Business Insider’s Ignition Mobile: Henry Blodget On How We Use Mobile

Business Insider’s Ignition Mobile conference kicked off this morning in San Francisco. To kick off the general session, Business Insider’s CEO and Editor In Chief, Henry Blodget ran through 105 slides in just under 15 minutes, basically providing an overview of what’s going on in the mobile industry’s to date.

Is this relevant to startups, and startups everywhere else?

Of course it is. Mobile is the fastest growing technology space in history. Mobile is now outpacing traditional PC sales, and most people have not one, not two but three or more screens.

Mobile usage is increasing ten fold. Gaming, music, social, video and of course search are dominating mobile.

Mobile, specifically tablets have increased in the bedroom. Consumers are consuming content on their iPads laying in bed more so than watching tv.

Mobile is giving advertisers a much more holistic approach, but Blodget warns that mobile is extremely intimate and advertisers with intrusive ads are going to lose. Blodget sees value across a variety of opportunities for new mobile apps and mobile startups.

Check out the video below:

Tennessee Showcasing Startups, Culture And More At Southland June 11th and 12th

Launch Tennessee and the Music City Music Council have teamed up to hold a new startup and innovation conference in Nashville in June. The conference, called Southland, butts up to two of the regions biggest music events, Bonaroo and the Country Music Association Music Festival.

This unique scheduling allows fans of both music and innovation to plan a nice 10 day trip to Nashville and enjoy a mixture of both.

Southland will feature venture capitalists and angel investors from across the country along with an extensive lineup of speakers and panelists with a firsthand knowledge of the power of innovation and its ability to transform a region’s ecosystem. Speakers include Sarah Lacy (Founder, PandoDaily), Michael Sippy (Vice President of Consumer Products, Twitter), Michael Marquez (Co-Founder, Code Advisors), KC Estenson (SVP & GM, CNN Digital), Ali Partovi (Co-Founder, Code.org), and many more from CNN, Scripps Networks Interactive, IBM and others.

“The Southeast is a hotbed for technology startups,” notes Charlie Brock, CEO of LaunchTN. “This conference is going to be the premier event for bringing together the best our region has to offer in entrepreneurs and cultural tastemakers, along with investors, technology and health care executives from around the country.”

In addition to the usual startup conference programming, like a startup village, and engaging keynotes speakers and panels, Southland will also offer a “Makers Marketplace” of southern culture featuring local musicians, BBQ pit masters, small batch distillers and southern artisans.

Unlike the national everywhereelse conference hosted in Memphis Tennesse, which highlights startups and innovation across, Southland is poised to be the largest regional conference for innovation and startups. Sandwiched in between the two major musical events, the Southland conference will offer an unheard of and very attractive cultural and innovation injection to all attendees.

Tickets are only $300, interested in attending visit southlandse.com

Nibletz provide the best startup coverage in the southeast, here’s more!

Meet The 10 Startups In The Nike Techstars Accelerator

Techstars, the world renowned accelerator network has been beefing up there offerings with new locations, like Techstars Chicago and new vertical accelerators in conjunction with Microsoft and Nike. When announced late last year, the startup space was on fire over the possibilities that would come from an accelerator driven by Nike and TechStars.

The Nike accelerator is buit around their NikeFuel digital platform and the Nike Fuel band.

“We are excited by the response to the Nike+ Accelerator and the high caliber of applicants to the program,” Stefan Olander, Nike’s vice president of digital sport, said in a news release. “We recently celebrated the first year of NikeFuel, and the Accelerator program is a natural next step to broaden and enhance the Nike+ ecosystem – allowing Nike to offer richer experiences to athletes of all levels.”

As with most TechStars branded accelerators, hundreds of teams applied. Here are the 10 that were chosen, as reported by the Portland Business Journal.

