California Startup Archives - Page 3 of 5

Los Angeles Startup: myRight Looking To Become the WebMD For Legal Issues INTERVIEW

When you’re not feeling well and have a definitive set of symptoms most people these days take to the internet. Even with health insurance, people seem to find it more convenient to consult with webMD or Dr. Google, before they waste their valuable time at the doctor’s office. WebMD is often credited as one of the big survivors of the first dot com bubble. The site, which has been around since the late 90’s, is a great place to get preliminary information.

While there are a variety of legal websites out there, there isn’t one that mimics what WebMD does. Sure there are a million places to find and complete legal forms, like Legal Zoom, but most of the websites out there for people to bounce legal questions off of, typically go right back to a lawyers office who will give you the information you need to know after a “free” consultation.

myRight is hoping to become the webMD of legal services. The Los Angeles based startup wants to be the preliminary go to place for people with legal questions. Some may even realize they don’t need to see a lawyer while others will jump on the phone with a lawyer right after their search of myRight.me.

Could Nikhil Jhunjhnuwala, Keval Amin and Michael Niu, the founders of myRight be onto something? Frank Monestere, the founder of LegalZoom thinks so. Monestere sits on myRight’s advisory board. To keep things legal myRight has two other lawyers on their advisory board too.

We got a chance to talk to Niu about myRight. Check out the interview below.

San Diego Startup: ScoreStream, CrowdSourced High School Scores

With the rise in online news sources and the decrease in old fashioned print journalists, most cities across the country don’t have a dedicated high school sports reporter. I remember back in the early 90’s growing up in the Baltimore area, the Sun and all the hyper local papers had one, if not a handful of full time reporters who’s beat it was to post the high school scores, details and results for track and field meets and anything that had to do with high school sports. As newspapers began cutting reporters, the high school beat drifted to the wayside.

There are a handful of high school sports sites on the internet but all of them seem to lack any decent box scores, or results from previous games. I remember looking up a high school score on the Sunday after a Friday opening game and it still hadn’t been updated.

This is the pain that Derrick Oien was looking to solve when he founded ScoreStream, a San Diego startup dedicated to high school sports.

ScoreStream can be found in the iOS app store and allows users to update high school sports teams in real time. From there they can post to Twitter, Facebook and ScoreStream’s own platform. ScoreStream encourages users who are actually at the game to post updates to that teams scores as the games go on. Oien has also baked a system into the backend of the website that uses GPS coordinates to tell if the person reporting the score is actually at the game.

“We have a data base of high schools, colors, mascots and longitude and latitude, so we know if a user is posting from a game,” Oien told UT San Diego. “What we do on the back end for media companies is we look at the scores coming in and we look at where the user is. So I can verify where they are.”

It’s the crowdsourcing part of ScoreStream that sets the new startup apart from sites like MaxPreps and SportsNgin. Those two sites are used to feed scores to other media outlets but rely on the school itself or a regional person to report a bulk of scores at one time.

ScoreStream has already inked it’s first media partner. San Diego’s XX1090-AM uses the service to supply their high school sports scores to their website.

Not bad for a startup launched this past April.

Linkage:

Check out ScoreStream here

Check out this interview at TechCocktail

Source: UT San Diego

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New York Robotics Investment Firm Makes First Startup Investment: Double Robotics

A Y-Combinator graduate and California startup, Double Robotics, is the first startup to receive an investment from New York based Grishin Robotics. Grishin was started by Dimitry Grishin who’s been dubbed the “Russian Mark Zuckerberg” by the fine folks at BetaBeat and others.

The investment into Double Robotics marks the first investment made by Grishin Robotics with more on the way. Grishin invested $250,000 into the startup.

Double Robotics has already sold 600 units ($1.2 million) of their first robotic product. The product, called Double, is a robot that puts an iPad on wheels and then gives you a mobile telecommunications device. Think that robot that Sheldon used on Big Bang Theory in the episode where he wanted Steve Wozniak’s autograph, but much more refined.

Grishin’s investment will be spent primarily on scaling, manufacturing and hiring for further development. Double Robotics plans on shipping the 600 pre-orders in the first part of 2013.

