Comments Off on Baltimore Startup: ParkingPanda Taps Local Firm, MindGrub For Mobile App0LikeLike 2,005
One of my favorite things about traveling in Washington DC and Baltimore (aside being from there) is Parking Panda. Parking Panda is a revolutionary new app that allows peer to peer renting of driveways and other under utilized parking spaces. What you’ll find after using the service is, better directions to a parking spot, not having to constantly plug meters with quarters, and the ability to save both time and money by using somebody else’s spot.
ParkingPanda also backfills peer to peer spots with under-utilized spots in municipal lots as well.
The service is currently only available in Washington DC and Baltimore however they plan on being in Philadelphia,Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco in the not so distant future.
ParkingPanda functions a lot like hotels.com. People with the space in their driveway or wherever else you can park a car, post pictures, a description, some nearby attractions and the requirements for parking there. End users who need to park their car go to the site, decide where they need to park and select a nearby option. The end user puts in their car data and their credit card and goes to the spot to park. It’s that simpe.
Of course like hotels.com the entire platform could increase it’s usability ten fold with a mobile app and that’s just whatParkingPanda has commissioned the team at MindGrub to do.
The Catonsville based design house has been around since 2004 when teacher turned entrepreneur technologist Todd Marks went a little bit ahead of the curve designing websites, and then mobile apps for Baltimore’s top shelf clientele.
Now, rather than having to plan hours or days ahead, people can utilize ParkingPanda on the fly, even as their driving aimlessly down the streets of DC or Baltimore looking for a spot.
Comments Off on Gwinnett Georgia Startup: 8Bit Receives $25,000 Founders Grant0LikeLike 2,146
8Bit is a wild gang of extremely talented and creative web publishing rockstars building a platform to give those web publishers without their creative fire access to an arsenal of great design. The Gwinnett Georgia based startup is the latest winner of the Gwinnett Innovation Park $25,000 Founders Grant.
While at first look you may get the impression that 8Bit is just another Word Press theme shop and those are about as common these days as Android developers, but when you dive through their site you’ll see that they’re super hero’s of the web publishing space and have compiled a bunch of great values that go into their work.
When you read their about page, creativity and urban,word pressing hipsterism seep out of your computer like a mocha latte seeping through the bottom of the Starbucks cup in your center console. If you read their blog and look at their actual work though, you’ll see they aren’t just a bunch of templates.
Each of their themes is customizable to the hilt. If you’ve been using Word Press for years, like we have, and you’re still not sure what all the different appearance settings do, no worries 8Bit spells it out for you in their themes while keeping a semblance of classy elegance. In fact 8Bit is so well liked that Mashable and TNW have featured their themes.
8Bit also offers customer support, a novel idea compared to the idiots of douchebaggery we bout this template from.
Oh but we’re reporting about their cash.
“The Founders Grant Award is intended to give back to the entrepreneurial community by rewarding entrepreneurial excellence and helping deserving companies continue on their path to success,” said Leland Strange, local serial entrepreneur, investor and long time supporter of Atlanta technology innovators to the Gwinnett Business Journal.
“8BIT loves being a part of the Nspire program. It has helped us get even closer to our goal by providing space for us to work together as a team, as well as opportunities for us to network,” explains John Saddington, 8BIT co-founder. “We are honored to receive the Founders Grant and know that the money will help us continue on our path to creating the best online publishing solution.”
In Brad Feld’s column in Business Insider this morning he talked about the Orbotix team, Adam Wilson and Ian Bernstein. They’re the two guys behind that crazy little ball we all grew to know and love at Thedroidguy offices as The Sphero. Feld was holding office hours during the 2010 Boulder TechStars program at a pivotal point for the ball. In fact, without Feld’s interaction with Wilson and Bernstein there may have never been a ball.
We first saw the Sphero Ball at Show Stoppers at CES in 2011, a year before almost everyone else saw the ball. You could control the ball with your smartphone and make it dance across the floor. It was right then and there that Russell Holly, a colleague of mine, and I, saw the true potential for the ball. Without any prompting we entered into a conversation with the founders about crazy cat toys, virtual golf, obstacle courses, virtual bowling and a slew of other things that would come to fruition in the following 18 months.