FitDeck (San Diego, Calif.) — Digital decks of exercise playing cards that deliver ever-changing workouts for fitness and sports. (Fitdeck.com)
GoRecess (New York) — Helps users find, book and review fitness activities. (Gorecess.com)
Chroma.io — Indie game studio that creates virtual worlds tied to real-world activity. (jumpbots.chroma.io)
CoachBase — Provides a digital sports coaching platform. (Coachba.se)
GoFitCause — Leverages fitness data as a means of raising money for charities. (Gofitcause.com)
HighFive — Ad network for health and fitness apps that helps people achieve goals by rewarding them along their journey. (Highfive.io)
Sprout At Work (Toronto) — Provider of corporate wellness solutions using social and gamification tools to inspire employees and employers. (Sproutatwork.com)
GeoPalz (Boulder, Colo.) — An interactive gaming and rewards platform for kids and families. (Geopalz.com)
Incomparable Things — Creates activity-driven fantasy sports leagues. (Incomparablethings.com)
RecBob (Cedar Rapids, Iowa) — Offers a platform that makes recreational sports easy by organizing play. (Recbob.com)

Find out more about TechStars here.

Check out more accelerator stories at nibletz.com

Romotive, One Of Tony Hsieh’s Earliest Startups, Leaves Vegas For Valley

There’s been a lot of talk, and a lot of action lately surrounding Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos and his joint venture, the Downtown Project. Through Hsieh and the Vegas Tech Fund, startups are being lured to a community revitalization project in downtown Las Vegas.

As Hsieh has explained several times, Zappos got the opportunity to take over the old Las Vegas City Hall. Rather than creating an insular tech campus like Apple, Microsoft or Google, Hsieh wanted to create an atmosphere where creative collisions naturally occur between Zappos employees, techies and creatives.

To that end, Hsieh has invested $350 million dollars into revitalizing downtown Vegas through the Downtown Project. Part of that money comes in the form of $50 million dollars that Hsieh and his partners have set aside to attract tech startups to Las Vegas.

He’s looking for startups that will excel at what they are doing and also excel at being community leaders. So far they’ve invested in twenty or so tech startups that have relocated to Las Vegas.

We imagined that Hsieh and the Vegas Tech Fund’s efforts were to be long term. No one really questioned what would happen when a startup was ready to leave. Well now, Romotive, a robotics startup that makes mobile phone controlled robots, is leaving Las Vegas for greener pastures in Silicon Valley.

In a letter thanking the Downtown Project, Romotive CEO Keller Rinaudo said “I can’t think of a place I would have rather built Romotive over the last two years than downtown Vegas. It’s also been meaningful to be part of something bigger than ourselves, and we believe deeply that Tony will succeed in building the downtown area into a vibrant tech ecosystem,” Inc reported

Las Vegas Tech Fund Partner, and startup community leader Zach Ware, isn’t put off by Romotive’s decision to relocate. Ware told Pando Daily “While here they’ve grown from a team of three to 20, closed a huge round with Sequoia, and written their largest order via a connection made in downtown Las Vegas,”

Ware went on to say “So we think it demonstrates that Downtown Las Vegas is an awesome place to launch and build a company. Romotive has special needs and we support Keller’s decision to relocate the company to be closer to strategic partners, that’s the right decision for them and we always support the decisions of the founders we invest in.”

Sarah Lacy, who’s husband is working on a Vegas Tech Fund funded photography project, went on to point out that Ecomom, the other promising Vegas Tech Fund startup has also suffered since the untimely death of it’s founder Jody Sherman. Lacy is quick to point out that other things are happening downtown though, a coworking space has opened, a fashion space has opened and more restaurants are going in.

Several other startups that have relocated to the Downtown Project are also doing very well. We really liked RollTech and of course love what TechCocktail is doing.

Check out the kick ass VegasTech party at SXSW

Nashville: Jumpstart Foundry Startup, Jamplify, Raises $600K

One of the highlights at the 2012 Jumpstart Foundry Demo Day in Nashville Tennessee last August, was how many startup teams actually had a product ready to go. Jamplify was one of those teams.

Jamplify crowdsources people for promoting the bands, brands and products that they love. Rather than crowdsourcing for actual capital Jamplify is crowdsourcing for social capital and human capital, and then there’s the payoff.

