Road Trip Archives - Page 2 of 2

We Talk With Matt Burris Founder Of Startup Weekend Crane In Indiana VIDEO

The Nibletz nationwide sneaker strapped startup roadtrip pulled up in Indianapolis Thursday to check out Verge Indy’s startup event. The event is held on the last Thursday every month and brings together a tremendous amount of people from Indianapolis and the surrounding areas’ startup and entrepreneurial tech scene.

We got a chance to meet Matt Burris who co-founded Startup Weekend Bloomington with Super Nick. Burris is a hardware and product guy that’s working on some awesomesauce in his top secret lab by day. By night Burris is a strong advocate and evangelist for the startup scene in both Indianapolis and Bloomington.

This October though, he’s headed to Crane Naval Base (well just outside of it) for one of the first Startup Weekend’s centered around a military base to date.

Burris already got his feet wet with the Bloomington event, now he’s able to focus on a truly unique Startup Weekend that he believes will produce a large number of hardware and product ideas vs the traditional mostly software and social media ideas that commonly come out of Startup Weekend events.

Check out our video interview with Burris below and check back with us in a little while to hear more about what Burris is working on at his company RT6:

Ahhh the Linkage:

Find out more about Startup Weekend Crane here at this link

Check out Matt’s daytime job where he is founder of RT6 here

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Indiana Startups: This Is Nick Tippmann VIDEO INTERVIEW

Indiana entrepreneur and startup founder Nick Tippmann and I have a lot in common. First off we both get carded to buy cigarettes (I know I know I need to quit), and he would probably get carded for NC-17 movies as well. The fact is that Tippmann is actually 22 years old and has already founded a startup that has been moved to the back burner.

Nick’s Impulse Coupons startup has is a great idea but he told us that he couldn’t put the right team together. He also quickly became very involved in the Indiana startup scene and the midwest startup scene. In just the last year (and at 22 but looking 15) Tippmann has: attended all the startup events at SXSWi, hosted a Shark Tank season premiere party for Mark Cuban (which Cuban attended), been to DEMO on DEMO’s dime, Big Omaha,Chicago TechWeek, oh and did we mention that he founded Startup Weekend Bloomington?

Right now the connections that Tippmann has made probably mean he could do anything or go anywhere he wanted. He was able to foster a relationship with Cuban at the party he and his mentor Larry Chiang threw for Cuban while he was in town for the Super Bowl which just happened to be the same weekend as the Shark Tank season 3 premiere.

He’s also formed a relationship with Startup America CEO Scott Case and countless others. Heck 500 startups founder Dave McClure even follows Super Nick on Twitter.

Tippmann is a whirlwind of startup energy with the conviction of only the most hardworking entrepreneurs and founders. He went to TechWeek in Chicago last week with a very unclear plan of where he was staying, locked his keys in the car one night and slept in it the next.

Tippmann takes every opportunity he gets to establish new relationships and nurture the ones he’s already had.

So what’s Super Nick doing next? Tippmann rode the Startup Bus from Cincinnati to South By Southwest. The Startup Bus kicked off at the Brandery and from that experience he knew he wanted to get into the next session which starts Monday. He has joined a team called Flock’d which is pivoting from a bar and restaurant check-in app, to something awesome in the world of sports.

Tippmann will leave for Cincinnati on Sunday but admitted tonight at the Verge event in Indianapolis that he hasn’t packed and has no idea where he’ll live. Lucky for him he drives a Suburban which could grow to be quite comfortable. The co-founders at Flock’d are going to make sure he has a roof over his head so he can get to work spreading the word about their startup and creating the fire that comes natural to him.

So what does Tippmann do in his free time? Well he meets more people, talks about more startups, mentors for the Lean Startup Machine in Chicago, consults with anyone who wants to talk to him and plans his next conquest.

