Tomorrow at 2pm PST we’ll be broadcasting live from SBF Demo Day presented by StartEngine. As well as broadcasting from other events live throughout the whole event that starts tomorrow. Panels ranging from Meet The Accelerators to How To Hire A Developer. Into coding and actually products, don’t worry as StartEngine has you covered with a full 48 hours Hackathon going on throughout the event. Quick hint, teams from Disney are among those who’ll be showing up to show us what they can do.
2012 Brown University graduate Stephen Hebson and his co-founder and fellow Brown graduate Parker Wells have developed a new startup called Overhead.fm. The company has decided to tackle a market that hasn’t had much disruption in a number of years. That market, is over head music at venues like restaurants, coffee shops and some retail outlets.
While many may think that business owners just hook up a sirius satellite radio, mp3 player or cd player, there can be serious ramifications to that. While they don’t wear uniforms or carry badges, “inspectors” for lack of a better word, from ASCAP and BMI are constantly visiting businesses to see what type of music they are playing overhead. If a business owner isn’t paying for licensing of music being played for the “public” they can find themselves staring down the barrel of a business life threatening lawsuit.
Muzak, one of the world’s leaders in overhead music charges establishments by their capacity and traffic. Restaurants and businesses can pay anywhere between $30 a month to nearly $200 to play music overhead. While it may seem logical to just not play music, music keeps patrons in their businesses longer and spending more money.
According to Mainebiz, Hebson had received some insider knowledge on the ins and outs of overhead music by first working at a coffee shop and then holding an internship at ATO Records in New York. After learning how high the fees were for licensing music he thought there had to be a better way, thus overhead.fm was born.
Hebson and Wells are building up a great library of music that is heavily weighted by more successful local acts in Portland and Providence. The company is offering the bands a great value proposition by allowing them access to analytics for plays, locations, frequency and more in exchange for licensing their music. The band wins by getting access to the proprietary information that overhead.fm collects. Overhead.fm wins by not having to payout actual fees.
Overhead.fm is going to start curating more “paid” for music shortly. They recently won the student track in the 2012 Rhode Island Business Plan Competition. With that honor came a prize package of $40,000 including some seed capital and legal services to the tune of $10,000.
Hebson told Mainebiz that they plan on using some of those legal services to construct a contract for licensing music to the company.
Hebson feels that businesses will enjoy overhead.fm because of it’s eclectic library featuring local artists. Right now in their test phase, the service starts off as a 30 day free trial and then goes to a $25 per month subscription model. Now remember that may be a little heavy for a streaming service on a personal side but it’s quite affordable when it comes to music being used for overhead systems in businesses.
We are treating [Providence and Portland] as test markets. We know these cities have pretty big independent music and retailer cultures and are small enough that we can get a lot of saturation pretty quickly and use that data” to build out the model, says Hebson said to MaineBiz. “We’ve already had a lot of success at businesses that are already playing off the independent or local vibe already,” he says.
Linkage:
Find out more about overhead.fm here
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Pittsburgh startup DuoLingo has just announced a $3.3 million dollar round of funding led by Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures along with actor turned tech investor Ashton Kutcher.. This article in the Post Gazette said Kutcher made this investment personally and no reference is made to his VC firm A-Grade investments.
Kutcher is known to journey outside the borders of Silicon Valley with his tech investments. He heavily vets his investments for game changing technologies. Kutcher recently invested in Des Moines mobile payment startup Dwolla. Although Kutcher hails from the same area, it was more about the technology, and the entrepreneur rather than just being from the same area.
With DuoLingo it’s obviously about the technology and the work that scientist/co-founders Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker have put into the startup so far.
DuoLingo is a translation software. Although there are a few very technical articles about DuoLingo’s technology, to put it into layman’s terms DuoLingo provides a platform for real life translation. While Google translate can be great for a straight up word for word translation, DuoLingo and their algorithms translate pages on the internet, in a more “real world” conversational way.
When you’re doing the real-world stuff, such as reading a news report in German or French, you really feel like you’re accomplishing something,” von Ahn said in a press release. “It reinforces why you’re working to understand this new language.”