Jamplify is like the kickstarter for fan based, crowd based musical promotion. As a fan of a band or a promotional ambassador you can agree to promote a band or musician. Based on your social graph and the amount of people that you actually touch with the campaigns short, trackable url you will become eligible for prizes from the band or artist you’re promoting.

What’s even cooler is you wouldn’t know it if you saw them pitch, but Jamplify was founded by two friends that met while they were coworkers in New York at Goldman Sachs. Andy Pickens and Moses Soyoola, left one of the most prestigious addresses on Wall Street and spent last summer iterating, developing, pivoting and reworking Jamplify to the product that it is today.

They’ve already started seeing great results. Business Insider reports that Jamplify was able to drive 190,000 views to a 15 year old pop stars YouTube video. What’s even more impressive is those 190,000 views were referred by 670 fans, meaning each fan drove about 280 views.

Their $600,000 round came from a number of unnamed Nashville and New York based investors and will allow the team to continue working on a product that’s been tried,proven and is developing traction.

Here’s their pitch video from the Jumpstart Foundry demo day:

We cover high growth technology in the South and Everywhere Else.

89 Year Old Grandma Reaches Her Kickstarter Goal

Pearl Malkin,Happy Canes, Kickstarter,startups

89 Year Old Pearl Malkin creating one of her “Happy Canes” (photo: CNN)

Kickstarter, the most popular crowdfunding platform in the world, saw $319 million dollars pledged for a wide variety of projects last year. With Kickstarter anyone can get their project funded.

Even 89 year old Pearl Malkin, has successfully had a kickstarter project funded. Her project called “Happy Canes” raised $3,606 from 154 backers, BusinessInsider reported.

While Malkin is a vibrant woman at 89, at one point she was stricken with vertigo which required her to use a cane. She felt that traditional canes were drab and boring and livened her cane up with flowers that she glued to the cane herself.

She decided she would make a go of these canes for others and with the help of her grandson, put on a Kickstarter campaign. “I want to be an example to young and old people that age shouldn’t be a barrier for what you want to do in life,” she said.

Here’s the original video from CNN:

OffBeatr is Kickstarter for Porn, more here

Startup Viagra, An Accelerator For Porn?

Cindy Gallop,Make Love not porn,NY, Startups,Accelerator

Cindy Gallop (photo: Abosch/Twitter)

According to Venturebeat, when Make Love Not Porn founder, Cindy Gallop started discussing the possibility of an accelerator for porn, former TechStars NY Managing Director David Tisch, looked uncomfortable, “get me the heck out of here” expression, says Devindra Hardawar with Venture Beat.

While some may think that Gallop is nuts, she is seriously interested about creating an accelerator for those startups in the adult industry. Her site, Make Love Not Porn, took about two years to find investors brave enough to back her idea. Her site tries to promote more realistic portrayals of adult entertainment.

“I would like to start the Y Combinator for porn,” Gallop said this morning at the Start conferencein New York City. She noted “there is nobody in the world to mentor” startups related to the adult industry, reports VentureBeat.

Adult entertainment and startups aren’t anything new. Back in August we ran an interview with the founders of Offbeatr a crowdfunding platform for adult projects, similar to Kickstarter.

VentureBeat speculates it could be a while for Gallop’s idea to take shape, we’re thinking it won’t be that long.

Sound off in comments.

We’re crowdfunding, see here.

This Pitch From DC Startup Speek Results In A Monkey Tattoo On John Bracken’s Ass [video][sxsw]

We’ve been following Washington DC conference calling startup Speek since they were little more than a pitch deck last year at a DC tech event.

The company was founded by John Bracken, one of the cofounders of E-Vite (the precursor to Facebook events lol) and Danny Boice, a startup renaissance man, who even spoke at our huge “everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference”.

Anyone who knows the Speek team knows that John and Danny compliment each other greatly. John is the yin to Dany’s yang. Danny is a constant cutup bringing fun into every situation and John plays a playful straight man to Danny’s antics. Well if John had been at Danny’s pitch during the TechCocktail Pitch Jam on Saturday at SXSW 2013, this great stunt, that made the Wall Street Journal, may not have happened.

