Rawporter: Nitty Gritty Raw Citizen Journalism

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Rawporter co-founder Kevin Davis pitches at everywhereelse.co 2013 (photo: Allie Fox for NMI)

By: Andrea LeTard, University of Memphis Entrepreneurial Journalism Student

To startup co-founders Rob Gaige and Kevin Davis, news is news, and it’s spreading fast with their website, rawporter.com.

“Rawporter.com helps people earn money for the photos and videos they normally post on Facebook and Twitter,” said Gaige. “Think about when you see breaking news or you see a celebrity, your normal instinct is to take a photo or video, and you tweet it out. With Rawporter, you can make money off these posts.”

Many media outlets, ad agencies, and brands want to use the photos and videos people post online. The problem is they can’t always find good, relevant photos and videos, and when they do, they can’t always trust them. Once they finally find one they actually want, they have to negotiate and determine what it is worth.

“With Rawporter, you can actually take a photo or video, post it to our site, and we still tweet it or put it on the Facebook page, but it’s got a watermark and it’s got a price tag,” said Gaige.

Every big idea has a story, and Rawporter came about when Gaige and Davis were at the right place at the right time. Back when both of them were working in corporate America two years ago, they were at a local bar’s happy hour talking about their future careers when a car ran into the restaurant next to them. According to Gaige, it was a huge scene, with the street closed down and people running out to take pictures and videos – something they assumed would naturally be seen on the news that night. Wrong. The story didn’t even make the local evening news.

Gaige said, “By the time the news media got there, the scene had already been cleared and there was no story, but if they would’ve had our footage they could’ve had something to lead off the newscast.”

Rawporter turns regular people into reporters. Media outlets send push notifications via the Rawporter app if they know a story is breaking across town. If they can’t get there fast enough, they can go to Rawporter and see how many people are in that area, and those people will be paid for the job.

“So instead of media outlets patrolling twitter or hoping someone got a photo, they can now go online and find what they need immediately,” said Gaige.

With several thousand users in over 50 countries, Rawporter’s base is now strong enough for them to approach media outlets and outsource their assignments.

For more information on Rawporter, visit http://rawporter.com.

ListenUp.fm Gives Fans Perks and Prizes From Their Favorite Artists

By: Brittany Tuggle, University Of Memphis Entrepreneurial Journalism Student

The creators of ListenUp.fm give users rewards for listening and sharing music with their friends.

“The more times a user listens to an artist or shares what they are listening to on Facebook or Twitter, they gain more points. Depending on the artists, users can earn backstage passes, tickets, or other merchandise,” says CEO Mykas Degesys.

In addition to offering fans rewards or discounts, ListenUp provides record companies with real-time data about listeners’ preferences they can use to develop better marketing strategies and build fan loyalty.

“We want to turn users into paying fans, which increases concert and album sales, [creates a] bigger fan base and more exposure,” said Degesys.

Degesys says the concept for ListenUp came out of learning about the music business and the different royalties artists earn from streaming platforms and sites such as iTunes.

“A song will have to be played on a streaming platform 140 times before making the same amount of royalties on iTunes, for any artist,” says Degesys.

ListenUp.FM was in the startup village at everywhereelse.co 2013, Are you going to be at EE 2014?

Milwaukee Startup Creates A Stock Photography Market For The Social Photog

Technology has made it so that every person with a cell phone is now a “photographer”. Of course there’s also those those tens of thousands of wanna be photographers who flock to Best Buy to get the latest DSLR from Nikon or Canon and never use more than “automatic mode”. While the people who actually know what they’re doing have sites like photorankr that serve as market places for those photos, what about grandma Lilly’s photos of the tomato garden?

Rest assured that if you’re taking tomato garden photos or pictures of your best friend doing jello shots, there is a market place for those “social photographers”. That place, is VZIBL.

The Milwaukee startup’s founder Alexander Marasco, picked the name VZIBL as a sort of slang for “visible”. “The idea of the company was to bring self awareness to your photographic content or become visible. VZIBL is just the ‘visual you for sale’.” he told us in an interview.

While sites like iStock are popular with folks sourcing photos from professional, semi-pro and even amateur photographers, VZIBL is the place for “social stock”. “photographic content created by socially engaged photographers focusing on new digital tools and social networking technology. Instagram, GoPro, iPhoneography, Nikon D90…whatever your camera vice!” Marasco said.

Once a social photographer sets up an account and starts sharing photos using VZIBL it’s up to him or her on whether or not they want to make money with their pictures. A photographers “social stock” can be accessible either royalty free, rights managed or exclusive rights, depending on both the photographer and the content.

