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Central Illinois Angels Invest In Startup: Intellihot Green Technologies

The Heartland Partnership announced yesterday that the Central Illinois Angels, angel network, has made another investment to a Central Illinois based technology startup,

Intellihot Green Technologies is based in Galesburg Illinois, The company has designed, and now manufactures, tankless gas water heaters. Every year hundreds of thousands of kilowatt hours of energy are wasted by heating water sitting in a tank.

Intellihot’s tankless systems for commercial and residential locations, heat water without a tank on an as needed basis.

Central Illinois Angels have invested $325,000 in the company which started out in the Peoria NEXT Innovation Center. Now that Intellihot’s water heaters are in production their manufacturing is based in Galesburg. The company continues to maintain an office presence at Peoria NEXT.

The $325,000 is part of a larger syndicated round. The Central Illinois Angels have invested $3 million in 11 companies to date.

Linkage:

Check out Intellihot here.

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else”

Israeli Startup: Managed For Mimi Provides Content Solutions For Your Company Brand INTERVIEW

So you’ve got your own company and everyone around you has a blog. This isn’t a new situation for today’s business owner. More and more businesses are adding blogs with actual content as part of their web presence. Content can be anything from a CEO’s daily ramblings, to content related to their business type.

More often then not, you’ll find great travel blog entries on hotel and airfare booking sites. If your favorite insurance agency has a blog they may talk about events they are going to sponsor and insurance needs. If you run a hunting and fishing store your blog may contain your personal hunting and fishing exploits or tips on the best gear to buy.

No matter what your business is, blogging and social media are some of the best ways to market yourself and your company.

The problem faced by most business owners though is that they are too busy to write a blog every week or every month, much less everyday. That’s where startups like “Managed For Mimi” come in. This Israeli startup helps provide, aggregate and churn out branded content for others’ sites.

We got a chance to find out all about this lucrative new startup, growing up in the Startup Nation. Check out our interview with “Managed For Mimi” below, and no we didn’t find out who Mimi is.

Seattle Startup: TangoCard Announces Salesforce Integration

Imagine if you could integrate actual gift giving into your Salesforce CRM system. Go beyond birthday and anniversary reminders and actually send a gift. That’s now a reality thanks to Seattle based startup TangoCard.

Salesforce integration for the Eric Schmidt, Innovation Endeavors, backed startup is just one on the features TangoCard has been working on this summer.

Once the user installs the TangoCard for Salesforce app, giving a contact a gift is as easy as finding that contacts name and hitting a button.

After installing the free app, just look up a contact or lead, choose a card, write a message, and hit send. Gift card options include the Tango Card as well as digitally delivered gift cards from major retail brands including Starbucks and Fandango. Through a partnership with Treat, sending a beautiful physical greeting card also becomes as simple as sending an email. Additionally there is “zero-click” integration with Concur Technologies. For any purchase made with a linked Concur® account, a receipt image for any purchase is posted directly to an open Concur expense report. This integration finally creates a simple way to properly expense and account for enterprise gift card purchases.

Now there’s no excuse to miss a present or for forgetting a follow up gift.

“Sales teams, customer service teams, recruiters, and others spend over $10 billion annually on gift cards, and many of these teams also use huge SaaS platforms like Salesforce,” says David Leeds, CEO and Founder of Tango Card. “We created this dedicated Salesforce app to dramatically simplify the process of buying a gift card. Perhaps more importantly, doing this through Salesforce empowers teams with great business intelligence and real power to follow-up on cards they have sent. It also provides a slick way to complete holiday gift card purchases.”

TangoCard announced a partnership with Denver startup Plink, to widen the reward choices for their platform which prior to that, dealt only in Facebook credits. Both companies announced that partnership in June.

Last month, TangoCard announced a partnership with Portland startup Hively to reward employees for great customer service.

While the SalesForce announcement is quite exciting we’ve got it from a good source that TangoCard will have even more news between now and the end of the year.

