Miami Startup: YourListen Crosses 100,000 Audio Uploads

Audio sharing site Yourlisten.com, founded by Scott Goodman, hopes to become the audio version of Youtube. They are well on their way as they recently announced their 100,000th audio upload. That’s definitely not too shabby for an audio file sharing site not based in Silicon Valley, and having to deal with the fallout from sites like MegaUpload.

Yourlisten.com is a free user-generated network that allows flexibility for uploading just about any kind of audio file. You’ll find a variety of music, podcasts, ringtones, interviews, soundbytes and other audio files on Yourlisten.com. The user can share the audio on the site, with friends and across social networks.

You would be surprised at the types of audio files that you can find on yourlisten.com. It’s not the site of the day out there to replace sites like megaupload. There are a lot of spoken word poetry pieces, international interviews and songs by new and undiscovered artists. A quick perusing of the site found that WTOP radio in Washington DC (one of the top billing radio stations in the country) uses Yourlisten.com to host interviews for people to listen to if they miss them during the original broadcast.

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Michigan Startup: FetchNotes Brings StickyNotes To Your Mobile Phone

Ann Arbor Michigan based FetchNotes is a new note taking mobile app. However they aren’t looking to challenge the likes of Evernote or Catchnotes. Co-Founder Alex Schiff says that they are looking to bring sticky notes to the mobile phone. Think more along the lines of three to four word notes not three to four page notes.

“We see ourselves as competing more with a phone’s native notepad than Evernote,” Schiff explained to Xconomy. “The problem with most of the note-taking software is that it focuses on long-form note taking. Ours is geared toward three-to-four-word notes, not three-to-four-page notes.”

Schiff and co-founder Chase Lee met at a entrepreneurship practicum at the University of Michigan. Their first idea was for an ideas marketplace startup. Schiff says he quickly learned that his idea “really sucked” and then he and Lee started looking at how people capture notes and to do items.

Fetchnotes has a variety of ways to jot down your note. Users can text, call and email notes on the fly from their mobile phone and then quickly recall them from the mobile app. Schiff admits to texting his own ideas to himself and then later putting them in a word doc.

“One day, my Blackberry’s notepad erased a year’s worth of ideas. I was very distraught.” Schiff said

Like Evernote and Catch Notes you can tag your notes and keep them organized using a hashtag system. With Fetchnotes emphasis on short notes the hashtag would be much more effective than it is on Evernote.  The different ways to input a note definitely set Fetchnotes apart from the rest of the pack.

Fetchnotes is currently bootstrapped and working on a seed round at the moment. They do have a staff of 9 right now and Schiff and Lee are still enrolled as Juniors at the University of Michigan. They’re hoping that Fetchnotes will be the goto  app for short notes.

source: Xconomy

Durham NC Startup: School House Apparel; Collegiate Home Grown Apparel With Purpose

Duke University Alum Rachel Weeks set out on a mission to create a line of fashion apparel that’s socially conscious. School House started when Weeks went to Sri Lanka in 2007 on a mission to build a socially responsible clothing company.  She was able to do that with her first college t-shirt from her alma mater Duke University.

The first School House line was manufactured in Sri Lanka and it helped support a living wage factory there. While she was maintaining an ethically social responsible clothing line while using a living wage factory in Sri Lanka she found the opportunity to come full circle in 2011 and brought her clothing line back home to North Carolina, but that wasn’t before Weeks was able to triple the wages in that Sri Lankan factory.

While Weeks felt great about what she was doing for the Sri Lankan factory she found out later on that the factory had taken on more and more orders from other companies and the School House orders were getting pushed to the back. With an angel investment Weeks was able to hire textile and apparel expert Susan Williams who had over 25 years of experience with brands like Jockey, Levi Strauss and the Gap. The two of them together did a cost analysis and decided that home was where School House needed to be.