Marasco is quick to point out what VZIBL gets out of the deal. Using the VZIBL app automatically assumes a 70/30 split in a sliding licensing agreement between the photographer and the platform. Naturally if you’re going royalty free there’s no split but a 30% revenue share isn’t too far off the industry norm.

VIZIBL has gone through a pivot or two along the way. At first Marasco wanted to do create a photo thread app where people could communicate through photographs. What he found in talking to people about that idea, was that no market place really existed for this layer of photographers that’s cropped up. There are probably more photographers in the “social photographer” category than any other.

While Marasco is getting ready to move east to Brooklyn New York, VZIBL was created in Milwaukee which like it’s counterpart Madison, has a bit of a startup scene starting to form.

“Milwaukee is definitely creating some great ‘Hackers’ and with new incubators and Think Tanks now available, it seems to be consolidating minds and is launching some really interesting concepts to market.” Marasco told us about his city known for it’s beer.

The secret sauce in VIZIBL is creating photo-celebs according to Marasco ” Publishing content has never been so easy…why not possess the ability to create future earnings from your original photography. We like to see ourselves as a visual ringtone. We want to make Photo-Celebs out of our users!”

Find out more about VIZIBL by following them on Twitter!

Body Boss Is A Fitness Startup For Teams VIDEO INTERVIEW

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Body Boss co-founder Daryl Lu explains his startup at Startup Rally (photo: NMI 2013)

There are a lot of fitness startups out there. At CES 2013 back in January, a panel of media big wigs actually talked about the fact that there may be too many fitness startups these days. There’s a lot of noise in the fitness space and you’ll have to be unique to succeed.

Atlanta startup Body Boss may actually have that uniqueness people are looking for. Body Boss isn’t just a fitness app, but it’s a fitness app for teams. High School, college and even professional sports teams can use the Body Boss platform to track the fitness performance of their players.

Coaches can use Body Boss to track workouts from individuals as well as the entire team. The platform gives coaches the analytics they need to compare each player, how fit they are and where they need improvement.

Body Boss is making it easier for college recruiters to get a better picture of the high school athletes they’re looking at.

“This is a great tool for tracking and recruiting high school athletes. I like the competitive aspect, accessibility on smartphones and tablets and instant updates. There is nothing on the market that is this professional looking” John Sisk, Director of Football Player Development at Georgia Tech said about Body Boss.

The competitive aspect that Sisk mentions is a feature in Body Boss that allows intra-squad competition. Virtual weight room crap-talking can be done through Body Boss, and whether athletes want to admit it or not, that can be a powerful tool.

Real time updates and an easy to understand UI make it a great way to create accountability for players and coaches. It also eliminates paperwork coaches would have to do on athlete’s workouts.

As the platform grows, Body Boss co-founders Daryl Lu and Don Pottinger hope that teams will be able to use Body Boss to not only keep up with their own team but other teams as well. A network for collaborating and sharing is already baked into the platform.

Check out the video below:

For more info on Body Boss visit bodybossfitness.com

Atlanta Startup Plisten Is Bringing Pinboards For Brands VIDEO INTERVIEW

While we will stay away from calling Plisten, Pinterest for Brands, that may be a very good description of exactly what Randy Mitchell and Eric Yu are doing with their Atlanta based startup.

Mitchell tells us in this video interview that Plisten came about after he had some trouble with major brands. He gives us just one example, citing a problem he had with a major bank where he had been a customer for years. As his situation got escalated he became more and more frustrated with customer service and the way the bank was treating him. Finally, a customer service “manager” told him to get any further he would need to write a letter to the CEO. Plisten is that letter.

But, Plisten is more about good interactions with brands as opposed to bad ones. Facebook, Google+ and even Twitter have taught us that people will communicate about their favorite brands. People will tweet about great experiences and of course bad experiences with any brand from Best Buy to BMW.

Coca-Cola, MTV, Disney, Red Bull, Converse, Starbucks and McDonalds are just some of the top brands on Facbeook today. Those seven brands alone count for over 250 million likes.

Brands are definitely a big play, Yu and Mitchell are hoping to hit a homerun with Plisten, which is a pinboard specifically for brands.

Consumers will be able to talk about their favorite brands, like their favorite brands and communicate directly with those brands. This is a powerful tool for consumers and for the brands themselves. By cutting away the noise from everything else people like, and honing in just on brands, Plisten will be able to deliver captive audiences and in turn those brands will be able to market directly to their most active customers.

