also learn best practices, how to create, edit and append Word Press posts and more. Interns will also be invited to attend regional startup and entrepreneurial events to cover the events for the site.
In exchange we will complete all your paperwork for college credit. We will also get you cleared into regional events that you can cover for the site and add as resume items.
You don’t need to be in college to do this if you feel like contributing to the site please send us an email at interns@nibletz.com
There may be an opportunity for those that excel quickly to either start earning money or equity into the business. Together we can grow the voice of startups everywhere else.
DataBase
We are going to introduce a new database of startups and startup resources “everywhere else” we aren’t looking to clone crunchbase or angel.co we are still staunch believers in the power of both. We are looking to create a database and community of startups outside of the valley to help and grow together. If you would like to submit your startup to the database, for now it can be done as an email to database@nibletz.com.
If you’re one of the nearly 1000 startups we’ve covered since the beginning of the year, we have an intern working on compiling that data now. We will launch the database in the coming weeks.
Comments Off on Happy Fourth Of July Startups Everywhere Else, From The Nibletz Team0LikeLike 1,535
While many of us are still working all through the holiday because it’s the startup way we just wanted to take this time to wish all the startups “everywhere else” a Happy Fourth Of July. Keep plugging away. Keep practicing your pitch. Keep reaching for those dollars. Keep testing your model. Keep failing and trying again.
But please take a quick break at some point in your day to watch this quick video,and crack open an ice cold Bud Light. You deserve it.
And if you’re so inclined, by us a beer or two and help us get out on the road again.
We just recently completed another leg of our sneaker-strapped nationwide startup road-trip. Cameron and I went to Memphis,Chicago,Madison WI, Indianapolis,St.Louis and back to Memphis. We had an awesome time along the way and met some great new friends as well.
We were in Chicago for Chicago TechWeek. The four day event was filled with technology and startups. It was there that we met the world famous Nick Tippmann who has quickly become a great friend. We also met Junaid, Michael Muhny the co-founder of ACT, Dana from Wahooly and many many more.
In Madison WI, Brad Orego from TrinkerApp absolutely floored us by setting up a meet up for us with nearly 20 different startups represented in under 4 hours notice. Absolutely incredible! We also went to the offices of PerBlue and Murfies and then had office hours in downtown Madison on a beautiful night, which was also the first night of their outdoor concert series.
Next we went to Indianapolis. Tippmann had invited us there to meet Matt Hunckler and see one of his Verge Indy events up close and personal. We also got to tour the coolest startup/developer/hacker space in the world, Developer Town, more on that later.
Next, we were headed to Memphis for office hours but we were able to make St. Louis an overnight stop. We woke up to spend some time with the guys from LockerDome and also got to talk St. Louis startups with Rick Holton Jr of Holton Capital and Venture STL.
Friday we got to hang out with the crew from LaunchMemphis again at a party at the Memphis Music Foundation. The next day we did office hours with some of the startups from Zero to510 incubator in Memphis.
It was an exceptional time and we got so much content, met so many new people and saw a great deal of the country.
As many of you know we are able to carry out our mission with the help of startups everywhere else. We are committed to being on the road an average of three weeks every month until September 2013 (not this September next September)
Why so long?
We want to see, help and report on as many startups outside of Silicon Valley (that’s the everywhere else part) as we possibly can. We have also secured a book deal for release in Q4 of 2013 on over 500 startups from “everywhere else”.
Our publisher has also promised us a kick ass party at CES 2014 where we will debut our book at Eureka Park.
Comments Off on NIbletz Says Thanks! There’s Still A Little Time0LikeLike 1,480
Thank you first off for being readers of nibletz.com the “voice of startups everywhere else”. If our rapid increase in traffic on our website and social media channels are any indication, it seems we’re doing a good, or at least decent job.