Linkage:

Check out TangoCard here

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Atlanta Startups To Win In CTW Breakup

Earlier this summer Atlanta super angel, Sig Mosely came out of retirement. It was announced that he was joining forces with Palaniswamy Rajan to form the $25 million dollar CTW ventures fund. Mosely also participated in a $600,000 round led by Dallas Maverick’s owner and fellow super angel Mark Cuban, in Atlanta startup Badgy.. It’s unclear whether or not it was Mosely or CTW in that round.

Now, just two months after the start of CTW the partners, Mosely and Rajan are parting ways. They are divorcing over what the Atlanta Business Journal is equating to “irreconcilable differences.

Rajan prefers to go long tail on technology ventures.

“Raj much prefers to dig deep, deep, deep into the technology,” Mosley said to the Business Journal “That does not do anything for me.”

Rajan feels the same way about Mosely’s desire to invest in entrepreneurs. Mosely is more of a risk taker which is actually great for startups.

Both men will go there separate ways but that doesn’t mean Mosely is going back into retirement. Mosely is creating his own fund that will invest between $200,000 and $500,000 in entrepreneur lead startups.

Mosely is hoping that his fund will be a feeder fund for deal flow with larger firms like Menlo Park Ventures.

Prior to retiring a first time in 2010 Mosely had oversaw the investment in over 130 technology companies as the President of Imlay Investments.

Linkage:

Source: Atlanta Business Journal

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South Carolina Startup: OpenMenu Standardizing Restaurant Menu’s Online

It all started over 2 years ago in Columbia South Carolina, over a piece of “death by chocolate” cake. It was Chris Hanscom’s birthday and in like most relationships is wife asked him a simple question, “where do you want to eat tonight?”. It was Hansom’s night and he didn’t really care where he ate, but he wanted a piece of death by chocolate cake.

This search, online and through phone calls, almost brought the death of him (or perhaps his smart phone), but Hanscom was determined to find his favorite piece of cake. What he found was a mess of websites for local restaurants. Some had mobile pages, some had scaled down pages, others had flash that he couldn’t get to load, and still others had text that didn’t look right. When he went to the computer, it was much of the same. There was no consistency in the online menu.

With Hanscom’s battle with the chocolate cake, an idea for OpenMenu was born. Now what Hanscom is proposing is a daunting task and he is well aware of that. He’s hoping to make a platform attractive enough that most restaurants will streamline their menus utilizing the OpenMenu platform.

Lets make this abundantly clear though, Hanscom doesn’t have some groovy restaurant app that he wants to sign restaurants up for, he wants them to JUST streamline their menus. The framework around the websites can remain the same, the graphics are all the restaurants, however the menu part, if streamlined and then tied to an API could become a very welcomed thing for restaurant patrons, and a very lucrative startup for Hanscom.

We got a chance to interview this bold entrepreneur. Check out the interview below:

Drexel Students Launch Philly Startup: Tagitbest

Nicholas Pirollo, a self proclaimed serial entrepreneur and an undergraduate student at Drexel University and his team have launched a new and exciting SEO product. Sure you’re saying what’s new and exciting about an SEO product? Well first off Tagitbest is about Twitter and Instagram, moving SEO to two of the hottest spaces on the planet right now.

Rather than search engine optimization Tagitbest is a “hashtag optimizing engine”. Tagitbest is actually solving a huge problem for people. Take the DNC for instance. We’re on the ground in Charlotte NC operating out of Startup Hub “Packard Place” at the PPL blogger/online journalist lounge. Now in a room full of 500 journalists no one could tell us the “official” hashtag for the DNC on Monday morning. Some are using #DNC2012, some are using #DNC12, Some are just using #DNC and then some are using #obama and #4moreyears.

If you head upstairs to the official Politico convention studios and hub they use their normal tag #Politico and then a different tag for each event that they’re hosting which has been a minimum of 4 events per day. All of these various tags can get a bit confusing, and that’s just for this one event.

Tagitbest will optimize your content, whether it be a picture, tweet or other piece of media and tell you what tag will be best to get your content in front of the most people.

Tagitbest comes in three flavors, web, iOS and Android and you can find their app in both the Google Play Store and the iTunes app store.