Danny knows they have something great going on with Speek. It’s by far the easiest way to hold a conference call and it does away with the need for long phone numbers and longer “pin” numbers. You simply go to someone’s speek page, like speek.com/kyle (my page) and click the call button. Voila. But after partaking in SXSW libations all day long and being couped up because of the rain, Danny had something cool in mind to win the Pitch Jam contest.

After going through is normal 60 second pitch, he added a twist. Call it humor, or a little jealousy, but John had to bail on the event to go have dinner with DC Mayor Vince Gray, and left Danny alone, to pitch, and to say whatever he wanted. And he did.

Danny told the audience at the end of the pitch that John would get a tattoo of Speek’s mascot monkey on his ass if they won. Since there was a lot of spill over from the DC Tech Meetup earlier in the day, there were plenty of people who knew John, and wanted to see him get a monkey tattoed on his ass.

Well low and behold, Danny won. The next day, John got this:

(photo: Wall Street Journal)

And here’s Danny Boice’s winning pitch video:

We’ve got more startup coverage from SXSW than any other site, click here and see for yourself.

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Startup Village Booths At Everywhereelse.co 2014 On Early Bird Special

Everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference, was a smashing success. 1287 people from across the country and around the world came to Memphis Tennessee to celebrate entrepreneurship “everywhere else”.

The conference featured great speakers like Scott Case, Ingrid Vanderveldt, Danny Poice, Patrick Vlaskovits, Brant Cooper, Gabe Lozano and many many more.

The conference featured over 75 startups in the startup village that came from all over the country. There were several panels, workshops and of course great parties.

The next conference is going to be even better. American Airlines,Amazon Web Services,.co, Dell, Baker Donelson, Independent Bank, and Archer Malmo have already signed on as major sponsors for next year and we still have room for more. The convention center has been paid for and the catering has as well. We’re also planning three smaller events in Miami, DC and Cincinnati.

Many attendees have already taken advantage of the attendee ticket special going on now. Now through March 27th you can buy your attendee ticket for the same price as 2013. Well now we’ve added the same early bird special for Startup Village booths. Now through March 27th you can get a startup village booth, with preferred placement, logo on the promotional t-shirt which prints in May and many other perks for just $295. But on March 28th that goes up to $550.

You can download the Startup Village packet here

If you’re interested in regular sponsorship (with huge early bird perks and benefits) you can download the Sponsor packet here

Visit the conference site at everywhereelse.co

And you can get your Startup Village booth ticket here, for just $295 through March 27th. It’s fully refundable less $50 before Jan 1, 2014

Online event registration for Everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference 2014 powered by Eventbrite

The Sneaker Strapped SXSW TakeOver, and Now We’re Back On The Road

Nibletz celebrated their first birthday as “The Voice Of Startups Everywhere Else” at South By Southwest 2013. The idea was born last year after the now infamous Startup Bus standoff. That’s when founder, and content director, Kyle Sandler (that’s me and I hate writing in third person), found that there were so many more startups outside Silicon Valley, than inside. 94% to be exact.

With that an idea was born and we immediately went to bootstrapping. Well our two man team, and our photographer put the words sneaker-strapped to entirely new levels. First off we would not have been able to perform like we did if it wasn’t for the “free food for founders” GroupMe group at SXSW. That list kept us informed for 5 days as to where all the great food was.

We also could not have done it without the help of Kelly Krause at the SXSW press office. You see in the previous four years we had press credentials through my previous site thedroidguy. This year, in planning everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference, we totally forgot the press deadline. A little groveling and some sponsor help allowed us to strike a deal with Krause and the SXSW press team where we came in early, covered the crap out of SXSWedu (which was a great show) and they would let our little oversight get swept under the rug. (that will never happen again).

So now here are some of the milestones, remember one writer (Kyle), One biz dev guy (Nick) and one photographer (Allie) and less than $300 when we got on the ground did all this:

– We were ranked 3rd on Twitter for SXSWi coverage (@nibletztweets) on Sunday and finished top 5

– We’ve already published 40 stories and have another 30 that are still being prepped

– We shot 100 videos

– Made friends with over 200 startups

– Sold a bunch of tickets to everywhereelse.co 2014

– and didn’t get into serious trouble

We stayed 20 miles out and took a combination of buses to get to and from the hotel. We caught up on a lot of rest in the Hilton lobby. And we truly brought out the voice of startups everywhere else.