So how did it almost, not happen?
Well Bernstein and Wilson went through what feld called “Mentor Whiplash”. We’ve seen it happen at many accelerators across the country, the accelerator pivot.
From Feld’s account at SAI, Wilson and Bernstein sat down to meet with Feld and looked like whipped puppies. Their fire was gone from Feld’s previous visits with the duo.They had three slides on the table and Feld wanted to hear the ideas. Both Bernstein and WIlson were self-proclaimed robot geeks, and hackers and loved working with robotics all hours of the night.
As Feld tells it in his SAI column, the first idea was a door lock that unlocked with a smartphone. The second idea it seems no one could remember, and the third idea was the robotic ball. Problem is, there was no market for a robotic ball,no way to scale a robotic ball and it just seemed like a fun toy. Feld encouraged Wilson and Bernstein to go for it.
Bernstein, Wilson and heck Feld aren’t alone when it comes to pivoting in the accelerator. In fact, pivoting in the acce
lerator is justpart of the process. Top ranked Cincinnati accelerator, The Brandery, co-founder Dave Knox told us:
“In the early days of a startup, a company is searching to find a business model that resonates with consumers and can scale. This search can lead to subtle changes in their direction or at times a complete course correction that we often call a pivot. It is a process we have seen several times at the accelerator stage at The Brandery. At an accelerator, startups are put into the spotlight with their peer companies, mentors and potential investors. This leads to a quick determination if their startup is going to have what it takes to make it.”
“A great example of a pivot during the accelerator was Michael Wohlschlaeger in 2011. He came into The Brandery with a company called Meruni that was a data aggregation and analytics play. At The Brandery he found that the original business model was flawed but there was a segment of consumers in fashion that were incredibly interested in parts of the plan. He pivoted the company to StyleZen, focusing entirely on that fashion market opportunity. And while the pivot happened only 4 weeks before Demo Day, it ultimately led Michael and his team to raise a seed round from the venture firm CincyTech.”
Wohlschlaeger added:
“StyleZen started as Shoptimize, an automated, smart grocery list solution. The link between Shoptimize and StyleZen was harnessing the power of consumer data to build compelling solutions for the consumer (as opposed to just the brands and retailers). StyleZen is a personalize fashion discovery platform (truly “me-commerce) that learns a consumers preferences and distills the fashion universe down to a personalized, consumable level. ”
In Memphis Tennessee at the Seed Hatchery accelerator, Work For Pie pivoted from a website that was looking to link founders to technical co-founders, to an all out social network for open source developers. In fact, the name Work For Pie came from that idea where they would link founders together who would of course work for equity instead of pay (well at least by design). When the concept changed the name remained the same and they quickly took off getting a $300,000 add on funding round led by Solidus.
As for the little robotic ball. After making it’s debut at CES 2011 it was prominently featured at SXSW 2011 and Google I/O 2011 where the Sphero ball was a main attraction at the Google playground. The balls officially went on sale right before the holidays last year and are still selling like hotcakes, or like must have robotic balls controlled by your smartphone.
Check out the Sphero Ball rocking it at Google IO 2011 (1:30 in or so)
The Sphero ball also caught the attention of one Barrack Obama back in April. The President even got a little snippy with passerbys while he was trying to play with the Sphero Ball telling them “Excuse me- give me some space to drive my ball”.
Comments Off on Startup North Carolina Launches As Startup America Region0LikeLike 1,783
Startup North Carolina, the official region for the Startup America Partnership launched last night with not one but two packed parties. Raleigh startups, founders and entrepreneurs celebrated the launch at the RTP foundation headquarters. Brooks Bell, Founder and CEO of Brooks Bell; Aaron Chatterji, Associate Professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and Derek Holt, Startup America’s Managing Director of National Partnerships were all on hand for the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill Event.