Check out the interview video below:

Yup we’ve got some linkage:

Check out Nick Tippman’s Blog here

Follow Nick on Twitter here

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Chicago’s Wunderland Group Wins Best Service Provider To Tech Community

The Wunderland Group, a staffing firm headquartered in Chicago has a national presence with offices in San Francisco, Austin, New York and New Jersey took home the Moxie Award for Greatest Service For the Tech Community. The Moxie Awards recognize leaders in the Chicago Technology space.

Wunderland was selected out of 70,000 votes and were recognized in front of 800 people from all walks of life within the thriving Chicago tech scene.

Although, technically separate entities entirely, the Moxie Awards for all intents and purposes kicked off Chicago’s four day TechWeek 2012 Conference

Although most people may not think a staffing company makes sense to win an award to the startup and tech community, The Wunderland Group goes above and beyond in the cities they serve, especially at home in Chicago.

The Wunderland Group holds technology focused meetups, provides mentors to various Startups and organizations, invests back in the community and of course serves as a staffing resource to any sized company.

The three original founders were on hand at the Moxie Awards ceremony held at the Park West Theater in Chicago last Thursday. What made the event even more memorable was that they we presented the award by the evening’s emcee, Saurin Choksi. Choksi is a Ruby on Rails developer who also happens to be the first placement ever for The Wunderland Group, three years ago.

Linkage:

For more on The Wunderland Group, Click Here

See our Chicago TechWeek Coverage Here

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We Talk With Madison City Councilman Scott Resnick About Open Data

By day Scott Resnick is the Vice President and partner in Hardin Design & Development in Madison Wisconsin. The company is a creative app powerhouse with a client roster that includes Mercedes, Toyota,Coleman Campers and Fedex. Hardin Design & Development continues on a trajectory of explosive growth and is currently expanding to Chicago.

After that Resnick is also an influencer in Madison’s thriving tech startup scene. There are a great bunch of people that seem to know everything going on in Madison, and that’s not because it’s a small town. They have a lot of centralized startup events and even shoulder groups that meet every month who are focused on things like health tech and hacking.

The list of resources for Madison startups would be reminiscent of a city with a million people. Madison has just a quarter of that. On our two days of office hours in Madison we learned about Capital Entrepreneurs, Madison Startup Weekend, Build Madison, Forward Technology Festival and some shoulder groups. Resnick is involved with almost all of these.

If that’s not enough to keep one man busy he’s married and he’s also a Madison Alderperson or CityCouncilman (depending on what PC hat you’re wearing today).

There are a lot of causes that Resnick supports and ran on including keeping the safety, alcohol, landlord tenant laws and open data.

The first three platforms are pretty self explanatory. As for open data, Resnick wrote the legislation for Madison to open up their public data so that developers could develop apps around it. Resnick said that any record that can be requested by open record requests can be available via open data.

Once he was able to get the data opened Madison went to work holding a Startup Weekend event to develop startups and apps surrounded by the data.

He gave us a couple examples of projects that came out of the open data hackathon. One was a startup that wanted to do pet health records. The entrepreneur went to work using pet license data available from the city to start developing the pet health records product.

Resnick told us that vendor carts are a big part of downtown Madison. Most recently the vendor cart licensing data and location for where they’re allowed to vend is kept on note cards. They have someone interested in producing an app to locate vendor carts and if this data goes electronic they can.

Madison was the second city in the nation to have their public data opened like this. New York as the first. Resnick told us there are many municipalities who have started toying with the idea but haven’t fully adopted it yet so they don’t have to necessarily give access to all the records.

Resnick is hoping the next step for Madison is to allow city API’s to go from “pushing the data to pulling the data”. When that’s available entrepreneurs will be able to create apps and startups for things like reporting a problem to a city. Resnick says many municipalities do this wrong. Most city’s use some kind of form emailed to a city manager or engineer and then the city manager or engineer uses their internal system to communicate job tickets and distribute projects.

