500 Startups Backed, Speek, Releases iPhone App

Last year after TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, most people thought that conference calling app Uber Conference was the bees knees. They had won the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield and were all the rage from the big publications. Meanwhile, back in the Washington DC suburbs Evite founder John Bracken and co-founder and PandoDaily contributor Danny Boice were busy working on Speek.

Speek is actually the easiest way to execute great sounding conference calls. Everything is handled through a web/cloud based interface and all you do to initiate a call is direct the participants to your Speek page, for instance mine is http://speek.com/kyle from there I can control who’s in the call, file sharing, information and anything else that pertains to a conference call.

The whole process is extremely easy and doesn’t require jotting down pin numbers or long codes, which can be quite cumbersome driving down the highway.

Well today Speek has released their iPhone app which makes it just as easy to initiate conference calls from your iPhone as it is from the web (although it was pretty easy just using a mobile browser like Chrome).

With Speek’s iPhone app, you can make super simple, free and visual conference calls. Reserve an easy-to-remember username (i.e.,http://speek.com/YourName) for your calls, instead of fumbling for a traditional phone number and PIN.

Features:

Talk instantly with one-click calls
Know who’s joined the call
Know who’s talking
Share images from your phone
Comment, mute and add/remove participants

Avoid the hassles of traditional conference calls with:

No telephone numbers and PINs
No scheduling
No elevator music
No interruptions

Check out Speek in the iTunes app store and go register your user name before all the good ones disappear. If for some reason you want to try it out feel free to Speek to me at http://speek.com/kyle

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DC Hot Tech Startup Gryphn Finding New Problems They Solve Every Day

One of Washington DC’s hottest startups is Gryphn. This mobile security firm released their ArmorText secure text messaging application for Android users last summer and they’re constantly hearing from customers that they’re solving a new problem every day.

“we are still discovering all the problems that Gryphn solves. People come up to us at events and tell us how our products can be used for public notaries, insurance resellers, journalists… you name it. We are staying focused to solving regulatory compliance problems for Healthcare, Finance, Government, Law Enforcement, First Responders and Defense.” Gryphn’s CEO and co-Founder Navroop Mitter told us in an interview.

Back in June the team had grown enough that they took over the space of fellow DC Startup JESS3 which relocated to Los Angeles.

Much of their success is coming from innovating in the security space in the sectors where security matters most.

We got a chance to catch up with Gryphn. In the interview below they reveal how they got their name Gryphn. Check it out:

What To Do After School? DC Startup Activity Rocket Has The Answer

As the parent of a kindergartener her father and I are swimming in mountains of ideas of things for our daughter to do after school. There are a lot of programs out there but not one central website to go to where we can check out everything. We’re just getting started and have a good 10-12 years more to plan for.

Parents in the Washington DC metro area won’t have to worry about this problem, especially going forward in 2013. Washington area startup Activity Rocket wants to be the Urban Spoon, or Flixter for after school activities.

Two ex-attorney’s and frustrated moms in Washington DC, Lisa Friedlander and Ilene Miller have created Activity Rocket to serve as a portal to the after school world for busy parents. Between the two women they have five children between the ages of 6-11 and before Activity Rocket, they had no place to start.

Now, their startup is filled with activity and program recommendations, referrals, expert written blogs, parent ratings and even calendar tools. Friedlander and Miller have made their system extremely easy to use. A parent searching for activities can go to their website and search as wide or narrow as they would like for the activities they want their child enrolled in.

Whether parents are looking for soccer, baseball, ballet, math club, computer clubs, cub scouts, girl scouts, or tutoring classes, Activity Rocket is the place to search. Right now they are solely focused on the DC metro area, but we’re willing to bet that demand will mean expansion in the coming years.

In between code revisions, meetings, car pooling, and holiday decorating we got a chance to talk with Miller about Activity Rocket, the DC startup scene and what it’s like for busy women to launch a new startup. Check out the interview below.

