Startups Archives - Page 70 of 144

Boston Startup: Nyopoly, Negotiate Your Price On The Hottest Styles

While most online shopping sites would die at the thought of having one singular customer, a new Boston startup called Nyopoly prides itself on making customers feel that way. Nyopoly is a new online shopping site that pairs consumers who like high fashion, chic, luxury items with retailers. From there the customer negotiates one on one with the seller for the best possible price. Nyopoly’s co-founder Joe Shartzer tells us that it’s this one one one negotiating that led to the name Nyopoly.

Shartzer tells us that Nyopoly’s process is easy and natural because it occurs between a single buyer and seller.

Nyopoly brings their members curated, trendy must have accessories, jewelry, watches, handbags and a more. Their site is going through a major remodel which will reopen on November 5th. They’ll be adding women’s fashion to their totally redesigned site.

We got a chance to talk with Shartzer, who is the company’s marketing guru. Check out the interview below.

We Talk Mobile Payments With Canadian Startup Payfirma

Payfirma is an early adopter in the mobile payment space. This Vancouver based startup is credited with being the first company to bring mobile payments to Canada.

Mobile payments are the way of the future, and for many the future is now. In the US we have Square, Paypal, Google Wallet and the forthcoming ISIS available in several mobile platforms for consumers to pay for services and goods.

Like others, Payfirma makes it extremely easy for merchants to take payments from customers in a variety of ways. Payfirma offers an online platform, point of sale software and a mobile app. Payfirma started out in 2011 and quickly became an industry leader in mobile payments. Back in December of last year they had passed the $1 million dollar per day transaction mark, and were already being called the “Square of Canada”.

The company was also named Canada’s best startup in 2011 at the KPMG startup awards. Payfirma has built a US presence as well, opening offices in Chicago and San Francisco.

On the mobile side Payfirma looks a lot like Square or Intuit’s mobile offering with a card swiping dongle that attaches to the top of an iPhone or Blackberry. Information is read from the dongle and transmitted via the smartphone to give merchants the ability to take credit card payments on the go.

Merchants who vend at swap meets, flea markets, craft fairs and other events were often faced with a tough choice. They could either choose not to accept credit cards at all or take them the old fashioned way by hand, for processing later. Processing credit cards by hand and then running them later can easily result in fraudulent sales.

We got a chance to talk with the team behind the award winning Payfirma platform. Check out the interview below:

Philadelphia’s Jewish Startup Accelerator Looking For 3rd Class

The Tribe 12 fellowship, a business accelerator focusing on ideas that relate to the Jewish community, is looking for it’s next class.

The fellowship is part of the Tribe 12 network which is a network of projects “that, as a whole, offer a holistic approach to engaging individuals in choosing a personally inspiring Jewish community, network, or life-style, with a particular focus on 20s and 30s. ”

The Tribe 12 Fellowship functions as a startup and business accelerator giving startups, and entrepreneurs access to mentors, seminars, grants and funding opportunities. While there is no seed fund in place for the startups selected for the class, the six month program ends with a pitch fest.

Many members of the Philly Startup Leaders, list serv were up in arms today when Danielle Selber, the Tribe 12 Fellowship coordinator, posted an application link. Many folks felt like an accelerator put on by a Jewish organization to strengthen the Jewish community was segmenting. Of course, I did not. Eventually many more seasoned members of the PSL spoke out in defense of the Tribe 12 Fellowship. The best comment being from Jerry Levine who said: Perhaps this is being a dead horse, but PSL is, by definition, a limited group – focused on Philadelphia (and Philadelphia-area). If it weren’t, perhaps it would just be called “Startup Leaders?”

Regardless of the PSL’s feelings about Tribe 12 it’s a great program and resource to entrepreneurs with a Jewish element in their startup or business. Most of the graduates from the 2010 and 2011 program have socially driven startups that are out to help the community at large.

Selber took a break between high horse ego beatings, on the PSL, to respond to a couple questions from nibletz, you know the info you’re dying to know.

Australian Startup Yolpme Is Crowdsourcing Social Media For Jobs INTERVIEW

With the recent surge in job related startups, founders are getting more and more creative with resources for recruitment. We’ve seen great socially charged recruiting and job startups like Barrel of Jobs in Washington DC. We also recently interviewed Employtown in Denver, they offer a reverse job market that’s definitely worth checking out.

