Startups Archives - Page 120 of 144

Austin Startup: Cyfeon To Kick Off Disrupt NY Battlefield

The first company presenting in today’s TechCrunch Disrupt startup Battlefield is an Austin based startup called Cyfeon.

Cyfeon has only been beta testing for two months. They are a very early stage, non-funded startup. They’ve created a tool called “Answer Factory” that lets any business pull data from anywhere, anytime in any format to get better answers to queries. Answer Factory is the answer for the headaches that can come from big data.

“Businesses are being overwhelmed with the amount of data they have to rely on to make decisions,” Cyfeon CEO Brandon Smith said. “And they are missing important information that might help drive better financial or operational performance. We’re convinced there is a market for technology that makes use of all available data to improve answer quality.”

The Answer Factory dashboard allows businesses to pull data from any source at any time. The data being pulled can be structured or unstructured and then unified using the Answer Factory platform. Businesses without huge IT departments can benefit from Cyfeon’s drag and drop solution.

“Data isn’t worth anything if it cannot be effectively used,” said Cyfeon CTO Chance Coble. “When we started developing Answer Factory, we knew there were tools out there to provide answers to database queries. But we didn’t see any product that effectively brings all that information together to deliver the best possible answer. We wanted to make big data a big benefit to businesses.”

Although Austin has a thriving tech scene and TechCrunch has held events at South By Southwest, Cyfeon is the first Austin startup in TechCrunch Disrupt’s five year history to be invited to participate in the highly coveted startup Battlefield.

Thirty startups will launch during the Battlefield competition but only one will go home with the $50,000 grand prize and the Disrupt Cup. The Disrupt Cup isn’t just about the money, previous winners of Disrupt Cup have secured millions in funding after winning the prize.

Judging this years Disrupt NYC Battlefield are: Michael Arrington (founder TechCrunch/Crunchfund), Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital), Chi-Hua Chien (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Beyers), Chris Dixon (co-founder Hunch), Marissa Mayer (VP Google), Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures).

Linkage:

Find out more about Cyfeon here

Check out our coverage of TechCrunch Disrupt NYC here

Check out TechCrunch’s coverage of Disrupt NYC here

We’re on a nationwide sneaker strapped startup road trip, help us out and find out more here

This Thursday: A Day Of Two Cases, Capital Connection & Tech Cocktail

Thursday (May 24) Is a day of two cases first Steve Case (L) then Scott Case (R) (not related)

This week on the nibletz startup road trip we will be in New York for Disrupt and DC for Capital Connection and an event with TechCocktail.

Capital Connection is a one and a half day convention/conference being held in Washington DC Wednesday May 23rd and Thursday May 24th. It’s one of the nation’s most respected industry conferences and showcases emerging, growing companies (startups).

“For 25 years, Capital Connection and now TechBUZZ, have brought together a high-powered cross section of the nation’s technology-based, high-growth ecosystem. Attendees include senior players from across the industry – investors across the continuum of capital, professional advisors, technology product and service firms, and, at the center of it all, innovative entrepreneurs.” source

The conference is divided into two tracks one on Wednesday afternoon and the other on Thursday. Wednesday afternoon is “TechBuzz” and features early stage startup companies. The TechBuzz companies will square off in a familiar quick pitch setting. Each company will have 4 minutes to present and two companies will present simultaneously, according to their website.

Later on Wednesday afternoon the best of the TechBuzz presenters will square off again in a “semi final” type round called “Best of the Buzz”.

The Capital Connection presentations involve early, expansion and growth companies that have been vigorously vetted prior to their presentation. During the application process, the companies presenting in the Capital Connection presentations are scrubbed for “the soundness of their financial model as well as the innovation and potential of their ideas”.

Over the 25 years of the Capital Connection conference it’s been a virtual who’s who of the best tech in the region has to offer.

The Thursday afternoon festivities will be capped with a keynote by AOL founder and Chairman and CEO of Revolution, Steve Case.

Later on Thursday evening we’ll move over to the TechCocktail sessions event with Startup America CEO and Priceline Founding CTO T. Scott Case. The other case (Scott) gives great, almost guy next door presentations on startups, the startup ecosystem and Startup America.

