Startups Archives - Page 123 of 144

Boston Startups: MassChallenge Downplays Voter Fraud

When you’re dealing with a gigantic pool of potential web based, software and technology startups, you know in the back of your mind that there are coders within the pool capable of “fixing the system”. While many hosts of startup competitions are hopeful that fraud won’t occur they still do their best to block it from happening. MassChallenge unfortunately wasn’t able to stop some voter fraud in the public vote.

In a blog post on May 3rd MassChallenge wrote:

Some MassChallenge 2012 entrants have contacted us regarding inappropriate use of the public voting function of the Startup Profiles. Throughout the application period some users have engaged in vote fraud and, just as the deadline was about to pass last night, several users used scripts to down-vote many of the other startup profiles. These folks seem to think that the best way to get ahead with their startup is to invent success by falsely boosting their public voting score.

MassChallenge used a public vote to narrow the pool of potential startups in the contest from 1200 to just 300. MassChallenge CEO John Hawthorne declined to comment to the Boston Herald this past monday on what he called an “inappropriate use of the public voting function.”

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Roanoke Startup: Lujure Wins Tech Excellence Award

The Roanoke-Blacksburg Technology Council held their annual awards banquet this week honoring local companies, and startups in the technology space.

A startup called Lujure Media LLC took home the council’s rising star award which recognizes the hard work of a locally based startup. Lujure has a web based application that allows Facebook users with fan pages to customize them quickly and easily.

Lujure also blogs about the business and semantics of Facebook and delivers information that is important to their customers. Lujure is a premium (paid) Facebook tool and according to Roanoke.com they have thousands of paying customers.

Lujure has generated over $400,000 in revenue in its first year. Their web application helps companies make their fan pages in less than 30 seconds. It’s a simple drag and drop method of putting together a Fan Page. Lujure has a number of different plans which are really based on two things.

The first factor in which plan you should take is how familiar you are with Facebook and Fan pages. This also takes into consideration either how much time you have to maintain your page and how much hand holding you need. Lujure has several plans from free to $3,000 per month. Obviously $3,000 a month may be a lot of money but Lujure gives you all the bells and whistles and does a lot of the work for you.

The other factor is how many enhancements you want.

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Washington DC: Carlyle Group Founder David Rubenstein Gives $15M To Duke For Innovation

One of Washington DC’s top investors and philanthropists, David Rubenstein has given $15 million dollars to his alma mater Duke University for innovation.

Rubenstein recently donated $7.5 million dollars to repair cracks sustained in the Washington Monument during last years freak east earth quakes. Rubenstein’s $15 million dollar donation to Duke University makes it his largest single donation to one institution.

Duke University just recently completed a $50,000 startup challenge. A health and life sciences startup called Nanoly was the recipient of the $50,000 award. Their startup has found a way to chemically preserve vaccines outside of refrigerators, and make them easier to administer in developing and third world countries.

Another great startup emerged from the Duke University Challenge called Mobile Foods which is entering the food truck tracking space. Their technology will allow customers of their favorite food trucks to track their location and find them easier using existing mobile phone technologies.

Rubenstein is the founder of the Washington DC private equity from, The Carlyle Group, which recently went public.

Rubenstein said today that the money will fund courses, mentoring and an incubator for students and faculty to develop new startup ventures through Duke’s innovation and entrepreneurship initiative which is also the backbone to the annual startup challenge contest.

Linkage:

source: WGME

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Miami Startup: Senzari Raises $1 Million Dollars For Global Expansion

Miami music startup Senzari has just raised $1 million dollars for global expansion.

Leading the round was Dave McClure’s 500 startups. Other investors from both Miami and Silicon Valley also participated in the round for this unique global music service.

Move over Pandora, Senzari has over 11 million songs (compared to Pandora’s 900,000) and the best part is that it is available outside of the United States. The service is available in the United States as well as Spain (in a partnership with MTV) and Brazil (in a partnership with VH1).