While DuoLingo is great for translation they also enter an element of education as well. As the Post Gazette explains:
Users can scroll over words if they need clues for their translations, and the program automatically detects blatant errors. The site also is designed to track words or concepts that give users trouble and to focus on those for future lessons.
The next phase of DuoLingo includes adding a document translator to it’s already existing web based platform for commercial uses. To get to this point DuoLingo used a pretty extensive beta testing process where von Ahn reports that the beta testers translated tens of millions of sentences.
By crowd sourcing the translations the software is able to pick up the most commonly used translations and achieve better accuracy.
Von Ahn is a 33 year old junior professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where he earned the honor of A. Nico Habermann associate professor of computer science. That’s an honor given to a distinguished junior professor every three years.
If you think that you’ve heard von Ahn’s name before it’s because you probably have. In 2007 von Ahn created the puzzle identifying system Captcha, the system used to verify that a human is filling out most forms. He sold that company to Google for an undisclosed sum.
von Ahn’s other credits include inventing “human computation” which is a form of crowd-sourcing humans to help computers solve problems that are beyond the technology.
von Ahn said that his goal with DuoLingo is to form a universally readable internet.
Linkage:
For more on this visit the Pittsburgh Post Gazette
Curious about Ashton Kutcher’s investments visit his Crunchbase Profile here
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A Portland Oregon startup up that specializes in producing smartphone apps for conferences and events, has been acquired by event planning software company Cvent. CrowdCompass is Cvent’s second acquisition in just one week. Last week Cvent, who’s based in Virginia, acquired Austin startup Seed Labs.
“Let’s be clear: We bought this for their people,” said Cvent chief executive Reggie Aggarwal. “We’re going to let the management team run the place they way they’ve been doing it.”
Mobile apps and technology have been changing trade shows, conferences and conventions over the past few years. It’s already been seen that the more robust your tradeshow app is the better. South By Southwest 2012 had a great app that covered every speck of the event officially produced by SXSW. As did the CES app earlier in the year.
Last fall the Oregon company raised $1.3 million led by the Oregon Angel Fund.
CrowdCompass was founded in 2009 and makes apps that connect event go-fers to specific events, other attendees and social media.
CrowdCompass corporate portfolio includes event apps for
E*Trade, Daimler, and Intuit; and meetings industry organizations, like The Meetings Technology Expo; and associations, like the American Bar Association, Association of General Contractors and American Society of Anesthesiologists.
“Cvent’s success is predicated on delivering best-of-breed technology solutions to our event industry clients and partners. This acquisition is an important step to ensuring we continue to lead the industry in the adoption of mobile technologies,” said Reggie Aggarwal, Founder and CEO of Cvent. “We selected CrowdCompass because it was clear that they are a leading developer of native mobile apps for business and association events. With experience building hundreds of apps for a wide variety of mid-to large-sized public and private events, the addition of CrowdCompass gives us unparalleled expertise in creating mobile apps for events. We have offered mobile friendly event web sites for some time, but the CrowdCompass product takes the mobile experience to the next level.”
To date CrowdCompass has produced 435 event apps which have seen over 500,000 downloads for Blackberry,Android and iOS.
“Becoming part of Cvent will allow CrowdCompass to operate on a greater scale than it ever has before,” said Tom Kingsley, Founder and CEO of CrowdCompass. “Our technologies and expertise will be a great fit with Cvent’s unmatched reputation and client base; we’re looking forward to all the services we will be able to develop under the Cvent umbrella.”
“The CrowdCompass app demonstrates the excellence and innovation that attendees have come to expect from the Mental Health and Addictions Conference,” said Courtney Young, Digital and Social Media Specialist at the National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare. “We had over 3,000 healthcare professionals and administrators in attendance, and the response to the app was overwhelming, with 80% of them downloading it. By offering the CrowdCompass app, we showed our attendees that we are listening to their demands and care deeply about their conference experience.”
Cvent was founded in 1999 by Reggie Aggarwal. Aggarwal took the company from a two person team to a team of over 900 in McLean Virginia, the city that was once home to America Online. Cvent has been profitable over the last ten years.
