Atlanta Startup: NearbyThis Launched Last Week At Virginia Highland Summerfest

nearbythis,groupon,atlanta startup,startup,kayak.comNearbyThis is exactly what you think it would be, a new “discovery” mobile app for iPhone. Ray Abram CEO of NearbyThis and lead developer Glenn Martin, say that their app is different though because it drills down and geo targets advertising.

“NearbyThis helps consumers see what’s going on around them in real time and save money with daily deals by leveraging social media,” Abram said. “For retailers, NearbyThis offers the power to have two-way conversations with mobile customers. Advertisers, meanwhile, can take advantage of innovative geo-targeted technology by placing ads on users’ phones when they’re nearby places that sell their products.”

“Imagine going to a mall and having all coupons for nearby stores on hand,  having the ability to receive realtime communications from the stores, as well as promotions from advertisers selling goods in those stores,” Martin said to the Examiner. “Other advertising models target users by behavior. We do it by proximity, which is more efficient and cost-effective.”

They recently launched NearbyThis at the popular Virginia Highland Summerfest in Atlanta last weekend. It was a great opportunity for them to launch the app in front of tens of thousands of people in an outdoor environment with plenty around to find and discover using NearbyThis.
NearbyThis also aggregates daily deals. We all know about Groupon and Living Social. We also know about the countless emails you can get for daily deals. NearbyThis pulls all that info into their app as well.
We’ve solved the problem with daily deal spam,” Abram said. “You get these emails every day, but you don’t want to unsubscribe because occasionally you find ones you like. We put all deals for nearby places on one page so you can just scroll through the list to see what you like.”
Another key advantage to NearbyThis is that Martin is no stranger to technology, mobile apps and big data. He holds the patents that power the widely popular Kayak.com travel site.
NearbyThis is combining the power of daily deals apps,social networking apps and geo-location or LBS (location based services apps) into one easy to use app and interface.
Linkage:
Find out more about NearbyThis at their website here
Here’s the iTunes page for NearbyThis 
Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” check out these stories from “everywhere else”

Baltimore Startup: Woofound Launches Gamified Recommendation App For iOS

Woofound is a Baltimore based startup in the recommendation space. Since we hail from Baltimore and Philly, this is exciting news for our area, and of course “everywhere else”.

Woofound matches your personality to things you want to do. Woofound was actually built in conjunction with psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Dr. Noreen Honeycutt from Baltimore Maryland. This is actually the second startup in just as many days that we’ve reported on that dives much deeper than the surface to serve up recommendations or discoveries. The first was London based ColourDNA which uses the psychology of colours in it’s discovery platform.

Our friend Sarah Pereze over at TechCrunch reports that Woofound co-founders Dan Sines and Josh Spears founded the company last year after Spears was set up on a blind date. The two friends thought, wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to match up interests based on personality traits?

Like Parking Panda, (another Baltimore startup) Woofound’s launch centers around Baltimore and DC, however today’s launch brings online the 70 top metro markets. Perez pointed out that most of the recommendations in her hometown of Tampa were things she was already familiar with. I had much better luck in Atlanta this early morning.

There’s not much mention of how deep the personality integration goes however they are going to develop a version of Woofound for the Univesity of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) that will help students with career path goals.

The interface is nice and it has this simple feel to it. The user simply rates things “Me or Not Me” reminiscent of the hot or not days.

The iOS version launched today with Android in the coming months.

Linkage:

Check out Woofound here

Source: TechCrunch

We’re the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more stories from “everywhere else”

Boston Startup: DailyFeats, Achieve Your Goals For Health & Well Being INTERVIEW

Sure everyone sets a New Years resolution and typically within a few weeks (if not shorter) the resolution is all but thrown out the window. You’re intentions may be great but the drive, and motivation isn’t there. The same can hold true when you set a goal, like losing weight to fit into a swim suit or quitting smoking.