Meanwhile down in Charlotte, Donna Harris, Managing Director of Startup Regions with Startup America and Louis Freeman, CEO of Edition Nation, led the festivities at that event. Startup America will be back in Charlotte in less than two weeks when the Democratic National Convention takes place the week of September 3rd. Startup America is partnering with Startup Rockon for startup focused events a both party conventions.
“North Carolina has an incredible history of innovation that has led it from being an agrarian leader to a hub of scientific and technological leadership,” said Scott Case, CEO of the Startup America Partnership. “Startup NC will be a catalyst to garner even more recognition for North Carolina’s world class entrepreneurs and startups.”
Startup America reported on Monday that over 350 people had registered for both events. According to the latest data from Startup America, even before North Carolina got their own Startup America region there were 202 members from North Carolina in Startup America.
Startup North Carolina launched with community involvement tied in. They opened up this website prior to the launch parties to vote on suggested ideas for a roadmap for the partnership.
Mital Patel, the Triangle Startup Weekend founder spearheaded the efforts in the Triangle while Adam Hill of Packard Place was tasked with firing up the Charlotte region.
Startup North Carolina plans to be a very active region for the Startup America Partnership.
Joining Startup America is free and the partnership offers members access to tens of thousands of dollars in benefits and services from their business partners like; Dell, American Airlines, .co and many more.
Comments Off on Nashville Startup: Zeumo Is A Productivity App For Teenagers INTERVIEW0LikeLike 2,591
Here are some startling facts about teenagers: 53% of teenagers would sacrifice their sense of smell before parting with their mobile phone. The average teenager spends 31 hours a week online. Only 29% of students believe high school offers a caring and encouraging environment. What if there was one startup out there that could help bring these facts to more desirable levels. Well there is.
Hal Cato is no stranger to teenagers and the lives they lead. Cato spent ten years as the CEO of the Oasis Center one of the nation’s leading youth serving organizations. During his tenure there he received multiple awards including the “National Agency of the Year” award from the National Network for Youth in 2008, and the “Best In Business Award” by the Nashville Business Journal in 2010. Now Cato has taken all of that experience and developed Zeumo a productivity app that miraculously touches every aspect of a teenagers life in a way that’s appealing to the teenager and fulfilling for their support system.
In 2012 two of the best ways to communicate to a teenager and actually have them hear you is through texting and social networks. Zeumo integrates those two features in a way that compliments their already available social networks and myriad of text messages. Zeumo also integrates schools, community based organizations, colleges and universities, businesses and the teenagers social world.
The app, which will be the must have app for teenagers when it launches in the fall, is filled with things that matter to teenagers and a UI/dashboard that’s easy to understand, filter and use.
We got a chance to talk with Cato in the interview below:
Comments Off on Los Angeles Startup: Unbucket, Make Lists Of Things You Want To Do, Then Do Them0LikeLike 1,873
Elliot Darvick CEO & Co-Founder of Unbucket (photo: businessrockstars)
Sure everyone has a bucket list of must see places they want to go before they die, or amazing things they want to do before they die. You know the kind, skydiving, Mt. Rushmore, run a marathon, truly epic things. What about when you need a list of things to do that may get thrown to the wayside in the hustle and bustle of everyday life. That’s where Unbucket comes in.
Unbucket allows you to make your own unbucket lists, or do them with one friend, or many. The types of lists you can make are infinite. Unbucket suggests things like, recipes you want to try, places to dine in your city, movies to watch, things to do on vacation.
I’ve already signed up for Unbucket using the beta code nibletz and created a few lists of my own. I’ve made a list of things to do with my daughter when I’m home on the weekend, and movies that I want to watch when I’m traveling. Hopefully this list making via Unbucket will come in handy.