DC Startup Speek Raises $1.2 Million Dollar Seed Round

We’ve been tracking DC startup Speek since last May when they pitched the initial concept and platform at the TechBuzz competition in Washington DC as part of Capital Connection.

What originally attracted us to Speek was the super easy interface for their conference calling application. The conference calling space is definitely a hot one. Back in May, another conference calling startup UberConference won the highly coveted TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt NY.

Speek is actually easier to use. With Speek you simply go to the website, pick a username and enter some information, like your primary phone number. From there, when you want to make a conference call you go to that user’s page on Speek and hit the big button in the middle of the page and voila, conference call initiated. For example, my Speek address is http://speek.com/kyle yes I was using it early enough.

The other main attraction to Speek is the startup pedigree. The company was founded by John Bracken who sold his first big startup e-vite to TicketMaster. Speek’s CTO Danny Boice was the founder at Jaxara a startup he sold to Pantheon in 2006.

Today they announced that they’ve raised a seed round of $1.2 million by “several early stage venture funds”.

“Conference calls today are a painful experience in a $3 billion market that hasn’t innovated in over twenty years,” said Speek.com co-founder and CEO John Bracken. “Speek is revolutionizing conference calling by turning a limited telephone-based service into one that is simple, free and in-tune with the next generation of web and mobile services.”

“Speek makes conducting a conference call fast and easy,” said co-founder and CTO Danny Boice. “No longer do you have to frantically search for a PIN number or wonder who’s on the call or who’s talking. Nearly ninety-percent of people who have used Speek would be disappointed if our service disappeared.”

Linkage:

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Official: DC Startup Living Social Lays Off 400

We reported early this morning that Washington DC based daily deals starutp Living Social was planning on laying off 400 people. That came to fruition later this morning and was announced by company spokesperson Andrew Weinstein.

Weinstein confirmed all 400 layoffs and said that they were spread across sales, editorial and customer service. They are also looking to streamline all of their operations and with that they are centralizing customer service to an office in Tuscon Arizona. Customer service jobs that were based at the companies DC offices are either being cut or moved to Tuscon. There may be some job openings at the Tuscon customer service office later on.

This may not bode will for Living Social who just received a major tax break from the DC government. Under the deal for the $32.5 million dollar tax break, LivingSocial is supposed to move to a massive, centralized headquarters and keep 1000 employees in DC.

Living Social is also trying to calm the editorial and social swell from the announcement. Many journalists, bloggers and investors in daily deals, are starting to worry that the once hot space is “over”. Weinstein told CNN “We think this actually puts us on the right path for long-term growth and profitability,”

Groupon, Living Social’s biggest rival and the big winner in the daily deals space, is going through turmoil themselves. It’s been widely rumored that the board of directors at Groupon is looking to replace CEO Andrew Mason. Their stock has performed dismally since going public and there has been a lot of executive turnover at their Chicago headquarters.

To add to LivingSocial’s problems, a month ago Amazon reported a $169 million dollar write down on it’s $175 million dollar investment in LivingSocial.

Linkage:

Livingsocial is here

Earlier story from nibletz is here

Startup News from “everywhere else” is here

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Rumored: DC Startup Living Social To Lay Off 400 Later Today

Several startup and tech sites are reporting that Washington DC daily deals startup, Living Social will lay off as many as 400 people later today (Thursday). The Washington DC Business Journal is credited with starting the rumor based on sources “with knowledge of the daily deal giant’s plans”

The news was escalated Wednesday when Pando Daily founder Sarah Lacy tweeted out a link to a short news brief on her site about the possible layoffs.

As early as two months ago at The Brandery’s demo day, Living Social CEO and Co-Founder Tim O’Shaughnessy led no one to believe that the company was in this much trouble. O’Shaughnessy was the keynote speaker at the branding focused accelerators investor event.

According to The Business Journal, the cuts are supposed to affect several of the company’s nationwide offices, including headquarters in DC which is spread across six offices downtown.