Well a very cool startup in Boston called DailyFeats is here to help you stay on track, and motivate yourself to achieve your goals and it’s working.

DailyFeats is a reward based habit tracker. It takes your big goals like, quitting smoking and helps reduce them into smaller, more achievable goals, like baby steps. Maybe you need to decrease your cigarette intake or, cut back on the bars you go to where you tend to smoke more. Perhaps you need to eliminate a small stress trigger that signals you to smoke a cigarette. If you can achieve these smaller goals, you can ultimately conquer your bigger goals.

DailyFeats offers a two-fold reward system. The user can request what they’d like to receive for achieving their goal or they can earn points which can be converted to actual dollars and then donated to charity, essentially paying it forward.

DailyFeats was co-founder by two brothers Veer Gidwaney and Vinay Gidwaney along with their science advisor Meghan Searl.

We got a chance to talk with DailyFeats about the startup and how they can help people achieve their goals for health and well being.

Check out the interview, after the break
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Android Developers Introduces An Amazing App Analytics Tool You’ll Really Appreciate

Earlier this month we told you about Appreciate, your personal Android app store. With the Appreciate app you get recommended apps based on the apps you have on you already have on your #Android phone and apps based on what your friends like as well.

Israeli startup Triapodi has already had tremendous success with Appreciate, because of their “Appreciate Relevance Engine”.

Now they’ve opened up something very exciting for developers. Appreciate, for all intents and purposes, has opened up their backend for developers to see and organized it in an easy to understand and visually appealing UI that they call Appreciate STATS.

If you’re among the hundreds of thousands of people who have already downloaded Appreciate, you’ll agree it is a must-have free app that cuts through the clutter of the Google Play Android Market to help users get the most out of their mobile experience by delivering apps perfectly tailored to individual interests.  Appreciate is also the only comprehensive Social App Market for Android, empowering users to locate others within the Appreciate community, and to discover and install apps that are being used by people with common interests.

If you’re a developer, marketer or simply an observer of the Android world, making sense of the marketplace is often a crapshoot. Appreciate STATS, available for public use starting on or about May 21, 2012, provides exclusive, powerful insights into the Android consumer and individual apps based on the real usage of hundreds of thousands of Appreciate users.  Appreciate STATS goes far beyond rankings based on the mere number of downloads to deliver detailed, segmented information about the usage of the most popular apps and the efficiency of individual app pages.

Appreciate has opened up an unheard of amount of data for developers.
You can see the most popular apps, demographic data, apps that are like the most popular apps, engagement, even “Android Market Funnel” that gives developers a break down based on sex.

Appreciate also gives great data about devices as well. Like Millennial Media’s Mobile Mix report, Appreciate provides real data on handsets based on the handsets that download the Appreciate personal app store app and the handsets that then in turn download apps.  This can be very valuable to a developer because they developer will know which handsets they need to develop for.

The stats dashboard offers developers data filters as well:

Geography: North America, Europe and Asia
Gender
Age Group: 13-20,20-25,25-30,30-40 and 40+
Category: Multimedia, Lifestyle, Sports,Social, Health,Books,Tools, Travel,Shopping

As you can see Appreciate has opened up a treasure trove of data for developers. Data, that until now was absent from their arsenal.

Check it out today at stats.appreciate.mobi  oh and did we mention it’s free?

 

Boston Startup: About Last Night The Ultimate Night Life Social App

copyright © 2012 - Nibletz Syndicate

We love About Last Night for several reasons. First off the crazy Bostonian serial entrepreneurs who co-founded About Last Night are pretty awesome. About Last Night is one of several startups that are incubating in their own personal incubator. Brothers Darren Dodge and Derek Dodge have a bunch of their own startups “cooking in the microwave, we just open the door and check on them” says Darren.

But really, the great thing about About Last Night is the robustness of the platform. They left no stone unturned, but at the same time the UI is appealing and not too cluttered.

