Startups Archives - Page 139 of 144

Chicago Entrepreneurs Launch PlanFast A Simple Way Of Planning

Chicago entrepreneurs Dan Schneider and Brian Doxey have launched a new start up called PlanFast. It’s a free web based service that allows you to plan just about anything visually rather than in a list form. As their video tour says, planning using PlanFast is as easy as scribbling a plan down on a piece of paper or using a white board.

When you check out PlanFast the first thing you’ll notice is the simplicity of it. As Doxey writes on builtinchicago.com:

There are a million ways to “get things done”, hundreds of “highly effective habits”, and dozens of ways to “map your mind”. These things tend to be complex, rigid, systematic, and intimidating for the uninitiated.

So essentially dumbing down the planning process makes it easier to plan things out and in effect easier to actually get things done.

Their introduction video shows how people who make lists for plans have no way to branch plans out, erase or interject something into their linear plan. On a white board or a sketched plan it’s easier to readjust pieces of your plan, check them off and collaborate.

Both Doxey and Schneider are no strangers to start ups, just two years prior they launched a cloud based browser loyalty program designed to reward people for browsing their favorite websites. Frequent Browser is currently incognito as the team adds new features to that service.

Find out more about planfast here at planfast.us

information from builtinchicago contributed to this story. If you’re an Illinois based start up builtinchicago.com should definitely be saved in your bookmarks

Colorado Start Up Answers: Dude Where’s My Everything

Steamboat Springs Colorado startup Ugrokit was founded by the wife and husband team of Carrie and Terry Requist to answer one of life’s most important questions: Dude Where’s My Everything.

Key finders have been around since the 80’s. There were some that worked like the clapper while others responded to a whistle or even others that required you keep track of a button in case you lose your keys. The idea has been refined over and over again. The ZOMM is a great iteration of a keyfinding device but that one uses BlueTooth technology and is relegated to a circular disc like device that is fastened on your keyring.

Ugrokit is different. Ugrokit uses RFID tags that are cheap, flat, washable and can attach to just about everything. The system comes with a Grok which is an orange RFID scanner that attaches to an iPhone (Android later?). You then use as many tags as you would like and you scan them into your iPhone. Once an item is scanned it’s stored and if you can’t locate that item you just wave the scanner around where you think it might be and a series of beeps tells you whether your hot or cold.

This Week In Funding 25 March 2012

This Week In Funding we have seen over $78 million dollars in investments go to Startups. They have raised it in all different ways, some going after big name Hollywood types like Ashton Kutcher. Or the more traditional rout with rounds Andreessen Horowitz leading the way. Everything from a Series A round to an E round happened. Bellow are a list of some of those that brought in investments this week.

With Nukona Acquired by Symantec Citrix Accelerator Graduates First Class

Nukona, a start up focused on mobile app management, was just acquired by Symantec last week. Nukona was one of the first startups in the Citrix Startup Accelerator.

The Citrix Startup Accelerator takes early stage startups with a focus on enterprise and not necessarily integrated with the Citrix platform. In addition to monetary backing Citrix provides the accelerator companies with office space near their Santa Clara headquarters, mentorship and access to the Citrix customer base.

They also give the accelerator companies access to Citrix executives, networking opportunities and access to vendor partners like Symantec who can be instrumental in a companies next round of financing.

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Jessica Alba’s Baby Safe Start Up Honest.com Raises $27 Million From Top VCs

Yesterday we brought you a story about celebrities getting involved in the tech start up world. One name that wasn’t in yesterday’s story was Golden Globe nominated actress Jessica Alba. Alba has stared a company called “The Honest Company” which seeks to replace baby products laiden with harsh and untested chemicals, with natural products that are baby safe like diapers, household cleaners, soap, sunscreen, laundry detergent and even dishwasher gels.

Alba’s $27 million dollar round included investors have funded some of the biggest web start ups including Netflix, Twitter, Zynga and LivingSocial. It’s no wonder they’re prepared to get behind a company that offers something every new expecting family is going to want with a face everyone already knows.