The layoffs may cause even more trouble, as Living Social just won a $32.5 million dollar tax break from the DC government, contingent on opening a 200,000 square foot centralized headquarters and maintaining a headcount of over 1,000. The company last reported 4500 employees globally, and while the 400 layoffs alone wouldn’t seem to affect that tax break, the question lays on what else happens with the company.

Living Social isn’t the only daily deals company that’s having problems. It’s been widely rumored, and some say leaked, that rival Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason may be ousted by his board of directors. Groupon has struggled since going public, despite the fact that they are still making money.

Living Social suffered a net loss of $566 million in the third quarter. Much of that was in the form of a $496 million dollar write down of some of it’s 2011 acquisitions. Revenue also slipped from $138 million dollars in the second quarter to $124 million in the third.

Linkage:

LivingSocial on the web

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Washington DC Startup: MBA Project Search Connects MBA’s & Businesses For Short And Long Term Projects

We’ve reported on several job and recruitment based startups. Most of these startups are attacking problems with hiring and recruiting with technology like video and social media. Some employment based startups, like Memphis startup Work For Pie, are honed in on specific markets like developers. A new Washington DC startup, MBA Project Search, is connecting businesses of any size with MBA students or alumni.

MBA Project Search is getting it’s start out of the Washington DC area and is tapped into the MBA scene at Georgetown University. They’ve also secured relationships with every Ivy institution as well as MBA equivalents internationally.

On the startup side, MBA Project Search is great for startups that need MBA caliber talent but don’t want to hire someone on full time or do some kind of equity for work scenario. With MBA Project Search startups can hire MBAs for short term projects at an affordable rate.

Currently MBA Project Search is free for both businesses that need to hire an MBA and for MBAs to apply for projects and positions. There are no other hidden costs involved either.

The MBA Project Search team says that for students, it gives them the kind of hands on experience a doctor would get from a $100/hr residency or a lawyer would get from a $50,000 internship. They’re giving MBA students and graduates another resource to find post graduate work that encompasses the degree they studied long and hard for.

We got a chance to talk with MBA Project Search co-founder Rasheen Carbin, check out our interview below.

With The Animated Gif Back, DC Startup MyFaceWhen Is Ready

Way back in the 90’s (saying that is so wrong), animated gifs were typically banners that someone who was building a website would use to attract attention to something or another. The more popular animated gifs were dancing bears, christmas lights, and even cars driving along in the middle of the web page.

Nowadays banner ads are fading fast and the animated gif is actually coming back.

Thanks to mobile usage and social networks animated gifs are almost, if not more popular than meme’s. If you want to get your point across in a cute, happy, or even angry way, you can say it with an animated gif. Technology has vastly improved over the past two decades as well, which means better animated gifs.

Of course there are places that are stockpiling cute, one off animated gifs that you can use to send to your friends and family but just like meme’s witty people want to create their own. That’s where Rodney Curl and his startup MyFaceWhen come into the picture.

The Howard University graduate has gotten the creation of animated gifs down to a science. In fact from start to finish you can get an original animated gif ready to send out in under 10 seconds. Curl also tells us if you want to use a stock gif MyFaceWhen will take you out to Reddit where gifs are a plenty.

We’ve seen a vast variety of startups come out of Washington DC. Cur’s MyFaceWhen is a fun mobile app and a nice break from the traditional tech startup.

We got a chance to talk to Curl. Check out our interview below.

Maryland Startup CoFounders Lab Is Connecting CoFounders

When Shahab Kaviani sat down and had some time to reflect about his previous startup, HyperOffice he quickly realized that the cofounding team behind that startup drove it’s success. He admits that they bootstrapped almost the entire project. He also says in hindsight their timing was lousy, but the cofounding team kept the startup together.

Finding the right cofounders should actually be at the top of the priority list in any startup. CoFounders lab is one of many startups that look to match people with cofounders. FounderSync is one of those startups that uses an online approach. FounderDating uses a hybrid online offline approach merging an online community with in person events.