We wanted to also say thank you to all of those people who contributed to our indiegogo campaign for phase Deux of our sneaker strapped nationwide startup road trip. We’ve committed ourselves to staying on the road 75% of every month through September 2013. During this time we’re going to be visiting startup focused events, startup weekends, hackathons, incubators, accelerators, startup offices and everywhere else we can pick up the vibe and report on the growing ecosystem of startups “everywhere else”
Before we get too long winded here is the link to our indiegogo page, the video is great our good friend Sean, voice to hundreds of radio and tv stations voiced it (as he does all of our videos) and it’s great. Please check out the video, donate $2 (or more) and share it across social media. The campaign ends at midnight tonight (Eastern time) here’s the link again
About “everywhere else”
We launched nibletz.com last Spring (2011) We were invited to cover TechCrunch Disrupt in New York for our other site and we became so mesmerized by everything there, and all of the passionate startup founders that we created a site to offload those posts off our mobile focused web brand.
We also took on the tag line “small crunchy bytes from the tech and startup scene”. We had a business plan that included becoming a compliment in capsulated form to TechCrunch (hence the crunch and the bytes), we took to Twitter and it was determined in a landslide that “Nibletz” were small crunchy bytes.
Well like every trying, startup we pivoted. We began to notice that startups “everywhere else” weren’t getting the coverage they needed and deserved. We launched the “everywhere else” concept at the new year and ran wild with it at South By Southwest. The response thus far has been phenomenal.
With our media backgrounds we’ve been involved in the tech scene and even researching and scoping startups for a number of years, but we took the blinders off to the rest of the country and WOW is the word that comes to mind.
Let it be known that we have nothing against the valley. San Francisco is an awesome place to visit, the valley is a tech geeks heaven as far as vacations go. Yes our founders have all ridden the bikes on the Google campus, dined at Facebook and even tweeted from Twitter. We’ve got great friends in the Valley and silent advisors who would probably shock some of our readers.
The startups “everywhere else” are like an elephant in the room. Everyone knows that we’re out there but no one is giving them coverage, not like this.
Cameron ran some great statistics this week and we found out that since January we’ve featured over 375 startups from “everywhere else” and the momentum, amount of content and features just increases month over month.
That’s all because of you.
Whether you’re in Boise Idaho, Memphis TN, Florida, Arizona or any of our great 50 states, or London, Israel and even a few countries we’ve never heard of, we’ve got your back. We’ve never purposely turned down any startup who pitches us for coverage at startups@nibletz.com unless of course you’re in the not “everywhere else” part.
We’ve got some really exciting things coming up in the next month or two including a really cool interactive that will help startups like yourselves, and us, crowd source the startup “everywhere else” community to help with their dilemmas, so keep an eye out for that.
We’ve started forging great friendships across the country and around the world and we thank you for that and your support.
We wanted to say thanks to everyone who donated anything on indiegogo from $2 on up. We actually received a donation Thursday that asked to remain anonymous of $1000 you know who you are and we thank you so much.
We also wanted to thank those of you who couldn’t donate but donated your time and your social media space by tweeting about us. We’re a startup ourselves, it’s hard. I could tell you the story about getting coins out of the couch, the seats in the car and off the washing machine to give my daughter $10 for a field trip, it’s real we know it.
Which is actually the reason that we’ve turned down to angel investors and plan to continue to not seek traditional angel and venture funding. We want to stay true to our core of everywhere else and we want to keep our ethics inline as journalists. That’s why crowd funding is so important for us.
We also wanted to point out that there are three other sites that we really like (and there in no particular order) that also cover startups outside of the traditional cities and they are, tech.li , TechCocktail and Beatabeat. So please add them to your readers as well if they’re not already there.
Again thank you so much for reading, contributing and helping out nibletz, the voice of startups “Everywhere Else”
Capital Connection TechBUZZ ’12 Had Steve Case as the Keynote speaker at the end of the two days. In 1985 Steve Case founded AOL. It was the first internet company to go public, it was the largest media acquisition of its time.