Of course in Mitchell’s case, when someone has a problem with a brand they’ll also be able to communicate that problem. Perhaps they’ll find that the problem is more widespread. They may also find it’s isolated, but either way, with the focus strictly on brands, brand managers will have a better way of finding those problems, and fixing them.

Check out our video interview below.

You can find out more at plisten.com

Athens GA Startup Wagglez It All Began With A Honey Bee Dance

Sure there are plenty of daily deals startups out there. In fact, one of the most popular Atlanta startups is daily deal startup ScoutMob, but, none have as good a name as Wagglez.

Athens Georgia based Wagglez takes it’s name from a dance that honey bees do when they get back to the hive to tell the other bees where the honey is. It’s that same principal Wagglez is hoping to achieve with deal seekers.

By delivering relevant local deals straight to the smartphone ,Wagglez eliminates the need to clip coupons or use a daily deals site like Groupon.

When a user fills out a profile on Wagglez, their data (minus their personal info like their name) is saved and delivered to participating merchants. Merchants can then analyze the data to see which offers and promotions are working with which demographic. They can then use that data to offer more strategic offers that will benefit both the consumer and the merchant.

Wagglez wants to make the daily deals experience as easy as possible for the end user. There’s no need to print coupons, all of the participating merchants create the deals themselves, along with the stipulations to take advantage of the deal. This makes the experience as easy as walking into a participating merchant and redeeming your Wagglez deal.

Wagglez is incubating at the FourAthens incubator in Athens Georgia along with several other up and coming tech startups.

Wagglez wants to be as relevant to visitors as it is to locals. The idea came about when founder Chris Bell and some of his fellow University of Nebraska alums went to a football game in Seattle. They didn’t know where to go or what to do. They were eventually pointed to a bar which some other fellow cornhuskers had taken over. For travelers, Bell is hoping to make Wagglez a platform where out of towners can easily find the best things to do with the best deals as well.

Bell was unable to be at the Startup Rally event in Atlanta Monday as he and his wife are expecting a baby, who will also become a Wagglez user. In his place we got to talk with Matt Downing, who even does the Wagglez dance for us in the video. Check it out below.

For more on Wagglez click here

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Pink Robin Avenue Brings the Party to EverywhereElse.co And Beyond

By: Brittany Tuggle, University Of Memphis Entrepreneurial Journalism Student

Memphis-based startup Pink Robin Avenue offers personalized party events for any occasion. Clients can discuss everything from color schemes to tablecloths with CEO Danielle Inez, and her team takes care of the rest.

“I want my clients to have a great party experience without sacrificing so much of their time,” says Inez.

What makes Pink Robin Avenue different from other event planning companies is the convenience of it all. Inez gets all the details from her clients in one session; when her website launches, clients will be able to easily create customized events quickly that way as well. The company pre-assembles your selected party items and ships them to you.

“If you envision it, you don’t have to create it. We’ll do it for you. Everything is exactly how you want it and it’s as unique as my client,” said Inez.

Pink Robin Avenue designs events nationwide and is currently working on launching their website and expanding their business. Inez is planning on entering the Black Enterprise Magazine pitch contest later this year in hopes of garnering additional funding.

To start planning your own event, visit: pinkrobinavenue.com<http://pinkrobinavenue.com> or twitter.com/pinkrobinavenue<http://twitter.com/pinkrobinavenue>.

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Atlanta Startup TripLingo Is Disrupting The Yellow Box

In 2011, after my third trip to IFA in Berlin I made a conscious decision to try and learn German. I wanted to be able to know how to order more than just a “cola light” (that’s German for Diet Coke). So I did what everyone in my position would do, I went to Union Station in DC and plucked down nearly $500 for a big yellow box from Rosetta Stone.

Don’t get me wrong, Rosetta Stone seemed great, but it wasn’t teaching me what I really needed to know. How can I hail a taxi, how can I read a mass transit sign, how can I ask someone where the bathroom is, and how can I order a German chocolate cake. I learned a lot of words I would never need to know, and not enough of the phrases I did need to know.

Well with a trip to LeWeb planned next year, I need to learn French. Since I didn’t pay an ounce of attention in high school, I need to get learning. Luckily at Atlanta’s Startup Rally I bumped into Bijal Nagrashna the VP of Strategy at Atlanta startup TripLingo. After a couple of real time lessons on how to correctly pronounce her name, she took me on a tour of what language learning software should look like.

TripLingo is a platform for learning languages specifically geared toward travelers. The extremely robust application is intuitive and pleasant to use. You start off by identifying where you are going, what you want to do there, why you are going there and your special needs.