When Resnick’s next vision for data is set in motion developers could develop an app that would allow resident’s to add their job to the queue, all of this done of course, by third party applications.

Linkage:

Check out Resnicks Day Job Here

Article from Capital Entrepreneur’s on the open data initiative

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Madison Startup: My Fashion Assistant, Is Well, Your Fashion Assistant

Nibletz spent Tuesday and Wednesday holding office hours in Madison Wisconsin. The startup scene is thriving as a matter of fact, our good friend Brad at Trinker in Madison helped organize a healthy sized, last minute meet up at the beautiful Union Terrace at UW.

Wednesday we spent some time with the co-working startups at Murfie’s office in downtown Madison.

One of the startups we met with was MyFashionAssistant and co-founder Louie Penaflor. Penaflor has a lot of great stories to tell about his work life in Manhattan at magazine publishing powerhouse Conde Nast which was actually the inspiration for MyFashionAssistant.

At first glance Penaflor does not look like he would be one of the founders of a fashion app for iOS and Android that has over 50,000 users. But boy he knows his stuff. Not only that but like many of the people we met in Wisconsin he is very excited about the Madison startup scene.

As for MyFashionAssistant, it’s a three panel slider app that allows users to take pictures of their wardrobe and then mix, match and mash them up in three sections which are shoes, pants (skirts etc) and tops. Now the beauty of MyFashionAssistant is that since right now most of the content is user generated, a fashion conscious man could easily use the same app.

Penaflor told us that he came up with the idea on many of his subway rides in New York. He noticed that everyone in New York is so laser lined focused on what’s right in front of them. “No one really looks at each other, but they do look at their phones and iPads” Penaflor told us.

On more than one occasion he would see groups of friends breaking the no looking rule to hover over someone’s phone or iPad and flip through pictures. It was that flipping through pictures that made a bell go off in Penaflor’s head and think about what if they could flip through their wardrobe.

Deciding what to wear is a major pain point for some folks. They spend hours thinking about what they’re going to wear. Colleagues of Penaflor’s at Conde Nast would bring up in conversation three days early what they might wear going out Saturday night.

Another major pain point is sometimes people forget exactly how this shirt or blouse matches that pair of pants, but not with MyFashionAssitant.

Users take pictures and catalog as much of their wardrobe as they want. Now when they’re at the mall or a new store they can easily see if something is going to look good on them. They can even open up the app while they’re flipping through magazines.

Right now MyFashionAssistant is supporting itself as it’s a paid app. Penaflor is weighing all of his funding options. He could use MyFashionAssistant’s treasure trove of data and market research as a revenue stream. He could partner with other companies, or even white label the technology for name brand stores.

Penaflor admits there are some apps that match fashion the way his does but he started MyFashionAssistant back when there were just 2000 apps in the Apple app store. Also, most competitors are name brand manufacturers who of course only feature their clothes within the app.

MyFashionAssitant supports thousands of different brands across their user base. Penaflor says he could see possibly doing advertising but not in the traditional way. Brands could pay to have their newest lines included in the app so that potential customers could try out the company’s new designs with the users current wardrobe.

Penaflor likes his app to a virtual fitting room. He said Steve Jobs validated the need for MyFashionAssistant by saying iPhone (smartphones) is a lifestyle device and of course fashion is all about lifestyle.

Linkage:

Check out MyFashionAssistant here at their webpage

Download for Android

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Interview With Chicago Startup: Swapidy

Swapidy is a brand new Chicago startup that just had it’s public launch Monday as part of Startup City at Chicago’s TechWeek 2012.

Swapidy is a pretty cool idea. The startup serves as the go-between for two people looking to swap, or straight up trade items of value or trade up if you want to and can find someone willing. For instance if you had an iPhone and you wanted to trade for the new Nexus 7 tablet by Google, you would be able to list your iPhone in an ebay style listing for trade.