About Last Night is about sharing the good times you had last night. The About Last Night crew showed off good times spent Sunday night in Times Square, at Bubba Gumps and other fine establishments around New York.


The app allows you to follow people you don’t know (like Twitter), People you do know (like Facebook) and your favorite night spots and locations (like a reverse FourSquare), again it’s like leaving no stone unturned.  It feels a bit like path, but it’s more about the jello shots you did at the Ale House, not waking up at 7:35 with a hangover and brushing your teeth.

They’ve been working on About Last Night for the last six months and they’ve come out with an easy and fun to use app. They’ve got plenty of time to work on even more startups, ya know with the Red Sox sucking and all…

Check out the video below:

Linkage:

Find out About Last Night here

More TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 coverage here

We’re on a sneaker-strapped nationwide startup road trip, check it out here (and support us please)

Now Your Android Phone Can Tell You When You Can Play Diablo III

Our gaming editor, Damien Rane, is having the hardest time getting a review of Diablo III published, and of course it’s no fault of his own. Like millions of other American gamers Rane was out at midnight on the night of Diablo III’srelease and home ready to play, but couldn’t.

Most Diablo fans as well as WoW fans are very familiar with the scenario. Blizzard, the company behind both titles, sells millions and millions of units but never seems to upgrade their server farm. You would think with the popularity of their two franchise titles they would be able to support their custom base on opening night.

What’s more disturbing is that while WoW is an MMORPG, Diablo III, is for the most part a single player game. There’s no real need for the player to be connected to the server throughout the entire game, aside from DRM. But they’re game to do what they want with it.

So what’sthe problem?

Any frequent Blizzard game player knows about “error 37” which basically equates to the Blizzard servers being down. On Diablo IIIs release night Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus were abuzz with pissed off customers who bought Diablo III and took to social networks to report they couldn’t play the game because Blizzards battlement servers were down.

There’s good news now though, at least for Android users. Android developer Eluamous has released an Android app and widget that will let you know when the servers are ready two go. No longer will you have to waste your precious time, checking to see if the battle net servers are ready.

The app is getting rave reviews in the Google Play Store. The develop has also made similar apps for other games including World of Warcraft (WoW).

The best part is that the app is free. So download it and get back to playing.

Download link Here

Source: WebProNews

 

California Startup: Smule Releases Hit App Songify To Android

At CES 2011 (last years CES not this years) hip hop producer/artist T-Pain told us personally and on video, that the “I am T-Pain” app would be coming soon to Android. Well for whatever reason that didn’t happen. But, there’s good news from the same startup developer Smule.

In addition to crafting the “I am T-Pain” app for iOS, which makes anyone sound like T-Pain, Smule has released a handful of other, intensely popular, interactive “music” apps, including Songify. If you’re an Android user and you’ve every seen or played with Songify on a friend’s iOS device then you know how addicting creating your own songs with the app can be.

What makes Songify so great? Well we had a chance to talk with Smule ahead of today’s announcement and here’s what they said:

“Songify has reached 9MM users on iOS and over 120MM songs have been created to date. We get multiple requests a day for users asking us to release Songify on Android. 
Our “secret sauce” is using sophisticated artificial intelligence technology to make music creation accessible to non-musicians. Anyone can make music with Songify. Just talk into the phone, and Songify turns your speech into melody. We also made the user interface super-simple, so everyone from the ages of 3 to 93 can (and do!) use the app with ease. When you make music creation so easy, it gives people a powerful new mode of self-expression. “
That’s  a lot of user created songs.
It’s been no secret that with midi api’s gone from Android since the release of Android 2.0, Android has lacked in the music creation category. Until now, all the cool creative music apps were on iOS only.
Smule released their popular Songify app to the Google Play store this morning. In addition to Songify and I am T-Pain, Smule is the developer of other hit music apps for iOS like Magic Guitar, Ocarina, Glee Karaoke and Magic Piano (which will hit Android next month)
If you can’t wait to try it, grab it here https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.smule.songifyin the Google Play Store.

Ur Daycare Locator Aims To Locate

Ur Daycare Locator aims to locate local daycare centers and schools for your child. The service has been tailored to give raw user-generated reviews and easy to use tools to help you make the best choice for you daycare needs. With only a few simple steps you will be able to find several daycare centers in your area or specified area and  get directions to them via your favorite maps application or browser on your Android device. The app is now only available on Android, but will soon be available on iTunes for your iOS device as well.

 

 

 

 

 

Start screenAt the home screen you can easily access the Directory, Maps, Search, Favorites, Applications and more.

 

SearchThis is the simple search option that will help you find any publicly listed daycare center within up to 20 miles from your specified chosen or current location.

 

Results Results are nice and cleanly listed for your choosing pleasure.

 

Map Maps view give you a better idea of how far your commute to and from the daycare centers will be.

 

Get Directions With the option to open a daycare centers address directly from your favorite map app or browser, you’ll have no trouble at all getting navigation instructions or driving directions to your favorite daycare center.

 

Apply Ur Daycare Locator makes it even easier by providing an easy to fill out application form that can be sent directly to your chosen daycare center. You don’t have to print and deliver your applications anymore.

 

Favorite List The favorites list makes it easy for you to save and access the daycare centers contact info when you need it.

 

Conclusion 

After using this app for a few weeks running through the different features while looking for the perfect daycare center to enroll my son at, I’ve found that Ur Daycare Locator has saved me a ton of time and allowed me to discover daycare centers that I didn’t even know were in my area. It is an important decision to pick where our children spend their time and who will be watching them. Let Ur Daycare Locator help you find the perfect daycare for your kid(s). Give the app a try on Android from the Google PLAY Store here Ur Daycare Locator for Android or if you’re an iOS user you’ll have to wait a bit. It will be available on iTunes soon.

 

Source: Ur Daycare Locator

L.A. Startup: Hereon.biz Discover Business Professionals Around You INTERVIEW

The past year has been a big one for discovery apps. We all know about the hype surrounding Highlight, Glancee, and countless other social discovery apps at south by southwest this year. Discovery apps are great for discovering people around you.

Most of the discovery apps are using Facebook and Foursquare as their backbone. This is great for finding people with like minded interests or in the same place but sometimes you want more out of a discovery app. Take conventions for instance. Big conventions like South By Southwest and CES have hundreds of thousands of people around. With everyone checking in somewhere or another it can be kind of noisy.

Hereon.biz solves the noise problem for people that are looking to meet people in their same profession or field. In most cases you’re paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars to participate in a work or professional conference. You don’t need to meet the barista from Starbucks that happens to be a block away jamming with friends.

Hereon.biz uses LinkedIn API’s to connect people in like minded professions. Ultimately events like conferences and conventions or being in major hubs on business are the ideal place where Hereon.biz really comes in handy, but you may be surprised at the people that are around you at home, in your same profession.

I know that when I signed up for Google+ and discovered the nearby feature it showed a lot more Google+ users in my hometown than I thought. However, after perusing their streams and profiles most of them really didn’t have much in common with me, outside the fact that they used Google+.

More after the break
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San Diego Startup: TextaPet Is Picking Up Steam INTERVIEW

If you’re a pet lover you’re going to love this new innovative idea called TextaPet .It’s like a cross-breed (ya see what we did there) between Instagram, and Facebook for your pet.

TextaPet co-founder Matt Clevenger told Nibletz: “TextaPet is a fun, easy photo-sharing app for animal lovers. We created TextaPet to help make people’s relationship with the animals in their life even more meaningful and enjoyable. We also hope to use the technology to better connect new pet seekers with adoptable shelter pets! We see TextaPet saving thousands of precious lives each year.”