“We are thrilled to have Grishin Robotics and Dmitry Grishin, in particular, as our largest investor to date,” said David Cann, Co-founder of Double Robotics. “We read about the new investment firm and Dmitry’s experience in the field of robotics in June 2012 when the fund was announced. The timing was perfect, as we were just beginning the Y Combinator program with our prototype robot. After our public launch in August, we met with Grishin Robotics and were immediately impressed with their mission and deep knowledge of the robotics industry’s past mistakes and potential future. We look forward to working with Grishin Robotics in the years to come as we build our business.”

Grishin is the Chairman of the Board and CEO of Russian firm mail.ru who holds major investments in players like Facebook and Zynga. He became Chairman of mail.ru after global venture capitalist Yuri Milner stepped down. Grishin Robotics is Grishin’s own venture capital firm, which as you can tell from the name, invests in robotics startups.

“Investment in Double Robotics perfectly fits our strategy,” said Dmitry Grishin, founder of Grishin Robotics. “It is a consumer-oriented product with potential to fit a broad range of applications and has already generated strong consumer demand. It’s also important that the price of the product makes it accessible to the wide audience. In addition, the team has creative approach to design and is keen to build user-friendly products — both are very important focus areas for next-generation personal robotics companies. Double Robotics is well positioned to leverage the unique potential of the prominent telepresence robotics market. We have a great belief in Double Robotics team and its product.”

Linkage:

Check out Double Robotics Here

Check out Grishin Robotics Here

and check out the biggest startup event everywhere else, here

Los Angeles Startup: Contur Launches To Turn Your Email Into Tasks!

When this pitch came across our editors box on Friday it was like Eureka. Los Angeles startup Contur has done something amazing with email. They’ve created a platform that beefs up the functionality of email, and the most important part of that, they’ve turned it into tasks.

When we have an idea for a longtail story or a feature story that requires more indepth reporting we typically add it to starred email and then set a reminder in the calendar to go back and work on it. The problem is the important starred email box fills up and the calendar does as well. This is hardly an effective process. Unfortunately with the volume of email we get, we sometimes get a reminder email from the startup we’re working with on the story.

If we could turn email into tasks, projects and add notes to them it would make our work flow go much better. Now thanks to Los Angeles startup Contur we can do that. The Contur app lets users treat any of their emails as tasks, organize them by projects, and add notes and non-email related tasks. Contur makes email more manageable and easier to put into context, manipulate, prioritize and search, moving users closer to “Inbox Zero.”

Contur CEO Justyna Wojick validates the fact that our current method of starring messages and making calendar entries is outdated at best.

“Contur is aimed at the 90 million knowledge workers and professionals in the United States who are experiencing email overload,” said Contur co-founder and CEO Wójcik said in a statement. “Contur takes email beyond such outdated tools as tags and priority inboxes, which have long lost their power to help users not only tackle the ever-growing volume of their incoming email, but to act on that volume as well.”

Monday-Friday we typically receive 300-500 email messages a day, making us power users by Contur standards. Contur was designed for power users and hopes to help get people to “inbox zero” something i haven’t seen in years.

“The demand is high for a solution like Contur to manage email inboxes; 500 people have already signed up on the Contur waitlist. In the United States alone, over a billion dollars are lost each year due to workers having to do necessary, but unproductive, tasks related to email, such as organizing them, keeping track of follow-ups, and other tasks. Contur will help recover some of that lost time and revenue,” added Wójcik.

Contur launched out of Start Engine the LA based accelerator founded by Howard Marks one of the co-founders of Actvision.

We’re on the Contur waitlist and can’t wait to use it. Contur is compatible with pop email and also gmail, or Google apps mail so most business power users can use it.

Linkage:

Check out and sign up for Contur here

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Los Angeles Startup: Swagsy Turns The Swag Bag Into A Flash Sale Platform INTERVIEW

We’ve reported on a handful of good Los Angeles area startups that are leveraging the celebrity power in Los Angeles for their companies.

LA startup 12 Society is spearheaded by rapper Nas (Nasir Jones) and he’s called on many of his influential friends from the hip hop, music, sports and celebrity communities to launch a “birch box” subscription startup with gadgets, toys and cool tech stuff. The monthly subscription box is curated by the stars and quickly had everyone in Los Angeles talking.

We’ve also reported on MoonShark a mobile gaming startup that was built as a partnership between the Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and Qualcomm. MoonShark leverages CAA’s roster of A-List celebrities to endorse, and build mobile gaming products with and around. Their latest project, Verticus is a collaboration between them and comic book icon Stan Lee.

