Comments Off on Los Angeles Startup: myRight Looking To Become the WebMD For Legal Issues INTERVIEW0LikeLike 3,451
When you’re not feeling well and have a definitive set of symptoms most people these days take to the internet. Even with health insurance, people seem to find it more convenient to consult with webMD or Dr. Google, before they waste their valuable time at the doctor’s office. WebMD is often credited as one of the big survivors of the first dot com bubble. The site, which has been around since the late 90’s, is a great place to get preliminary information.
While there are a variety of legal websites out there, there isn’t one that mimics what WebMD does. Sure there are a million places to find and complete legal forms, like Legal Zoom, but most of the websites out there for people to bounce legal questions off of, typically go right back to a lawyers office who will give you the information you need to know after a “free” consultation.
myRight is hoping to become the webMD of legal services. The Los Angeles based startup wants to be the preliminary go to place for people with legal questions. Some may even realize they don’t need to see a lawyer while others will jump on the phone with a lawyer right after their search of myRight.me.
Could Nikhil Jhunjhnuwala, Keval Amin and Michael Niu, the founders of myRight be onto something? Frank Monestere, the founder of LegalZoom thinks so. Monestere sits on myRight’s advisory board. To keep things legal myRight has two other lawyers on their advisory board too.
We got a chance to talk to Niu about myRight. Check out the interview below.
Comments Off on Vermont Startup: Popngoseek An Event App For Mobile & Pop Up Events0LikeLike 2,341
Food trucks, pop up stores, pop up restaurants, and pop up fire sales seem to be increasing in popularity. It’s like the old days of the mystery rock concert where an artist would come and play a show and then they’d have some mystery show and you’d have to listen to the radio station to get clues as to where to go.
Well nowadays these kind of secret pop up businesses tend to take to social media to spread the word. Washington DC, New York, San Francisco and other major cities have had an outbreak of “pop up” restaurants. A lot of times chefs will take over an abandoned or closed down restaurant location for a very limited time. This can be a week, a weekend or possibly a month. They do this to either test the waters with their restaurant idea or just as a temporary way to make people crave even more.
Apple, Samsung and other major electronics manufacturers have been known to set up “pop up” stores at major events. Apple set one up at SXSW in 2011 when the iPad 2 was released. Samsung set up pop stores at the Olympics.
Popngoseek is about unique experiences in unique places. They aren’t looking to be your everyday check out the app and see who’s playing platform. They want to be the go to app to find the really cool once in a blue moon events.
Now when your girlfriends call you and tell you about the awesome pop up store or trunk show a designer did, you won’t miss the tweet or the Facebook post.
Popngoseek has taken to indiegogo for their first round of crowdfunding so if you’re one that doesn’t want to miss out on unique events, you should support these guys here.
We got a chance to interview the team behind Popngoseek. Check out the interview below:
Comments Off on Insider Louisville To Continue Spirit Of IdeaFestival With Call For Social Pitches0LikeLike 3,005
If you’re looking for a great startup ecosystem in the middle of the country to check out, Louisville Kentucky is one of the top cities on our list. Kentucky has one of the most active Startup America partnerships. They have some great acceleration efforts going on state wide, and they’ve brewed some great startups like Impulcity, WhyWait and Beam just to name three that fall off the top of our heads.
That’s why it’s no surprise the folks at Insider Lousiville are gelling off the success of the most recent IdeaFestival. Now that the festival is over they want to continue the forward momentum and spark innovation. To that end Insider Louisville is now calling for social entrepreneurs to pitch their startups for the possibility of investment, incubation, free office space and more.
Give us your detailed plan for a self-sustaining, social-impact business based on the concepts of social entrepreneurism.
If we believe your idea has potential, we’ll get you face time with major philanthropists, entrepreneurs and economic development including Ted Smith, director of Louisville-Jefferson County Metro Government’s Department of Economic Development and Innovation.
If your business plan is viable, investors and management gurus will help you forge your idea into a working enterprise … a startup with a reasonable amount of time and capital to prove its worth.
Smith went on to say; “Idea Festival was the appetizer – bring on the main course and let’s take a social impact business to the next level.”
Ideafestival just wrapped up last week in Lexington Kentucky. The four day startup and innovation conference featured a wide variety of panels, keynotes and other resources for just about anyone in Kentucky at any level in starting their own business or startup.