The interface is easy to use and as long as you know what a hash tag is you’re in business. Now if you’re a developer they do offer an API as well so that developers can embrace their new backend technology.

Linkage:

Check out Tagitbest here

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Canadian Startup: BufferBox Had Amazon Locker Idea A Year Earlier, INTERVIEW

By now we’ve all hearda bout Amazon’s new locker service. Amazon Lockers is a system of lockers at public locations that Amazon customers can use for picking up their packages in a safe, secure and more private area. These lockers are a great idea for people who aren’t home and can’t get home for a daily delivery, and also can’t get personal deliveries at work. They’re also great for those of us that shop for nosy kids and spouses around the holidays. Of course you can read between the lines for other reasons that you may not want your Amazon shipments going to your house.

A Canadian startup called BufferBox, actually had the idea a year earlier. The difference between BufferBox and the Amazon Lockers though, is that online e-commerce channels outside of Amazon can use the service.

When BufferBox co-founder Mike McCauley first heard about Amazon Lockers he was disheartened and felt their idea had been ripped off. He was later able to turn it into a much more positive spin when he said: Amazon “put credibility behind the technology,” McCauley said. “Now there’s a big new market Amazon has created. Because Amazon controls 30% of the e-commerce market, you need a third party to offer the service for everyone else.” to the Wall Street Journal

We got a chance to talk with McCauley ourselves about the service that could easily be utilized by the other 70% of the e-commerce industry.

Check out the interview below:

Frequent Traveler Creates Siesta Pillow Startup In Los Angeles INTERVIEW

California based serial entrepreneur and frequent traveller Mark Hill is looking to re-invent the travel pillow. As we all know, most travel pillows are shaped like a U and designed to go around the neck. They are ugly, awkward and have no reasonable place to store them. When you travel with a travel pillow you’re locked into it’s clutches. For many it’s more discomforting that sleeping on a plane or train with no pillow at all, or worse, the “free pillow”.

So on a return flight from Hawaii one day Hill decided he was going to do something about it and did it. Hill knows his market is ripe with over 730 million passengers who boarded domestic flights.

Hill’s pillow is different. He’s found, and many agree, that the most comfortable position to sleep on in a plane is leaning forward. This also goes for buses and trains as well. You pretty much rest your head in your hands or on the seat in front of you. This process can get complicated and uncomfortable for many reasons.

First off the person in front of you controls where their seat is positioned. They could, in mid flight, train ride or bus ride, decide to recline the seat or put it back to it’s upright position, which would discomfort you a great deal. Next, on a plane and some trains there is a tray table in front of you which means your forehead or the top of your head is vibrating against a large plastic or metal object, again not worth the pain that’s going to come from riding that way.

Hill’s pillow is designed to make that position comfortable and insures great rest while traveling. Hill is a serial entrepreneur who’s tried his hand at technology startups and hard goods including water bottles with removable bottoms. This latest invention/startup, Hill is confident will be a big winner.

Check out our interview with Hill below:

Meeting Burner Partners With Startup America For New Member Benefits

The member benefits that Startup America members get when they sign up for Startup America are plentiful. There is a wide range of great businesses resources, tools, literature and more available to Startup America members at deeply discounted rates and sometimes free. Microsoft, Dell and American Airlines are just some of Startup America’s large corporate member partners that are hoping to spur innovation by providing their hardware, and services at discounted rates. (did we mention signing up for Startup America is free?)

The latest company to join the ranks of Startup America member benefits partners is MeetingBurner.

The Startup America partnership has been using MeetingBurner’s platforms to host their educational webinars with top startup ecosystem advocates across the country. Here’s a short list of just a handful of people featured in Starutp America webinars hosted on the MeetingBurner platform:

SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin
Rebecca Corliss (Head of Social Media at HubSpot)
Eric Jackson (CEO CapLinked/PayPal),
Jason Best & Sherwood Neiss (founders of Startup Exemption and two of the key guys who pushed the Crowdfunding bill through Congress)
Ingrid Vanderveldt (Entrepreneur and Dell’s first Entrepreneur in Residence)
Don Charlton (CEO The Resumator)
Tristan Walker (Andreesen Horrowitz/Former BD at Foursquare),
Tony Tjan (Founder CueBall VC firm/HBS Author)

Now, Startup America member companies can use the same webinar platform for their own webinars and web meetings. MeetingBurner is offering a 25% discount on MeetingBurner Pro or Premium for Startup America members.