We got a chance to talk with Elliot Darvick, co-founder of Unbucket. Check out the interview below:
Comments Off on Who Was That Girl At The Wedding, Find Out With DC Startup SocialTables0LikeLike 1,522
Weddings, Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, even reunions can be a bit awkward. Sure the person planning the event knows the social make up of the guest, they may even have some great reasoning behind the way the tables were set up, but you don’t. You may strike a conversation with someone in the same business as you or maybe even a hot guy or a hot girl. Perhaps you feel awkward exchanging data at someone else’s wedding. Fear not, the web has you covered, in a startup called socialtables.
socialtables is a hot dc startup founded by Dan Berger. It’s much more than a seating chart tool. socialtables allows wedding planners, brides to be, Bar Mitzvah moms and anyone else planning a party with seating charts, to use their tool to do it. But wait there’s more…
socialtables allows users to set up a seating chart and then pull the seated’s seatee’s (is that even a word), social data through to the socialtables website. The socialtables website can be accessed by guests. It’s up to the creator of the seating chart as to whether or not they open up the chart to guests before or after the wedding.
Berger tells NBC affiliate 5 KSDK.com, that more users are opening up the seating chart after the wedding, which is as good. Now you can figure out just who that was sitting next to you. Typically we all put our best game faces on for a wedding, maybe you’ll check out that person on socialtables and find out they aren’t as cool as you thought they were. Or, conversely, you may find out that they have more in common with you than you think.
When the creator opens up the socialtables seating chart ahead of the wedding you can find out more about the people you will be sitting next to.
Berger told KSDK that the idea for socialtables came up after he attended a destination wedding and didn’t know anyone. More and more people are connected online in different ways now and socialtables is another way to blend the online and offline universe for just about anyone.
Crunchbase reports that socialtables received $500,000 in seed funding in May of this year.
Comments Off on Toledo Ohio Startup: Buyvite Closes Funding Round Looks Forward To Expansion0LikeLike 1,883
Our good friend Brandi Wimberly and her group buying startup, Buyvite, have just finished closing a funding round. This unique startup makes creating makeshift buying groups easy to do and easy to collect.
No we aren’t talking about some crazy Groupon, group buying platform, we’re talking a much more practical use. Picture you and your cousins, uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters are all putting their money together to buy grandma and grandpa an anniversary cruise. You know how this traditionally goes, one coordinator puts their money on the line for the entire trip and all of a sudden everyone has a problem making the payment.
ANother great example is say you and your college buddies decide to take a group trip to a baseball game. Same thing, one person is holding the bag. No longer, not with BuyVite.
Buyvite lets you pull money together for one thing, it makes collecting the money a cinch and then one administrator can take the collected money for the group purchase. Pretty smart huh?
That’s what the investors must have thought because Wimberly reports that she has closed a funding round and plans to expand Buyvite’s markets infrastructure, mobile platform and management team.
“Now that we have successfully closed this round of financing, we can aggressively and confidently pursue retail partners who are interested and willing to participate in this socially relevant and expanding piece of the marketplace in which to further drive their products and services to and through. Buyvite is a new and exciting way to capture this evolving and growing segment of the social payments audience and we are extremely confident that the retail community will seize and embrace this new opportunity. We’re also excited to be approaching some new high growth market opportunities that have so far been largely ignored by the social commerce space.” Wimberly said in a statement.
“Our recent investment will also allow us to add new functionality and pivot our product to more closely align with consumer and retailer feedback and feature requests. Our investors and advisors are very focused on retail business development and brand building but also respect the technology we are crafting and overall product execution. Among our investors and advisors are experienced business leaders with a wide range of talents that can help us achieve our goal of being the leading group payment platform for retailers. We are lucky to have such an amazing group of people helping to build this company.” Wimberly added.
Buyvite also announced the addition of Bob Mallo and Brad Bialas to the management team. Mallo will assist in strategic formation, operational direction and company wide execution. Most recently Mallo was the Group President of Follett Educational Distribution Group and President of Follett Educational Services prior to that. Bialas will help develop sales, marketing, and pricing models as well as strategic partners. Bialas has been in the payments space for 12 years, most recently as the President of BluePay (a large payment processing software provider) where he helped the company grow from 3 employees and nominal revenue to over $100MM in annual sales. Buyvite Advisors include Vijay Raghavendra of IBM, Balaji Gopinath of Turner Broadcasting and Media Camp, Jacob Tell of Oniracom and Poornima Vijayashanker of Bizeebee Software.
This undisclosed funding round was led by Rocket Ventures.
Comments Off on Ever Wanted Your Own Infographic? Oregon Startup Vizify Has You Covered0LikeLike 2,891
If you’ve ever wanted your own infographic, you can have it now thanks to recent TechStars graduate and Oregon startup Vizify. Their exciting new social media tool is more than just a dashboard it gives you a visual glance at the things you’ve got going on in your personal social graph.
Now people can use your interactive infographics from Vizify to figure out what you’re all about.
For instance Emma the chief security at the Portland company likes to talk about squirrels, went to happy-go-lucky kindergarten and tweets pictures of herself. Everything is visual in a graphically appealing UI. Vizify draws out your social web as you can see from the screen shot above and when you click on any of the webs bubbles you can dive more into the content.
Todd Silverstein, Vizify’s co-founder told Mashable that the root of Vizify stems from Zuckerberg’s law. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that online data about you doubles each year. That makes a total mess of disjointed content about one person. Vizify simplifies that data and makes it pretty, and easy to use.
Another place where Vizify comes in handy is in the job search. Now all of your content is aggregated in an easy to view and easy to navigate platform. Face it every HR person and recruiter in the world is searching for all your social data anyway, now you can just add the url for your Vizify page to your resume and in one click a recruiter can see everything about you and where it fits in to your social graph.
We got a chance to interview Silverstein ourselves, check out the interview below:
Comments Off on Chattanooga Startup: Nudge Gamifies Workplace & Daily Wellness INTERVIEW0LikeLike 2,580
While we were in Chattanooga covering their big GigTank Demo Day we ran into Mac Gambill the co-founder of Chattanooga startup Nudge. We were fascinated by the idea of a workplace wellness app, essentially gamifying employee wellness.
Employee wellness can be costly for employers and employees. An unhealthy workforce can lead to employee absenteeism, low employee morale, a rise in health insurance premiums and more. Employee wellness affects the employees themselves, the employer and the other employees in any office. Spending 8-12 hours a day with sick people, down people or just people not well, isn’t any fun and pinches on the budget.
Employees with fulltime jobs that don’t work at a plush Silicon Valley or New York City office with iPad docks on exercise bikes, often times find themselves behind the desk for hours on end. Cutting back on coffee or deciding to forego that chocolate bar or lose that M&M jar on a desk, may help improve your wellness.
In fact Matt S. who participated in the nudge beta said he lost 13 lbs and was able to cut out caffeine (not just coffee) completely. Imagine how life would be if you could cut out caffeine completely.
But nudge isn’t about just workplace wellness, it’s your personal cheerleader throughout your day. Nudge isn’t about changing your lifestyle a lot or a completely new exercise regimen it’s about highlighting the things you’re doing well, rewarding you for doing good things for your body and your wellness and sharing them with friends and co-workers.
We got a chance to follow-up with Gambill in the interview below.
Comments Off on Toronto Startup Venio Is All About Healthy Meals & Healthy Lifestyle INTERVIEW0LikeLike 2,542
Toronto startup Ven.io is all about healthy meals, and healthy lifestyles. This new meal plan startup, helps users set up structured meal plans that are personal, scientific and valuable.
Setting up your meal plan via Ven.io is a simple three-step system that learns your habits, tastes and dietary needs. This is a really great platform for those who have regular dietary constraints like diabetes and lactose intolerance. Ven.io can give you great suggestions for every meal that will help you reach all of your goals.
The Ven.io team is an international tapestry of talent. In fact in our interview below they answered the questions about where they were based by saying they were Georgian and Iranian, and yes the headline is correct they live in Toronto. Their marketing guy Karim El Rabiey suggests that it’s this patchwork of different nationalities that creates a special flavor (you see what we did there) for the Ven.io team and the Ven.io product. They actually have one of the best about pages we’ve seen in a while, you should check that out here.
We got to interview El Rabiey about Ven.io and how they’re unparalleled in the world of specialty meal planning platforms. Check out the interview below.