Linkage:
For more on Cvent check out their corporate website here
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By a show of hands who’s old enough to remember the community bulletin board at the grocery store? Sure there are probably some grocery stores that still have them, but they don’t fill up like they used to. Everyone has resorted to some kind of app or some kind of social network.
Well London startup StreetPin is looking to bring the community bulletin board back in a social, mobile sort of way. It’s actually a novel concept. They are of course building it in London and hopefully they will scale up large enough to adopt here in the U.S.
Now we know that Craigslist has a community section but StreetPin is more about short little pin up notes that are looking for reaction, remedy and answers as quick as possible. It’s kind of like a simplified version of both Craigslist and Zaarly all rolled up into one with a sense of urgency and immediacy about it.
We got a chance to talk with StreetPin co-founder and CEO Tim Buick about StreetPin. He gives some great examples of how to use the new service in the interview below the break.
Over the past weekend, I was able to interview Ari Rashti, from StartEngine and Angel Vision Investors. We where able to talk to him about how the Los Angeles Tech Scene has come and gone, and then coming back again. Along the same lines we dug deeper into why LA hasn’t seen as many hot startups come from here, as well as the valuation disparity we have from the Bay.
Jacksonville Florida based startup Path.to has announced an expansion of their job matching startup to three major cities. Chicago, Boston and New York City joined the Path.to network to connect potential job candidates to hiring employers.
Path.To connects the right people to the right jobs using their sophisticated, proprietary algorithms assuring both job candidates and hiring employers that their connection is more relevant than other job search platforms. The startup was founded last year by Darren Bounds who also serves as their Vice President of Product.
Path.To understands an applicants passion, personality and experience and says that they connect people with jobs they love.
In addition to the new markets Path.To has announced some new email features as well. Path.To will email job candidates available positions that the service feels are a good match for them. Path.To users searching for a job can opt out of certain employers if they feel that they aren’t a fit, and of course continue to apply for jobs that they feel are, the perfect fit.
The company also announced a social resume feature that will allow users to add their social network information, accounts and streams so that potential employers don’t have to dig through the internet to find it. This also insures that the candidate shares what they want from social media, and delivers a more “open” feeling in the job vetting process.
At this stage in the game, Path.To is still free for both applicants and employers although Bounds told TNW that they will shift to a paid model for employers later on this year.
Linkage:
Check out and sign up for Path.TO here
Source: TNW
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Seattle startup TangoCard continues to make news. Just last week we reported that Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, had participated in a $1.8M round of funding for TangoCard through his Innovation Endeavors investment arm.
Today loyalty and rewards startup Plink has announced a partnership with TangoCard that will take their 35,000 merchant rewards network from Facebook credits, to a plethora of great opportunities for redemption. Now in addition to earning Facebook credits that can be used for hundreds of Facebook apps and games, customers in the Plink reward network can also earn credit towards top merchants like Amazon,Home Depot, Target,iTunes,The Gap, Nike and many more.
“Our members have asked for more choices and we’re excited to expand the innovative ways they can earn rewards for eating and shopping offline,” Peter Vogel, Plink’s co-founder and President said in a statement. “Plink’s goal is to bridge the gap between online consumers and their offline purchases and partnering with Tango Card makes that vision more rewarding for our current members and attractive to new ones. We still believe in Facebook and Facebook credits; we wanted to increase our reach and exposure.”
Tango will also handle all of the work involved in the gift card part of the program.
“Plink and Tango Card are rethinking how consumers want to earn and use rewards,” David Leeds, CEO and founder of Tango Card said in a prepared statement. “Tango Card carefully curates digital rewards to deliver a complete program in a card. This approach allows Plink to focus on their core business: creating an innovative online-to-offline loyalty program. We are huge fans of what Plink is doing and are delighted that Plink selected our easy SDK [software development kit] to integrate the Tango Card.”
“We were looking for new ways to advertise all over the Internet and through Facebook, not just to people that are playing games on Facebook,” Vogel added. “We had seen Tango out in the marketplace. They have a lot of the biggest and most popular brands that our members want. Tango Card provides our members with a one-stop stop shop with an easy entry point. Tango also has a mobile application that enables our members to pick the [electronic] card they want on the go. It’s a very appealing model. For us, it’s all about choice.”