Today we’re bringing you the story of Australian startup Yolpme. Yolpme is a new recruitment platform that is combining crowdsourcing with social networking. Yolpme uses crowd sourced referrals through targeted media channels to find the best talent for companies.

To increase the value of the candidate and to make placement more likely, Yolpme offers referrers a referral fee of 3-5% which means that on a position that pays $100,000 the referrer could see a reward of $3,000. This is a value proposition to the referrer, definitely worth checking out.

Yolpme is also working to put a ranking in place for referrers so that referrers can’t just spam open positions. Companies will be able to see the ranking for the person giving the referral which will reflect on the potential quality of the candidate.

Right now Yolpme is available in Australia but they are hoping to expand to the US and Europe next year. We got a chance to talk with the team behind Yolpme. Check out the interview below.

Scottish Startup: sensewhere, Perfecting Positioning Without GPS

A startup in Edinburgh Scotland, called Sensewhere has become a leader in providing positioning and location based information without the use of GPS. The technology is ideal for rural areas and indoor locations where there is either bad satellite coverage or none at all.

Sensewhere automatically crowd-sources and cross-references RF access point data via users’ own devices, cheaply and dynamically creating an almost limitless proprietary global RF location database that self-corrects with use. sensewhere will allow social networks, device manufacturers and app developers to finally capitalize fully on the enormous potential of highly-accurate indoor location.

Like other existing indoor location systems sensewhere uses whatever hybrid RF location reference information the end-device can receive to fix a location; whether Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, UWB, NFC, RFID, GPS, etc. The system checks signals against its own database of fixed-location reference points, then uses industry-leading proprietary low power algorithms to provide an accurate and reliable indoor location.

The team behind Sensewhere is hoping that their technology will work as effortlessly as GPS does (in most situations), where the end user won’t even have to think about it. One of the biggest misconceptions in this space is that GPS can penetrate buildings and work underground. Anyone who has tried to navigate out of parking garage knows this isn’t true.

Sensewhere is currently available for iOS devices and Android phones. The Sensewhere team is hoping that the technology will be available on every mobile device.

One of the big advantages to Sensewhere is that as the user base grows, the accuracy grows with it. Ultimately it will be more accurate both indoors and outdoors when trying to navigate to other people or businesses in a close environment like an outdoor festival or a shopping mall.

Another down side to typical GPS, is that, even though accuracy has improved once you get to a location like an outdoor shopping mall, you’re stuck finding things on your own.

Google Maps has recently deployed indoor navigation for some major airports and even some Ikea stores. This technology relies heavily on wifi and other rf identifiters as well.

We got a chance to talk with the year old startup. Check out our interview below.

Failing Gracefully: Minnesota Startup Altsie Closes It’s Doors

Back in April we brought you an interview with Lucas Rayala, the founder of Minnesota startup Altsie. Altsie provided a new socially charged way for independent movie go-ers to enjoy independent films.

Altsie built partnerships with independent film producers and local businesses to show movies in their establishments. The platform brought more customers to local businesses, let independent film fans comingle with each other and served as a platform for independent film producers to have their movies screened.

Back in April it seemed that things were chugging along for Rayala and Altsie. Altsie was showing films in the Twin Cities, getting press from the likes of Paul Carr at Pando Daily, and Rayala had even had the chance to meet with Tony Hsieh at the Downtown project in Las Vegas.

But two years creating Altsie and 8 months running it was taking a toll on Rayala’s psyche all the way around. He writes in this piece at techcrunch.com that he was overweight for the first time in his life, he was losing touch with his new wife Kathryn, and he was smoking more and drinking more.

While many of us startup go-hards constantly try to one up each other with stories about sleeping on floors, eating ramen or not sleeping at all, startup life can take it’s toll.

To compound these issues for Rayala, he also continued to work a full time job which meant in between contacting movie distributors, venues, designers, customers and friends he actually had a job to do.

Unlike many startup founders Rayala found it inside himself to gracefully exit, and shut down Altsie. He could have kept going, but he made the conscious decision to say enough is enough. Often times this is one of the hardest things for a startup founder or entrepreneur to do.