Within the platform you would be able to describe the item, the condition and then say what items you would be willing to trade for. Once someone finds your iPhone and has the item you want to trade for, you set up the trade through Swapidy.

From there the two people trading items would send both items into Swapidy’s headquarters in Chicago. Their the Swapidy team would make sure that the listings matched, the both items worked and in the case of phones, that ESN’s were truly clean and the item was ready to go.

Once Swapidy approves the items for trade they are then sent to their final destinations.

That’s all well and good so far. It’s like an escrow system for trading valuable products. Swapidy brings a new layer of safety and protection to those wanting to trade something with someone not in their immediate area.

At launch though, Swapidy is having both traders pay for shipping along with a fee that gets paid to Swapidy. Swapidy uses that fee to facilitate the trade and then the final destination shipping. Swapidy founder Adam Ahmad suggested in the video below that the entire trade may cost both parties $25.

Now when you’re looking at acquiring an iPhone or a tablet, $25 doesn’t seem like that much money, but in the end it may be frowned upon since none of the money is changing hands from trader to trader.

On the other hand $25 may be worth the piece of mind that you’ll get from completing a trade on Swapidy and knowing that the item you are trading is exactly as it appears. When trading direct with shipping involved there are all kinds of factors that could leave one of the traders either empty handed or with a far inferior product.

We will definitely have to check in with Swapidy in a few months to see how the community of traders is growing and how many trades they’ve successfully enabled.

Check out the video below:

Linkage:

Try Swapidy now at swapidy.com

Here’s more of our Chicago TechWeek Coverage

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Interview With Chicago Startup LineChop

LineChop Co-Founder Nishanth Samala is all smiles about getting rid of the wait list (photo: nibletz)

Being placed on a waiting list at a restaurant can be one of the most frustrating things in the world. You don’t want to stand around and do nothing, but you don’t want to leave the restaurant in fear that you may miss your call for a seat.

Earlier this month we brought you the story about Pittsburgh startup NoWait, and how they’re providing a turnkey iOS based system for restaurants to manage their waiting list. While at TechWeek in Chicago we met this young group of guys who are still in college, and plan on disrupting the wait list as well.

As LineChop’s co-founder Nishanth Samala told us though, LineChop is different form NoWait because it doesn’t require any specific hardware. The system, for lack of a better word, is cloud based. Samala was quick to point out that a host or hostess at a restaurant could run LineChop on their existing computer, an iPad or other tablet.

The other thing that sets LineChop apart is that they’re plan from the get go is to offer coupons and deals to those customers that are waiting in line.

LineChop has a text or messaging based feature which will allow patrons to be notified when their spot in line is available or they can get notified via the LineChop app.

Check out our video below with Samala who’s very excited about the prospects for his startup:

Linkage:

For more information visit linechop.com

Here’s more of our Chicago TechWeek coverage

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See All The Bathroom HashTag Signs From Tech Week Chicago

This past weekend at TechWeek in Chicago, startup ReviewTrackers had a very innovative guerrilla marketing technique to expose people to their company. What they did was give the TechWeek bathrooms a hashtag #twbr. This was actually the first thing we noticed when we arrived for TechWeek and started checking out the tweets.

The tweets were a mix of clean enough for tv potty humor blended with facts about reviews on Yelp and other sites, which are at the core of ReviewTrackers business.

Here we’ve assembled a collection of all the hashtag signs that were prominently displayed in the men’s bathroom. The custodian for the Merchandise Mart wouldn’t allow us in the women’s bathroom even after hours.

We’re familiar with companies taking to the bathroom to promote their message. At TechCrunch Disrupt in New York for instance, an Israeli startup left what looked like car keys in the bathrooms. If you found one you were directed to a treasure chest in the Israeli pavilion at Disrupt to see if your key opened the box.

Often times at other conventions you’ll see company stickers plastered to the backs of stalls and above urinals. In this case ReviewTrackers was able to expose their message in various tweet style signs and get traction going on Twitter during the four day event.

