Startups Archives - Page 138 of 144

Huffington Post Co-Founder Has His Sights On CNN With New Startup

Ken Lerer, one of the co-founders of the Huffington Post has embarked on a new video startup. He is going to deliver the news via the web and has his eyes set on traditional tv cable news outlets like CNN and Fox News. According to AllthingsD’s Peter Kafka Lerer is looking to provide a news outlet for those who watch Jon Stewart, and a generation that consumes most of their media from the internet.

It’s obvious that people are moving to the web for news, and real time events especially when there are live events and breaking stories. That’s evidenced in a 20% upswing in NCAA tournament viewing online.

Lerer who, with co-founder Ariana Huffington, sold the news giant Huffington Post last year to AOL for over one million dollars. Of course the Huffington Post is a more traditional new media outlet.

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Seattle Start Up Replyboard Uses Risky (But Hilarious) Hidden Camera Videos To Show Risks On Craigslist

Replyboard founder Steiner Skipsnes has created a website that allows anonymous buyers and sellers to get rated and become trusted without divulging their private information.

Sure we’ve all heard about or seen the movie “The Craigslist Killer” however dealing with strangers in their homes can be dangerous. Meeting strangers in a public place may seem safe but you could still get totally ripped off when that electronic item you just bought doesn’t charge up ever again, or you find out that used cell phone you bought has a stolen ESN.

Overall the replyboard concept is a valuable one.

Skipsnes is bootstrapping it. In fact he is still working a day job to support replyboard right now. So he was looking for a way to show the importance of replyboard on a rather large scale without spending a huge amount of money on marketing. He also wanted to show his users exactly what replyboard was for without cluttering the message.

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Meshin Recall: A Valuable Tool For Startups, Business And Everyone Else

Meshin, a Paolo Alto based s tart up and part of Xerox’s Paolo Alto Research Center, has released a valuable tool for startups, business and everyone in between. The tool called Meshin Recall, is currently available for Android smartphones and is in beta for iPhone.

Meshin Recall leverages your calendars and Evernote and ties them together to give a consistently flowing, easily indexed and accesible way to recall your notes in Evernote. By tying Evernote notes to your calendar you have an organized way of recalling the notes later, and of course that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Meshin’s founders Chris Holmes and Kristen Galliani, are doing vast amounts of research on semantics and the way people use the tools that they use everyday and making them more productive. Categorizing notes may seem like a menial task but so far it’s been the most effective. Everyone can tag notes in Evernote but the tagging system in Evernote is about as effective as hashtagging on Twitter. What do I mean by this? Well with Evernote you can tag a not any way you’d like, but once you have the freedom to so broadly tag your notes, it gets as hard to recall as the note itself.

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New “Fame” Game Could Get You A Whole Lotta Twitter Followers (For A Day?)

Adam Ludwin a Principal at RRE Ventures and some developer friends have created an interesting new game called “Fame”. The purpose is to raffle off Twitter followers. One lucky person each day will be followed by everyone who has entered the contest. According to their website as of the time of this posting the current pot of followers is 359 followers.

How does this work exactly? Well you login to the game at playfame.com with your Twitter account. You are then in the daily drawing along with everyone else who enters that day. Logging in gets you one chance to win that day. Tweeting about Fame gives you ten more entries per day, and if your Tweet gets more people to sign up, you get one raffle chance per new entrant that signs up using your link.

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New Startup Trendabl, An Instagram For Fashion, Enlists The Help Of Mary Kate & Ashley Olsen, Nicky Hilton and More

Olsen Twins, Olsen Twins Hot, Trendabl, Nibletz.com, TechCrunch, Sara Lacey

(photo: go4celebrity.com)

No the Olsen Twins and Nicky Hilton aren’t teaming up to announce a startup to find the hottest parties in town. They’re providing feeds for Jon Alagem’s new startup Trendabl.

Trendabl launched yesterday and is being likened to an Instagram for the fashion sect. Like Instagram, users can take photos, and upload and tag images on their free mobile app. They can also share pictures with filters too. However it’s all set around a fashion theme. Users can share their fashion feeds with other users or visit feeds of other users.

To launch Trendabl Alagem was able to recruit celebrities including; Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, Nicky Hilton, designer Michael Koors, Diane von Frustenberg, Barney’s New York and more. These celebrities, designers and upscale stores will provide their own feed of photos and fashions for users to enjoy.