In an email to his cofounders Rayala wrote:

“I’m folding up Altsie. It’s been a great experience but we didn’t get the outside interest I was hoping for, and I want to end things neatly instead of bludgeoning a great project to death over time. Want to have a postmortem beer?”

Do you know when to say when?

Read Rayala’s personal account of “Killing Your Startup On A Thursday Night” here at TechCrunch.com

Linkage:

Our interview with Rayala

Source: TechCrunch

Startups “everywhere else” , this event will provide you with the most facetime with investors, ever!

Speek Holding Speek Easy During Digital Capital Week (DC Tech Week)

While the Washington DC area and the rest of the north east are being pummeled by Hurricane Sandy, “Frankenstorm”, entrepreneurs are still planning on attending DC’s Tech Week which starts this Friday.

Our friends at TechCocktail and many others have put together a weeks worth of great programming for entrepreneurs, founders, startups, developers, designers, coders and anyone else in the tech scene. Hopefully we will be able to travel to DC for the event.

One of the big parties you don’t want to miss is the “Speek Easy” being hosted by Speek at Capitale in NorthWest Washington DC Saturday night November 3rd from 8:00pm-2:00am.

Speek is the easiest to use conference calling platform. Rather than a call in “bridge” number with a bunch of codes to memorize and enter, with Speek you just direct your participants to your Speek page, they click a button and get brought into the conference. You can speek me at speek.com/kyle.

Speek’s pulling out all the stops and taking the “speak easy” theme back to the roaring 20’s. They’ll have 1920’s style photo booths, burlesque dancers and they’re encouraging everyone who attends to register for their Speek link before the party. Attendees with Speek links will be eligible for some cool prizes.

The free “Speek Easy” party is happening at

Capitale
1301 K Street NW
Washington DC 2005

Linkage:

Got A Truck? Make A Buck! With Seattle Startup CraigsTruck

We’re not sure how Craig Newmark is going to feel about the name of this new Seattle startup CraigsTruck, but undoubtedly hundreds of folks are going to love the service that CraigsTruck is offering.

On weekends my step father likes to make extra money. He takes his big dually pick up truck over to Home Depot, Best Buy and Lowes and offers to deliver people’s purchases to their homes for a nominal fee. Bruce makes a decent amount of money every weekend but the marketing isn’t effective and even though he’s a nice enough guy, and an honest guy, there are always people skeptical of hiring the guy in the parking lot with the truck.

That’s where Mike Hanson comes in. Hanson, the founder of CraigsTruck, has designed a service that is perfect for all the people out there like Bruce. Truck owners sign up for an account on the CraigsTruck website, and people that need a truck and a driver, can find one, just as easily as you could with Craigslist.

Whether you’re looking for someone to bring that furniture back from Ikea, or a bunch of lumber from Home Depot, CraigsTruck makes it easy.

CraigsTruck is just a platform to facilitate the peer to peer negotiation for the delivery or as Hanson refers to it Consumer to Consumer delivery.

We got a chance to talk to Hanson. Check out the interview below.

L.A. Entrepreneur Launches Social Network Startup For Film Makers In Post Production

Unless you’re one of those award winning notorious film makers like say Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, or even Aaron Sorkin these days, it can be hard to find others to collaborate with, share feedback and share ideas. As L.A. entrepreneur Cosmo Scharf discovered, it’s even tougher at the post production level. That’s why he created Blosmo.

Scharf, a student at the University of Southern California, decided he wanted to start a social network for film makers. As he tells us in the interview below, after collaborating with his buddy Corey, they narrowed down the social network to those in post production.

Blosmo is as much a collaboration tool as it is a social network. Right now, independent film makers don’t have many avenues for feedback, ideas and suggestions. YouTube comments, when they aren’t spam, are immature and not very helpful. Even though Vimeo has a more professional audience, the comments aren’t very useful either.

Blosmo gives their community members access to a higher level of feedback from likeminded, professional or semi professional film makers. Comments on Blosmo are incentivized through a point system where users can actually receive prizes and rewards sponsored by film companies. The points also give film makers access to discounts on gear and equipment.

Check out our complete interview with Scharf below.