Today we’re talking with Los Angeles startup Swagsy. This is a new online shopping and flash sales platform where the items that they are selling have been curated by a panel of “influential tastemakers”. Swagsy Co-Founder Grant Cohen, likens Swagsy to a flash sales site for things you would often times find in swag bags at A-list events. That’s also where the idea came from, as well as the name.

Swagsy’s curators recommend the type items from the top brands. From there Swagsy negotiates flash sale offers with the brands and manufacturers themselves, then their A-list tastemakers take to social media to help promote the brand, the item and the website.

No startup has tried to use celebrity power to back a flash sales model so far.

We got a chance to talk to Cohen in the interview below.

Frequent Traveler Creates Siesta Pillow Startup In Los Angeles INTERVIEW

California based serial entrepreneur and frequent traveller Mark Hill is looking to re-invent the travel pillow. As we all know, most travel pillows are shaped like a U and designed to go around the neck. They are ugly, awkward and have no reasonable place to store them. When you travel with a travel pillow you’re locked into it’s clutches. For many it’s more discomforting that sleeping on a plane or train with no pillow at all, or worse, the “free pillow”.

So on a return flight from Hawaii one day Hill decided he was going to do something about it and did it. Hill knows his market is ripe with over 730 million passengers who boarded domestic flights.

Hill’s pillow is different. He’s found, and many agree, that the most comfortable position to sleep on in a plane is leaning forward. This also goes for buses and trains as well. You pretty much rest your head in your hands or on the seat in front of you. This process can get complicated and uncomfortable for many reasons.

First off the person in front of you controls where their seat is positioned. They could, in mid flight, train ride or bus ride, decide to recline the seat or put it back to it’s upright position, which would discomfort you a great deal. Next, on a plane and some trains there is a tray table in front of you which means your forehead or the top of your head is vibrating against a large plastic or metal object, again not worth the pain that’s going to come from riding that way.

Hill’s pillow is designed to make that position comfortable and insures great rest while traveling. Hill is a serial entrepreneur who’s tried his hand at technology startups and hard goods including water bottles with removable bottoms. This latest invention/startup, Hill is confident will be a big winner.

Check out our interview with Hill below:

California Startup Wants To Put Siri On Your Wrist

(photo: Ian Hamilton, OC Register)

Smart watches have done really well on Kickstarter. We’re all familiar with the millions of dollars that the Pebble watch has raked in and many of us have heard about the Android powered Metawatch Strata which raised three times the $100,000 they were looking for.

A new company called Martian Watches, based in Irvine California recently started a Kickstarter campaign for their smart watch earlier this month. While at this writing the project is still under $100,000 of the $200,000 goal there’s still over 30 days left in the campaign. Once this watch starts picking up momentum it will surely out do Meta Watch’s Strata.

Why? Well for starters Martian Watches is looking to sync their smart watch with the iPhone for the purpose of bringing voice commands and Siri interaction to the wrist. You’ll look like a secret service agent as you speak commands into the watch on your wrist.

According to this story in the OCRegister you’ll be able to pair your watch with your existing, Siri enabled iPhone and speak any normal Siri command into the watch. From there your iPhone will handle the Siri query as usual and give you the information that you’re looking for back as a text message on the watch itself.

The startups founders Jeffrey Hsieh and Stan Kinsey already have a working prototype and showed off a bunch of voice commands to folks at the OCRegister.

“Voice command to us was the ultimate solution for making the watch an extremely useful tool. More so than just trying to replicate what you can do on your phone,” Kinsey told ocregister.com

For now the voice commands work one way which seems to be causing a little bit of concern with the people commenting on the Kickstarter Page, but that shouldn’t effect their $200,000 project goal. The watch has already received great reviews from TechCrunch, The Verge and the OC Register.

Linkage:

Here’s Martian Watch’s Kickstarter Page

Source: OCRegister

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Los Angeles Startup: Unbucket, Make Lists Of Things You Want To Do, Then Do Them

Elliot Darvick CEO & Co-Founder of Unbucket (photo: businessrockstars)

Sure everyone has a bucket list of must see places they want to go before they die, or amazing things they want to do before they die. You know the kind, skydiving, Mt. Rushmore, run a marathon, truly epic things. What about when you need a list of things to do that may get thrown to the wayside in the hustle and bustle of everyday life. That’s where Unbucket comes in.