CoFounders lab also blends online and offline through in person events. We hope that he’s not too late to this party as well. Of course we all know that when the Dodge brothers went to build cars they weren’t worried that Ford was already doing the exact same thing.

Kaviani was fortunate enough to get selected into the Fort accelerator in Washington DC. After graduating from the program the company moved to Rockville Maryland where they are currently based now. They recently pitched the “Pitch Across Maryland” bus as part of Startup Maryland back in September.

We got a chance to talk with Kaviani. Check out our interview below.

Miami Startup: RentJiffy Simplifies Life For Landlords INTERVIEW

Continuing with the series of features about each of the impressive Startups Incubate Miami 2012 has been able put together this year Startropica sat down with Jonathan Addison, Founder and CEO, ofRentJiffy, a real estate management platform that makes life easier for landlords and property managers. This is our interview with him:

How the thought of creating RentJiffy came about in the first place?

It came out of my own Real Estate practice. I am from Washington DC, one of the busiest, and one of the most legally complicated real estate cities in the country, the most obvious example of this is the license property owners need to have in order to be able to rent that specific property, that’s for every single property they own, with all the different regulations for each type of building of course. So RentJiffy was conceived in 2010 originally to make life easier for DC Landlords offering to facilitate this type of licensing. Basically they go to RentJiffy and hire us to process the license for them, but we are about to launch a host of additional features as well on a national level, that’s why we came here to Miami.

So Rentjiffy started by offseting a huge need in the DC Real Estate market, I am guessing it grew fast.

Thankfully yes it has been a success. Since January of 2010, we have doubled our revenue every year, that’s 3 years in a row. In 2011 we did $175.000 and to date we are approaching $300k in sales for 2012, enough to keep the team going and to help us put in place the next step which is to make RentJiffy a national platform

Continue reading at Startropica.com

Speek Holding Speek Easy During Digital Capital Week (DC Tech Week)

While the Washington DC area and the rest of the north east are being pummeled by Hurricane Sandy, “Frankenstorm”, entrepreneurs are still planning on attending DC’s Tech Week which starts this Friday.

Our friends at TechCocktail and many others have put together a weeks worth of great programming for entrepreneurs, founders, startups, developers, designers, coders and anyone else in the tech scene. Hopefully we will be able to travel to DC for the event.

One of the big parties you don’t want to miss is the “Speek Easy” being hosted by Speek at Capitale in NorthWest Washington DC Saturday night November 3rd from 8:00pm-2:00am.

Speek is the easiest to use conference calling platform. Rather than a call in “bridge” number with a bunch of codes to memorize and enter, with Speek you just direct your participants to your Speek page, they click a button and get brought into the conference. You can speek me at speek.com/kyle.

Speek’s pulling out all the stops and taking the “speak easy” theme back to the roaring 20’s. They’ll have 1920’s style photo booths, burlesque dancers and they’re encouraging everyone who attends to register for their Speek link before the party. Attendees with Speek links will be eligible for some cool prizes.

The free “Speek Easy” party is happening at

Capitale
1301 K Street NW
Washington DC 2005

Linkage:

DC Startup Quad 2 Quad Offering Halloween Treat To College Bound Teens

Last month we brought you the story of two DC area women who are old enough to be Mark Zuckerberg’s mom, and have launched a startup based on the pains they faced as parents during the college bound process. If you’ve been to college, or have a student planning on attending college than you know how rigorous planning a bunch of college visits can be.

You’re probably already juggling soccer practice, drama club, glee club, the student newspaper, karate and 16 other extra curricular activities. Add to that needing to go out of town to a strange city full of college students and you’ve got a recipe for a huge headache. Pushing through the visit process, you know that the ultimate goal is for your kid to make you proud at whatever college they select.