Wisconsin Startup Bad Donkey Creates A New Hybrid Text Language

Bad Donkey, a startup in Madison Wisconsin with a really funky name, has created a new hybrid cyber language of sorts. “Enriched Text Content” or ETC for short combines personal digital imagery with traditional alpha numeric text to create a new and fun way of sending text messages. To break it down for you, this new “Enriched Text Content”, mixes letters with emoticons and images for a fun new way to text.

Interesting is probably the first word that comes to mind when diving into Bad Donkey’s ETC cyber language. The product seems like it would appeal to the youngest set of texters. Older more affluent texters are constantly looking for the fastest and easiest way to send text messages. However, the combination of pictures, images and text may make it easier to get a point across than traditional texting.

Alongside their “ETC” cyber language, Bad Donkey has created an app and closed social network that supports the technology. BuzzMsg is a messaging platform that takes advantage of the hybrid language. The messages within BuzzMsg are called BuzzMarks and are organized in easy to read and understand lifestyle folders.

We got a chance to talk to Bad Donkey’s head jack ass Bill Towell about his new startup and cyber language. Check out the interview below.

San Diego Startup Expeerience Crowdsourced Event Photos For Everyone

There are a few startups out there vying for the position to be the platform that allows people at an event to all upload photos from the same event. San Diego startup Expeerience is one of those companies.

Expeerience allows users to share videos and photos at events. When individual Expeerience users upload their photos at any particular event they are put together with all of the photos and videos from other users at the same event. Essentially, Expeerience is crowdsourcing photos and videos from their users at events, creating one big gallery of event photos.

With many of the other photo sharing apps available today people take photos and videos and upload them to their existing social networks. If they’re at a big event there’s a good chance time lines will be filled with similar photos. However, as co-founder Stephen Boyd explains in an interview with nibletz, after the event everyone goes their separate ways. Social networks begin filling with the next big event.

Expeerience keeps an ongoing record in a “collection” with all the photos from the same event that users can go back to over and over again. Expeerience users can also save event photos from other users. At a small event like a wedding, users can easily save the bouquet toss and dancing photos from other users. They can do the same thing at a football game for big plays and touch downs.

Boyd compares Expeerience to a “Pinterest style Twitter”.

Check out our interview with Boyd below.

TECH Fort Worth Startup Ampcare Gets FDA 510K Approval For Technology To Improve Swallowing

Russ Campbell, President & CEO of Fort Worth startup Ampcare

Last month we brought you a story about Memphis startup Handminder and what they are doing for stroke victims. Handminder has a technology that re-teaches the brain to interact with the hands of stroke victims so they can relearn motor skills. Handminder was part of Memphis’ Zeroto510 accelerator that prepares medical device companies for their 510K FDA approval.

Last week it was announced that TECH ForthWorth startup Ampcare just received their 510K approval from the FDA for their technology that also helps stroke victims.

Ampcare’s Rx3E series of electrodes applies external stimulation to the muscles needed for swallowing. This is also a technology that directly impacts the lives of stroke victims, and those suffering from Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ALD (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) and Muscular Dystrophy.

Russ Campbell, Rick McAdoo and Ronda Polansky, the three therapists that founded Ampcare, envisioned the device as a treatment option to treat swallowing problems.

“At Ampcare, we understand that eating and drinking affect quality of life. This product will offer healthcare professionals, specifically speech language pathologists, a technologically advanced treatment approach to address swallowing difficulties,” said Russ Campbell, President & CEO.

Dysphagia, or difficulty with swallowing, affects 18 million people in the U.S. Without proper management, dysphagia can lead to choking, malnutrition, dehydration, weight loss, muscle attrition, aspiration pneumonia, increased rate of infection and death.

“For example, people with strokes often lose their ability to protect their airway when eating and drinking,” McAdoo said. “Our device rehabilitates the muscles that move the airway to keep it protected during swallowing.”

Ampcare’s technology is just as important for comfort as it is for patient safety.

Ampcare is a startup resident at the TECH Fort Worth Incubator in Texas.

“Since May, when Ampcare won our Impact Award, the team has been pressing hard for this next milestone, the clearance of its product for the market,” said Darlene Ryan, Executive Director of TECH Fort Worth. “The Ampcare founders have their heart in this product. Their motivation is the patients who will have a higher quality of life because of their work. It is clients like this that inspire me to do everything I can to help them and others continue to bring new products to market that really matter.”