Unbucket allows you to make your own unbucket lists, or do them with one friend, or many. The types of lists you can make are infinite. Unbucket suggests things like, recipes you want to try, places to dine in your city, movies to watch, things to do on vacation.

I’ve already signed up for Unbucket using the beta code nibletz and created a few lists of my own. I’ve made a list of things to do with my daughter when I’m home on the weekend, and movies that I want to watch when I’m traveling. Hopefully this list making via Unbucket will come in handy.

We got a chance to talk with Elliot Darvick, co-founder of Unbucket. Check out the interview below:

San Diego Startup: Cream Of The Crop San Diego Changes The Job Game With Transparency & More

Is there really a way to reinvent the jobs site? Sure there are plenty of startups out there that think they have the next monster.com on their hands but do they?

People on the jobhunt have dealt with the shortcomings of jobs sites for years because they’re usually in a position where they have no choice. Right now for instance, monster.com has so many vague ads you don’t know what you’re applying for and in some cases you don’t know who you are applying to. There is no way to separate the head hunters and the employment services from bonafide job openings at real companies.

While many website strive to get better and better every year, searching for a job on Craigslist gets worse and worse year over year. Sure I can understand getting 50 fake emails when listing an iPad or iPhone for sale on Craigslist, but the amount of scammy junk mail that’s coming in off Craigslist job boards is overwhelming as well. It seems that one in three Craigslist job ads are legitimate. It could be less.

One of the other big pains in the current job site model is the amount of money that sites charge companies for posting jobs. Sure they have to make money but the fees that monster.com and other job boards charge employers, almost guarantees that startups can’t afford to post in front of the masses.

This year we’ve seen a few good job platforms come across the pages here at nibletz.com; DC based Barrel of Jobs is definitely one of those as is hiredmyway a Detroit startup that has since moved to Chicago.

San Diego job site Cream of The Crop, joins that list. They offer free listings for employers. They also require transparency in posting jobs, they want the applicants to know who they are applying to and what they are applying for. Novel ideas, right?

We got a chance to talk with Cream Of The Crop’s Oscar Urteaga in the interview below:

This California Startup Says They Have The RightSignature INTERVIEW

As more and more smartphones and tablets make it into the hands of people worldwide, the need for easy to use document signing has grown. There are several startups in the document signing space like “Sign My Pad”, “Sign Later” and many others. Most of them import a pdf and allow you to draw on top, and sign.

RightSignature is a Santa Barbara California based startup that promises to be the all in one solution for getting documents filled out and signed online. RightSignature has a way to sign your documents on an iPad,iPhone, Android device or any web browser. They allow you to import any document locally or from the cloud.

For business users RightSignature allows the user to create templates for frequently used forms and other features to make the application easy to use and the documents legal. Long gone are the days of printing, signing and scanning, and of course waiting by a fax machine.

We got a chance to interview RightSignature co-founder and CEO Daryl Bernstein, check out the interview below:

California Startup: nfinitu.de Helping Legacies Live On Through Social Media

Back in March we were the first site in the world to report on UK startup Deadsoci.al. This unique startup allows people to let their social media channels live on after death. After someone passes away, messages that they set up in advance can continue to inspire (or haunt) those they knew through social media and in real life. Mortality is an issue that more and more people are facing and that was actually the motivation behind deadsoci.al. As we found out at South By Southwest, the founder of deadsoci.al is dead serious about the startup.

Many don’t like to bring up tragedies but if you take a look back at the tragic incident at Columbine high school in 1999 and compare it to the recent tragedy in Aurora Colorado this past week, you may have noticed how much technology has changed in the previous 12 years. While social networks were just blossoming in the late 90’s today through social media many of the Aurora victims have Facebook tribute pages set up, walls with thousands of pages of comments, Twitter feeds with thousands of Tweets and more. In fact some of the survivors of the Columbine massacre have reached out to the victims of the Aurora tragedy via, you guessed it social media.

Combine things like that, with the tragedies surrounding mortality that we face all the time and it’s no wonder that Mario Horvath the founder of SplashHead LLC has created nfinitu.de.