Now as we get back on the road to again continue our roadtrip we need some major community support. We’re sneaker strapping it and we’re reader supported. We are charged with being on the road for the balance of 2013 as we wrap up our book that will be released Q4 2013. We’ve already been to 65 cities now and plan on visiting another 40 more.

We stopped in over 60 different cities across the country, went to startup meetups, startup weekends, startup weeks, incubators, accelerators and anything with a startup pulse. We made some awesome friends and met some great startups, many of whom came to Memphis for everywhereelse.co.

We can’t do this alone. Last year in 4 campaigns we raised around $5,000 on indiegogo. For this leg of the trip we’ve got some interesting things we can offer our sponsors and we’re doing it directly below. Thank you so much for your continued support and let us know what city and state you’re in so we can connect on the road trip.

Sponsorship levels

Attaboys (The Extra Value Meal) $6.00 (face it $5.00 doesn’t get you an extra value meal anymore)

This is our “attaboy” sponsorship feel free to get us as many extra value meals as you’d like. We’ll gladly thank you with a link in a thank you weekly wrap up on nibletz.com and give you a shot out on our twitter accounts.

A Taco, from Moe’s Or Chipotle $10.00

This sponsorship will help get us a taco from Moe’s or Chipotle, food is fuel, fuel is good . Feel free to get us as many taco’s from Moe’s and Chipotle as you’d like we will be extremely grateful.

For this sponsorship we will give you a paragraph shout out with your link, description and Twitter handle in a per stop thanks for the Taco’s post. We’ll also give you a shot out on Twitter (info captured in the butto below).

Bus Ticket $25.00

We take the Bolt Bus, Megabus and other regional cheap bus services everywhere we can because we boot strap to the point we call it sneaker-strapping. Your $25 donation can get us a lot more places than you would ever imagine on Megabus and Bolt Bus.

For this sponsorship you’ll receive a new “nibz” short form story about your startup (identified as a sponsored nibz) along with a linkback in the logo and at the bottom of the story you’ll also get 2 shout outs on Twitter.

A Tank Of Gas and A Tank You! $50.00

For the stops on the trip that we can’t make by bus we have to drive and your $50.00 sponsorship for gas comes in quite handy.

With your $50.00 sponsorship you’ll get a nibz featured post on nibletz.com as well as a thank you mention in our weekly thank you post with linkbacks. You’ll also get 4 tweets with your Twitter handle and link.

Hotel Money $120

You’ll breathe easier knowing that the nibletz crew will get most likely 2 nights out of this hotel money. We may not sleep, but rather stay up and work all night, but that’s ok with you because we’re all startup founders.

With your hotel money sponsorship you and your startup will receive a “sponsored” nibz feature story about what you do. We’ll tweet the story out on our regular tweet schedule to nearly 150,000 followers and share across all of our social networks.

Sneaker Strapped Patron Sponsor $550.00

The nibletz sneaker strapped patron sponsorship includes one “startup village” booth package for everywhereelse.co 2013, February 17-19th, 2014 in Memphis Tennessee. The Startup Village booth includes booth space, wifi, a chance to pitch for over $10,000 in cash and several other contest opportunities, name in program, description in virtual village and 3 attendee tickets.

As part of the road trip patron sponsors your website will be mentioned in a rotation with other sponsors on our youtube videos from the road trip (not including SXSW).

You’ll also get a sponsored feature story. Which will run in our social streams.

Also, if you choose, you can send two t-shirts one XL and one M and we will wear them in videos from the trip.

Sneaker Strapped Saint $1000

With the sneaker strapped saint sponsor package you will get everything in the Patron package including the startup village booth for next years conference. You will also get your logo prominently featured on the 2014 everywhereelse.co conference SWAG bag.

Provided it fits in the tour schedule we will also stop by your startup for an event or meetup.

If you choose we will wear your t-shirt in our videos as well.

