Ann Arbor Startup Archives - Serious Startups

Ann Arbor Startup: Seelio Is Connects College Students To Jobs In New Ways

Seelio, (connecting see and portfolio) is a new startup based in Ann Arbor Michigan connecting college students with employers and job recruiters. Sure there are plenty of employment connection platforms out there but Seelio is serving a few under-served segments.

First off, Seelio is serving the college student to work category which is filled with competition. One of the other big hindrances for college students competing for work is the fact that they’ve been in school the past four years and don’t have real work, resume items. Seelio solves this problem for students by opening up profile space on the service to post academic papers, computer aided designs, art projects, lesson plans, photos, videos, even pitch decks. Employers can now see a more rounded profile of the applicant and can consider them for positions outside of “entry-level”.

“Instead of sending a stale, black-and-white resume, Seelio lets you bring yourself to life and present yourself in a more holistic way,” said co-founder Moses Lee, assistant director for student ventures at the U-M College of Engineering’s Center for Entrepreneurship to the University of Michigan News Service. “It can help college students get discovered. This is really important, especially in this tough economy, because they don’t have a lot of job experience. But many have done amazing work as a student.”

Seelio is taking an early stage Facebook approach to building scale. They rolled out the platform’s truAPP to students at the University of Michigan, exclusively in January of this year. They quickly saw 1500 students sign up and some big employers as well. Quicken Loans, Teach For America, Compuware, Under Armour and Airtime were all early adopter companies for the platform. They have since opened up the platform to all students with a .edu email address.

One of the early student adopters that used the service, Lydia Muwanga, recently finished her master’s degree. She was able to use Seelio’s truApp to land a job as an information architect at SapientNitro. Muwanga reported that after getting her profile posted she applied for five jobs in ten minutes. Less than 24 hours later she had heard back from three companies.

“It helps us more accurately target candidates, allowing us to differentiate between, say, human-computer interface students who love research, versus those who love wireframing,” Kati Llewellyn, creative recruiter at SapientNitro said.

For college students Seelio is a platform that merges a professional social network like LinkedIn with an actual jobs site like Monster.com, it’s quickly becoming a welcomed tool in the college students job application arsenal.

Linkage:

Check out Seelio here

Source: Univesity of Michigan News Service

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Go Shopping Together Online With Ann Arbor Startup: HangTrend INTERVIEW

Leore Avidar has built a new social network/e-commerce hybrid platform immersed with fashion. As he tells us in the interview below, he started HangTrend, an Ann Arbor startup, when he couldn’t easily find a pair of driving moccasins. He had searched all of the usual sites to buy a pair online, but to no avail. Along the way he also realized that there wasn’t an easy way to interact with friends who may be shopping at the same time either.

Now a lot of shopping and e-commerce sites allow the user to share an item they like but no shopping site allows you to share a possible purchase online in real time to get feedback on a purchase. Just think about how often this scenario plays out in a brick and mortar world. You go to the mall with your buddies or girl friends and say do you like these shoes? Will this look good on me? Is this too much to pay? All of these questions could easily be asked online on a platform which allowed easy sharing, easy re-call and social feedback.

That’s exactly the concept behind HangTrend works. As more and more people take to the web for shopping on multiple screens, HangTrend is a natural evolution of the e-commerce space. Now only that but HangTrend has access to millions of products by tens of thousands of designers and of course you can ultimately buy the latest fashions, direct.

We got a chance to talk to Avidar in the interview below:

Interview With Ann Arbor Startup MyRepairFacts

Michigan has two great hot beds of startup and entrepreneurial activity, Detroit and Ann Arbor. We’re constantly seeing startups from both cities make news. We’ve profiled and interviewed quite a few startups from Michigan.

Ann Arbor startup MyRepairFacts is a new web 2.0 portal to connect used car buyers and enthusiasts to sellers and information. MyRepairFacts offers their users National Motor Vehicle Title Information Reports (NMVITS) for $10 less than most competitors at $24.99. Not only that though, they serve as a repository for information pertaining to anyone’s car.

Users of MyRepairFacts can start using the service when they purchase their new car. Then, every time they go to the repair shop for an oil change, a repair, a tire rotation, new tires, or any other history with their vehicle, they can scan in the receipt and other information to make a nice, neat file on their vehicle in the cloud.

Storing important vehicle information through MyRepairFacts keeps all your information in a centralized location for you in one area. It also frees up valuable space in your glove box. Now though, when you go to sell your car you can be equipped with the NMVITS report, CarFax and every receipt from everything you’ve done to the car. In effect, this will improve your bottom line when selling your vehicle.

After the user has put all their information in the system and they’re ready to sell their car they can share as much or as little of the online history with the buyer via email, Craigslist or any other site with a link from MyRepairFacts that’s good for 30 days.

We got a chance to interview MyRepairFacts CEO Andrew Ramirez about this new automotive related startup. Check out the interview below:

Michigan Startup: Current Motor, First In Dell’s $100M Startup Fund

An Ann Arbor Michigan based startup called Current Motor, is the first startup to benefit from Dell’s new $100 million dollar Innovator’s Financing Fund. Current Motor is developing electric powered scooters.

The fund, announced Thursday, is entirely funded by Austin based pc powerhouse Dell. Their Entrepreneur in Residence, Ingrid Vandervelt, came up with the idea for the fund, under the supervision of the entrepreneur in residence advisory board.