To get started just sign up for Startup America at their website s.co and if you’re already a member look for it in your member dashboard alongside the numerous other great benefits.

Linkage:

Meetingburner is here

StartupAmerica is here

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Video Interview With Charlotte Startup: WeRX Winners Of The StartupRockon Contest At The DNC

Just prior to the StartupRockon kickoff part at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte North Carolina we got to meet Amir Khoshnevis the Chief Strategist for Charlotte startup WeRx.org. They were one of the three finalists for the $5,000 StartupRockon grant contest. The winner was announced just before The Roots took the stage.

WeRx.org is an innovative crowdsourcing platform that would definitely be considered in the social entrepreneurship space. Khoshnevis and his co-founders discovered that people are paying way too much for their medication. Of course we’ve known this for years but what the WeRx team found was something that will blow most people’s minds away.

Take Lipitor for example. In it’s generic form the WeRX team found some pharmacies sold the drug for $11 and on the high end, $180 and that’s right in the Charlotte metro area. The unfortunate reality is that most people who require medication may do a limited cost comparison, and if they do they check the few pharmacies close by. If they can’t afford the cost of the medication close by they often decide to not take it. This can ultimately lead to death.

As another example Khoshnevis and the WeRx team found that in West Charlotte diabetes medications cost two to three times as much as they do in the Ballentine suburb of Charlotte. Why? Because the demographics skew more diabetic in West Charlotte.

So what did they do about this problem? They created WeRx which is a platform that allows people to crowdsource prescription prices. WeRx encourages those taking medications to input what they paid for it. Then then end users can geo-discover the best prescription prices and make the trip to another pharmacy to get the best price.

Ultimately the idea is to build such a large platform that big pharmacy companies bring their pricing system back inline with each other.

WeRx gives those that report prices a feel good “pill heart” so they know they’ve done their part to help people find the medications they need and hopefully drive the cost of prescriptions down.

This idea was so good that the startup that launched just last week, won the $5,000 StartupRockon grant contest. There win was announced Monday evening at the StartupRockon party featuring The Roots.

An ecstatic Khoshnevis tracked me down by the bar so proud that such a socially important startup won the contest. They plan on putting the $5,000 right back into the company that they’ve been bootstrapping since inception. Check out a video interview below with Khoshnevis just prior to the start of the party:

Linkage:

Check out WeRx here at werx.org

Here’s more DNC 2012 coverage brought to you by rawporter.com, and kiwi.ly

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” and we’re on a sneaker strapped road trip “everywhere else” more info here.

Swedish Startup: Studemia Is A Collaboration Platform For Students INTERVIEW

We are finding more and more great educational, student facing startups, are coming from overseas. Take Prague startup MySchoolNotebook for instance. Their platform allows students to easily take notes, share notes, sync notes and reference notes on and offline, digitally, in a super easy to use platform and a graphically appealing UI.

Today, we’ve got an interview with Swedish Startup Studemia which allows students to collaborate in a Google Wave/Asana type fashion with the focus being on students in either college or high school.

Now you can collaborate with friends and schoolmates in the same class or across the ocean. As they explain in the interview below it’s a seamless sharing platform for students to share resources and keep projects organized.

Studemia allows students to organize projects by project or by course. Also, just about any kind of media can be uploaded to the platform.

They’ve built the platform for students by students. Studemia’s co-founders; Vilhelm Josander, Per Almhorn and Markus Sackemark are all students themselves and realized the need for a platform like this, specifically geared towards students, quickly and have been working on it ever since.

Check out our interview below:

Lithuanian Startup: Vidiget, Teach Or Learn Anything INTERVIEW

Lithuanian startup Vidiget is all about peer to peer learning. Whether you have a skill you want to learn or you have a skill you want to teach, Vidiget is the platform to help do that.