Nibletz/Everywhere Else Saint Sponsor $1800

This sponsorship includes everything in the Saint sponsorship however the perks will be included during the SXSW 2013 coverage. This is an excellent opportunity for startups that can’t be at sxsw but still want added exposure.

At $1800 Nick or Kyle will wear your startup t-shirt for an entire day and an entire day’s worth of on camera videos. Your startup will also be featured in all of our AOL Radio coverage as demonstrated here.

Finally, we will write two stories about your startup and tweet them out over the course of a week. We will also give you 20 additional Tweets

Platinum nibletz & everywhere else sponsor (3 Available) $2700

This sponsorship includes everything in the Saint sponsorship however the perks and more

Your startup will be featured in every video that we do during the “outro” see this link for an example.

At $2700 Nick or Kyle will wear your startup t-shirt for three entire days and an entire day’s worth of on camera videos

Finally, we will write two stories about your startup and tweet them out over the course of a week. We will also give you 40 additional Tweets.

Thank you so much for your continued support!

Steve Case & Ted Leonsis, Can These Two AOL Men, Save Social Local Commerce?

Steve Case,Ted Leonsis,Daily Deals, Groupon,Living Social,sxsw,sxswi

Steve Case (file photo: NMI)

Two of Washington DC’s powerhouse investors, Founder of AOL Steve Case, and owner of the Washington Capitals and Washington Wizards, Ted Leonsis, work side by side on many deals. Both are heavily involved in Case’s investment company Revolution.

Leonsis has been involved with Revolution Growth since it’s founding, however he has no financial stake in Revolution Growth I investments. Leonsis and Case have worked together since the AOL days, where Leonsis was a member of active management for 13 years, retiring in 2006.

They continue to work together today, although both are invested as individuals and separately in daily deal competitors Groupon and LivingSocial.

While many know that Groupon’s typical strategy, at least pre-ipo, was to quickly buy up competitors across the country, Living Social has always been on it’s own and will most likely stay that way.

We’ve seen the turmoil that both companies have been going through as of late. Groupon fired it’s founding CEO poster boy, Andrew Mason and quickly installed Leonsis and Groupon co-founder Eric Lefkosky as Co-CEO’s until a new CEO can be named.

Back in the DC area Living Social has been going through some problems of their own.A little over week ago, the investors in Living Social basically took back the company with an emergency $100 million dollar investment, which according to many sources, including privco.com, rendered all previous stock, even employee stock, worthless.

(PrivCo EXCLUSIVE): LIVINGSOCIAL Receives Emergency $110M Debt (“Equity” In Name Only) Infusion From Existing Investors With Oppressive Terms, JUST DAYS FROM BANKRUPTCY, Effectively Handing Over Distressed Co. to Today’s Financing Participants…Implied Valuation Incl All Req’d Payments: JUST $330M, DOWN 94% FROM $5.7 BILLION In Dec. 2011 V.C. Round…Pure Equity Was NOT Issued Today (As Has Been Widely Misreported)…Instead, A Desperate LIVINGSOCIAL Accepted A COMPLEX Series of Secured-Convertible-Debt-Like Securities With Onerous Terms (PrivCo Has Confirmed Exclusively) Including: (1) Liquidation Preferences of SEVERAL TIMES the $110M In Debt (2) Mandatory Cash Dividends Due (3) “Super-Warrants” And/Or Large Lump-Sum Cash “Elimination” Payment, (4) Secured Against Co. Assets and Stock, (5) Repayment of the $110M “Loan” in 4 Yrs w Add’l Payments, and (6) Re-Pricing of Participating Investors Earlier Rounds…Employees’ and Founders’ Common Stock Now Worthless. (industry trade publication privco said on their site)

A former LivingSocial employee, on condition of anonymity, told nibletz.com that friends of hers in the sales department hadn’t seen a paycheck in nearly two months, before the most recent cash infusion. A current LivingSocial employee, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, told us that the company was right on the cusp of some big ideas with both technology and sales and that no one wanted to see the company shut down.

Case was rater bullish on LivingSocial when speaking at the TechCocktail event at SXSW on Saturday afternoon. He said that despite what’s going on with the company, LivingSocial does have the potential to become the next AOL.

Many may recall how Case was instrumental in the biggest media merger of all time beween Time Warner and AOL. Although he is held highly responsible for the merger, he agreed to step down as CEO after that merger closed. While the outcome was far from the results they were expecting, AOL is still a big player in online media and is again seeing forward momentum.

Groupon has already pivoted since their value began declining shortly after going public. They now offer Groupon Goods, an almost Amazon competitor, that is the backbone to where the company is headed.

While LivingSocial hasn’t done anything that drastic just yet, they do have some new technologies in the works.

Case has never been one to turn down the long hall. At 54 he has plenty of time to see some of his investments pay off ten fold. ZipCar, a big investment for Revolution, was just recently sold to Hertz with a huge return to investors. The company was in a position where they didn’t necessarily need to take that deal, but it was right.

While four years may seem like an eternity to a startup, from reading all of the language in various stories about the recent LivingSocial bail out, the investors are giving the team four years to turn things around. Which, may be just enough time.

Meanwhile across the hall at Revolution, Leonsis has taken on much more responsibilities for day to day operations at Groupon. “There is a ton of negative sentiment in the press about this company, and I think people don’t separate the signal from the noise,” Leonsis told The Verge, “We have $1.2 billion in the bank. We have basically zero debt. And this last quarter, we had an operating profit. Yes, with one-time write downs, there was a loss. But the fundamentals of this business are sound.”

With Leonsis balancing Lefkosky’s Yang, and Case and company giving Living Social four years more breathing room, two men from AOL may have just saved daily deals.

Watch this video with Case’s remarks, this past Saturday at SXSW, on Living Social:

Steve Case talks about the importance of crowdfunding to early stage startups.

Chattanooga’s GigTank Extends Application Deadline

GigTank,Chattanoga,startup,startups,accelerator

Last year’s GigTank winner Banyan, relocated permanently to Chattanooga from Florida. (photo: NMI 2012)

If you’ve been a nibletz for a while, then you acutely aware of the fact that Kansas City is not the first gigabit city, Chattanooga Tennessee is. With that, Chattanooga hosted their first GigTank accelerator last year.

The GigTank accelerator functioned with two tracks,students and entrepreneurs. The idea behind it was to accelerate companies that would use Chattanooga’s extremely fast internet as a conduit for their business.

This year, the cohort based program will run from May 13-August 16th. There’s a sliding scale for seed money, based on the number of founders. There’s also a pool of $150,000 of guaranteed follow on funding.

Here are the rest of the details:

· Access to Chattanooga’s “living lab” – The city’s 170,000 businesses and homes are connected to one another by a $300 million, one-gigabit fiber infrastructure, and GigTank participants will have this access at their fingertips.

· Access to a “tool kit” of unparalleled technology – Participants to the program don’t need to start from scratch. Every participant will have the opportunity to take advantage of GigTank’s “toolkit,” which ranges from existing prototypes in need of startups to enabling technologies that can be combined to create new concepts. More information about the “toolkit” can be found here. http://www.thegigcity.com/gigtank/toolkit/

· Workspace: All participants will share workspace in the heart of downtown Chattanooga.

· Mentors: GigTank is driven by mentors to help accelerate the process of bringing products to market. This year, participants will have access to industry experts from hundreds of companies around the world.

· Demo Day: Startups will present on Demo Day to crowd of strategic corporations, VCs, angel investors, mentors and media. In 2012, Demo Day had over 500 in attendance. Top performing teams will be taken on a cross-country investment tour as well including Silicon Valley and New York City.

· Funding: Accepted two person teams receive $10,000, plus another $5,000 if there are three or four founders. Individual specialists receive a $3,000 stipend for the whole summer. Teams can get access to additional prototyping capital from Alcatel Lucent, depending on the focus of the concept. These decisions are made independently by Alcatel Lucent. Promising concepts earn access to a pool of follow-on investment capital up to $150,000 per team.

For more information or to apply, interested entrepreneurs and teams can visit this site.

We’re on a sneaker strapped nationwide startup road trip, can you help?