Thursday will be a fun filled day of two cases.

Linkage:

More on Capital Connection here (tickets still available)

NY Startup: Bar & Club Stats Presenting At TechCrunch Disrupt This Week

If you go to bars and clubs in the New York area and in the near future and have your license scanned by someone with an iPhone or iPod scanner, chances are they are using technology from New York Startup; Bar & Club stats.

The innovative new startup provides a two fold service to bar and club owners in their iPhone/iPod scanning app. The app allows bouncers and doormen to effectively check licenses and IDs. On the backend the app is providing anonymized demographic information that is analyzed and given back to the establishment in easy to understand data.

For example, a bar owner may find that Tuesday nights from 8pm-1am are great nights for women between the ages of 30 and 45, with that data they can offer better drink specials and promotions to attract more of that crowd. A club may also find out that on Thursday night, college night, they actually have a bunch of patrons who are in their late 20’s. Maybe changing college night to another night would work better for them.

This is just one of the many exciting startups presenting in either “Startup Alley” or the Disrupt Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC this week.

TechCrunch Disrupt NYC: Get Me Listed To Launch New Platform

We are reporting tonight from a Times Square hotel that actually has good wifi, something very hard to find in New York. We are here for TechCrunch Disrupt. This will be our third year bringing coverage from TechCrunch’s signature event in New York City. The previous two years we covered for our former site thedroidguy.com

In case you didn’t know, nibletz.com unofficially launched at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC last year. We still owned and ran thedroidguy.com at the time and we were looking for a place to put content from startups that really appealed to both Cameron and I, but didn’t really fit in the Android space. The fact that we were launching the site out of disrupt is exactly why our SM tagline was “small crunchy bytes from the tech and startup scene”. Most know that we’ve now pivoted to “the voice of startups everywhere else”. That’s exactly what we will find here, startups from Silicon Valley, New York and everywhere else.

One of those startups that will be in startup alley is are the folks from “Get Me Listed”. The New York based startup specializes in local marketing solutions. Get Me Listed’s technology allows marketing professionals to manage hyper local marketing campaigns from a simple easy to use dashboard.

At Disrupt this week (starting Monday morning), Get Me Listed CEO and Co-Founder Michael Mire and Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder Ravdeep Sawhney will be showing off their brand new Get Me Listed platform.

“We are excited to showcase our new platform to the public for the first time. We worked closely with our clients to develop a system that is even more versatile and offers an all-in-one solution for location-based marketing,” said Ravdeep Sawhney.

We will post more including an interview and video later on this week from Disrupt NYC.

Preparing For TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2012

The Nibletz Team is ready to bring you round the clock coverage of what is sure to be the bet Techcrunch disrupt event to date.

First off, you may remember that last year was when Michael Arrington the founder of Techcrunch got into a very public dispute with both AOL and their queen of the Blogsphere (at the time) Arianna Huffington. That dispute of course was what fueled Arrington to wear an “Unpaid Blogger” T-shirt as the emcee of last years event.

After missing a few TechCrunch events, including the most recent Crunchies in San Francisco, Arrington was invited back by the current TechChrunch regime for virtually the same duties as previous Disrupt events. We are curious to see what Arrington wears tomorrow morning when the official event kicks off. The hackathon started two days ago and is the lead in to the event.

We are also looking forward to some of the usual suspects like SV Angels, Ron Conway who is a Battlefield judge this year, as well as MC Hammer.

We are also looking forward to an interview with Hollywood Producer and founder of the LA based startup, Lovvit, Max Gottlieb. We are also hoping to sync up with our friend, rapper and tech investor Chamillionaire during this weeks festivities.

TechCrunch Disrupt NYC will be a great showcase of startups from everywhere including the Valley, NYC and “everywhere else”. If your startup is either pitching in the Battlefield, exhibiting in Startup Alley or just attending the event make sure to drop us a line at disrupt@nibletz.com

Nibletz Sneaker Strapped Road Trip Fundraiser, Now That’s More Like It

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.

Please check out the new indiegogo page at http://indiegogo.com/everywhereelse and help if you can.