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Des Moines Startup: Freebee Cards About To Launch, Making Customer Loyalty And Engagement Fun

A new Des Moines based startup called FreebeeCards is preparing for launch. They are launching May 15th in Des Moines and they are currently signing up merchants and users, for what promises to be a fun and exciting new way to build customer loyalty and engagement.

Freebee Cards was founded by CEO Ken Lazzaro who is a consultant in the reward/loyalty card and credit card processing space so he has experience with this kind of thing. How did he come up with Freebee Cards? Their marketing guy Todd Razor told us in an interview:

“Ken’s consulting company, which educates and helps business owners implement gift card, loyalty and credit card processing programs, was working with the owner of a women’s clothing boutique in Austin, Texas.  Ken had just sold the business owner a point-of-sale system, and she was also very interested in increasing customer loyalty. Ken’s company approached her about offering preloaded gift cards with varying values of $5, $10, $25 and $50 to customers in her area.

She loved the idea of consumers having to visit her store to find out the value of the cards. Yet a concern over not being able to measure the customer acquisition cost stopped her short of running that program. 

Ken soon realized that developing an electronic version of this gift card marketing concept would allow merchants to track customer shopping habits, as well as open a direct line of communication to make special offers, reward customer loyalty and collect candid feedback outside of the public’s view.

It snowballed into an idea for a website and FreebeeCards was born.”

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Kansas City Entrepreneur Inspires Startups To Get Fit With New Fitness Startup Blog

The managing partner and co-founder of Think Big Partners, Herb Sih, has launched a new startup of his own called “Startup Your Fitness”. The new media startup (blog) aims at giving startup founders and entrepreneurs who live the workaholic startup lifestyle fitness and living tips that fit into their busy lives.

The site, which launched on the first of April, was no April Fool’s joke. “Startup Your Fitness” offers exercise tips, diet tricks and health advice that can fit into a busy lifestyle. Sih created the startup because as a serial entrepreneur he found himself drifting further and further away from being in shape.

“I know many other entrepreneurs who are in the same boat as me,” says Sih. “They’re passionate and committed to their dreams, but struggle finding time for exercise and living a healthy lifestyle. So, I’m challenging them to join me in my next venture in building an exercise regimen that works for entrepreneurs just like me.”

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Birmingham Alabama Hosting A Startup Day On April 24th

They don’t have a Startup America affiliation yet and they haven’t had a formal 3 day 54 hour startup weekend, however Birmingham Alabama has a growing startup scene. Birmingham has an active startup Twitter account called StartupBirmingham and they have a startup day coming on April 24th.

The all day event will be held at Birmingham’s WorkPlay theater and the organizers are calling the event the Startup Summit. The organizers are Jonathan Sides the CFO of Daxlo and Tony Summerville the founder of his own startup called Rarestep which makes Fleetio a web based solution for fleet management.

As with all great startup events Sides and Summerville have enlisted the help of some of the top entrepreneurs in Birmingham’s startup ecosystem as well as community business leaders. More than 100 startup founders and entrepreneurs will attend the event. Sides and Summerville promise in addition to the content, lectures and panels there will be several networking coffee breaks, a networking lunch and an after event party where startup founders can network with each other. As we know that’s an integral part to any startup event.

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Chattanooga Entreprenuers’ Pure Soda Works A Huge Hit In Chattanooga Expanding To Retail Location

In our quest to be the startup voice from “everywhere else” we sometimes come upon hard goods startups that have a great story. Pure Soda Works is one of those startups. We learned about Pure Soda Works when our startup road trip brought us to the thriving community in Chattanooga TN. While Pure Soda Works isn’t “on the gig” they’re certainly quenching the thirst of those that are.

Pure Soda Works is the brain child of husband and wife team Matt Rogers and Tiffany Rogers who’ve already had success with their all natural bath and body company called Everday Eclectic. While we would hardly call Chattanooga a “hippie town” their residents are passionate about the environment, natural products, eating healthy and the environment. In a story or two about our trip to Chattanooga we’ve talked about how we saw electric car charging stations about the town. It’s really a great place.