NY Startup: Slate Science Launches SlateMath, Closes $1.1M Angel Roud

With a fresh $1.1 million dollars in the bank, New York EdTech startup Slate Science has announced the launch of their newest STEM educational product, SlateMath.

SlateMath can be downloaded in multiple languages and is available now in Apple’s App Store.

The SlateMath series was conceived to address a global frustration with math learning. The company’s breakthrough learning methodologies tap into children’s natural and intuitive learning processes, and help them acquire knowledge and competence constructively, using self-guided as well as teacher-guided exploration. “SlateMath has two purposes,” said Prof. Shimon Schocken, one of the company’s co-founders, “to teach math proper through self-paced and engaging discovery, and to expose children to the ways mathematicians think and reason about the world. We see a tremendous opportunity to use tablet technology and constructive pedagogy to endear math to children, and to help them develop into confident and competent thinkers.”

The SlateMath series was designed from the ground up for an environment consisting of tablets, cloud computing, and standardized curricula. The series is based on a huge portfolio of modular, richly-indexed, and recombinant educational apps that Slate Science is now developing. Subsets of the SlateMath portfolio can be assembled to support existing textbooks and learning programs as well as the new wave of emerging digital textbooks. The software also adapts the contents dynamically, to address the learner’s revealed strengths and weaknesses in real time.

“SlateMath is a game changer because it offers a new and innovative approach to teach math. The product is based on an experiential context, hands-on learning, and self-discovery, making the best utilization of the tablet’s touch interface I’ve seen thus far in educational apps. This approach allows children to acquire and understand math ‘in their bones’. The Slate Science technology and learning methodologies are applicable not only to math, but to many other STEM subjects as well,” said Robert Scoble.

In conjunction with the launch, Slate Science announced the closing of a $1.1 Million angel round of funding led by private investors. The funds will be used for continued product innovation, marketing and operational costs.

Slate Science was founded by an A-team of educators and engineers with more than 100 years of combined experience in science education, instructional software development, and mobile platforms. The company developed a proprietary technology and a field-proven methodology for teaching STEM fields. Rather than oferring frontal videos and drill and skill practice, the company is focusing on crafting constructive learning environments that guide children through a rewarding process of self-discovery and intuitive exploration. The company’s proprietary authoring technology enables it to develop and deploy its learning apps in a remarkably efficient and timely manner.

Slate Science builds portfolios of educational apps designed to support standard STEM curricula while allowing students to develop, deeply understand, and experience hands-on conceptual learning. The company’s first series of products is SlateMath, intended for the consumer market and aimed to support math instruction according to the Common Core Standards. A school version of SlateMath, intended for classroom use and equipped with a suite of teaching aids, will be released soon.

For more information visit: slatescience.com

Nevada Startup SocialMatic Bringing Instagram To Life With Polaroid

I guess someone forgot to tell the founders of Las Vegas startup SocialMatic that bringing Instagram to life was done over 50 years ago with the first Polaroid. Of course the technology needs an update and a digital camera with an Instagram style face, some filters and Polaroid prints may just do the trick.

For now the company has entered into a binding agreement with C&A licensing an authorized Polaroid licensee and the same one that licenses the Polaroid One Step SX-70 image and likeness to Instagram.

Currently SocialMatic only has some really good mockups but they reportedly plan on bringing a product to market by 2014.

(photo: socialmatic)

“We are so proud to work together with C & A and Polaroid, giants of digital photography.” – said Mr. Antonio De Rosa, CEO of Socialmatic. “It ‘s been a long and difficult negotiation but we were strongly motivated to reach an agreement to create a small revolution in digital photography. This mix of Hardware and Software, together with our brand new photo social network will fill the gap between virtuality and reality.”

While the licensing deal has been struck with Polaroid it’s unclear whether they will need to do any licensing with Facebook, the owners of Instagram. The mockups look like one gigantic Instagram without the word Instagram on it.

One place where it may get a little hairy is the fact that Socialmatic plans to use the hardware to share pictures on their own photo based social network.

Would you buy an actual “Instagram Camera” tell us in comments below.