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Des Moines Start Up Answers The Question: What Are You Doing Later With ShareWhere

Dylan Hamilton, a Des Moines Iowa entrepreneur has been pondering a question that has yet to be answered. Six years ago Twitter answered the question “What are you doing”. Hamilton, with his start up called ShareWhere, hopes to answer the question “What are you doing later”.

ShareWhere’s purpose is to help the user easily create plans big or small and hopefully replace the hodge podge of texts and emails that traditionally go hand in hand with planning events on the go. Once the plan is hashed ShareWhere than matches those people in your plan with merchants that can help out with the plan.

Sure everyone has a deals program that will help you locate proximity based deals, but that’s not what ShareWhere is all about. The deals ShareWhere users enjoy pertain to the actual plan. For example if you and a group of 10 friends were going bowling, the bowling alley could give you a party room, a personalized discount on pitchers of beer and free shoes. Most deals sites would give you a discount on wings at the place across the street from the bowling alley.

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Ed Tech Start Ups Heating Up In New York

New York is a great city for start ups. There are a lot of hot marketing, web based and of course social discovery start ups out there. There are also a lot of culture start ups flourishing among the skyscraper of the concrete jungle where dreams are made of. Another important start up category is heating up in New York now as well. That category is Ed Tech, or Education Tech.

Douglas Crets, who works for Microsoft as the Developer Evangelist for the Bizspark program, founded the program, and then teamed up with Saad Alam CEO of citlighter, an online academic research tool, and came up with a new strategy to launch similar Ed Tech programs in Silicon Valley, L.A., Nairobi, Kenya and other countries.

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Xoogler Spotlight: Alohar Mobile, Putting A Bigger Spin On Siri

In a Keynote at the 2011 Google’s then CEO, Eric Schmidt described an experience where integrated mobile technology into commerce would mean you could walk down the street, close to your favorite clothing store and have a new pair of pants pulled off the shelves, bagged for you and waiting when you got to the store. This kind of technology is what ex-Googler Sam Liang is working on with his new start up Alohar Mobile.

Liang described the technology he and his co-founders are working on as “Siri after Siri” in a recent interview with Forbes’ magazines resident start up and entrepreneur guru Ryan Mac in an interview.

Liang has described scenarios like this one, you wake up one morning with a head cold, you miss your usual drive time and you haven’t found your way to the office. After confirming with your calendar that you didn’t have any other appointment in the place of work, your phone automatically makes an appointment at the doctor for you. This is the kind of smart computing that phones will be able to do with a technology Liang dubs as “persistent sensing”.

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LA Entrepreneur Moves Into His Car To Build New Startup

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LA Entrepreneur Kurt Varner is bootstrapping it from his car (photo: Kurtvarner.com)

LA entrepreneur Kurt Varner has decided to turn his marriage into a long distance relationship and move himself, in his car from LA to Silicon Valley. Once he arrives there, the creator of Vloggo who’s working on his next start up, Daily Toaster, is going to live out of his Honda Civic.

He writes on his personal blog about his adventure, that his wife is a school teacher in Los Angeles and it’s not economically feasible for them to rent two apartments. Varner also insists because of the thriving culture in Silicon Valley that’s where he needs to be to continue working on the Daily Toaster and hopefully attracting a co-founder that doesn’t mind his infrequent showering.

Varner has arranged to work out of two collaborative work spaces, the first Hacker Dojo in Mountain View. He’ll also work out of Parisoma in San Francisco. Both work spaces offer Varner a desk, internet access, a chair to sit on and a kitchenette which is a vital part to this journey.

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Celebrities In Start Ups A New Trend

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Ashton Kutcher On Stage At TechCrunch Disrupt NY (photo: Nibletz.com)

The LA Times published a huge piece this week on celebrities lending themselves to new start ups. There are a couple ways that celebrities are doing this. Some celebrities of course, can be bought to lend their name, likeness and endorsement to a start up. Then there’s the path that singer and actor Justin Timberlake and Lady GaGa have gotten involved.