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With Two Startups In The Program, New Health Focused “WellTech” Incubator Launches In New York

There’s a new startup incubator in New York City hoping to help launch new businesses in the health and wellness sector. The WellTech incubator is based in New York’s Gramercy neighborhood and is headed by Peter Ellis who is the CEO and one of the founders of SpaFinder the world’s largest spa and wellness resource.

Welltech is being financed by Ellis’ Jubilee Investments. Jubilee found it’s big success by being a first round investor in Gramercy One. Gramercy One offers cloud based business management solutions for over 5,800 spas, gyms and medical practices world wide. Gramercy One announced a $14.5 million dollar round of financing led by Steve Case’s Revolution Ventures, GroTech, TD Capital and Jubilee, last fall.

“The phenomenal success of SpaFinder and GramercyOne showed us that technology holds enormous potential for helping people lead healthier lives,” Ellis said. “New York City is home to some of the most creative innovators in both the technology and wellness sectors, and we look forward to working with them to take wellness-related technology and services to an exciting new level.”

Companies chosen to participate in the WellTech Incubator will receive $50,000 in seed capital to start their business, along with office space. They’ll also have access to GramercyOne and Spafinder executives for guidance and mentoring. There may also be future financing rounds in the cards from WellTech along with other introduced investors.

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DC Start Up Venga Pivots To Add More Of The Restaurant In Their Restaurant App Business

Venga is a Washington DC start up that is part of The Fort accelerator based in the nation’s capital. When they came onto the scene they wanted to offer an app that was a little more upscale than Urban Spoon or Open Table. They were able to get their product launched and actually launched it simultaneously across iPhone, Android and Blackberry at the same time.

Restaurant apps have many avenues they can use to get off the ground. Although most avenues are very time consuming, the easiest way to a restaurant app is to draw from a location based API, crowd source reviews and voila. Well apparently that strategy didn’t set well with Sam von Pollaro or Winston Lord, the company’s founders. They actually went out to restaurants and got feedback for their app, what a novel idea.

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Marc Cuban Offers Advice To Startups Don’t Follow Your Passion?

(photo: Inqusitr.com)

Billionaire tech entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban offered a great tidbit of advice on his blog, blogmaverick.com last week. That advice “Don’t Follow Your Passion, Follow Your Effort”.

Now to many people this may seem a bit absurd. But if you’ve ever watched Mark in action on Shark Tank this season, or on his guest appearances in season two than you may agree with this advice. Religious watchers of the ABC reality show about startups and pitches have seen one too many “entrepreneurs” leave the shark tank in tears because their passion didn’t transcend to a true business model.

“Mr. Wonderful” Kevin O’Leary is usually the first shark with his jaws open asking the entrepreneurs “That’s great, where’s your sales”. On episode after episode you’ll see people turning out new versions of the snuggie, useless kitchen gadgets and one of my favorites a pet food remedy that the veterinarian promised would prolong a pets life without any data to back it up. The one common thread in many of these unsuccessful pitches was passion.

Ridearoo, A Startup That Originated At Drexel University, Expands To Every College Campus In Philly

Ridearoo is a start up in Philadelphia that was founded by Drexel University graduates Andy Guy and Aksel Gungor. They started ridearoo in 2010 and now it’s starting to pick up traction and is available to all college students in Philadelphia.

Ridearoo isn’t some national gigantic network of rideshares, Ridearoo is designed to be implemented in organizations like colleges, universities and companies with large campuses. Each organization that utilizes the Ridearoo system supplies their students, workers or community members with a password that is customized for their organization. This way students at Temple University don’t have to comb through drivers and riders at say Villanova. The same would hold true as Ridearoo picks up more clients with companies.

The founders of Ridearoo characterize the service in their own words as:

“We offer a private, online tool to organizations that allows commuters within that organization to set up carpools with colleagues and peers.”

The Ridearoo service is easy there are three simple steps:

1. Tell Ridearoo your daily commute or special trip

2. Find matches who are going to the same areas or on the same route

3. Join rides

Ridearoo started when Gungor found a ride share board at Drexel University, the idea was born out of that. They then took the ride share board online in the first iteration of Ridearoo. Now it serves every college campus in Philadelphia with plans to expand to other colleges, universities, business campuses and other organizations.