Sure there are plenty of ways to share your pet pics already but TexaPet is it’s own unique app and environment and it’s sure to be a huge hit with pet lovers. Although they haven’t released their user numbers, they’ve already created a good following on social media networks. They’ve amassed a following of 22,000 followers on Twitter already. Most of their reviews in the iTunes store echo the same thoughts, people have been waiting for an app like textapet.

Textapet’s other co-founder is Daniel Carpenter. The two met in their home town of Santa Cruz but they are in the process of relocating the company to San Diego. Both co-founders have entrepreneurial spirit in their blood and they both had started clothing lines in college.

More after the break
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Startup Interview: Meshin’s CEO Chris Holmes, Plus You Could Win An iPad!

Most app developers and development companies have been going to iOS before the Android platform. Trends are showing that’s starting to change. One of the companies that has released to Android before iPhone is Meshin.

Meshin’s co-founder Kristen Galliani explained to Nibletz.com that Apple doesn’t allow apps to call into other apps, that was one of the main reasons they needed the more open architecture of Android to build Meshin, an email and message aggregator, and Meshin Recall. Meshin Recall syncs with Evernote and helps organize your notes by using dates from your calendar. There is a lot more in store for Meshin Recall. The Meshin team is on the tip of the iceberg of the contextual intelligence space.

Meshin is about to unveil their Meshin Recall product for iOS and they are currently looking for Beta Testers to sign up. If you sign up for the iOS beta and refer the most people you could win one of those flash “New iPads” go here to do that.

Meshin came out of the Palo Alto Research Center with their biggest chunk of funding coming from Xerox (remember that little company that makes copiers and fathered the Mac?). PARC needed someone to bring Meshin to life and that someone is Chris Holmes.

With more than 25 years in the tech start up arena and some huge accomplishments under his belt he was the perfect fit.

Check out the interview after the break

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Flud The “Instagram For News” Raising $8 Million Dollars Heads To Android

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San Diego based startup Flud, a social news reader app for iPhone is does a great job of differentiating itself from other news readers like Taptu and Pulse.

They do this by allowing users to create profiles join the platform and share their news with others in their network. The UI is very polished and some in tech circles are calling Flud, the Instagram for news.

Sure everyone has access to the same internet and the same news stories but the way people curate the news is what makes some blogs and most news aggregates so popular.

More after the break

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Hailo Cab Let’s You Hail A Yellow Cab In London With Your iPhone or Android

While hot tech start up Uber is preparing to embark on London before the 2012 Olympic games there is already an app available for iPhone and Android that lets people in England hail a taxicab.

The app called Hailo is a network that matches passengers and licensed taxi drivers. The app makes cabbies days more sociable and allows British taxi drivers to go to destination fairs rather than waiting at taxistands all day.

The app is great because it beats calling a taxi. Instead the user can click a button on their Hailo app and a cab is dispatched to them. Hailo promises you’re never two clicks away from a taxi.  Hailo allows you to pay by credit card or debit card in-app or in cash to the driver. Hailo cab drivers will even wait five minutes before starting the meter.

More after the break
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Hotel Tonight Sticks To Their Core For SXSW Promotion Too

Hotel Tonight Founder: Sam Shank (r) with Hotel Tonight Team in front of their first Austin Room. (photo: Sam Shank)

Yesterday we brought you a story about SideTour and how instead of a huge alcohol induced binge party at South by Southwest, they hosted intimate “Side Tour” style gatherings with some successful start up companies like Tumblr and Etsy.

Another great start up, Hotel Tonight, stuck to their core of finding last minute rooms for their South By Southwest promotion.  Hotel Tonight Founder Sam Shank, rented an Airstream trailer for the companies on-site headquarters by day. By night, since rooms were scarce Shank and the Hotel Tonight team rented out the Airstream.

While it’s just an Airstream trailer, it was quite cozy. There was a couch when you walk in with a nice breakfast/dinner table, running water, a shower, bathroom, cooking area, king sized bed and a flat screen tv. Just what a South By Southwest go-er would need for the night.

More after the break
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