In this day and age it’s so hard for people to take courses after work. Now it’s easier to learn and teach things online where you can have 1:1 time with the teacher and at the same time you don’t have to leave the comfort o your own home. Whether you’re looking to learn how to crochet, make biodiesel fuel, the importance of Twitter, how to draw, how to play guitar or any other form of learning and teaching, Vidiget is the platform to do that.

In the U.S. we have California startup TeachMeo doing just about the same thing. It will be interesting, to say the least, to see what happens if Vidiget expands outside of Europe.

The idea for Vidiget came when Vidiget’s co-founder Vytis Duknauskas was teaching himself how to program. He wanted to teach himself all kinds of programming but found he could also benefit from legitimate courses. However, what he found was either too expensive or didn’t pass his litmus test for a course he could take and the learn something.

Check out our interview with Duknauskas below:

Nibletz Is At The DNC And We’re Using Nashville Startup: KiWi

The Obama Administration continued to pave the way for Startups all over the country with the creation of Startup America, the passing of the JOBSAct and many other initiatives that have been it in place to help entrepreneurs and startup founders across America.

Thats why it’s our honor to cover the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte North Carolina. We’ll be partnering with Startup America and the guys at StartpRockon.com to bring you guys everything there is about Startups at what’s sure to be one of the best DNC’s of our time.

We’ve got some great access to bring the best coverage for Startups across America.

We’ll be representing one of the best states “everywhere else” for Startups and entrepreneurs and that is Nibletz home state, the great state of Tennessee. Not only that but starting Tuesday we’ll be using one of the exciting new startups that just graduated from JumpStart Foundry’s 2012 class, KiWi,

We got off to a rough start with KiWi after their founder ad libbed at the end of his presentation. Since then KiWi and it’s co-founder Jayme Hoffman has come highly recommended by Michael Burcham, Vic Gatto and Marcus Whitney,

Hoffman and his team couldn’t catch a break after demo day as they’ve been working tirelessly since then to make sure we’ve got something great to use at the Democratic National Convention.

KiWi is like Instagram except instead of photos you are taking short videos. The UI is extreme

As for Demo Day, Hoffman had said that he would be looking for term sheets in Nashville for thirty days. It came off to me that he was giving Nashville an ultimatum, give us a term sheet in 30days or we’re leaving. That was far from the case. Hoffman was trying to convey that things have been moving so fast for the KiWi team that an opportunity for local investors to get in at the ground level may not exist in 30 days. Of course we may speed that process along this week.ly user friendly. Filter selection is topnotch and from capture to share, the experience is fast and fluid. It’s actually not nearly as clunky as SocialCam.

We’re looking forward to the next few days here in Charlotte representing our home team: LaunchMemphis,LaunchYourCity,Launch Tennessee and Startup Tennessee.

Find The Best CrowdFunding Site Using Columbus Startup: StandOffer

CrowdFunding is taking the world by storm. There are traditional crowdfunding, artist crowdfunding, project crowdfunding, tuition crowdfunding, civic crowdfunding, fundraising crowdfunding sites popping up everywhere. We’re expecting even more crowdfunding concepts to come out of the woodwork in the next two years. There are even crowdfunding sites to invest in startups, starting pop up now in anticipation of the JOBSAct regulations that should be released around the first part of the year.

A startup based in the “Cool Tech” city of Columbus Ohio, called StandOffer, is setting out to make the troves and troves of crwodfunding sites easier to navigate. Using their proprietary algorithmic system, dubbed “crowd control” StandOffer is going to connect users with the crowdfunding site that will work best for them and their needs. You may think your project is great for Kickstarter, but StandOffer may know there’s a different site out there for it. StandOffer would then show you what to do to move forward.

The founding team at StandOffer has been working closely with crowdfunding startups everywhere to insure that they offer the best, most up to date data, and an easy way for people to apply for crowdfunding across multiple sites that fit their goals.

StandOffer is like a hotels.com for crowdfunding sites and it could not have come at a better time.

We got a chance to talk with Mason Estep the founder of StandOffer in the interview below: