Maryland Startups Getting On The Bus: Pitch Across Maryland

Mike Binko and Julie Lenzer Kirk organizers of Pitch Across MD photo: Pitch Across Maryland

Apparently we’re not the only ones who truly believe to cover and spread the word about entrepreneurship you need to take it in the trenches and to the streets. That’s the exact idea behind Mike Binko and Julie Lenzer Kirk’s, Pitch Across Maryland initiative.

The two have organized the Pitch Across Maryland bus that will start September 11th and end on September 28th. Like our sneaker-strapped, nationwide startup road trip, Pitch Across Maryland will get in the trenches and make stops at accelerators, incubators, and anywhere with a startup pulse in Maryland.

The Pitch Across Maryland bus will stop by Baltimore Innovation Week on September 21s and round out their tour at Merriweather Post Pavillion in Columbia Maryland to introduce startups and entrepreneurs. Our friends at Technically Baltimore are also reporting that the bus will make it’s first Baltimore area stop on September 20th at UMBC’s campus.

If Kirk’s name sounds familiar to you, that’s because she’s the executive director at the Maryland Center for Entrepeneurship. She is also one of the organizers of the Startup Maryland chapter of the Startup America partnership. Binko is the CEO of Annapolis based Kloudtrack.

The Pitch Across Maryland Bus has been outfitted with a video studio so that entrepreneurs along the route can record their video pitches. The Pitch Across Maryland Bus crew will give the entrepreneurs a copy of their video and also submit them to a statewide pitch contest. After all the videos have been submitted via bus, the contest will open up online and then 16 finalists will be chosen. Those 16 finalists will receive extensive coaching before presenting in front of judges and competing for prizes at an upcoming entrepreneurial conference.

“Once the voting is done in late October, we’ll announce the top vote-getters at an entrepreneur expo,” Binko told TechnicallyBaltimore.com.

Linkage:

Source: Technically Baltimore

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Dallas Area Gets New Angel Network In TECH Fort Worth’s CowTown Angels

TECH Fort Worth, an early stage business incubator and huge start up resource in Fort Worth Texas has just announced the formation of CowTown Angels.

The new angel network consists of angel investors from across the region. Angel investors are those who invest in startups in exchange for stock in the company. It’s a high risk investment for some and in order to be an accredited investor the “angel” typically has a net worth of $1 million dollars outside of their residence.

The Dallas Fort Worth area (DFW) is crawling with millionaires who’ve made money in oil, traditional industry and tech. Angel networks are cropping up across the country with the fundamental goal of injecting startups with the early stage capital they need to bring their products to market. The hope is that these startups will generate a return on the investment and grow to bring new jobs and money into the area.

TECH Fort Worth will take the applications and vet startups ahead of monthly scheduled pitch meetings. From their the angels discuss the opportunities presented and then they can invest in them individually, in groups or together depending on the need and fit of the business.

“We know angel investors in our community, and we meet lots of companies who need startup capital,” said Darlene Ryan, Executive Director of TECH Fort Worth. “By providing an organized and efficient way for them to meet each other and discuss business, we hope to help more of these companies establish strong roots here, grow here and create jobs here.”

“It’s a natural extension of what TECH Fort Worth does for the local technology business community,” said Brent Sorrells, the incubator’s Director of Programs. “In our other programs, we coach and mentor entrepreneurs building companies based on technologies such as medical devices, data and energy, and we help them prepare their presentations to put their best foot forward. We’re excited to be able to offer this new program to connect the angel investors and entrepreneurs. It’s all about creating more jobs and wealth in our community.”

Linkage:

Check out TECH Fort Worth here

Check out CowTown Angels here

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Minnesota Venture Firm Tells Startups: Stop Reading TechCrunch

Four business partners with roots in Minnesota, came together earlier this summer and announced the formation of a new venture firm called AMP Partners. Minnesota has seen a recent boost in startups and entrepreneurism spearheaded by JumpStart Inc and then quickly taken over by Minnesotans.

Darren Marhula, Brad England, Mark Donahoe and Chris Palm pooled their own money together from investment banking, Wall Street, and property management, Marhula told tech.mn in June. “We’re interested in the right entrepreneur with the right plan more than the exact market. We’re not exclusively focused on any one type of business, but definitely interested in local technology startups.”

Now as the summer season comes to a close and AMP’s been on the ground running for the last few months or so tech.mn checked back in with Marhula who echoed a main theme that we continually hear on our sneaker-strapped nationwide startup roadtrip. That theme, simply put is, valuations are too high.

In the follow-up interview Marhula said “we continue to be surprised by the unrealistically high valuation expectations by many entrepreneurs out there, which has prevented us from making more investments.”. So again in line with markets their size like St.Louis, Cincinnati and even Washington DC, entrepreneurs are pricing themselves out of an investment. This can be a lethally hard lesson to learn.

To date, AMP has invested into two companies, presumably with more modest self-worth. HomeVisor is an online Realtor referral service and the first to receive funding from AMP. Their second investment , BuyWafers.com sells silicon wafers and other materials for semi-conductors. That company will be launching shortly. AMP didn’t reveal how much money was in either deal.

It’s evident that AMP, like most investors, are looking for viable startups and businesses and they’re not holding a business plan competition. AMP is also seeing a lot of buzzword happy entrepreneurs who are the same entrepreneurs being poked fun at by Vooza in New York.

Marhula said: “Stop reading TechCrunch and focus on building your business; get your valuation expectations in check and when you come in to pitch your idea, we don’t want to hear about exits, pivots, and MVPs…we want to see results.”

AMP Partners would love to hear your realistic pitch, drop them a line here

Linkage:

Source: tech.mn

Check out AMP here

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Founder Institute Introduces Mentor Mondays In Seattle

The Founder Institute, the largest idea stage accelerator in the world is starting a new initiative in Seattle to connect startups and entrepreneurs with great mentors.

Mentor Mondays cost a very modest $5.00 fee and give early stage startups, entrepreneurs and anyone with an idea access to a large mentor base of the regions top mentors. Founder Institute has over 60 successful founders and CEO’s that are there to support the startup ecosystem in Washington.

The lunch meetings are BYOL (Bring Your Own Lunch) but no worries there are over a dozen food trucks a stone throw from the venue in South Lake Union. The hour long schedule is stacked tightly:

12:00-12:15 Lunch and casual conversation
12:15-12:30 Mentor Topic
12:30-12:45 Q&A
12:45-1:00 Mentor 1:1 meetings

It’s kind of like mentor speed dating but the access opportunity for just $5.00 is incredible. Of course when you go into Mentor Mondays with a great idea, passion, drive and a plan you’ll probably get to spend a lot more than just 15 minutes 1:1 with the mentors.

Mentor Mondays start Monday August 20th and you can register here.

These are the same caliber mentors that Founder Institute is known for and that several have paid hundreds of dollars to get access to. In Seattle, for Mentor Mondays it’s just $5.00 (and the cost of your food at the food trucks if you so desire)

Linkage:

Source: StartupSeattle.com

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Entries Now Open For Business Excellence Awards 2013 Best Startup Company

The Business Excellence Awards is a global event put on by ActionCOACH the world’s largest business coaching and executive coaching firm in the world with offices in over 40 countries.

The next Business Excellence Awards ceremonies begin January 25th and 26th 2013 in Las Vegas. They continue in Europe on February 7th and 8th 2013 and finish in Asia February 22 and 23rd 2013. Each region will present a “Best Startup” award for companies that have had the best results since beginning no later than January 1, 2011.

In addition to Best Startup, other award categories include:

Best Overall Company
Best Turnaround Company
Most Innovative Company
Fastest Growing Company
Best Customer Service Results
Young Entrepreneur (35 or younger)
Entrepreneur of the Year
Best Retailer
Best Service Based
Best Manufacturer/Wholesaler
Most Community Impact

Source88 in St.Petersburg Florida was the 2011 Best Startup Winner. That ceremony and forum event were held in Miami Florida.

Linkage:

If your startup is ready you can check out the awards and enter here

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Startup America Forms Partnership With CapLinked: Gives Members Access To Fundraising Tools

The Startup America Partnership has announced another new partnership to offer exciting new benefits to members.

Startup America’s latest partner is CapLinked a company that offers fundraising management tools. To date CapLinked has help raise over $37 billion dollars for over 135,000 users.

This is the latest partnership announcement for CapLinked which is committed to helping startups in America. They recently announced benefits to those startups being accelerated by TechStars, Science and Dave McLure’s 500 startups. CapLinked will now give the over 8,900 members (and growing daily) of the Startup America Partnership.

Joining Startup America is free and the benefits are plentiful. Startup America offers their members hundreds of thousands of dollars in perks and discounts all available via a members membership management dashboard located at S.co Startup America’s website.

CapLinked’s platform includes private workspaces where entrepreneurs and investors can share fundraising documents and manage other transactions, as well as a network tools for connecting the two groups can meet. Now startups who are enrolled in Startup America will now get access to the company’s premium features, says CEO Eric Jackson. Those tools include workspace activity reports, multiple workspace administrators, the ability to create additional workspaces, plus more tools for networking with investors.

CapLinked joins the ranks of Dell, Microsoft, American Airlines, LegalZoom, .CO and many other companies offering useful benefits to Startup America members.

Linkage

Signup for Startup America here, it’s FREEStartup America here are more Startup America stories

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When Bad Names Happen To Great Startups: Corpora And More NSFW

We were in Chattanooga Tennessee this past week covering GigTank’s demo day. GigTank is a three month accelerator that was centered around building startups that utilized Chattanooga’s 1gb city wide fiber optic network. Chattanooga’s 1gb fiber optic network launched a year before Kansas City’s, Google backed 1gb network.

The first team that presented was a startup from Asheville North Carolina called Corpora. Corpora is a platform that uses social media to aggregate and crowdsource things on a grand scale. For the purposes of the competition they showed off how the service could be used to track medical conditions like allergy clusters. Corpora could also be used to source clusters of other conditions like a food poisoning outbreak or conditions with widespread results.

One of the judges quickly shot the idea down by suggesting that they wouldn’t tweet about “a rash”. Aside from that, and if you can look past the medical vertical, there is a lot of data that could come out of something like Corpora. Although they didn’t win the grand prize of $100,000 they definitely have an idea worth continuing on now that the accelerator program is over.

So why is Corpora in the headline?

Well Thursday morning while sitting at the press table on the second row at the demo day presentations, I discovered something quite disturbing about Corpora. I had just finished video taping their pitch and began to compile this story about Corpora. After writing a short summary of their presentation, and uploading the video to YouTube, I began to hunt for a logo for the startup. Like most people the first thing I did was a Google images search.

I wholeheartedly apologize to anyone reading this who was seated behind me and had their eyes on my monitor instead of the actual presentations. You see Corpora yielded a search for Corpora Cavvernosa. The first page of Google images results yielded over 25 pictures of penises. Some of the penises were pierced, some cut open, some were just medical illustrations. You see Corpora Cavernosa is the tissue part that runs on top of the urethra and fills with blood and expands as a result of nitric oxide during arousal. Yes Corpora Cavernosa is the actual part of the penis that “gets hard” during an erection.

In a half joking manner and in a half “WTF why didn’t these entrepreneurs vet this out better” manner, I texted a few of my colleagues who were sitting a few rows back (sorry Eric and Patrick) and of course they too saw the disturbing pictures that undoubtedly you’ve gone and Googled now as well.

Some may say that this is a minor thing, on the contrary it’s something that’s minor but could have been dealt with early on. They don’t actually have any significant brand presence at the moment.

We’re not totally in the clear either, however we knew about our issue early on and decided not to worry about it. There is an Urban Dictionary definition of niblets (with an s) that means something that may be a bit on the NSFW side (I’m sure you’ve Googled it now as well).

Our situation is a bit different, that colleague of mine I mentioned above Patrick Woods is a director at archer>malmo’s a>m ventures group. They specialize in branding, brand identity, advertising, and PR. Woods would love for us to change our name. When he thinks nibletz he thinks snacks, and now of course the UD definition we told him about.

Our name came about because we actually came out with our original tag line before the name itself, which was: “Small crunchy bytes from the tech and startup scene”. As a compliment to our huge Android site (which was sold in April) we came up with Nibletz last year. Our original plan was to do a capsulated version of tech and startups similar to what you would find on TechCrunch. We pivoted in January to “the voice of startups everywhere else” and kept the name.

Unlike Corpora we have an established brand presence so for now the name is the same.

a>m ventures has submitted a suggestion for a SXSWi panel/talk in 2013 called “When Bad Names Happen To Great Startups”. If selected archer>malmo’s Chief Creative Officer Gary Backaus along with their Senior Copy Writer will host and moderate a discussion on the importance of naming and having a great name that you can build an even greater brand identity with.

They’ll highlight some of the companies that have changed their names under archer>malmo’s direction and done very well.

Name changes happen for many reasons, but it’s much easier and a lot less costly when little nuances like your name being part of the word for erection, come up early on in the startup process. Even major corporations sometimes go through name changes. Phillip Morris Companies, the manufacturers of Marlboro cigarettes and one time owner of Kraft foods recently went through a name change to Altria. Of course for Altria many will always refer to them as Phillip Morris.

The Haloid Company was the first name for Xerox. Lucky Goldstar, the Korean company that became LG, changed their name for better global adaption. Under the Lucky Goldstar name they released a number of very low end electronics, this may have had to do with the shift when they started shipping flat screens, and smartphones worldwide. Now with the shortened name they’ve adapted the slogan Life’s Good.

Many don’t realize that when they fly AirTran they are traveling on the same carrier once known as ValueJet Airlines. ValueJet quickly made a name for themselves in the early to mid 90’s until 1996 when a crash in the Everglades caused them to change their name permanently. Now, most people have forgotten (or didn’t know) that Airtran is ValueJet and just associate AirTran (a unit of Southwest) as a value carrier.

Our own word?

One thing we like about nibletz is that we’ve made it our own by swapping the S for the Z. Do we think we’re the next Google? No of course not but made up words can be fun. The downside to made up words is when you invert a letter like we did or use some other creative spelling that’s hard to articulate in speaking. We are forced to use some SEO ninja skills to help direct people who may be looking for us with an “s” and not a “z”.

We’ve also had a problem with good ole Heather who holds the Twitter name “nibletz” she used the name nibletz as her gamer name for many years and has tried to hold the Twitter handle hostage hoping we’ll pay her thousands of dollars to use it. Sorry we’re doing just fine wtih @startuptechguy my personal Twitter and @nibletztweets.

We’re hoping that the team behind Corpora will do something with the name (or flood the net with pictures to push down all those pictures of penises). We’re also hoping that archer>malmo will win a spot at SXSW for their valuable talk.

Linkage:

More great Chattanooga GigTank coverage here

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This may be our last crowdfunding campaign but we need it the most!

Startup Weekend Asheville August 24th-26th

Startup Weekend is coming to Asheville North Carolina in less than two weeks. The festivities will kick off on Friday August 24th at 6:30pm at the A-B Tech Community College Enka Campus.

The Startup Weekend Asheville team describes the three day hackathon as “the 48-Hour Film Fest for techies, marketers & entrepreneurs”, making reference to an annual film fest in North Carolina’s mountainous cultural hub.

Asheville has a thriving startup scene, in fact a startup from Asheville called Corpora, just completed the GigTank startup accelerator in Chattanooga Tennessee (check out their pitch video here). In fact we met quite a few people from the Asheville area who had come to Chattanooga to check out their startup scene.

If you’re not familiar with Startup Weekend (and you should be if you read nibletz.com regularly) It’s a 54 hour hackathon style event where marketers, entrepreneurs, developers, and coders work together to develop ideas presented on Friday evening into companies come Sunday evening.

Friday starts off with registration, dinner and then Friday pitches. This is when everyone who has registered for the event and has an idea, can pitch that idea in sixty seconds or less. After the initial Friday pitches those who pitched are scattered throughout the room and the audience votes on the ideas to be developed by placing a sticker on a poster board with the idea on it. At the end of the voting period those ideas with the most stickers are developed.

After the Friday winners are selected, teams are formed. From there the teams spend the next 50 hours working on developing a product, testing their idea with consumers (consumer validation), and putting together a minimum viable product (MVP), mock up, working demo or actual product.

Saturday the teams reconvene early in the morning and continue to work on their startups. Throughout the day the event’s mentors (coaches) provide valuable advice to each and every team. The coaches for Startup Weekend Asheville are:

Rob Zazueta, Partner and Integration Manager at Vertical Respons; Denise Gaskin, Chief Operating Officer at Van Winkle Law Firm; and Traci Sigler COO at WallStCheatSheet.

On Sunday evening the teams will pitch before the judges and then go through a grueling Q&A session. After all the teams have finished their pitches and Q&A’s the judges disappear off to judge land and decide on the top teams of the weekend. Most Startup Weekend winners win valuable business related prizes and some Startup Weekend’s even have cash prizes.

Startup Weekend Asheville’s judges are: Jonathan Lawrie, PhD. Executive Director of the Western Office of the North Carolina Biotechnology Center; John Stainer, Managing Director at Carolina Financial Group; Joe Emison VP Research and Development at BuildFax.

It looks like Startup Weekend Asheville is going to be a great time in a beautiful city. If you’re in Asheville or surrounding areas it may be the perfect weekend event to get your entrepreneurial juices flowing. To register and for more information, visit the link below.

Linkage:

Startup Weekend Asheville

Nibletz coverage of Startup Weekends

We’re on an international sneaker-strapped startup road trip through Sep. 2013 and need your help

Atlanta Startups Get More Resources In Startup Atlanta Organization

On Tuesday, the city of Atlanta Georgia’s economic development agency, Invest Atlanta, will announce a new startup resource for Atlanta’s growing entrepreneur and startup eco-system. The new startup program, designed to promote and increase entrepreneurship is called “Startup Atlanta”.

Startup Atlanta itself is not part of the Startup America Partnership, however a spokesperson from Startup America’s headquarters in Washington DC told nibletz on Friday that many of the same people involved with Startup Atlanta are also involved with the soon to launch StartupGA partnership region.

One of the backbones to the new Startup Atlanta initiative will be a website with an interactive platform that maps out the startup resources in the region including incubators, co-working spaces, accelerators and other valuable resources. The idea behind the site is to connect entrepreneurs and startups with the resources that they need as well as each other.

Atlanta has had some great startup news in recent weeks. Over 1300 entrepreneurs, founders, startups and venture capitalists poured into the Sweet Watery Brewery for a TechCrunch meet up.

Not less than a week later Atlanta startup Bad.gy announced a $600,000 round of funding led by Dallas Maverick’s owner and ABC Shark Tank Shark, Mark Cuban. Just yesterday Atlanta played host to the Art Of Launch, an event that saw 13 area startups compete in a 5 minute pitch contest for thousands of dollars in cash and prizes.

Startup Atlanta has attracted the attention of local dignitaries including Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, Director of the United States Patent and Trade Mark Office Dave Kappos and Georgia Tech President G.P. “Bud” Peterson. All of whom will be on hand for the Tuesday announcement.

Linkage:

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more startup stories from Atlanta

Source: Atlanta Business Chronicle

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Wisconsin Elected Official: Romney/Ryan Bad For Startups

Just hours ago Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney announced that seven time Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan would be his Vice Presidential running mate in 2012. While we stay out of politics for the most part here at nibletz.com, this presidential election is important to startups, founders and entrepreneurs.

Of course we are all familiar with big government bailouts that some may not necessarily agree with. However, we are also well aware of the work that the current administration has done in terms of advancing startups and entrepreneurism across the country. Most notable were the formation of the Startup America Partnership and the passing of the JOBS act.

Congressman Paul Ryan is in his seventh term as the US Representative for Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District. Ryan is the chairman of the House Budget committee and is often cited for his views on economic policy.

We reached out to Madison WI Alderman, Scott Resnick who is also very active in the startup and entrepreneurial community across the state of Wisconsin, for his comment on the Ryan appointment. Resnick told nibletz.com:”

“The Paul Ryan budget is highlighted by de-funding higher education, decreasing government grants for cutting-edge research, and increasing student loan rates. The Romney/Ryan ticket will weaken the talent pool of high quality engineers and put the US further behind other nations in adopting innovation technologies.”

We will stand alongside the bi-partisan Startup America Partnership and Startup RockOn at both the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention in support of Startups as a whole.

But in going to the polls this year it’s important to see where entrepreneur and startups will be effected most.

To opine for just a moment:

Many of the entrepreneurs and founders we talk to (and we talk with hundreds per week), were almost forced into entrepreneurship as the country tries to recover from the economic crisis that was left after the previous administration. Some of these entrepreneurs have faired very well, some have been able to create stable businesses. None of them just sat around waiting for a government check.To make things harder for startups and entrepreneurs when it’s already hard enough to get a “job” would be mind boggling.

To this issue only it should be pretty clear where I will vote.

Linkage:

Check out our interview with Scott Resnick on Open Data

Texas Startup Competition Is Back Fort Worth Business Assistance Center Annonuces

A popular Forth Worth area business plan competition is back for it’s second year. The Fort Worth Business Assistance Center announced today that founding sponsors Capital One Bank, The Alternative Board and Sales Mastery Consultants (Sandler Training) have teamed up to put on the contest which has over $40,000 in cash and business services prizes.

The competition is open to all BAC clients and Tarrant County businesses and startups. After the initial application process (going on now through September 19th), 25 teams will be selected as the competitors in the event. These 25 companies will receive 8 hours in professional training, valued at $1,000. this includes two 3-hour training sessions with valuable information from Accion (Cash Flow), Texas Christian University’s Center for Professional Communication (Effective Presentations), Whitley Penn (The Importance of Financials), and a panel discussion from business leaders on effective marketing and sales. The preliminary round will also include a minimum of two hours of one-on-one business counseling with counselors from the BAC and competition partners the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) for Enterprise Excellence, SCORE of Fort Worth, and Tarrant SBDC.

After the preliminary round the three strongest business plans will be selected as finalists and will advance to the final round. The final competition will be combines with an awards ceremony which will be held November 15th at the Texas Christian University.

The winners of the 2011 competition were Ikerd Consulting, Positive Influences and Cleves Research and their Cluso product.

If you’re in the Fort Worth area (Tarrant County) now’s the time to apply at the link below.

Linkage:

Apply here

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Washington DC Startup Barrel Of Jobs Launches

We first covered Washington DC startup Barrel of Jobs back in May. They were one of 28 startup teams pitching at the two day Capital Connection event in our nation’s capital.

Barrel of Jobs isn’t your ordinary career startup though. What Chris Hertz and Craig Zingerline have done with the concept of job hunting is truly innovative. Their unique new platform harnesses the power of social networks and present day “word of mouth” to connect businesses with the best candidates, even if they weren’t exactly looking for a job.

In our video interview with them here, both Hertz and Zingerline explain exactly how Barrel of Jobs works.

Companies everywhere are quickly realizing that beyond connecting people, social networks are the “word of mouth” for current times. Marketers, brands and musicians have all harnessed the power of social media for “word of the mouth”.

Barrel of Jobs does the same thing for jobs. You may not know a top level JavaScript developer or a marketing executive in the Real Estate Industry but a friend of your friend on a social network may have the perfect candidate in mind. Again, even if they aren’t necessarily looking.

So I’ve said “not necessarily looking”a couple of times so far, what does that mean?

Well Barrel of Jobs and it’s social element mean that jobs can be connected to people who may be passively looking. You know the type, you may have a friend in a career position that’s upset about pay or their boss but they aren’t actively looking. They may be ok with their current position because it’s comfortable, or because of the benefits. Friends may know this information but also know that person hasn’t floated a resume in years. By taking advantage of social networking open jobs can be referred to those people and vice versa.

Inevitably when you go to a networking event you hear about some job opening. Perhaps it’s not for you, but you recommended a great candidate. Barrel of Jobs takes that exact concept, takes it to the web and multiplies it.

Even just recently launched this hit startup is picking up traction. Nibletz covered them in May here. They are in the Huffington Post here, The Business Journal here.

Linkage:

See how Barrel of Jobs works in the video here

Check out Barrel of Jobs yourself here

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Jumpstart Foundry Nashville Startup Rentstuff.com Moves To Chicago & Pivots Away From Core

Earlier this year we brought you an interview with Rentstuff co-founder Chris Yaeger. The Nashville startup had quickly rose to prominence in the peer to peer renting category, with the idea they cultivated as part of the JumpStart Foundry program.

With $600,000 raised to help them along the way the startup relocated to Chicago’s 1871 in July and debuted their Chicago based team at TechWeek earlier this summer.

Their original idea, had a lot of holes in it in terms of insurance to the renter, and market viability but the concept was rock solid. One user could rent that DSLR camera that sits in the closed for $30-$50 a day to their local neighbor and make a few bucks on the side. You may have even been able to go as far as to call the idea “AirBnB for Stuff”.

At last look you could find anything from tents and sleeping bags, to weed-eaters and iPads. While I admitted to a friend on the phone just the other night, I would never rent out my personal iPad, if there was a market for it, I may pick a used one up off Craigslist just to rent out on rentstuff.com.

While couchsurfing and AirBnB made it ok to crash at a complete strangers house or even on their couch, it seems that letting a complete stranger rent my crock pot, serving trays or video camera, wasn’t in the cards.