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Des Moines Based: Goodsmiths “The Market Place For Makers” Is Open For Business

goodsmiths, siliconprairie, etsy, artifire, nibletz.comDes Moines based Goodsmiths, the “Market Place for Makers” is now open for business. The co-founders James Eliason and Levi Roscol opened up for a soft launch on Wednesday April 4th. They characterized it as a soft launch because at opening they were only using local payment provider Dwolla. They’ve since added Paypal as a payment option.

While on the surface you may immediately think Etsy clone, Eliason and Roscol insist that Goodsmith’s is no Etsy clone.

Eliason and Roscol are differentiating Goodsmiths from Etsy in three key areas. The first is community. The co-founders told SiliconPrairie that when they started doing market research they found that a lot of users of competing sites like Etsy and Artfire weren’t pleased with their community offerings or lack there of. To win in the community area both founders have concentrated on building the communities and launched them at the same time as the rest of the site. They’ve also recruited bloggers to keep the content fresh within the communities.

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Launch Pad Ignition Hosting Launch Fest In New Orleans During Jazz Fest May 3rd

Looks like New Orleans may be looking to turn their annual jazz festival into a jazz and tech festival reminiscent of the evolution that south by southwest has taken in recent years. Launch Pad Ignition is hosting a Launch Fest event on May 3rd in New Orleans .

The Launch Fest promises to bring together mentors, speakers, and investors to raise funding for the entrepreneurs in New Orleans.  The Launch Pad Ignition 2012 class will present their first public pitches at the event including  Kinobi,  VoteItRed Ticket GamesGiftmeo,UnawkwardLawyerfy, and Connect for a Cause.

The event also features a great list of speakers:

If you’d like to attend follow this link to register.

Source: Siliconbayou

Victoria Police Endorsing Australian Startup MyBikeRego To Help Reunite Bikes And Owners

Police in Victoria are endorsing a new QR based technology designed by an Australian startup called MyBikeRego.

The concept is rather simple. MyBikeRego gives users of their service, three very hard to remove QR code stickers to affix to their bicycles. For $30 per year the owners information is stored in the cloud.  The bicycle owners name, phone number, address and even other important information like blood type and next of kin can be stored in the cloud.

Now, when someone finds a bike and has a QR code reader on their smartphone they can easily locate the bicycles owner. Also police departments can do the same thing. With the information like the blood type and next of kin, should a bike rider ever get in an accident emergency personnel can easily contact the riders next of kin.

Craig McDonald, a leading senior constable and crime prevention officer in the northwest region of Victoria met with MyBikeRego in 2011 and instantly started recommending the product:

“As Police if we find a bike they all look the same to us,” he says, which makes it hard to help those whose bikes have been stolen. Bicycles’ inherent portability doesn’t help matters, as many end up in areas distant from their owners where it is even harder for Police to return a bike.

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Chicago Startups Yield $160M In Q1 From Funding To Acquisition: What’s This Midwest Mentality?

Whoever said Chicago didn’t have a thriving tech scene may need to crawl out from under their own angels and actually look at the facts. Builtinchicago.com has just released the Q1 numbers and they are mighty impressive for a town with no startup culture and entrepreneurs who are at home by 5:00pm.

According to the latest data from builtinchicago, 32 new startups were launched in Q1 2012. 17 startups saw funding to the beat of $33 million dollars and there were 12 acquisitions for a total of $127 million dollars. If you put your basic arithmetic hats on you’ll see that Chicago startups (and just the ones builtinchicago.com reports on) yielded $160 million dollars in funding and acquisitions.

Ageology, gtrot, Band Digital, Hireology, BodyShopBids, Kauzu, Buzz Referrals, Lab 42, CareShare, MediaFly, Channel IQ, Retrofit, Eved, Tap.me, Fippex, Univa and Vmock all saw some kind of funding in the first quarter of 2012.