Just last week Tango received a $1.8 million dollar series A round. They said at that time they would use the fund for expansion, hiring more developers and expanding their proprietary software applications. Obviously they are moving quickly toward that goal.
Linkage
For more information on Plink visit this link
For more information on TangoCard visit this link
Source: Press Release via Loyalty360
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AngelTracking is a new app startup out of Toronto Canada. The app is the latest from app development startup Berobo, who’ve already produced a lot of apps for Android, and Blackberry. This newest app, AngelTracking, allows parents to monitor their children’s smart phones in a variety of ways. Theres casual monitoring and then full blown, we’ll send you every text and email monitoring, which me hit a nerve with the privacy advocates.
AngelTracking offers real time stats, real time location and even “surveillance”. If you just want to keep up with your kids whereabouts because you’re concerned about their safety, AngelTracking may be for you. If you also want to see all their photos, messages and emails and get alerts as they travel throughout the city, AngelTracking can do that too.
While the verdict is still out on how well “privacy” nuts will adopt to this kind of surveillance tracking, we got a chance to interview the team behind the app. The interview is below the break:
While we try to manage our hashtags on Twitter every now and then we find that we deviate to make sure the umpteen hundred hashtags for events, startups and the like are all hit to gather the same news. When we’re at an event, conference or convention, those hash tags get worse.
Take the International Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas every January for instance. At this years CES there were people using #CES #CES2012 #CES12 #EurekaPark #CESLasVegas #CESLV and several other variants. What’s Shakin handles that problem.
What’s Shakin is able to manage the social media throughput at an event, or venue by location. Now it’s not about the tag but rather the location the tag was created in, providing people are using geolocation in conjunction with the tags.
Now if you wanted to keep up with the social activity at the One Direction concert you don’t have to track 20 different hash tags, just one location with What’s Shakin.
We got to talk to Chris Hashley (I know great last name for this right?), about What’s Shakin in the interview below the break.
A new startup in Atlanta called WorkityWork has set out on an ambitious goal of making people hate work less. While many actually like their jobs, there are equally as many who don’t like their jobs. This is what WorkityWork is hoping to do.While we’ve reported on a couple of startups that allow people to give feedback about their workplace and job conditions both by name and anonymously, WorkityWork is about your co-workers. Work Place moral has become a hot space for new startups. We really like the ones that are taking advantage of front facing social media like Kebuki and this one. Although it has equally as silly a name as Kebuki, the idea behind using social media to recognize co-workers can be uplifting.
In fact, while Kebuki is a management tool, one of the key elements is a pat on the back from the manager. WorkityWork’s key element is a pat on the back from co-workers.
When you got that promotion, or came in under budget, your co-workers can send you Kudos. If the entire team hit a sales goal, you or your manager can recognize the entire team. You can even set your mood on WorkityWork using what they call Vibes.
Check out how WorkityWork works, in this video below.
We got a chance to talk with Ashli Norton co-founder of WorkityWork in this interview below the break. And yeah, after watching the video WorkityWork is more of a fun name than a silly one.
If you’re one of those people with great plans and bad follow through than this New York startup may be for you. Moteevate is a motivational site that helps people going on their goals and plans. This is achieved by offering a huge knowledge base of action plans that use easy and manageable steps for just about anything and everything.
Moteevate offers a ton of action plans on a wide range of topics like the arts, business and money, coaching and motivation, music, health and fitness, pets and many more.
You can also create your own goals and action plans and then recruit your social networks aka Facebook friends and motivate friends, to cheer you on and help you with your progress.
For instance, if you’re looking to lose weight you can set up an action plan for diet and exercise or use one of the suggested action plans via Moteevate. Either way, once you’ve picked your plan your friends can monitor your progress and help you out when you’re having an off day and cheer you on when you’re on target.
Moteevate has already helped users with job hunting, finishing their thesis, running, staying in shape while traveling and even conquering the medicine regiment associated with breast cancer. As they said in the interview below, Moteevate is for just about anything, and everything.