Aside from it’s gigantic catalog of songs Senzari separates itself form other on demand listening services like Pandora, Spotify and Slacker Radio by partnering with music distributors instead of the record labels directly. Some of their partners include SoundExchange, and publishing companies ASCAP, BMI, and SEASAC.

“We are excited about joining the 500 family as it allows us to leverage its impressive mentor network and global relationships,” says Senzari COO Demian Bellumio to techcrunch.com. “As a matter of fact, we created a special section in Senzari with radios for each of the stops of the tour with music that represent current and classic hits.”

Senzari also offers a proximity based service called “Around Me” that allows users to use social media data to find songs that people in close proximity to them are listening to, very similar to Berlin startup wahwah.com

Linkage:

Check out Senzari for yourself here

Source: TechCrunch

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Greenville Startups: 12 Software Startups Headed To Greenville SC For NEXT Big Thing

Greenville’s startup community is looking to make their place on the map more defined this summer as 12 software startups head there for the NEXT Big Thing. The three month incubation program will happen at Greenville’s NEXT Center. Journalwatchdog is equating it to ” a sort of a Rocky Mountain Boulder, Colo., in the Blue Ridge foothills”

Kevin Survance former Chief Technology Officer for MapQuest is heading to the NEXT Big Thing to work on a new mobile app for smartphones this summer. Survance told journalwatchdog.com “It has all the marks of putting Greenville on the map as a technology hub…But it won’t happen overnight”

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Startup Quick Byte: twiDAQ

For todays Startup Quick Byte we take a look at twiDAQ a site that mixes both Wall Street and Twitter into one. Located in Bath, United Kingdom this company takes Twitter to another level that even has me interested. After having raiser $48,000 in funding so far, twiDAQ is using peoples love affair for Twitter and wanting to do more with it to a whole another level.

While some sites like Klout mask and try and hide how things are rated, twiDAQ holds no such qualms as they clearly post it on their site Here

There are two principal models for setting the share price; performance & demand. What we’re all seeing at this early stage in the market is the dominance of performance over demand which is allowing small stocks to rise in price.

Currently, only on the Web and iOS and free on both markets. So if you are into Twitter and just want more. Make sure to check it out. No words yet on an Android application yet.

Where to find:

Website

Twitter

Facebook

Baltimore Startup: Need Beta Testers? Beta Punch Has You Covered

Ross Nochumowitz, is a bail bondsman by day and a startup founder by night. His startup called Beta Punch seeks to make the beta testing process more productive for startup founders and software launchers.

Beta Punch is a community of beta testers, almost a social network of beta testers if you will. There are other companies out there that promise and deliver beta testers for startups but with Nochumowitz’ Beta Punch, the beta testers themselves are ranked by startups and have their own competitive network within the community.

The other day I heard someone say if you show your startup off to everyone and they love it you’re doing something wrong. Nochumowitz echoes that philosophy telling tehccoktail.com:

“The biggest mistake that startups make while beta testing is asking the wrong people for feedback for their startup. Often times startup founders want to show their family or friends their next big idea, and no matter what it is ,they are going to tell you they like it.”

The other popular course for the beta test is LaunchRock. If you’re a startup or into the startup scene then you’ve probably seen one too many Launch Rock pages. While it’s a great concept and does work for some, many startups wait months and months to accumulate email addresses and then when it’s time for the beta people have forgotten about the startup or even worse, they’ve already tested a competing product.

Beta Punch has over 500 testers and has already worked with over 150 startups.

One thing about Beta Punch though is that the testers will give real feedback. I overheard someone at a startup event in New Orleans talking about “I don’t want to get bad feedback” whoa those guys need to go back to the workforce. Beta Punch is definitely worth checking out if you’ve got a startup product ready to be tested.

Linkage:

TechCocktail the source for this story is holding an awesome event in DC learn about it here

Here’s that source piece from TechCocktail

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NY Startup: We Talk With Three Ring The Winners Of Best Education Startup At New York Tech Day

At the recent New York tech day a startup called Three Ring walked away with the best education startup award. In short three ring provides a platform that makes it incredibly easy to digitize students work. The backbone of the Three Ring system functions as a portfolio or digital filing cabinet.