Current Motor is using the funds from Dell, along with their expertise and “24 hour support” to help them implement an e-commerce system that handles customer service tracking, and also tracks important information on the scooters, such as battery life remaining. They want this entire system to be accessible via mobile app, similar to that of some of the shared bicycle and car apps out there (ZipCar).

“In exchange for a low monthly payment, we get one point of contact and a really comprehensive, scalable technology solution that allowed us to get to market six months ahead of schedule, while conserving our equity capital for sales, marketing, research and development,” Lauren Flanagan, executive chairman and an angel investor in the company told the Austin Statesman.

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Ann Arbor’s TechBrewery Welcomes Innovators Behind PaperDesk

Ann Arbor’s TechBrewery is part co-working space, part incubator and home to some of the top innovators in Ann Arbor’s thriving startup community.

Scott and Lida Hasbrouck are the innovators behind the educational notepad app PaperDesk. PaperDesk is the duo’s most well known app under their WebSpinner brand. It’s a note taking app developed with educational purposes in mind, and aimed at replacing traditional spiral and composition notebooks.

PaperDesk, is not what the Hasbrouck’s plan on working on at TechBrewery though. They will be working on a new educational startup that goes by the name Ginkgotree. They’re also bringing an iOS developer, 3D animator and graphic designer to the TechBrewery as well.

Ginkgotree will fall under the TechEd category, but it’s unclear exactly what they will be doing. Their website currently has a place for a login and the words “Learn Beautifully” on it, on a chalkboard, no less.

Ginkgotree will join these 37 other startups and innovator members of TechBrewery.

“We’re excited about our new beginning at the Tech Brewery,” states Lida Hasbrouck “and participating in the Silicon Valley of the Midwest.”

They’re not the only entrepreneurs and members of the startup community excited about Ann Arbor. The Foundry’s Jason Mendelson recently spoke at an event in Michigan and talked about how Ann Arbor is starting to thrive. Also we recently profiled Michigan startup HealPay who was happy to be moving back to AnnArbor to continue working on their FinTech web applications.

Two students also launched their note taking app called FetchNotes in Ann Arbor. All of this startup excitement in Ann Arbor is why we’re trying to make Ann Arbor, and actually most of Michigan, part of our nationwide sneaker-strapped startup road trip.

We can’t wait to see what the Hasbroucks have planned for Ginkgotree, and what else brews out of TechBrewery.

Linkage:

Ginkgotree’s website can be found here

Checkout TechBrewery here

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” check out these other Michigan stories

Check out our sneaker-strapped startup road trip here

Foundry’s Jason Mendelson, Now Bullish On Michigan Startup Scene

The Michigan Growth Capital Symposium was held this past Tuesday and Wednesday in Ypsilanti. Xconomy’s Sarah Schmid reports that over 450 founders, entrepreneurs, VCs, and others in the Michigan startup community showed out for the event.

Among them was the managing director and co-founder of Foundry Group, Jason Mendelson who gave a keynote address entitled: “The Velocity of the Midwest Venture Capital Ecosystem: Sleeping Giants or Momentary Blips?”

During his speech he was very positive about the current startup scene in Michigan. Mendelson is no stranger to the state of Michigan. He was born in Detroit and graduated from the university of Michigan. While this weeks talk was all positive, it wasn’t always that way for Mendelson and his native state.

After graduating from law school at the University of Michigan, Mendelson wanted to stay in Michigan but he quickly found that the state, so deep rooted in the auto industry, didn’t care if someone had the next million dollar idea. At that time no one cared about anything except seniority.

So like any aspiring entrepreneur Mendelson made a pilgrimage to Silicon Valley, an experience he doesn’t speak to highly of.

Mendelson said that the competition in Silicon Valley was so harsh that the only pleasure in life came from relishing in others’ failure. Mendelson described Silicon Valley to Schmid as “toxic” ultimately causing him to leave in 2006 and head for Boulder Colorado.

Michigan Startup: FetchNotes Brings StickyNotes To Your Mobile Phone

Ann Arbor Michigan based FetchNotes is a new note taking mobile app. However they aren’t looking to challenge the likes of Evernote or Catchnotes. Co-Founder Alex Schiff says that they are looking to bring sticky notes to the mobile phone. Think more along the lines of three to four word notes not three to four page notes.

“We see ourselves as competing more with a phone’s native notepad than Evernote,” Schiff explained to Xconomy. “The problem with most of the note-taking software is that it focuses on long-form note taking. Ours is geared toward three-to-four-word notes, not three-to-four-page notes.”

Schiff and co-founder Chase Lee met at a entrepreneurship practicum at the University of Michigan. Their first idea was for an ideas marketplace startup. Schiff says he quickly learned that his idea “really sucked” and then he and Lee started looking at how people capture notes and to do items.

Fetchnotes has a variety of ways to jot down your note. Users can text, call and email notes on the fly from their mobile phone and then quickly recall them from the mobile app. Schiff admits to texting his own ideas to himself and then later putting them in a word doc.

“One day, my Blackberry’s notepad erased a year’s worth of ideas. I was very distraught.” Schiff said

Like Evernote and Catch Notes you can tag your notes and keep them organized using a hashtag system. With Fetchnotes emphasis on short notes the hashtag would be much more effective than it is on Evernote. The different ways to input a note definitely set Fetchnotes apart from the rest of the pack.

Fetchnotes is currently bootstrapped and working on a seed round at the moment. They do have a staff of 9 right now and Schiff and Lee are still enrolled as Juniors at the University of Michigan. They’re hoping that Fetchnotes will be the goto app for short notes.

source: Xconomy