Cellit, ClearTrial, Pointbridge, PrepMe, FeeFighters, RegistryPro, Intelli, RoundArch, ki edit + design, Savid Tech, MobManager, and Quiet FDN all saw exits through acquisition.

data from builtinchicago.com

Las Vegas Startup: Ticketometer Looking To Disrupt The Ticket Space With Creativity

How creative can the ticket space be? It’s a pretty straight forward business right? Have an event, you need to have a ticket. Nowadays that can be a hard paper ticket, a printed ticket at home or a virtual ticket housed on your smartphone. So is their room for creativity?

Well brothers Ardon and Jaron Lukasiewicz of Las Vegas think there is. In fact creativity is what is driving their startup Ticketometer from being different than all those other event ticketing sites. 24 year old Ardon tells Las Vegas’ Channel 8 news that they have a company of 5 already and their hoping to turn a profit in their first year with their ticketing business.

Ticketometer hopes to attract venues to using their service by being creative. That can mean making a wild and popping event web page or incentivizing ticket sales with new promotions and concepts. Ticketometer also provides back end details on ticket sales to venues, statistics that some other ticketing sites are quick to give up. But that’s not all to their openness. Ticketometer provides information to those buying tickets like how close an event is to actually selling out. Sure we all know what it’s like to miss a ticket sale and find our favorite show is sold out, but when a ticket is available is the show really popular? Are you one of 100 people going to see your favorite local band or one of 5,000. These things make a difference to both the event go-er and the venue.

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Former Vermont Secretary Of Agriculture Co-Founds Rural Location Based Mobile Startup ViewBoost

In January 2012 it was announced that former Vermont Secretary of Agriculture, Food and Markets Roger Allbee would be joining Vermont Technical College as Senior Scholar In Residence.  It didn’t take too long for Allbee to go all in and help co-found a startup.

The startup called ViewBoost is a location based startup that is designed to enhance rural travel and beyond. ViewBoost is fine tuned to rural areas where similar mobile apps are designed for major metropolitan areas.  The team behind ViewBoost looks at the app as a digital concierge connecting people to people, places, events and businesses. It also enables travelers to see their route, destination and recommend points of interest along the way.

The Vieweboost application integrates with Facebook to pull feedback and comments about places that users find along the way.

“Vermont has so much to offer, and is the perfect laboratory for the development of this rural tourism application. So many businesses and jobs depend on tourism that an application of this type is badly needed,” says Roger Allbee, a co-founder and former Secretary of Agriculture, Food and Markets in Vermont. “We are known for our landscape, agriculture, and food systems, and the state has been named as one of the key destinations in the world, so why should we not be at the forefront in developing this application that can better define what we are and who we are as a state and tourist destination?”

Viewboost is still in their infant stages. They are using Vermont as the test market and plan on targeting other similar sized areas as they build out. They are hoping to have the product on the market by spring of 2013.

source: BurlingtonFreePress

Denver Startup: Closely Gives Small Businesses A Competitive Edge With Perch Dashboard

As a small business owner how do you keep track of what your closest competitors are doing? Do you wear blinders and pretend they aren’t there? Do you shop at competitor locations to see what they’re doing? Do you plant spies? Do you set up Google alerts?

While some of these things (except wearing blinders), may seem effective, they all involve time and most small business owners don’t have that. Luckily there is a Denver based startup called Closely that is looking to simplify the monitoring of your competitors in one easy to use dashboard they’re calling Perch.

Perch is currently in a closed beta. The founders at Closely are hoping that Perch will give local merchants a snapshot of competitors marketing activities and help merchants build ideas of how to respond.

“We found that the majority of businesses don’t quite yet understand the level of activity surrounding them,” Closely CEO Perry Evans told Street Fight in an email. “As the application that they learn to rely on for daily tracking and watching, we’re in a front row position for helping them participate.”

Evans, started his career in technology as head of the Mapquest publisher group so he’s very familiar with the benefits of LBS, group deals and the other technologies that are preying and benefiting local merchants.

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