Thanks,

Kyle, Cameron and Brent

Here’s the link again indiegogo.com/everywhereelse

Facebook Acquires Karma

After a topsy turvy day on Friday for Facebook, and Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg’s nuptials on Saturday, the company has decided to extend their good Karma. They’ve done this by purchasing San Francisco based startup Karma.

Karma is an application that allows users to send gifts. Karma says while their are a number of social gifting apps on the market, they differentiate themselves by combining intelligence, social discovery and easy gift giving.

Facebook recently acquihired the team from photo app Lightbox sans their Creative Director Giles Peyton Nicoll who started his own agency. Of course we also know about Facebook’s $1 billion dollar acquisition of photo app Instagram which is expected to close in the second half of the year.

Like Instagram the Karma purchase was a complete acquisition. Karma and Facebook are both saying that for now Karma will continue to operate as is, with a bigger “back bone”.

An acquisition of a startup like Karma makes sense since it is a social app that would inherently give “more” to the social experience. Until we see what’s to come, the LightBox acqui-hire didn’t make that much sense since Facebook did just acquire Instagram which is in the exact same space as Lightbox. In fact Lightbox used to directly compete with Instagram in their outbound marketing to Android users.

source: Engadget

London Startup: Kebuki Is A Team Management Tool For Managers To Inspire

It’s been a while since I worked at Best Buy, but when I did during the very late 90’s and early part of the 2000s we used to have team meetings in the “hub” every day. Anyone who has worked at Best Buy probably remembers these meetings. Everyday as a department head and then sales lead we would go in the meeting with the team and have all the Best Buy notes, stock quotes, and store information.

Our regional manager at the time, now former Best Buy CEO, Brian Dunn, also had his stores add in key dates for employees, birthdays, maybe anniversaries or if we’d get reliable info about maybe a kids achievement at school, or maybe they just finished paying off their car. We would recognize that employee in that quick meeting. As silly as that sounds it made the employee feel good for the day and morale at our store was pretty good.

That kind of rubbed off during my radio career as well when I became “management”. Although I had much smaller teams, taking an employee out for a beer on their birthday when they had no idea you knew it was their birthday goes a long way.

This “soft” management style is the heart around London startup Kebuki. Kebuki is a team management mobile tool that can be managed on any web connected device, an iPad or iPhone. Basically you load a data set (that gets encrypted) into Kebuki consisting of employees name, position, salary and incentive package, husband, wife and kids names, personal anniversary dates and important work related dates revolving around the employee.

The app (platform) then puts all of these things in a timeline for the manager. The manager can then make public recognition for the employee via the company, or even through social media channels. According to research done by Kebuki and other management consultants, these little “pats on the back” go a long way.

Imagine how thrilled your employees will be that you remember their birthdays or when they call you to tell you their spouse is sick you can tell them you hope that their spouse feels better, by name.

But how do you really know? Well in addition to the team management platform Kebuki sends out an email to the employees on your team monthly, with one simple question, “On a scale of 0-10 how would you rate me as a manager”. This feedback is great for the manager, and it further reiterates that some “soft” management tactics can go a long way.

We got to talking with Charlie Cowan, the founder of Kebuki about his management inspiring startup, and why, despite the fact that Kebuki is based in the UK, they are launching in the US first.

Check out the interview, after the break
Read More…

Ohio Startup: Whotever, A New Social Website To Discover Whotever You Want

After South By Southwest in Austin Texas earlier this year, the last thing people want to hear about is a new “discovery” app or platform. It seems everyday another startup is launching to help discover people socially. Well this startup, based in Ohio, called Whotever is hoping to fix that problem.

As more and more social discovery sites pop up, actually using the web or your mobile to discover information on the things you actually want to know about gets harder in harder. Even with basic search engines like Google, the results you get today are much more polluted than the results of say a 2005 Google search.

That problem became evident to Timi Azeez and the other co-founders of Ohio based startup Whotever, 8 years ago. Azeez told nibletz.com:

“About 8 years ago, the three of us were in a heated debate and it prompted us to confirm our facts/findings on the internet. During the research online, we discovered that we could not find exactly the information we needed for our debate. Instead, we spent hours sifting through the data page by page defeating the purpose of the discussion. We realized the internet experience was more hectic than fun and this precluded us to start Whotever.com. It was the first step to improving the users’ experience on the internet.”