Check out the interview after the break.
Simple is good, right? If that’s the case then you’re going to like the ease and simplicity built into UK gift giving startup Parcel Genie. Sure it’s got a “blah” name but remember Parcel may be much more glamorous in the UK, you know the way they add that “u” to colour it makes it more colourful (and boy does spell check hate it).
Parel Genie is available on iOS, Android and even Windows Phone 7. It makes sending gifts to your friends as easy as sending instant messages and texts.
“We are pioneering the concept of gifting as communication,” says John Taylor, CEO and co-founder of ParcelGenie. “With our service, people can respond to news from friends, co-workers and loved ones — an achievement at work, a personal goal achieved, a quick thank-you, or someone not feeling well — with an immediate, low-cost real little gift and personal message. ParcelGenie closes the gap between thought and action, making it easy to do something meaningful to deepen emotional connections with the people in our lives.”
With Parcel Genie you send small little gifts, almost like chotzkes to your friends and family via their mobile number. If you know their actual address you can enter it for delivery. If you don’t have their address or don’t have time to fumble with it, they’ll receive a text message notifying them that you’ve sent this great little gift and prompt them for their delivery address.
In Europe the service is called Parcel Genie and there’s a Parcel Genie app in the iTunes App Store, Google Play Store and whatever it is they call the app store in Windows Phone 7. In the United States and other countries Parcel Genie is actually a white labeled partner service for some of the major e-commerce sites out there. If you see a “send an instant gift” or a “ping” button it takes you to the Parcel Genie service on behalf of that partner.
The company’s website says they are totally international and are opening an office in California. Their management team includes Sir Chris Powell, an actual knight, who achieved knighthood for his role in British advertising.
Their CEO is Dr.John Taylor, who is an actual doctor ;). Taylor actually thought up the idea for Parcel Genie back in 2006. The management team rounds out with CTO Dr. Richard Tolcher and Bruce Garvey (who is a real Bruce).
What we like about this startup:
Well sending vouchers, gift cards and other executables seems so generic. Sending real presents with flower arrangements and cards is so, well 2006. We like the immediacy of Parcel Genie. We also like the fact that Parcel Genie eliminates the problem of “I would send someone a gift but I don’t have their address”.
Exploring their gift store a little more gives way to cool key chains, coffee mugs and even boxes of Jelly Belly’s, I mean who wouldn’t appreciate a box of genuine Jelly Belly’s.
Linkage:
For more on Parcel Genie click here
Download it in the Google Play Store here
Here they are in the iTunes App store
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The JumpStart organization in Cleveland Ohio is a non profit organization looking to help startups across the country. While Startup America does a great job on a broader scale, JumpStart focuses on women, minority and inner city based entrepreneurship. JumpStart is also a member and partner with Startup America.
The $250,000 grant came from the Surdha Foundation one of the nation’s oldest and largest family foundations. The foundation is headquartered in New York City and was founded in 1917 by John Emory Andrus, a successful New York businessman who served four terms in congress.
“Through our Strong Local Economies program, we aim to create robust and sustainable economies that include a diversity of businesses and sectors, improved access to quality jobs and opportunities for economic mobility. We are proud to support JumpStart in its efforts to expand this valuable program,” said Surdna’s president, Phillip W. Henderson.
“Minority and women entrepreneurs growing larger scale firms can contribute meaningfully to the country’s economic output by becoming more significant job creators,” says Darrin Redus, JumpStart’s Chief Economic Inclusion Officer. “With Surdna’s help, JumpStart can continue to develop and share inclusion best practices and make key connections that will help speed the growth, market entry and success of these high potential young companies.”
Along with the Knight Foundation, the charitable foundation that is the legacy of the Jack and Jim Knight, the brothers who started the Knight Ridder newspaper empire, Surdha is a founding partner of Jumpstart Inc.
Linkage:
Find out more about Jumpstart here
Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more stories from “everywhere else”
Nibletz is on a sneaker-strapped, nationwide startup road trip and could use your help please check out this link and also watch the video below:
Nick Tippmann
Kyle