As for this call to action by Insider Lousiville, they’re specifically looking for social startups. They are looking for ideas that echo the fundamentals behind startups like Waterstep, a Louisville startup that oversees water purification in third world countries, or the now nationally famous Tom’s shoes that donates a pair of shoes to children in need for every pair of shoes you purchase.
Insider Louisville says that they’re looking for ideas from anywhere and the right idea could result in the startup getting help to move to Louisville Kentucky to build it out.
“This isn’t just empty Chamber of Commerce sloganeering. This is a call to action at the nexus where capitalism meets practical, sustainable social change.” Insider Louisville says.
Comments Off on DC Entrepreneur: Sarah Ware Makes Her Markerly Over 2800 Miles For 500 Startups0LikeLike 1,976
Sarah Ware’s mobile office set up in Littleton CO on the way to 500 startups
Nearly two weeks ago the woman behind Washington DC startup Markerly and her gal pal Megan set out on an epic journey. These two twenty something women set on a cross country road trip only rivaled by Thelma and Louise. Except this was 2012, and Ware managed to work throughout the entire trip.
In between camp sites, horseback riding, boating, hiking, and picture taking, Ware was constantly working to prepare her social highlighting startup for the real journey which begins soon in Mountain View California.
Ware and Markerly join a nice sizable handful of startups from the Washington DC area that have caught the eye of Dave McClure and his 500 startups.
While we’re preparing another epic journey of our own to cover a bunch of accelerator demo days from accelerators that have been working all summer long, McClure and the 500 startups fall 2012 class are just starting to arrive. They’re wiping the last bit of sleep out of their eyes and preparing for five months of intense bootcamp style work on their startups.
It may no even be fair o call what they do at 500 startups “boot camp style” some of the startups that have completed McClure’s rigorous program have likened it more to “startup hazing” with a much bigger pay off.
Ware is no stranger to unusually long work days as the 25 year old has managed to graduate from Georgetown, work at DC’s prominent startup, Living Social, and then battle her way through the mine fields of launching her own startup. She’s even had imitators come out of the woodwork already and those who have accused her of imitating.
We’ve tried a few of the highlighting applications out there and nothing is as easy to use or easy to share as Markerly.
As she gears up for 500 startups it’s easy to see why she and her friend decided to drive it across the country. There’s no more rest for the next five months. We will be checking in with Ware periodically over the next 5 months while she’s in the top secret 500 lair crushing it.
Canadian serial entrepreneur and startup aficionado Jean-Pierre Levac is working on solving the pain points involved in musical festivals, tours and shows. To do this right, Levac found early on that all three stake holders would need to be involved. Musicians, fans and venues. Without all three pieces in the process one stakeholder would end up with an unfair advantage, while another may be left out in the cold.
Levac has spent much of his career in the IT Industry, with the last fifteen years spent in startups. He’s always been interested in the music business, but not necessarily the way everyone else is. Levac wants to take his skill sets and those of his co-founder Artem Mindrov, and fix the back end of the music industry.
Levac and Mindrov are attacking the fan angle first. To that end they are looking for beta testers, especially people who attend music festivals and make travel excursions out of them. To us it seems that there are so many people out there attacking the event discovery problem from the aggregation side, Levac and Mindrov seem to be on the right track to integrate all three stakeholders before the events pour into search engines and aggregation apps.
We got a chance to talk with Levac about what they’re working on at GigTrip. Check out the interview below:
We are one week away from seeing the 2012 class at The Brandery accelerator in Cincinnati. The Brandery is a top 10 accelerator and focuses on branding and marketing. They’ve attracted hundreds of applications from across the globe for each of their last three sessions.
While The Brandery follows a co-hort accelerator model, as well as the Global Accelerator model, what sets them apart is their focus on branding and marketing. Being situated in Cincinnati Ohio puts them at ground zero for one of the biggest branded companies in the world Proctor & Gamble (P&G). P&G’s influence can be found within the walls of the Brandery. General Manager, Mike Bott, came to the Brandery after a successful stint as brand manager for Olay and other P&G brands. P&G’s roots don’t stop there, Brandery Co-Founder Rob McDonald is the son of the current CEO at P&G Robert McDonald. The younger McDonald is a lawyer at Taft during the day though.