Timberlake invested in and led a consortium of investors who successfully bid for MySpace from Fox Media last year. The price $53 million dollars. While some thought that the investors were going to rip the data out of the social network and sell it, they actually pumped new life into it and for the first time in years MySpace has graced the top 50 ComScore list two months in a row.

Timberlake went as far as to be the MySpace pitch man at the International Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas in January. Pitching everyone that would listen to him both big time investors, and well just everyone. Teen pop superstar Justin Bieber was also at the Consumer Electronics show however in his case it was a paid endorsement of Tosy, a robot company banking on his star power attracting potential buyers to their booth.

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New Start Up Will Let Developers Sell Their App (as in the business) E-Bay Style

When I first heard about Apptopia and the words “app” “sell” and “purchase” were in the same conversation I instantly thought we had another third party app store on our hands. No, that’s far from what Apptopia is.

This Boston based start up is headed by Jonathan Kay and Eli Sapir. Kay was the Ambassador of Buzz for Grasshopper, the phone service for startups. Sapir was the former Entrepreneur in Residence at GreatPoint Ventures. Sapir also founded GPush a Gmail notification iPhone app. It was GPush, and his difficulty selling the business which prompted Apptopia.

Apptopia is a marketplace, not for downloads, but for app developers to sell their businesses, not just licensing either, the whole shooting match. Betabeat characterized Apptopia as an exit strategy for unprepared developers.

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Start Up Hearty Spin Releases iOS App For Autistic Children

A Singapore start up called Hearty SPIN has released a new app meant for helping autistic children communicate to the Apple app store. The SPIN in Hearty Spin stands for Solutions for People In Need. Hearty SPIN’s website describes them as a “social enterprise that creates special education, learning and communication assistive technology apps for individuals with autism and other special needs worldwide”.

Their first app for autistic children, called Picture ACC, and uses visual learning strengths to help children communicate more effectively. The app, which is available in English and Chinese, is designed for iPads and iPhones.

ACC stands for augmentative, alternative communication. This app allows autistic children to communicate by using the pictures on the screen.

“Picture AAC app enables children with autism to learn effective communication by utilizing their visual learning strength.” said KhengWah Koh, Founder of Hearty SPIN

Parents of autistic children are very aware of the PECS binder which allows autistic children to pick from a number of pictures to help communicate with friends, family and loved ones. The Picture ACC app effectively takes the idea behind the PECS binder and puts it into a touch screen app format.

You can find out more about the Picture AAC app here

Redfin Adds Price Alerts For Home Shoppers

Real Estate start up Redfin just made home shopping a little easier. They’ve added new price alert email notifications via their “Instant updates”. Now instead of waiting for a weekly or daily email, users are notified within 15-30 minutes of any price change to the properties that they are interested in.

Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman, told geekswire.com that in this day in age in real estate timing is everything. He pointed out that 17 percent of listings that debuted on Redfin and then sold, were under contract within three days or less.

“In a world where a Las Vegas chef can now buy a fish caught in the Adriatic before the fisherman has even returned to the harbor, it’s crazy to think that real estate for the most part has run on 1950s-newspaper-time, with one email update in the morning. Instant Updates changes the whole speed of the game.” Kelman told geekswire.com

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Startup Quick Byte: Share Magnet

For Startup Quick Byte we’ll take a look at Share Magnet, a company based out of Los Angeles, Ca. Share Magnet system enables users who register on the site to get paid for personally recommending relevant items to their friends, family and social connections. The revenue source comes from companies that wish to reward individuals who recommend their products, services, online links, and entertainment such as games, music, films, etc. In other words, you’ll be our advertising and we’ll pay you for sending links out to your friends.

Our mission is to bring consumers together through common interests, and reward them for sharing the things they like.