That’s the foundation for this new startup that they hope to launch later this year. We got a chance to talk a little more in-depth with Azeez about whatever.

More after the break
Read More…

Israeli Startup: Jinni Is Powering Big National Sites With Pandora Like Movie Engine

You may not have heard of Yosi Glick, the founder of Israeli startup Jinni, but one things for sure you will probably agree with his fundamental principles behind video discovery.

Glick talks in this story with Bloombgerg’s Cliff Edwards about how most video (movie) discovery/recommendation sites have things all wrong. Edwards uses the example of the movie The Usual Suspects. When you watch The Usual Suspects on most video platforms it’s going to recommend Se7en. While both could be characterized as crime thrillers, the audience for Usual Suspects is hardly the audience for Se7en.

Glick’s startup Jinni has put a lot more into discovery when it comes to movies. They provide in-depth algorithms and matching, making it more like a Pandora for movies. Jinni has created an “entertainment genome” that weighs thousands of different parameters to serve up like minded suggestions for movie viewers.

In addition to offering a much more thorough recommendation engine for movie viewers, LG Electronics invested $5 million into Jinni for voice recognition software. The voice recognition software taps into the platform where a user could say “I want to watch a Harrison Ford action movie” and it would serve up Indiana Jones or Star Wars.

LG and Jinni are mum on whether the technology has gone into this next round of smart tvs that the Korean manufacturer is putting out.

They must be doing something right because some of the top companies in the world have employed Jinni’s technology. Best Buy’s movie rental site uses Jinni and Microsoft entered into a deal last September to incorporate Jinni’s software into the Xbox 360 service.

Linkage:

Put Jinni to your own test here at their website

Source: Bloomberg

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else”

Arizona Military Startup: AlphaStripe Wins Austin Startup AppSumo’s Lean Startup Challenge

We’re starting to see more and more great stories of one startup from “everywhere else” helping another startup from “everywhere else”. That’s the case here with the story of Arizon based Military Startup AlphaStripe.

AlphaStripe provides a multimedia platform for military veterans and participants in wars and conflict situations to record and share their stories. The Arizona startup is made up of several ASU entrepreneurs, two of which were previous founders of ASU Edison startup companies.

We’re fortunate at nibletz.com to have two former military people on staff. One of our co-founders and Editor at Large, Brent Fishman, was active duty military and said:

“As a former soldier in the United States Army, I can understand the need for something like AlphaStripe. When we come back from a deployment and settle into civilian life, AlphaStripe will help those who have been through it, cope by being able to share and relive those moments with other troops and our families”.

Our Florida based east coast editor Alex Smith, who served in combat on two tours to Iraq and one to Afghanistan, as a United States Marine, added:

” Peace of mind. When it comes to deployments, many of us hold on to the memories as long as we can and unfortunately PTSD keeps those negative memories playing on constant loop. To have a platform such as the one above, I feel that the user would benefit from not only sharing their life experiences with others that can relate, but also with the healing progress that many Armed service men and women that have undiagnosed cases of PTSD”

Smith, who was diagnosed with PTSD, often deals with it by talking about his experiences in the military as often as he can. He takes great pride, when we are at conventions and other events, to sync up with those mobile, wireless and technology companies that are either founded by former military people or who’s technology has aided the military.

More after the break
Read More…

Boston Startup: Wizgig, Crowdsourced & Expert Advice In 150 Characters Or Less

A new Boston area startup called Wizgig launched in March offering the wisdom of both experts and the crowd. The caveat, all of the wisdom comes in 150 characters or less. It’s like Twitter for wisdom with 10 more characters.

Wizgig co-founders Matt Murphy and Mark Boswell feel that by limiting the advice tips to 150 characters users will get right to the point, without the clutter. We’ve all been there, reading three and four page expert advice columns and finding that the meat and potatoes is no more than a few sentences.

The trick is going to see if the tips can be in intelligent, easy to understand language. We’re even guilty of shrinking some of our tweets down to hash tags, and internet lingo.

Here’s an example of a Wizgig tip, this one is on interviewing:

Prepare beforehand and research the company, the people, the culture, etc. Be prepared to match your skills and background to the company’s needs.