Linkage:

Check out Ampcare here

TECH Fort Worth here

Everywhereelse Here

Denver Startup Appit Ventures Wins $50,000 In Business Plan Competition

There are a fair amount of quality startups out there who’s purpose is to help startups. Take nibletz.com for instance. As the “voice of startups everywhere else” we’re providing news coverage and traction to startups across the nation and around the world that they may not otherwise get.

Appit Ventures, a Denver startup, is another great startup that fits in that category. Appit Ventures helps entrepreneurs write business plans, grow their business and get access to funding. They also build custom mobile applications through a revenue sharing model. They also provide strategic consulting and post launch strategies.

The startup won $50,000 in Denver’s first ever JumpStart Biz Plan Awards. In addition to the cash AppIt Ventures also receives free office space for a year at Galvanize a new hub/incubator for startups. Professional legal services provided by Polsinelli Shughart and tax services from Deloitte were part of the prize package as well.

Appit Ventures will also receive 60 hours of strategic marketing services fromDovetail Solutions, social media consulting from WideFoc.us, and entrepreneurship mentoring from TiE Rockies.

“The quality of business plans presented in this inaugural program has been truly inspiring,” Denver Mayor Michael Hancock said in a statement. “Each of these entries further illustrates the strength and vitality of Denver’s small business climate. Our city has no shortage of promising entrepreneurial gems, and we are committed to helping our businesses grow and stay right here in our world-class city.”

Other JumpStart Biz Plan finalists were Big Mountain Robotics, Choozle, Fresh Takes Kitchen, Guerilla Gravity, Ibotta, One World Labs, Presm, The Uber Sausage and VertiFresh.

“Starting with over 150 companies and being selected to the top 10, we were honored,” said Jeff Macco co-founder of Appit Ventures. “Getting to the top three, we were humbled.”

Linkage:

Check out Appit Ventures here

Source: Denver Post

Join hundreds of other startups from “everywhere else” here

Israeli Startup Walkme Raises $5.5 Million

Less than two weeks ago we brought you an interview with Israeli startup Walkme. Walkme is the easiest way for companies, startups and anyone on the web to create walk-thru’s for your readers and end users.

No matter how easy or complex your task is, WalkMe wants to provide you with the tool to create an easy step-by-step “Walk thru” guide to everything. Walkme is a simple to use plugin.

Once you have it installed you just move about your screen in the natural steps it takes to do whatever process you want to teach. As you begin to complete each step you write what the step is, how to do it and add your text balloon and move on to the next step. You can easily create “walk thru” instructions while you’re creating your WalkMe walk thru. Anything from how to complete an order, to how to change your password, can easily be explained using Walkme. If you want to show someone an easy to use trick on your own website, you can create a WalkMe “walk thru”.

Basically if you can do the task you want to teach, and if you can use a mouse, than you’re in business.

Walkme’s $5.5 million dollar series B round was led by Gemini Israeli Ventures. Mangrove Capital Partners and Giza Venture Capital also participated. Mangrove Capital Partners provided an undisclosed amount of capital back in April for Walkme.

“Using online services is a necessity for everyone. However, businesses are struggling with ineffective and costly solutions to make sure their users are able to use their offerings,” said Eran Wagner, General Partner at Gemini Israel Ventures. “WalkMe is a disruptive system that can fundamentally change the way online services engage with their users online. WalkMe’s ability to increase visitor clarity, satisfaction and conversion while dramatically reducing help-desk costs, makes it a no-brainer for a business of any size. We look forward to seeing WalkMe maintain its explosive growth and become an industry standard for guidance by replacing video-tutorials and help sections on websites – just as GPS systems have become a standard replacement for maps.”

Dan Adika, CEO of WalkMe, said, “the demand for our online guidance solution is growing exponentially and we sought funding to support this growth. We now have thousands of registered businesses that are utilizing WalkMe’s revolutionary technology to better guide their users online. With this round, we’ve found investors who shared our vision of creating a company that changes the way people use the web.”

Linkage:

Check out Walkme here

Here’s our interview with Walkme

Source: GigaOM

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