Teachers can use an iPhone or Android phone and take a photo or video of a student assignment. From there they can organize the entries by tags including student name, class, assignment and other core parts of the assignment which makes it incredibly easy to recall for later use.

Teachers can use the assignments stored in Three Ring to provide assessments of the students work, go over the assignment more in depth with students and easily recall assignments for things like parent teacher conferences. Three Ring is currently in beta and only for teachers however Three Ring plans to incorporate a parent, student and administrator component.

In the future a parent module or student module could easily be the remedy for “the dog ate my homework”. The possibilities with all four components are endless. Later on, Three Ring could be a way for students to submit an assignment to a teacher once completed. Imagine uploading the assignment to Three Ring and even if the student couldn’t make it to school, got sick before class, or had to leave early for a football game an assignment could be turned in to a teachers Three Ring account and the student could still get credited on time.

There are several tools out there in the digital world for teachers. Three Ring makes is an extremely easy to use tool that can be adapted to several scenarios.

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Dallas Startup: Ustream’s Brad Hunstable Joins GuideHop’s Advisory Board

Texas native and co-founder and CEO of the world’s most popular live streaming network Ustream has, Brad Hunstable has joined the advisory board for Dallas startup Guidehop.

Guidhop allows users to create and market custom tours and experiences and share them with an online community.

For example, Aaron B, who is a founding member of Guidehop, offers a scooter tour of Austin. One of his tours on Guidehop is “Ride With a Scooter Gang”. For $40 a person he will take people on a scooter tour of downtown Austin. His tour is flexible, you can ride with him on his scooter, or he’ll get you your own to rent and lead you on the tour. If you don’t have any experience on a scooter he will take you to a school parking lot first to practice before hitting the sites. Not bad for $40 a person it’s comparable to what you would pay to rent a scooter in Miami without the tour.

In San Francisco, Ligia C will take you on a legends of Rock tour for $100 a person. The four hour tour includes the homes of Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia and Jimi Hendrix.

These aren’t professional touring companies these are user generated experiences, which makes Hunstables appointment to GuideHops advisory board even more meaningful. Hunstable’s Ustream is all about user generated streaming content.

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Denver Startups: Castrol 20/20 innoVentures Crops In Denver To Hear Pitches.

20/20 innoVentures a venture capital arm of Castrol Oil/BP stopped in Denver Colorao this week to hear pitches from up and coming mobile/mobility technology startups.

Crashboxx a Fort Collins based startup was one of four companies that made their pitches. David Byrne, Crashbox’s CEO said that this was his first time pitching to a vc firm.

Crashboxx is a technology geared towards fleet. The Crashboxx functions much like the black box on an airplane and records data that can be recalled in the event of a crash.

“This is really the future of fleet management and something every parent of a teenage driver would want,” said Byrne to the

Denver Post

Lightning Hybrids out of Loveland pitched as well. Their technology uses a hydraulic system to store the force from braking and re-applies it to accelerating.

According to Lightning Hybrid’s Founder Dan Johnson, their technology boosts mileage efficiency up to 30%

Fort Collins startup VanDyne SuperTurbo has made over 300 pitches according tp founder Ed VanDyne. They’ve raised over $14 million dollars so far.

They need to raise more capital for their technology that uses exhaust waste heat and torque from an engine’s drive train to increase an engine’s energy efficiency up to 30%.

GreenGold of Colorado Springs also pitched their manufacturing technology that according to their website “unlocks the full potential and benefits of biobased ingredients to create machining lubricants”

Source: Denver Post

Chicago Startup: Chippewa Five Supplying Beer Pong Tables To Facebook And More

Zynga and Facebook have more in common than just social online gaming. A Chicago Startup called Chippewa Five has helped both Zynga and Facebook get back into physical gaming, at least in their offices.

Chippewa Five or C5 for short, makes professional grade, furniture style beer pong tables. Wait, beer pong? Yes beer pong. Their tables are high quality wood finished tables with a secret skeet shot capability and dining grade table legs. Just look at the picture.