For example, I’ll be going to France on business, to cover LeWeb. I won’t be shopping, but I will be eating. I’m type II diabetic (there’s an option for that), other than that I like just about any kind of food.

TripLingo pulls a bunch of popular, and necessary phrases together and gives the user a bunch of options. You can pick the text book translation, or you can go with something a little more casual or slang. If you’re adventuresome there’s a “crazy” option as well. Once you master that option you’ll sound like any hipster local.

TripLingo leaves no stone unturned (no pun intended). Their app offers the transliteration in text and if you plug in a headset you can hear how it’s supposed to sound.

The app also has the ability to help you out in a pinch, whether you’re having an emergency or you’ve spent all day at a conference and forgot to take a break to eat.

While I haven’t dove into the platform just yet, I’m going to use it and I’m confident that it’s going to be a much better experience than Rosetta Stone (and a lot less expensive).

TripLingo also offers a customized professional version for companies. Say you’re the CEO of a big company with offices in another country. Your company can customize TripLingo for phrases that will be important to people traveling on behalf of your company for business.

TripLingo was one of nearly 100 startups that exhibited at Startup Rally in Atlanta.

Find out more here at triplingo.com

EdTech Startup 19 Pencils Is Saving Lots Of Time For K-6 Teachers

Most teachers don’t have nearly enough time to spend finding resources and lesson planning. Cuts in education typically mean that average teachers have a larger class load, and some are often faced with pulling down multiple jobs in school and even after school. This can be especially difficult for K-6 teachers who often want to give their students all they possibly can.

This is where Jason Fabbri and his Sacremento based educational startup 19Pencils comes in. 19Pencils provides an online community for like minded elementary school teachers. Using their platform teachers can search and discover great educational content and upload and share things that have worked for them in the classroom.

Fabbri has been a software engineer for the last 17 years. He’s had a long career with Adobe contributing to projects like Photoshop Elements, Photoshop Services and more. It was volunteering at his children’s schools that prompted him to create 19Pencils. He saw firsthand the frustration that teachers had in curating good web content for first grade students, and then sharing it.

We got a chance to talk to Fabbri in depth about 19Pencils and the growing startup community in Sacremento, just 90 minutes outside of Silicon Valley. Check out the interview below.

Monster Offers Is Daily Deals On Steroids With Nearly 60,000 Deals

Orange County California daily deals startup Monster Offers is a daily deals startup on steroids. Where most daily deals startups, outside of sites like Living Social and Groupon, focus on one particular area, Monster Offers is aggregating daily deals across several platforms. This gives the user a one stop destination to search for deals on just about anything.

Monster Offers gathers deal offerings from such discount providers as Groupon, Living Social, DealFind, Goldstar, and nearly 100 others. Assisted by a new partnership with Sqoot, Monster Offers can now save you tons of time and money, putting at your fingertips thousands of daily deals from 100 or so deal providers, with many offering discounts of up to 99%, all searchable in one easy location – from your web browser, your Smartphone or other handheld Smart device. The service, now available from both websites, identifies where you are geographically and begins populating the freshest and best deals near you. And based on your location, you can then filter your search based on keywords or by category, and then sit back and check out the recommended deals (including the National Deal of the Day)!

Indeed, there are hundreds, if not thousands of daily deals providers that provide unique offerings to today’s consumers, recently reported to be $2 Billion in industry sales annually. Monster Offers has had success, and remains well positioned in this growing marketplace, with its unique, one-of-a-kind approach through the Monster Offers Smartphone apps, and now adds a web-based search platform. Displaying thousands of deals each day, Monster Offers aggregates them in one convenient place, eliminating users having to wade through countless irrelevant offers just to find one that they’re interested in. The company remains dedicated to its corporate mission of delivering a robust and user friendly interface that allows buyers to organize their deal information based on geographical setting, business type, category, and keywords.

Monster Offers looks broadly across the other daily deals sites to return something that can be as national or hyper local as the user needs. This comes in handy especially for travelers who may have a local daily deals routine.

Other features include:

Hyperlocal list of daily “Monster Dealies” in up to 14 categories and 60 subcategories in your local market, all easily accessible with the press of a button.
View deals from hundreds of daily deal providers, including Groupon, Living Social, EDeals, iCoupon, Goldstar, DealFind, Zozi, Restaurant.com, Signpost, Double Take Deals, and many more.
Get the best deal in the country with the “National Deal of the Day” — straight from the Monster Offers “Monster” himself.
Utilizing IP addresses, map deals from the pool of over 30,000 potential offers, available right to your physical location in real time through your web browser, or the Smartphone App available for download.
In the Monster Offers App, adjust your preferential settings to a specific radius that reflects your daily travels.
Share deals with friends and family through social networking sites (including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and more).

