Startups Archives - Page 140 of 144

Start Up Spotlight: Chicago’s Klutch Club, Health & Wellness Delivered To Your Door Monthly

Companies like Shoe Dazzle and Sole Society revolutionized a new concept for busy people. These two companies send their “club members” a new, stylish pair of shoes every month. The shoes are roughly based on questions you submit when you join and most users are finding they get very stylish shoes.

The “of the month club” industry has expanded to cosmetics, purses, and now health and wellness. Klutch Club is a woman owned start up based in Chicago. Founder Julie Bashkin.

Klutch Club was built on Bashkin’s background as an engagement manager at McKinsey and Company. In that position she served packaged goods and retail clients and noticed that her clients were struggling to engage customers in a multi-channel way and hardly any had a digital presence.

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JOBS Act, Aiding Start Up Investment, Flies Through Senate

The “Jump Start Our Business Start Ups” or JOBS Act, flew through the senate Thursday. The bill will allow fundamental changes in how small companies are able to raise money. The version of the bill that passed through the senate today has some changes from the bill that recently passed through the house, that means this bill will have to be reconciled with the original. Either way this is a big victory for start-ups, venture capitalists and angel funds.

Under the provisions of this ball, smaller, emerging companies can raise up to $1 million dollars in a period of up to five years to private investors without making the investors subject to disclosure regulations that normally affect publicly traded companies.

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Texas Start Up Blurtt Let’s You Make MeMes And Have Fun With Photos On The Fly

After a background in Finance at big name financial houses like Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, Texas based entrepreneur Jeanette Cajide started to work on something beautiful and fun. After a long twisty road she has finally launched Blurtt.

Blurtt is an iOS app that functions as a “tool that allows users to express themselves” with text overlaid on photos. You can use photos that you take or photos off the web. Although it’s not integrated (only hipstamatic is), you can take a photo, instagram it, bring it through Blurtt, re-instagram it with no filter and add words while it’s in Blurtt (I promise it’s a lot easier than it sounds).

Cajide started Blurtt with the idea of sending beautiful postcards to people. When she started it she had a co-founder in Nikhil Sethi who moved on. Cajide finished Blurtt on her own and with help from Archimede’s Labs acceleration program.

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Hailo Cab Let’s You Hail A Yellow Cab In London With Your iPhone or Android

While hot tech start up Uber is preparing to embark on London before the 2012 Olympic games there is already an app available for iPhone and Android that lets people in England hail a taxicab.

The app called Hailo is a network that matches passengers and licensed taxi drivers. The app makes cabbies days more sociable and allows British taxi drivers to go to destination fairs rather than waiting at taxistands all day.

The app is great because it beats calling a taxi. Instead the user can click a button on their Hailo app and a cab is dispatched to them. Hailo promises you’re never two clicks away from a taxi. Hailo allows you to pay by credit card or debit card in-app or in cash to the driver. Hailo cab drivers will even wait five minutes before starting the meter.

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Peter Thiel Looking To Bolster New Zealand’s Budding Tech Scene

VentureBeat is reporting today that Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel has invested $12.1 million dollars into the New Zealand technology scene.

Thiel’s Valar Ventures is teaming up with the New Zealand Venture Investment Fund for a total offering of $40 million dollars. New Zealand’s Minister of Economic Development, Steven Joyce, welcomes the funding not just for the money but also the connections Thiel brings to the table.

“[This] is a very positive development for New Zealand technology companies wanting to expand into large offshore markets,” Joyce told the Wall Street Journal. “These companies require not only capital but also getting access to the right offshore networks in those markets and building their customer base.”

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Dan Porter: You Earned That Bump Like A Mother Fucker

One of OMGPOP's "The Wire" Inspired Meeting Rooms (photo: Business Insider)

Dan Porter the CEO of OMGPOP became a very wealthy man yesterday. After six years of producing games and the blockbuster hit Draw Something, OMGPOP hit the big time being acquired yesterday by Zynga.