To find out more about Ridearoo visit ridearoo.com

North Carolina Startup, Evatran, Attracting Funds By Finding Ways To Cut The Cord For Electric Cars

Outside of Detroit, North Carolina is a mecca for innovation in the automobile sector. North Carolina also has a thriving tech community in the research triangle area which encompasses Raliegh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Cary and surrounding areas. One of those companies is Evatran.

Evatran is a spinoff of a company called MTC transformers, which is an electronics manufacturer based in Whytheville Virginia. Evatran moved to Morrisville NC to be closer to the global technology hub that exists there.

So what is this start up doing that is Evatran doing that is so phenomenal that Google, Hertz Rent A Car, Duke Energy and Clemson University have come to the plate with funding for them? They are looking to cut the cord to recharge electric cars. Evatran is working on a plugless recharging station for electric cars.

“Fundamentally, what we’re selling here is convenience,” said Evatran co-founder Rebecca Hough told the Winston Salem Journal. “The cord gets really dirty. People run over the cord.”

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Charlotte Based Startup Rawporter Putting A New More Viable Spin On Citizen Journalism

Rawporter made a pretty nice impact at South By Southwest in Austin Texas earlier this month. This two person start up out of Charlotte NC is bringing a new concept to citizen reporting. With Rawporter, not only can a citizen report the news via video, they can also get paid for it.

Rawporter came about when friends and co-founders Kevin Davis and Rob Gaige were hanging out and then saw a horrible accident. Of course everyone on the scene of the accident had their camera phone out and were shooting the entire scene, but when they got home and turned on the 11:00 news, Gaige tells me that the only shot they had was the reporters stand up at a cleared scene.

Gaige and Davis knew that there had to be someway for those people who too that video, and the hundreds of thousands of people who take videos of incidents like this everyday, could both get sourced and make money.

Gaige has a background in marketing. Davis has a background in news radio, and then changed careers to marketing. They both met in the marketing department at Bank of America. As they see first hand that the biggest companies in the world are cutting back staff, and Davis knows that news media jobs are eliminated every day, citizen reporting can easily become a huge source for news stations.

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Shawn Parker’s AirTime Is Ramping Up For Launch, Has 2,000 Users And They’re Hiring

In 2010 Napster’s co-founders Shawn Fanning and Shawn Parker quietly started making noise about a new start up. At that time it wasn’t clear if the two were reunited when Fanning received an early seed round of funding in the amount of $200,000 for a startup, at the time called SupYo, as in “What’s Up Yo”. At that time Supyo’s founders were listed as Fanning and Voxli founder Joey Liaw.

Almost a year to the day later in October 2011, Fanning and Parker had competed an $8.3 million series A round. Some of the top investor’s in Silicon Valley were involved including; Founder’s Fund, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Yuri Milner, Ron Conway, Marissa Mayer, Ashton Kutcher, Will I Am, Scott Braun and Michael Arrington. With an all star line up like that Parker and Fanning must be on to something big. All that is known so far is that it’s some kind of video chat.

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Rockstar Start Ups: Yup See It In An Infographic

A really cool infographic has come to us by way of alltopstartups.com. The infographic conceptualizes the startups journey from assembling the team, to retiring and becoming an investor, through the looking glass of a rockband. I know with our extremely long nights, crazy off the wall times for meetings, and being fueled by Ramen and Monster, start ups (including us) feel like Rock Stars now we can see it.

You don’t believe Tech Startups and Rockbands are alike? South by Southwest obviously does.

Shane Snow, curator and designer of this fine infographic, hits the nail on the head. Read through it real quick it’s greatness.

Start Up Spotlight: Artsicle For Renting Beautiful Art

Artsicle founders Alexis Tryon & Scott Carleton (photo: business insider)

Throwing a cocktail party and want a nice piece of art for your home? Are you having an open house at the office? Do you need a couple of nice pieces of art for prospective investors to look at your office before you can afford to go out and purchase them? These are all great reasons to check out New York based artsicle.com

Artsicle’s got a cute little name for a company that provides beautiful pieces of art for all of their customers. Artsicle isn’t in the business of brokering 6 figure pieces, they rent out their art collection for as little as $25 per month.

Being New York based gives Artsicle the advantage of being connected to some of the top emerging artists. The company uses those connections to curate beautiful collections.

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