Here are the signs:

Linkage

Check out our story and video on ReviewTrackers here

Visit ReviewTrackers on their website here

Here’s more of our TechWeek 2012 coverage

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Startup Interview With Chicago Startup KlutchClub

One of the startups we were very interested in meeting up with in Chicago was KlutchClub. We featured this subscription box for health and wellness startups back in April here on nibletz.com. Even in that short time we saw Klutch Club exploding with growth.

The KlutchClub booth at Startup City during TechWeek was slammed throughout the exhibition. Their card jar was full, yet they didn’t win the People’s Choice award. (we have no faith in that card system). They are definitely one of the top Chicago startups in our book. And, KlutchClub is woman owned.

Founder and CEO Julie Bashkin created KlutchClub out of her own needs. She spent some time in her career in corporate America in a position where she had to trail 4 days out of every 5 day work week. She struggled to find quality health and wellness products that worked, fit her travel lifestyle and were cost effective.

Through her career in marketing she found that vendors weren’t getting to the customers they needed to and customers weren’t finding these manufacturers products. KlutchClub solves that problem as well.

After a couple of years of vetting the idea out, she finally launched KlutchClub to a great reception. Bashkin won’t say how many subscribers she has but she happily reported that they’ve shipped over 15,000 boxes.

Each monthly box contains a minimum of $50 in products and members pay $18 per month. As you’ll see in the video though, this months box is well over $150 with just one of the products retailing at $70. This is a win win for every household.

The original KlutchClub boxes are all geared towards women however with the feedback and subscribers Bashkin has already picked up she quickly set out to design a box for men as well. That monthly subscription will begin in August, and we are definitely getting on that list.

Check out our video interview with Bashkin below:

Chicago Startup: Benevolent One Of The Greatest Ideas At TechWeek

We scoped out Benevolent.net at TechCocktails mixer on Sunday night at TechWeek 2012. We didn’t learn that much about it and they quickly went on the shortlist for Monday. I’m really glad that we did get to spend time withMegan Kashner the founder and CEO of Benevolent.net because what she and her startup are doing is incredible.

Benevolent is a kickstarter like platform for low income people to get things that they need to better their lives. Kashner, a career long Licensed Clinical Social Worker, found that in her days of seeing low income clients that just one extra push like $100 for a pair of glasses and an eye exam, or $200 for a college credit course, could make or break someone trying to rebuild their lives.

Social Workers are always told to try not to bring their work home, and not to mix their personal lives with their work lives, but I know about 5 social workers who work with low income people or people in recovery who take themselves almost to poverty levels by just giving their clients that extra money for that thing that they really need (not want).

Well Benevolent makes helping people with these kinds of needs easier, however Kashner is no fool she has a very serious vetting process for the needs based kickstarter platform. First off, the user who “needs” something needs to be endorsed by a social worker or accredited 501 C3 organization. Kashner and her team make sure that each “endorser” or “sponsor” is fully vetted and that no one is trying to fraudulently rip off people by pulling on their heart strings.

Benevolent is already making a difference. Kashner showed me an example of a young lady who was trying real hard to interview for jobs and she was very self conscious about her thick glasses. She really wanted contact lenses but couldn’t afford the lens exam and that first box of lenses. Her story was endorsed and she quickly received enough donations for the contact lenses. Now at the end of the campaign the funds don’t go to the person that actually needs the item, but rather the social worker or non profit that is the sponsor. This provides an extra layer of security and insures the donators that the money was used exactly for what it was intended.

Check out the video below:

Linkage:

Check out Benevolent here at benevolent.net

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Startup Interview: Chicago Startup PrepHero

PrepHero is a new Chicago startup that bills itself as the premiere “social” development network for athletic training. While RocBob, another startup that exhibited at Chicago TechWeek, is about recreational sports, the team and “the game”, Prep Hero is about the athlete.