During the press conference call yesterday Porter highlighted how Zynga got exactly what OMGPOP was doing with Draw Something. He also spoke about how Zynga would back their mission with future games. Porter will become the VP and General Manager of Zynga’s New York office.

Porter shot up in my book ten fold today when I read this walk through of OMGPOP’s offices in Business Insider. With Jason Kincaid gone from TechCrunch it’s hard to find segments like TechCrunch Cribs anymore.

Of course the news of the OMGPOP Zynga merger made the office tour piece a goto piece today. But what I found out when I viewed the story is that Porter has had all of their meeting spaces named after the hit HBO drama “The Wire”

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The Forgiving Valley: Path Puts Privacy Issue Behind Them Takes Another Round At A $250 Million Valuation

Yesterday we brought you the story of how some folks are out for blood against New York deals start up Sqoot. They misspoke and came off sexist, not once but twice. While opponents of sqoot are begging anyone that will listen to stop supporting their start up over saying that women would be at their hackathon serving beer, Path the social media network started by Facebook Alum Dave Morin, had a much more severe issue and just got another round of funding.

Although I truly feel that privacy is in the hands of the user and that if you are that worried about your privacy than you should stay off the net, Path did something far worse than Sqoot. They uploaded the complete contents of users address books to their own private servers.

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Another Day, Another Possible Black Mark On Pinterest

Another day, another possible black mark on Pinterest. The site that has been marked in the past with Link Baiting, Spam issues, and copyright infringement maybe up to it one more time. Business Insider is reporting that “VC’s” are trying to get a new round of investment valued for the company at around $1 billion dollars. There is just one problem with that, everyone they’ve called to talk to has denied it with no known knowledge of a new round. Nor does Pinterest “want” to raise a new round of funding as of yet they claim. This is also a company that still has no business model for revenue yet as their past one with links didn’t work out.

What they are hearing is VC’s are trying to bribe and are showing up uninvited to Pinterest in hopes of starting those talks.

Could it be a rogue investor trying to drum up more interest as one of the original investors as either bringing more money in or a possible exit plan? Or could it just be that Pinterest is trying to drum up hopes of another round, so that hopefully someone buys them out instead.

Source: Business Insider

Startup Spotlight: Los Angeles Based Incubators

For years, Silicon Valley has been the first thought when someone says Startups and Incubators, however Los Angeles is trying to change that. In this Start-Up Spotlight, we’ll be featuring three LA Based Startup Incubators trying to change that. While Los Angeles may be famous for Hollywood, Crips and Scientology, companies such as MySpace, Helio, and Picasa have all started here as well.

OMGPICTURELIFE: Charles Forman’s Next Project Heating Up

Charles Forman (left) with MC Hammer & Dan Porter (photo: Business Insider)

The news that Zynga has purchased OMGPOP for a reported $200 million dollars must have made Picturelife.com founder Charles Forman very happy, and very rich. While OMGPOP’s executive team has been running the show, Forman, founder of OMGPOP with Dan Porter, has been busy working on his new start up Picturelife.

Picturelife is the collaborative effort of three young executives experiences in the entrepreneur world. You’ve got Charles Forman who started OMGPOP as Iminlikewithyou iilwy, Nate Westheimer, who for 4 years with the Executive Director of the NY Tech Meetup, and Jacob DeHart, founder of threadless.

Picturelife is supposed to be the one central place to put and store all your photos from all your devices. Some in tech circles have called it a Flickr killer. Currently it’s in beta and it will cost you $7.00 a month of $70 for a year to get into the beta. The founders do promise a freemium model when they launch to the public.

source: VB

Sqoot Puts Foot In Mouth With Sexist Comment, Now Move On

We’re just 10 days away from what was looking like a great even in Boston, MA, the API Jam. The API Jam, a hackathon of sorts, was set for March 31st to April 1st. However, after what people are calling a grave mistake the event may not happen after all.