While Hovarth is simultaneously launching nfinitu.de and another startup called Mindbl.am at the same time, nfinitu.de is what he focuses on in our interview.

Taking mortality into consideration and the way that people cope with tragedy nfinitu.de actually makes a lot of sense. A few years ago some may think the concept is morbid but not anymore.

With nfinitu.de people can create social media pages for those recently deceased in a tribute fashion. Often reminiscing, even if it’s just in the online context, can help people cope with the loss of a friend or loved one, whether they died of natural causes, fighting an illness or some other tragedy.

People sometimes don’t know what to do to cope with the feelings that come up after someone passes away and nfinitu.de actually helps them harness those feelings.

Check out our interview with Hovarth, below:

Interview With California Startup: Bib4Brides

Okay so in a previous life I owned a rather large dj business, you know the type that does weddings, school dances, that kind of thing. We were the biggest in the state of North Carolina and South Carolina as well. I’ve actually been involved in over 1000 weddings, that’s a lot.

When helping brides plan the dj part of their wedding, we had a lot of influence over the schedule and flow. One of the big things that brides and grooms wanted to know was when should they do their special dances, like Father/Daughter, Mother/Son, Bridal Party Dance etc. The question was easy, the answer was some times chuckled at, laughed at and some even found it offensive. We would ask every bride and groom that asked us that question, well “are any of you messy eaters”. Why, because a stain on a tux or wedding dress could ruin the wedding photos the couple is paying thousands of dollars for, and that are precious memories.

Enter in California startups Bib4Brides. Now we know this isn’t a tech startup but as we’ve shown here many times we do tangible startups too and this one was one that couldn’t be passed up.

Bib4Brides founder Sandi Romena has developed a product, essentially a bib for the bride and the groom, that in the long run can save embarrassment, ridicule and a lot of money. Sure the bride keeps her dress forever but Italian sauce isn’t the easiest stain to remove from the tuxedo before you take them back Monday morning.

The Bib4Brides was created after Romena had a little incident at her daughter’s wedding which she describes in the interview below:

What The MixTape Is Back? We Interview Los Angeles Startup Mixtaping.FM

Do you remember those late nights you used to sit around your bedroom with your dual cassette deck and make sweet mix tapes for your girlfriend or boyfriend, yeah me neither. (Ok yes I actually do). Well if you were into creating mix tapes for that special someone than Los Angeles based startup mixtaping.fm may be for you.

Mixtaping.fm has taken the concept of making mix tapes and brought them up to date. They offer a cloud based platform that lets you create 30 minute mix tapes, legally.

Edward Chan, the co-founder of Mixtaping.fm realizes that today’s “mix tapes” in the sense we’re talking here, are very similar to playlists but there are problems with playlists. First off everyone’s playlists are on different services. Some services require you to sign up and pay a fee just to listen to the playlist. Other services are so obscure that it’s hard to find anything.

Mixtaping.fm lets you make a custom 30 minute “mix tape” with music that you like, or want to specifically share with someone or a group, and then you can share it easily.

One of the other big things with Mixtaping.fm is that they’ve integrated Facebook and Instagram so not only can you create a “mix tape” but you can also create cover art.

MixTaping integrates with Spotify and has plans to integrate Rdio as well.

We got a chance to talk with Chan in the interview below.

Interview With San Diego Startup Recovery Brands, Disrupting The Addiction Treatment Space

The addiction treatment space is a $16 billion dollar industry. When you or a loved one needs an addiction treatment center, finding the right center can be an overwhelming experience, especially when coupled with helping the addict. Often times, it’s too late when you actually need the services of a treatment center, to do the mounds of research.

There are lots of factors that go into finding the right treatment center. Will my insurance cover it, how far is it from home, is it a lockdown program, can we visit, how much is it? Sure there are sites out there with directories of treatment centers and they are great. Many recommend getting treatment out of state.

Even with centers charging $25,000 to $50,000 per person per month, there are many treatment centers out there that aren’t reaching profitability. Some of the profitable centers aren’t reaching their desired goals for treatment. Through Rehab Brands services they hope to help treatment centers become more profitable, help rehabilitate more people who need it and educate addicts and their families in a better way. Some of the smaller centers are also being hurt by the fact that many recommend getting treatment out of state, and that is lost income as far as they are concerned.

This startup has a very interesting story and we were able to get more of it in the interview below.