PrepHero allows the coach and the athlete to keep up with their training regiment, skill sets, areas of improvement and more. The coach can then use the PrepHero platform to keep up with his or her entire team and map the progress of their athletes.

What sets PrepHero apart from other scholastic athlete focused startups is that PrepHero is about the conditioning and developing of the athlete. It’s more invested in the person who is the athlete rather than how many home runs, RBIs, rebounds or free throws they have.

Where some platforms for athletes are about bragging rights and wins, PrepHero is about achievement and progress. In fact those who support the athlete, outside of the coaches circle, are called boosters. Boosters can be dad, mom and other family members, even your grandfather states away.

We got a chance to interview Barry Tarter the co-founder and CEO of PrepHero about this unique new idea. Check out the video below:

Linkage:

Find out more about PrepHero’s here

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Chicago Startup: Safe Snips Wins TechWeek Launch Competition

Monday at Chicago TechWeek was Startup City day. 34 Startups from Chicago and everywhere else participated in an expo day and Launch competition.

The competition included $100,000 I’m cash and business services for the winning companies. The prize package included six months free space from Catapult, services from Microsoft, Motorola Xyboard tablets from Verizon Wirless, a year supply of Diet Coke, $5,000 dollars in cash and more.

The finalists in the contest were narrowed down by their startup overall. The panel of judge combed the exhibit floor early on in the day and then selected four finalists. A fifth finalist came from popular vote by attendees. Attendees of the Startup City expo were given a card when they went in and told to put their card in the jar of the startup they liked the best. We thought it was a good system but apparently flawed in talking with over 50 attendees none of them had even seen the booth for Biz Inject the startup that had supposedly won the popular vote. Even worse during the judges Q&A the founder had trouble conceptualizing his concept in pitch form….

The other four startups selected were great by our standards. They were all fresh innovative ideas, with great pitches. The other four finalists were GDine, Mouse House, SafeSnips and Pretty Quick.

GDine is revolutionizing the way people dine in groups. Using GDines platform users can enjoy similar benefits to “Restaurant Week” year round. Groups can choose menus from participating restaurants, split the check and pay in advance. GDine has already received $650,000 in funding, and released last March, The service is already available in Chicago and Ne York.

The company founded said that with only 30 restaurants on board in New York as well as the fact that they’ve only been in New York a couple months, New York is pacing to pass Chicago,

Mouse House I love it when I learn cool totally off the wall things. With Mouse House I did just that. This startup has revolutionized the way Mice ponds are tracked and kept up with in labs,

Traditionally mice are kept in groups in cages with index cards on the front of the cage and data updated by hand. Mouse House puts the information in an iPad app. This new app greatly cuts down on the time of the administration of keeping up with the mice and frees scientists up to spend more time experimenting.

Pretty Quick

this startup was founded by a former employee of also Loreal who discovered the problem she was solving when a plane she was to take from France back to the states was delayed 2 hours. As she said in her pitch, she had two hours to be by herself and do something for herself.

She wanted to get her nails done and find somewhere in the airport or close by to do that, and book an appointment on short notice.

Now here new startup makes it extremely easy to find salons and book appointments with a variety of options. Again a really great idea.

SafeSnips would fall into the medical devices category. The team behind SafeSnips has developed a technology that will be implemented onto surgical cutting instruments. Using near infra red technology SafeSnips will make cutting safer and less likely to accidentally cut arteries which can be fatal.

SafeSnips had one of the most innovative ideas. Since they are incorporating their technology into existing medical devices they don’t expect FDA approval to take very long.

On top of their innovative technology they had a great and enthusiastic pitch. During the Q&A session during the finals the pitchman for SafeSnips didn’t miss a beat while answering the questions. Obviously these factors played into SafeSnips being the winner of the TechWeek launch competition.

Linkage:

Find out more about SafeSnips here at their website

Here’s more our our Chicago TechWeek Coverage Here

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