When crowdfunding was brought up he spoke about the ability to raise funds for projects via indiegogo or kickstarter Recently he has been spending a lot of time in Washington DC convincing the US Government to deal with entrepreneurial issues and American jobs. When asked how he feels about crowdfunding (JOBS Act) he mentioned the fact that it has been passed and is waiting for the SEC to finish their part. The law had previously stated that it was illegal to sell private equity to investors online. “You can sell the whole business – 100% but you will go to jail if you sell 1%” Case stated “for the first 6 years it was illegal for us to connect to the internet.” The JOBS act focuses on modernizing an extremely old system.
In this short clip he discusses the benefits he sees in crowdfunding for startups and where it will may have the biggest benefit. As we are well aware, if you are in North Dakota, Philly, St Louis, Chicago, or Everywhere Else – it is very difficult to get covered by media outlets or to raise seed or angel capital. This is where we come in. We are planning on driving across the country for just over a year meeting with startups, incubators, accelerators, and their towns. While we cannot directly assist in helping you raise capital, we are sneaker strapped ourselves, we can help get your names out. We will come to your city and spend time with you. We don’t discriminate against a lack of funds being raised or lack of angels in your region. We only care about meeting startups who are making a go at something new.
We do need some help though, which explains the title of the article, our case has been made by Steve Case himself. Take a look below:
Comments Off on Nibletz Sneaker Strapped Road Trip Fundraiser, Now That’s More Like It0LikeLike 1,264
First off we wanted to thank everyone who contributed to our Nibletz sneaker strapped road trip fundraiser. We appreciate the donations and they are being put to good use on the road.
However it’s no secret that we had no idea what we were doing when we set it up and we had an extremely lofty goal of $25,000 we were hoping to fund the entire 14 month road trip in the bus but as a startup ourselves we’ve realized that was a ton of money and also with $25 the first donation someone could make, that could be even too much for some of our startup friends.
We consulted with a few of the crowd-funding startup founders that we’ve covered so far and some people who’ve been successful at indiegogo and kickstarter as well as some of the people that work for those two sites. We’ve revamped our entire fundraiser. We’ve added a $2.00, $5.00 and $10.00 donation option and decreased our goal to $5,000.
We’ve also worked out some strategic hubs across the country where we could safely park the bus and have friends and colleagues either help us with transportation to surrounding areas or hop on a low fare bus like MegaBus and BoltBus to get to some of the other towns on our journey.
We’ve started our road trip back up again in the Prius. We will immediately move to the bus quasi-full time when we hit our $5,000 goal (within 1 to 2 weeks of funding), and until then continue our mission, goal and project in the Prius.
Thanks for all your feedback. If you want us to come to your city please email us at tips@nibletz.com let us know who you are, and we’ll make a trip of it.
Comments Off on Nibletz Road Trip To Continue This Week0LikeLike 1,413
Thanks for checking out Nibletz.com whether you’re new to the site or have us on RSS and come every time there is a new story, thank you thank you thank you.
The feedback to the site and our mission to be the voice of startups “everywhere else” has been met with great enthusiasm from startups we’ve covered, and startups that we haven’t covered to angels, VC’s, incubators, tech enthusiasts, and startup enthusiasts alike.
We’ve actually only had two pieces of bad feedback, both along the lines of “Silicon Valley” is where all the startups are. We actually found out by talking with Jared Konczal Senior Analyst at the Kauffman foundation that, that can’t be further from the truth. There are over 300,000 startup stage companies across the country and only a fraction of them are in the valley.
We love the valley and what it’s done for technology. Our other site wouldn’t be where it is without the valley, but our mission is “everywhere else”.In covering that message we found very early on that the best way to do that is to get in the trenches with all the other startups. We’re a startup ourselves and that kind of coverage has meant sleeping in the car (and a whole lot of Motel 6’s and Red Roof Inns), eating a lot of Ramen and Pop Tarts, going to every mixer with free hor dourves and camping out while covering incubators and co-working spaces so we can really get some work done.