The Brandery pulls from other marketing resources as well. Take co-founder Dave Knox for instance, Knox is the Chief Marketing Officer at Rock Fish a digital agency with a laundry list of clients that are household names. PF Chiangs, Sam’s Club, Bunn, and White Cloud are just a few of the brands that trust RockFish for their creative needs.
The Brandery is a hard core accelerator. There’s no working part time and participating at The Brandery. We spent five days with The Brandery founders and the staff in Cincinnati’s Over The Rhine neighborhood earlier this summer. There was a constant swarm of activity in the bullpen where each startup has desk space and white boards. There was also class after class in The Brandery’s second floor class room. Folks come from all over the country to talk with The Brandery’s startups and even skype in for lectures.
Some of The Brandery’s startups from this class had pivoted by the time we went to visit in August, others have pivoted again as they got closer to demo day. Even startup evangelist Nick Tippmann found himself changing teams with less than two months to go. No matter what way you look at it, next week’s demo day is shaping up to be an eventful one.
“We’re pumped to showcase our companies on Demo Day. They have done a fantastic job leveraging the relationships and partnerships in Cincinnati and our broader national network to refine and validate their businesses. Its awesome that the Cincinnati and Brandery communities are working together to build something special” Bott told nibletz.com
From what we’ve heard on our visit to Cincinnati McDonald gets more and more excited every year. In addition to helping teams with legal issues, McDonald gets out in the community with the Brandery teams every chance he gets including festivals, events and even Reds games. The Brandery teams were also major parts of Startup Weekend Cincinnati over the summer. McDonald, Knox, Bott and many of the teams founders were on hand throughout the weekend to provide mentorship and guidance. In fact Austin Hackett, the founder of Crowd Hall (A 2012 Brandery Company) pitched his own startup on startup weekend, the one that actually looked most complete.
Accelerators are intense and sometimes a bit insane. Gut checks at an accelerator happen often and pivots are inevitable. Greg Svitak and Kurt Pettit from Cleveland Ohio entered The Brandery with a startup called Flock’d. The premise for the idea was good, they wanted to do “swarm” like deals at night clubs and bars. Pettit explained to us that the idea was abandoned because every municipality in the country has their own liquor advertising laws which made a nationwide app in that space all but impossible.
Svitak and Pettit regrouped and developed AndTix which is a ticket selling platform for major sporting events. Neither man is any stranger to startups. Pettit has been a designer that’s done startup work for years. Svitak was one of the organizers for the 2012 startup bus to SXSW. After wrestling with the ticketing idea for a little over a week, they regrouped again and plan to show off a great concept in ticketing next week.
26 year old Andy Zhang from Seattle Washington went into The Brandery with a concept called Fly Dutch which according to Angellist matched starutps and investors. Zhang, who is a trained lawyer among other things, actually pivoted FlyDutch into “woowhoo! online dating for the offline type”. His startup boasts no messaging, no surveys and no work. Could it be Pinterest for dating?
One of the teams we’ve seen as a standout since before this session at The Brandery started is Salt Lake City based CrowdHall. CrowdHall is a platform where celebrities, politicians, micro-celebrities, bloggers and others can communicate with their audience in a voting up and down question asking forum. Back in July they tested the platform with Bachelorette winner Jeff Holm. CrowdHall is the perfect platform for elections and online town hall meetings.
Co-Founder Jordan Menzel admitted that CrowdHall would be perfect for the Presidential Election, but the timing may be off. CrowdHall has stayed the course from entry to demo day and will reveal a polished, ready to go product that nestles nicely into it’s own space. We’re pretty sure that over the next few years and then again into the next election cycle CrowdHall will become a household name.
Our other standout team from this years session at The Brandery is Impulcity. We’ve covered Impulcity since before they were even selected for The Brandery. This Louisville startup is offering up a new way to find events in any area. They have hundreds of thousands of events organized and delivered into an app that has a slick and visually appealing UI and a feature set that includes the ability to share events, follow events, and add to an events wall.