Comments Off on Tell Your Life Stories With DC Startup: Monthsof.me INTERVIEW0LikeLike 2,296
Sure there are plenty of video apps out there and there are plenty of photo apps out there. Not it’s time to put everything together to tell a story. Scrapbooking grew to an amazing popularity in the 1990’s. There were scrapbooking classes, scrapbooking stores and more. There are still a few brick and mortar scrapbooking businesses, but like everything else scrapbooking has taken to the internet.
Monthsof.me is a Washington DC area startup that helps you collect, and organize all your photos, video and other media to tell stories that you can share with friends and family.
You can choose to tell the story of your life or stories of life’s precious moments. Baby’s first day, a wedding, the first day of school, soccer season, there are so many ways that monthsof.me would come in handy.
Monthsof.me came about after co-founder RJ Johnston had his fourth child and came to the realization that he had hundreds of albums of digital photos and videos across several sites, but none of them really told a story. He immediately went to work on monthsof.me. Johnston has a varied background mostly in sales, even government sales and a performance at the rock and roll hall of fame. Now he’s turned hie business acumen to the home and the family. Monthsof.me is a platform that people everywhere will find meaningful.
Check out our interview below with Johnston about monthsof.me and the hot startup ecosystem in our nation’s capital.
The transportation hailing app space is a hot one. In the United States the clear winner is Uber. They’ve expanded to many major cities across the country with plans for even more. Uber is being hit with a lot of challenges though because they are utilizing hired limousines and sedans rather than taxis themselves and they operate in a gray area when it comes to taxicab regulations. We actually use Uber quite a bit on the sneaker-strappend nationwide startup road trip.
In the UK, Skype backed HailO is the big taxicab hailing app. They recently received $17 million in funding to expand across the pond to the United States where they will go head to head with Uber.
A new Copenhagen startup is looking to shake up the whole space by launching globally all at one time. ClickATaxi is trying to build a network of worldwide cab drivers to make one all-inclusive app. ClickATaxi CEO and founder, Soren Halskov Nissen, thinks it’s ridiculous for travelers to have to have multiple taxi cab apps and then have to remember which countries or which cities each app works in. By taking on the entire world from the beginning they hope to quickly build scale with travelers.
We got a chance to talk with Nissen in the interview below.
Is there really a way to reinvent the jobs site? Sure there are plenty of startups out there that think they have the next monster.com on their hands but do they?
People on the jobhunt have dealt with the shortcomings of jobs sites for years because they’re usually in a position where they have no choice. Right now for instance, monster.com has so many vague ads you don’t know what you’re applying for and in some cases you don’t know who you are applying to. There is no way to separate the head hunters and the employment services from bonafide job openings at real companies.
While many website strive to get better and better every year, searching for a job on Craigslist gets worse and worse year over year. Sure I can understand getting 50 fake emails when listing an iPad or iPhone for sale on Craigslist, but the amount of scammy junk mail that’s coming in off Craigslist job boards is overwhelming as well. It seems that one in three Craigslist job ads are legitimate. It could be less.
One of the other big pains in the current job site model is the amount of money that sites charge companies for posting jobs. Sure they have to make money but the fees that monster.com and other job boards charge employers, almost guarantees that startups can’t afford to post in front of the masses.
This year we’ve seen a few good job platforms come across the pages here at nibletz.com; DC based Barrel of Jobs is definitely one of those as is hiredmyway a Detroit startup that has since moved to Chicago.
San Diego job site Cream of The Crop, joins that list. They offer free listings for employers. They also require transparency in posting jobs, they want the applicants to know who they are applying to and what they are applying for. Novel ideas, right?
We got a chance to talk with Cream Of The Crop’s Oscar Urteaga in the interview below:
Kyle
One of my favorite things about traveling in Washington DC and Baltimore (aside being from there) is Parking Panda. Parking Panda is a revolutionary new app that allows peer to peer renting of driveways and other under utilized parking spaces. What you’ll find after using the service is, better directions to a parking spot, not having to constantly plug meters with quarters, and the ability to save both time and money by using somebody else’s spot.