You can check out Monster Offers for yourself here.

Calmighty Is The Twitter Of Calendars For Sports? INTERVIEW

If you find yourself toggling between apps like the official NHL app, the official NBA app and ESPN just to find out when your favorite teams are playing, than a startup out of Finland may have the answer for you. Calmighty, says they are the “Twitter of Calendars” for sports fans.

The app offers an easy to use interface which allows you to quickly scroll through your favorite professional sports leagues, pick your favorite teams, or an entire league and have one click access to when and who your favorite teams are playing.

This may not be the biggest of first world problems to solve, but their UI is both pleasing to the eye and a breeze to navigate. At the moment the NFL and MLB are not part of the app, which may be a downer for some sports fans but if you like soccer, NBA, UFC, or NHL you’re in luck.

Finland has had some luck with mobile startups in recent years. Rovio is probably their most well known mobile developer, with their Angry Birds franchise.

We got a chance to interview Calmighty co-founder Tomi Kaukinen. Check out the interview below.

DC Startup CrowdCusp Making The Best Of Things Before SEC Regulations

Crowdfunding is a hot topic these days. Hundreds of crowdfunding startups have surfaced over the last few months, patiently waiting as the Securities and Exchange Commission takes their sweet time figuring out regulations.

While crowdfunding is nothing new, the JOBSAct passed last year which will allow people to crowdfund startups for an equity stake without the normal regulations around venture capital and angel investing. Startups will be able to use this form of crowdfunding as a vehicle for up to $1 million dollars in funding, just as soon as the SEC defines the regulations.

This waiting period has put some crowdfunding startups on ice, while others have found ways around regulations without allowing startups to actually give up equity. In some cases prize packs, swag, and other gifts are donated by the company in exchange for someone’s backing. Other times it’s just about feel good donations.

CrowdCusp is a Washington DC based crowdfunding startup that has already started crowdfunding, sans the equity stake.

We got a chance to talk to the team behind CrowdCusp. Check out the interview below.

Add Your Portfolio To Your LinkedIn Profile With French Startup Dokker

LinkedIn is undoubtedly one of the most useful tools to connect with people from your work life. However, many users have complained that their LinkedIn profile doesn’t give them an adequate platform to show off their portfolio. This can prove to be an important missing piece for marketers, artists, designers, and even writers.

French startup Dokker is looking to change that by offering a platform for portfolios to sync up with LinkedIn accounts. Dokker is free and allows users to post any kind of document to their online portfolio. Once a user builds a Dokker portfolio they can share it with LinkedIn and also Viadeo, which is LinkedIn’s number one competitor in Europe.

Services like Dokker allow for a much more robust picture of someone’s work life rather than just text and recommendations.

We got a chance to speak with Fred Ducrot, Dokker’s co-founder, General Manager and Product Designer. Check out our interview below.

Plixser Addressing The Pains Between Music Students & Music Teachers

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Plixser founder Marcus Wiggins pitching in video contest finals at everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference. (photo: Allie Fox for NMI)

By: Calvin Carter, University Of Memphis Entrepreneurial Journalism Student

Plixser, a music teaching startup, is hoping to expand nationwide from its base in Memphis.

Plixser is a software program that attempts to fix many of the headaches faced by music teachers and students. The program features a live-streaming function for teachers to give lessons to students online, an automated billing system, and the ability to track lesson completion.

Marcus Wiggins, a doctoral student at the University Of Memphis who has been involved in music since the 8th grade, is the founder.

“I know the pains of both the teacher and the student, and Plixser can eliminate those pains,” he said.

By the time you read this, Plixser will have already officially launched. It spent two to three weeks in beta, gaining a positive reaction from ten teachers and students so far, Wiggins said. But Wiggins will continue to spread the word about the music program outside of Memphis, starting with an upcoming event with the Texas Music Educator’s Association. He hopes to garner some interest from the crowd of 25,00 expected to attend.

In it for the long haul, it appears that Wiggins is already enduring the trying moments of being an entrepreneur.

“The sexiness of being an entrepreneur wears off real quick, especially when you get no sleep and are working all the time,” he said.

But Wiggins said he shares one goal of many entrepreneurs trying to solve a problem: going beyond just having a job. “I want it to be that this is who I am and not what I do,” Wiggins said. “…. I want to fund the life that I live.”

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