CEO and Co-Founder Hunter Hammonds is putting his all into Impulcity. In July they had a full featured, working beta, in fact we were in the beta test. There really was nothing else like it available in any app store or market. Impulcity was able to find and recommend events based on location, likes and other algorithms and deliver them with great visuals and the information an end user needed to make a decision about what to do.
Impulcity may have been perfect to a lot of people’s standards however with just under a month to go Hammonds blew up the whole thing and started over from scratch. They took a lot of beta testers feedback and iterated to the product that will released next week.
The stylish Jay Finch came to Cincinnati and The Brandery from New York, with his offline-online crowdfunding hybrid, SockStock. The concept takes businesses in need of funding and allows patrons to micro-crowdfund projects at the businesses they frequent via Finch’s platform. Finch has already made inroads in Cincinnati with the Carol Ann and Ralph V Haile Jr /US Bank Foundation who are referring their creative entrepreneurs and artisans to SockStock to raise money for their own projects to grow their companies. Finch plans on staying in Cincinnati after demo day to further the SockStock platform.
We’re expecting great things from the 11 teams at The Brandery this year when demo day rolls around next week.
Comments Off on Houston Startup: Sports Tradex, The Fantasy Stock Exchange For Sports INTERVIEW0LikeLike 2,863
For those of you old enough to remember, back before 9/11 Cantor Fitzgerald was the outfit behind a virtual stock exchange called HSX. HSX stood for Hollywood Stock Exchange and it was one of the first virtual stock exchanges that allowed users to buy and sell celebrities, movies and movie options. Unfortunately after 9/11 and the loss that Cantor Fitzgerald had in the tragedy, HSX faded. It was revived for a short time but not the same way.
Houston Startup Sports Tradex has revived the model except instead of Hollywood it’s all about sports. Sports Tradex gets to the core of the fantasy sports lover with a financial background. It’s the ultimate place to go if you like to armchair quarterback sports and the stock market.
Sports Tradex really heats up when it’s game time. The market stays open throughout a sporting event so traders can trade in real time.
Sports Tradex is the brain child of co-founders Ben Lipson and Omri Buzi, both entrepreneurs. Lipson’s first entrepreneurial experience was actually a root beer company while Buzi has a more traditional background in web development.
We got a chance to talk with Lipson in the interview below:
Comments Off on San Diego Startup: ScoreStream, CrowdSourced High School Scores0LikeLike 2,884
With the rise in online news sources and the decrease in old fashioned print journalists, most cities across the country don’t have a dedicated high school sports reporter. I remember back in the early 90’s growing up in the Baltimore area, the Sun and all the hyper local papers had one, if not a handful of full time reporters who’s beat it was to post the high school scores, details and results for track and field meets and anything that had to do with high school sports. As newspapers began cutting reporters, the high school beat drifted to the wayside.
There are a handful of high school sports sites on the internet but all of them seem to lack any decent box scores, or results from previous games. I remember looking up a high school score on the Sunday after a Friday opening game and it still hadn’t been updated.
This is the pain that Derrick Oien was looking to solve when he founded ScoreStream, a San Diego startup dedicated to high school sports.
ScoreStream can be found in the iOS app store and allows users to update high school sports teams in real time. From there they can post to Twitter, Facebook and ScoreStream’s own platform. ScoreStream encourages users who are actually at the game to post updates to that teams scores as the games go on. Oien has also baked a system into the backend of the website that uses GPS coordinates to tell if the person reporting the score is actually at the game.
“We have a data base of high schools, colors, mascots and longitude and latitude, so we know if a user is posting from a game,” Oien told UT San Diego. “What we do on the back end for media companies is we look at the scores coming in and we look at where the user is. So I can verify where they are.”
It’s the crowdsourcing part of ScoreStream that sets the new startup apart from sites like MaxPreps and SportsNgin. Those two sites are used to feed scores to other media outlets but rely on the school itself or a regional person to report a bulk of scores at one time.
ScoreStream has already inked it’s first media partner. San Diego’s XX1090-AM uses the service to supply their high school sports scores to their website.
Comments Off on Philadelphia: First Round Capital Debuts “Dorm Room Fund” For Student Startups0LikeLike 2,941
Josh Kopelman is the managing partner at Philadelphia based First Round Capital. While based in Philadelphia, First Round Capital, invests in companies across the country.