As we learn in our interview with co-founder Daniel Manriquez both Facebook and Zynga have a C5 beer pong table in their offices. It’s not the least bit crazy we’ve actually seen a good dozen or so incubators, and startup offices that have the beer pong tables you can get at Spencers in offices. That’s the “boot strap” version.

Manriquez along with co-founder Joseph Mollo learned that they could take a favorite college past time for themselves and many from their generation and make an actual business out of it. After selling a few tables via easy, and a flash sale on fab.com (the Facebook table) they’ve decided to make a real go out of high end beer pong.

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NY Startup: Fancy Attracts Silicon Valley Backers For Social, Reverse Groupon Platform

If you like something, fancy it? Feeling kind of British? Well it’s not a British thing it’s an internet thing and it’s a new startup in New York that’s attracting some investors from the Valley.

Even though he didn’t get Instagram, that hasn’t stopped Twitter (and Square) co-founder Jack Dorsey from investing in an innovative disruptive new social platform. It’s also attracted the likes of Chris Hughes( Facebook) and Maynard Web of Ebay.

Although he hasn’t invested yet, Fancy has struck the Fancy of Ashton Kutcher. Kanye West, Bar Rafaeli and Selma Hayek have all become celebrity activists of this new kind of e-commerce platform.

So what is it? Fancy is part store, blog, magazine and wishlist. Anyone can join Fancy and when they do they can share the things they love and like with others. When their social friends across Fancy, like something, merchants can step in and offer a “Groupon in reverse type deal”. This is going to create a new, disruptive and competitive e-commere market place.

Fancy has 500,000 users across their web app, iOS app and recently introduced Android app. It’s great for users because they can see all the things their social friends like. It’s great for merchants because they know what’s in demand.

Fancy is free to join and get started. As Fancy tells Nibletz.com everything that you see on Fancy is either for sale or can be for sale.

Linkage:

Check out Fancy here at their website

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St.Louis Startups: Arch Grants Announces 15 Recipients of $50k Grants

If you’re been watching Nibletz.com then you probably know that St.Louis has a thriving startup scene. Square co-founder Jim McKelvey has been investing in some of the leading area startups. Tech.li CEO Edward Domain (no relation to Kim DotCom), moved tech.li’s operations to St. Louis as well.

St. Louis has a tight knit community of startups, entrepreneurs and investors, but at the same time we’ve found that they are really open and welcoming of any startup, extremely easy to talk to and just a great bunch of people. Heck if tech.li wasn’t already in St. Louis, we’d consider moving there :)

Yesterday Arch Grants announced 15 recipients of $50k in startup grants, the winners of their business plan competition. Arch Grants co-founder Jerry Schlichter said that the 15 recipients came out of a pool of 400 submissions.

In addition to the seed money, Arch Grants will provide business consulting, mentorship and big discounts on needed services like office space.

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Arizona Startups: Peoria Getting New Biotech Incubator “BionInspire”

Peoria Arizona is preparing for a new biotech incubator called Bioninspire. The incubator will launch next month and is a partnership between the city of Peoria and BioAccel and Plaza Companies a real estate firm.

BioAccel is a Phoenix Arizona based non profit that works in life science technologies. Plaza Companies specializes in medical and technology real estate. BioInspire will focus on medical device technologies. The incubator will operate out of 6800 feet that will encompass office space, lab space, conference rooms and more.

The city will support BioInspire with an aggressive marketing campaign.

For selected biotech startups BioInspire could provide up to $300,000 in seed investment along with free office space, free lab space and mentoring. Mary Ann Guerra, Chief Executive of BioAccel said that she hopes to bring in the right people that want to succeed and plans to do this with a vigorous vetting process.

The Bionspire Incubator will have an advisory council that includes; Russ Yelton, President of Northern Arizona Center for Emerging Technologies; John Lineham, a biomedical engineer professor at Northwestern University; and Enrico Picozza, director of SensAble Technologies.

The city is hoping that the incubator will help fuel the local economy and that the companies incubated there will stay in the area and continue to grow.

Linkage:

Source: AZ Central

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