Here’s another on quitting smoking:

When you do your spring cleaning, make sure to get rid of all the ashtrays so they don’t remind you of smoking.

All of the topics are laid out in a nice looking design and easy to navigate. With 150 characters or less you can view many tips at the same time. This is what the teaching category looks like.

Although I tend to be modest about it, I often speak as a “twitter expert” at conventions and conferences. I think my use of Twitter since the very beginning is why I was so intrigued with Murphy’s pitch to nibletz. I got a chance to talk to Murphy about starting up Wizgig.

Check out the interview, after the break
Read More…

London Based Startup: StoryBricks Lets You Create Your Own MMO Stories

I’m sure after reading the headline some of you are thinking making your own MMO story would kick ass, and it does. Thanks to the folks at new startup StoryBricks MMO fans can create their own characters and stories to share with friends in a simple to use, but feature packed interface.

StoryBricks is based in London and California and was founded by serial entrepreneur Rodolfo Rosini, Brian “Psychochild” Green and Buck Wilson. While Rosini is the experienced entrepreneur Green and Wilson are the MMO, gaming and RPG nuts.

As you’ll see form our interview with Rosini and Green the platform has really taken off in just days. 555 stories were created in just 72 hours, and that’s before the team could publish a tutorial on how to harness the power of the unique interface.

Let’s dive right in and find out more about this unique startup.

Tell us, what is storybricks?

Storybricks is a technology that allows users to create their own stories within games without any programming knowledge. It combines an easy-to-use visual editing system and a sophisticated and patent-pending intelligence layer to create a system that gives characters in a video game the illusion of life. We plan to put Storybricks into massively multiplayer online (MMO) games and let users have control over their play experience.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

The team is Rodolfo (a serial tech entrepreneur, 2x VC backed), Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green (an MMO developer that ran the legendary Meridian 59 MMO), Stéphane Bura (a game designer with a background in AI and tabletop RPG) and Buck Wilson (a designer that sold his previous startup and his apps got featured in Apple commercials)

Our advisor board include Don Bluth and Gary Goldman (the legendary Disney animators), Richard Bartle – the inventor or MMOs (back when they were called MUDs) and Chris Avellone (Wasteland 2, Planescape) who is the Chief Creative Officer of Obsidian

Where are you based?

The company is based in the SF Bay Area and we have an office in London

More after the break
Read More…

Atlanta Startup: LaunchTable, Find & Collaborate With The Ultimate Team

One of our favorite startups is Cleveland based Foundersync which links founders with each other without the stuffy, snobbery of sites like Founderdating. Foundersync has an excellent back end that will continue to grow over the next few months with an intelligence layer that will yield great results connecting likeminded co-founder teams.

Atlanta startup Launch Table takes over and helps find the rest of the team. Whether you’re a coder with a great idea and you’re looking for a marketing guru, an entrepreneur, and a mobile expert, LaunchTable is a place to find them all.

LaunchTable is obviously a play on lunch table, can you remember the conversations you had about taking over the world at the school lunch table? The best practical jokes, collaborative assignments and parties were planned around the lunch table. One person had all the friends, the other had the parents going out of town, while one person new where to get the extra-curriculars. Little did you know, those collaboration skills would come in handy down the road.

In fact, LaunchTable founder Ian Jones told us in an interview that LaunchTable is for startups looking for that next great business idea or students working on a project. When we attended the Duke University startup challenge earlier this spring we found that several of the startups in the contest had just one or two co-founders based at Duke, others were at Stanford, Princeton, M.I.T., UT and other schools across the country. Had LaunchTable been around earlier they could have taken advantage of it.

LaunchTable shouldn’t be confused with a social network. You’re not there to pick up as many friends as you can. The purpose is to build, create and innovate together. If you’re familiar with Dustin Moskovitz’ new startup Asana, Launch Table is more similar to Asana then Facebook. Now for a minute imagine that you don’t necessarily know the people you’re collaborating with yet. Say you want to meet them and then dive into a project. That’s the back bone to LaunchTable.

We’re really excited for Ian and what he’s building in Atlanta. Like the Nibletz team he’s out running all over the east coast getting people excited about creating at the LaunchTable.

Check out our interview after the break
Read More…