Kopelman got his start as an entrepreneur with his company Infonautics which he founded in his dorm room as a junior at Penn. By the time he graduated the company had 20 employees. Kopelman believes that colleges and universities house some of the best ecosystems for innovation.
That’s why he’s started the “Dorm Room Fund”. This new fund is set up to become a fund that is for students, and eventually run by students. While First Round Capital is injecting $500,000 in seed money to the fund, Kopelman is hopeful that the initial first investments will then select the next round, and the next and so on and so forth. Kopelman is looking forward to being an advisor to those companies selected to the fund.
This new student fund will:
1. Be run by a students – not suits. A student investment team would know the entire student and campus ecosystem – allowing them to find, screen and invest in the best ideas
2. Be located on campus, so that it constantly has a feel for the vibe on campus
3. Students are engineers, marketers, financers, writers, doctors, lawyers and researchers… Allow them to focus on investing in companies that disrupt big markets that they (students) have expertise in.
4. Finance students based on their needs. Students are scrappy and often just need that first $10,000 – $20,000 in order to build their product and ship a minimum viable product – let’s call their current stage the dorm room stage…
First Round Capital and Kopelman hope to introduce the Dorm Room Fund in college cities across the country. This first round of investments is concentrated to Philadelphia and students that are either enrolled in, or just recently graduated from Philadelphia area schools like the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel.
Kopelman is currently on the prowl looking for the first 8 students who will serve on the investment committee, which will oversee which student run startups get investments from the fund. If you’re interested in being considered for the investment committee you need to be a student in the Philadelphia area and hit the link below.
Comments Off on Pittsburgh Startup Introduces PopChilla A Robot For Autistic Kids0LikeLike 2,193
A new Pittsburgh startup called Interbots has announced plans to unveil a new robot called Popchilla, at the Consumer Electronics Show ( CES) in January. While CES is usually riddled with robots that tackle all kinds of tasks, Popchilla is different.
The cute blue robot with bunny like ears is designed to help kids with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The folks at Interbots have designed Popchilla to be friendly, bright and inviting, all of which will provide a great stimulant to autistic children who sometimes prefer to interact with non humans over humans.
“Some autistic children are more willing to interact with robotic devices than humans. We want to use Popchilla to help those children with their social skills and interacting with real people,” says Interbots Chief Technical Officer Michael Knight.
In addition to bunny ears, Interbots also gave Popchilla a tail like a lion. Popchilla is able to make facial expressions when he’s happy. However, unlike other robots, Popchilla isn’t controlled by sensors, rather a therapist, parent or other care provider can manipulate or program Popchilla with a remote control or computer.
The ability to totally program Popchilla is one of the key elements to the therapeutic part of the robot. Interbots CEO Seema Patel told fastcoexist.com:
“Children with autism don’t react well to things that are unpredictable, and therapists prefer to use tools and technology that they have full control over,”
Interbots is also introducing an iPad game called Popchilla’s world which helps autistic children get over the fear of developing routines. They expect to debut the game and show off the robot at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January in Las Vegas.
Comments Off on New Hampshire Startups Look To 2032 At Disruptivate Oct 9th0LikeLike 2,251
New Hampshire startups and innovators are looking forward to the second Disruptivate event scheduled for October 9th at Wentworth By The Sea in New Castle.
Mark Galvin, the Managing Director at the New Hampshire Innovation Commercialization Center was ecstatic with the turnout at the first Disruptivate event held in April. According to seacoastonline.com Galvin was hoping for 100 attendees. Over 250 folks came to they event with most staying into the night, and the after party.
“We were hoping we could break 100 participants,” Galvin told seacoastonline.. “We were pleasantly surprised that 250 people showed up and we sold out. Many people stayed from registration in the morning through the after-event party until 8:30 that night. A lot of people were really jazzed up. ”
The first event was broad in scope, highlighting technology innovation across a variety of sectors. For the October 9th event Galvin and the team are highlighting the healthcare and education sectors. Afternoon panels at the event will take a look at what healthcare and education may look like in 2032.
“We are looking to highlight 12 disrupters who have a company, an idea or even a piece of legislation that can actually change and move the innovation agenda in New Hampshire for health care and education,” Galvin said. “The woods are filled with disrupters and serial entrepreneurs. We need more people to help move the needle on disruption to benefit the state, the country and the world.”