In an event flyer, the company hosting the event, NY based deals site Sqoot.com said that one of the perks or benefits for participating was the fact that “women” would get beer for the participants.

Women as a perk set off a firestorm of comments on Twitter calling the team behind Sqoot sexist, and scumbags. According to tech.li Heroku, Cloudmine, Levelup and MongoHQ have all withdrawn their support of the event. LevelUp was supposed to provide credit’s for the food trucks.

We totally think that the line may have been in bad taste what I’m having a hard time grasping is the difference between that line and the scantily clad women at the LevelUp/Amex party at SXSW in support of the Jay Z event, which were of course there to serve beer.

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Nibletz: What’s That Small Crunching Sound? Get My Start Up Featured

Nibletz was launched in the summer of 2011. We’ve been here ever since and have seen some phenomenal growth as of late. What’s a niblet? It’s a small crunchy byte from the tech and startup scene.

We’re here to bring you news and news bytes from around the startup and tech world. You’ll see stories here from the hot startup pockets like Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley, Silicon Beach and other places that don’t have Silicon in the name like the GigCity (Chattanooga), New Orleans, Austin, Syracuse, London, Berlin and more.

In these economic times more and more people are trying to find security in themselves and taking their ideas to the next level. Many fail, while many succeed and we’ll continue to bring you those stories from start-ups next door and start-ups across the globe. If it’s interesting, we’ll run it and the editorial team at Nibletz finds many things interesting.

We love to talk to people and want to hear about your startup so if you have a startup or know of an interesting startup send us an email at startup@nibletz.com we also like talking to people on the phone and we have a bad ass phone number for that (202)-NIBLETZ (2O2) 642-5389 it’s real easy to remember.

Another great thing about Nibletz is that we want our readers to understand the news and the lingo in and outside of the valley so you won’t find stories that are backed by old Silicon Valley urban legends. We’ll source stories from everywhere.

We read TechCrunch and PandoDaily, well Daily so we won’t do a lot of regurgitating from those sites, keep visiting them as well. But make sure you add nibletz.com to your RSS reader and drop us a line or a phone call.

If you’re not sure if you have startup news or you know you’ve got some cool tech tip for us send that email to tips@nibletz.com oh and our phone number again is (202)-NIBLETZ (2O2) 642-5389

Hotel Tonight Sticks To Their Core For SXSW Promotion Too

Hotel Tonight Founder: Sam Shank (r) with Hotel Tonight Team in front of their first Austin Room. (photo: Sam Shank)

Yesterday we brought you a story about SideTour and how instead of a huge alcohol induced binge party at South by Southwest, they hosted intimate “Side Tour” style gatherings with some successful start up companies like Tumblr and Etsy.

Another great start up, Hotel Tonight, stuck to their core of finding last minute rooms for their South By Southwest promotion. Hotel Tonight Founder Sam Shank, rented an Airstream trailer for the companies on-site headquarters by day. By night, since rooms were scarce Shank and the Hotel Tonight team rented out the Airstream.

While it’s just an Airstream trailer, it was quite cozy. There was a couch when you walk in with a nice breakfast/dinner table, running water, a shower, bathroom, cooking area, king sized bed and a flat screen tv. Just what a South By Southwest go-er would need for the night.

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Berlin Company wahwah.fm Is Turning Music Sharing On It’s Head

Berlin’s wahwah.fm was in Ausitn Texas for SXSW for the second year in a row. Last year, the new iPhone app start up took home an App Circus award. This year they were showing off WahWah in the SXSW Interactive trade show in the Berlin/Germany row.

wahwah.fm is a new kind of music sharing app that is available for download throughout the world. What it does is allows you to broadcast the music you’re listening to on your iPhone to other iPhones in close proximity with the wahwah.fm app installed.

Because the end user or listener to one wahwah.fm station isn’t controlling the music itself they aren’t under the same scrutiny as in-demand listening apps like Pandora or Spotify.

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