We’re headed back out by car at first, but we’ve been given the opportunity to use a friends 37′ bus as a mobile newsroom, promotional vehicle for our mission and the startups everywhere else, and as a place to sleep and take a shower. Of course that costs money that’s why we have this indiegogo page set up. Please check it out and help if you can.
Over the next three weeks we’re going to be in New Orleans, Chattanooga (again), New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Boston and Connecticut. We’ll be gradually moving west towards Chicago, St.Louis, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Omaha, Wisconsin, and many more. We are going to be on the road from next week through September of 2013 taking a 5 day break every 3 or 4 weeks to be with our families and rest.
We’re doing this because it’s an explosive time for growth for startups and we’ve made so many great friends along the way. We’ve seen so many great areas and we can’t wait to see more.
So wish us luck and please check out our indiegogo page. Also if you want us to stop in your town please drop us an email at startup@nibletz.com let us know your startup, incubator, co-working space or event and we’ll see if it works in our calendar.
The nationwide startup community everywhere else is great and it’s only getting greater! Here’s another link to the indiegogo page
Word got back to the Nibletz headquarters that a colleague of ours based in Silicon Valley told another colleague of ours “Nibletz, They’re all over the place”. That has to be the best compliment about nibletz.com
If this is one of your first trips here, here’s a little bit about is. This is our second new media startup. We soft launched it in June of 2011 basically at Disrupt. Our mobile focused site was doing very well and two of our writers Brent Fishman and Cameron Wright, and I wanted to write about other things outside of mobile operating systems. When Cameron and I went to Disrut in NY we soft launched Nibletz with a lot of that content.
We’ve actually pivoted twice and at South By Southwest our mission became very clear. We were becoming the Voice of startups everywhere else. Our traffic grew over 500% and continues to grow every day/week. After South By Southwest we decided we immediately needed to get in the trenches and live and breathe this thing like a startup, and we are.
We piled into Wright’s Toyota prius with 5 kilos of Mate, peanut butter and jelly, Ramen for the hotels and stay between the car, the rest stops and Red Roof Inns (you know they’ve upgraded a lot of their hotels). We’ve made some awesome friends in our travels and will continue to do so. We plan on staying pretty much on the road through the summer of 2013 (taking 4 or 5 days every 3 weeks to see our families).
We’ve discovered some truly awesome startup clusters in Washington DC, Philly, Richmond, Chattanooga, Birmingham Alabama and many more places. We’ve covered startups all over the place. One thing about this great country, and the world is that there are great ideas EVERYWHERE. Maybe next year we’ll go overseas too.
Now we’ve got the opportunity of a lifetime. A friend of ours, from our first site, has agreed to donate to us, the use of his 37′ bus for the rest of the trip. This means we can stop sleeping in the car and at Red Roofs. We can write more often and stay at stops longer to get even more of the great stories. We plan on going back and forth across the country and into Canada.
We’re turning to our fellow startups, incubators, accelerators, VC’s, angels and everyone in the startup community to help support our efforts. The downside to the bus is that it has a 75 gallon gas tank and goes about 8 miles per gallon. That’s roughly $400 per tank.
We’ve set up an indiegogo page at http://indiegogo.com/nibletz we’ve got some awesome sponsorship packages out there for what well be a legendary trek through America highlighting the best startups in little towns, medium cities and “Everywhere Else”
Our good friend Caleb who has co-woring spaces throughout the country kicked us off last week. Our new friends at LockerDome in St.Louis have also contributed.
Please take a look and support us if you can. We even give hugs and share Mate.
Kyle
Here at the nibletz world headquarters we are pleased to announce that we have entered into a strategic content partnership with Moises Szarf and StarTropica.
Nibletz
Cameron Wright