Jeff Carlisle, the founder of an EMR startup and author of the book “We Love Innovation, so Long as It’s Nothing New”, was named a top Disruptivator of 2012 at the April conference. He will be on one of the healthcare panels at the October Disruptivate conference.
If you’re in the North East it looks like this is going to be a great event. Hit the link below to register.
Comments Off on Charlotte Startup: Rawporter Raises $300,000 Seed Round With Two Inaugural Investments0LikeLike 1,921
We are very excited to report that are good friends, and longtime supporters of Nibletz and our previous ventures, have raised a $300,000 seed round.
Rawporter is a socially driven market place where citizen journalists can post their photos and videos of interesting news events. Rawporter has an e-commerce platform built in where users can sell their pics and videos to news sites, bloggers and even tv stations.
The idea was born when co-founders Kevin Davis and Rob Gaige were eating dinner in Uptown Charlotte. They saw a pretty intense auto accident outside of the restaurant. What they noticed was that all of the people passing by ( including themselves) had snapped some pictures and videos. However by the time the news crews arrived the accident had all but cleared.
Both Davis and Gaige thought that there had to be a way, outside of emailing the photos and videos unsolicited to a news director, to get eyewitness news to the media.
That’s the core to Rawporter now they’ve added social features and more.
Rawporter was able to attract funding from two new funds in their home state of North Carolina. This the first investment by the newly formed IMAF (Inception Micro Angel Fund) Cape Fear and the N.C. Fund of Funds.
Gofman Holdings also participated in the round.
“We formed IMAF Cape Fear to invest in emerging technology businesses. Rawporter is an exciting way for us to take advantage of the photo and video-sharing momentum. Additionally, our expertise in Mobile and eCommerce will better prepare Rawporter for success,” said Dallas Romanowski, Fund Director at IMAF Cape Fear.
As mentioned above, Rawporter is also the first investment by the N.C. Fund of Funds program, a component of the N.C. Small Business Credit Initiative, which was created through federal funding under the Small Business Jobs Act.
“We will be investing in early stage North Carolina companies, like Rawporter, with the potential for exceptional job growth. Our financial support will lead to exciting employment opportunities in the ever-growing North Carolina technology sector,” said Timothy Janke, Director of Private Equity Initiatives for North Carolina’s Small Business & Technology Development Center.
“Although we’re pleased with the progress to date, this funding provides the opportunity to expand faster and introduce functionality our community’s been clamoring for,” said Rawporter Co-founder Kevin Davis.
UPDATE: This event was moved to November 7, 2012 because of election day.
If you’re a Houston area startup and you’re looking to pitch to a room full of your peers than take note. November 6th 2012, starthouston.com is holding a demo day for up to 15 startups.
Houston startups should prepare a pitch highlighting:
-Product Explanation & Demo
-Growth Strategy
-How you will monetize your product or service
-Explain if you are bootstrapping or seeking funding
Each interested startup should put together a three minute pitch, complete with deck and should also be prepared for up to two minutes of mentor feedback and then a group 30 minute Q&A with those in the audience.
This event, being held at 1179 Delano Street, in Houston at 6:00pm on November 6th will be a great place for startups to practice delivering their pitch to investors and groups. If you’re a startup interested in pitching you should reach out to contact@starthouston.com to be considered.
After the startup presentations, there will be time for networking with the startups and others in attendance. This is not a monetary pitch contest, but you never know who will be in the audience.
Comments Off on Pittsburgh Startup: DuoLingo Raises $15 Million In Latest Round0LikeLike 1,601
Pittsburgh startup DuoLingo has just completed their latest round of funding to the best of $15 million dollars, rounding out a great week of funding for startups outside the valley.
DuoLingo isworking on a large scale crowd sourcing platform for language and translation. It was founded by Carnegie Mellon University Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Louis Von Ahn.
If Von Ahn’s name sounds familiar its because he is the same man behind Captcha the extra layer of privacy control used when logging into many websites. Captcha was eventually purchased by Google. Google uses the technology to help prevent computerized logins, but perhaps more importantly to verify addresses for Google Maps.
It’s that large scale verification that has been reworked and made into a platform to grow the largest translation database in the world.