The company, now based in Chicago, has pivoted to a more mainstream, portal to connect folks with businesses in the “Rent To Own” industry like RentACenter and Aarons. Now, you go to rentstuff.com and you can fill out a form which lets you request rental quotes from local companies. You can attempt to rent anything from a limousine to a laptop, to a sofa, whatever you need you should be able to get it.

A note on the site tells you that letting a rental company call you can get the process done faster. Of course, bidding out your rental should also mean that you get better deals.

Call me crazy though, the original idea was much more innovative. In fact the crazy guys that produced the Wipple video below, used a leaf blower that they rented from the “rentstuff.com marketplace” to produce this video.

There is definitely a market for the new version of rentstuff, similar to the way that there is a market for the pivoted SpareFoot.com which we covered earlier this month.

Linkage:

Check out rentstuff.com new site here

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Tennessee’s Venture Community Is All Eyes On Chattanooga’s Gig Tank

Entrepreneurship and startups are a hot bed of activity this month in the great state of Tennessee. As we reported earlier, there are three different accelerators graduating this month, all with their own demo day. Possibly because it’s the first of the three graduations, or possibly because they have a unique program, Chattanooga’s Gig Tank has attracted a lot of attention from the entire state.

The City of Chattanooga along with the Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce have organized an entire press junket tied to various events throughout the city that are celebrating the graduation of the first Gig Tank class of entrepreneurs and students.

A little background.

Chattanooga was actually the first city in the United States to offer gigabit ethernet to the household, not just the node within a 600 mile radius. Every house and every business within Chattanooga’s gig footprint have the fiber piped to their home. The backbone of what is referred to here are “The Gig City”, is a smart grid. The City of Chattanooga has deployed a smart grid to communicate information from electric meters and other utilities for all residents and business’ within the footprint.

Now, it’s the decision of the resident or the business, if they want to also utilize that same fiber line for data services, tv and telephone. The “Gig” was deployed last year, a year ahead of Kansas City and Google. The gigabit ethernet in Kansas City functions more like a traditional cable company. The gigabit ethernet goes to the node, or the street, then Google signs customers up to bring the service down to the home. Of course one of the big things to consider in all of this is there aren’t wireless routers that can support wireless transmission of a full gigabit data stream, wirelessly to the device. Most traditional computers also can’t function at the gigabit speed. Right now, end users will experience speeds from 30-100mbps which is of course a huge feat in itself.

The GigTank is a traditional accelerator program that was designed for startups to utilize that huge bandwidth to develop startups. Unlike most traditional accelerators the GigTank had two classes, an entrepreneur class which received a $15,000 seed investment and a chance to win $100,000 in additional funding Thursday morning. The other class is a class of student led startups that received free room and board, but did not receive a seed investment. The students are competing for a $50,000 prize.

Also unlike most traditional accelerators, all of the startups will pitch the judges in a closed door session Thursday morning ahead of the actual pitch presentations on stage tomorrow.

Needless to say all of this excitement in Chattanooga has attracted a lot of attention. When commenting to a local reporter StartupTN President and President of Nashville’s Entrepreneur Center, Michael Burcham said “There will be 500 people here tomorrow who’ve either started companies, or invested in companies, and most of them are coming from out of town”. If the buses the city are running specifically for the event from the area hotels are any indication, there are definitely a lot of people from out of town here.

Jared Nixon, a partner in Daymond John’s Shark Branding, is one of those out of town guests. He’s here in Chattanooga to scope out the startups that are participating in the event, but he’s also intrigued by the infrastructure around the gig itself.

There are folks in town from Warner Brothers, Mozilla, US Ignite and other nationally known companies and ecosystem partners.

Even the Nashville centric Burcham, who happily announced that 70% of the investors and 90% of the venture capital is in Nashville, is eager to see the ideas that come out of the GigTank which is equally important to Burcham in his role as StartupTN President. Burcham says he looks for two main components in deals he does, the “idea” and the competition. If there’s no competition in the space, he stays away from that idea because there’s no market. One of Burcham’s strongest suits is nurturing good ideas. He does this on a daily basis through the Entrepreneur Center and Jumpstart Foundry, Nashville’s GigTank counterpart.

While there are a lot of startups presenting at Gig Tank’s demo day with similar ideas happening all over the country, these startups had a huge internet pipe to work on, and hopefully these ideas will win far more than the $150,000 available from the GigTank itself. Hopefully there are some multi-million dollar ideas in the bunch.

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