Well Susan Jones (68) and Elizabeth Van Sant, feel your pain. That’s why they’ve created Quad 2 Quad a mobile app for parents and students taking college visits. The app serves as your own virtual tour guide in your pocket with a directory of services, hours of operation, local food spots and other things you need to know, but don’t often think about ahead of time.

When you think of entrepreneurs launching startups you don’t typically of women Van Sant and Jones’ age, you think of their fresh out of college age children (and for the record we joke about their age all the time via email in fact Jones is typically the one who starts the joking).

Between the two of them they’ve got some serious college visit experience. Their two families have visited over 30 different campuses as they put their kids through high school and then college.

Quad 2 Quad is now available for sale and if you’ve been down this road before you know all too well that Halloween is almost a time marker for when the visits start. With that and mind, and to spread some halloween loving, Quad 2 Quad is on sale in the iTunes store for just $2.99 from October 30th-31st (next Tuesday and Wednesday)

Linkage:

Check out Quad 2 Quad here

Download it from the app store here

Come see Jones and Van Sant at “everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference” click here

Mother & Daughter DC Startup Dormify, Changing Dorm Rooms Everywhere

What can you do with the limited space of a dorm room, or shared living space while you’re in college? Well unless you’re an interior designer for Ikea you may think your options are limited. That’s not the case thanks to the mother and daughter team of Karen Zuckerman (mom) and Amanda Zuckerman (daughter).

The Zuckerman’s have created a new Washington DC startup called Dormify that looks to serve those college age students with ideas, and tools to help transform their living space for their four years of college life. Everything from crafty ideas, to room furnishings, trinkets and even college flair can be found on the Dormify site.

Dormify gives college students everywhere the freedom to stop combing the aisles of Ikea and Target in hopes to find some idea that all the other students aren’t using.

Towels, pillows, home furnishings even stylish school supplies and sweets can be found on the Dormify website.

As you can imagine Dormify came about when Karen was helping Amanda move into her first dorm room at Washington University in St. Louis. Both Zuckerman women have been known for their creativity throughout their lives and the neon colored towels, matching trash cans, rug mats and computer chairs on sale at Target weren’t going to do the trick.

After shopping for Amanda’s dorm room at a variety of boutique shops in downtown St. Louis, a look Amanda could live with was born. The Zuckerman women realized that there is no centralized place to build looks like this, so they did what any entrepreneurs would do and built it themselves.

We got a chance to talk with Dormify’s employee #1, Nicole Gardner, who tells us more about Dormify, below:

OpenTable And Fishbowl Veterans Join DC Startup Venga’ Rebrands To My Loyal Family

Back in March we brought you the story of Washington DC startup Venga. Venga began as a more traditional restaurant discovery platform similar to the likes of Urban Spoon. While they were accelerating at The Fort in Washington DC they pivoted to a more restaurant centric focus.

During their customer discovery they went to restaurants and talked to the owners to see what they really needed in an app.

When founders Sam von Pollaro and Winston Lord took to the streets to talk with the restaurants themselves they found that while traditional restaurant discovery apps could provide spikes in traffic, they weren’t receptive to the restaurant themselves. Apps like Open Table weren’t talking to the restaurant point of sale systems so there was no way the restaurants could take advantage of the well procured background data on the users.

Venga, with the help of Fortify, embarked on a new product to create mobile centric loyalty programs for customers. Now surveying customers on exits, and even rewarding them isn’t new however working it all back into a mobile focused program to benefit the customer and the restaurant is. Venga now has a tool that helps restaurants keep track of customers, their likes and dislikes and their service experiences. The restaurant takes that information, along with order information and then they can send each customer more targeted offers via email rather than a generic email blast.

Venga had already started picking up traction with their new product and have found that it was a great space to be in. Venga is data driven and pulls from customers previous checks to create detailed profiles, letting restaurant owners and marketers know exactly what hits their customers buttons and what will bring them back in for more.

The company has started ramping up their staff and with that they’ve brought on Fishbowl’s former Regional VP of Sales, Bob McKay as Vice President of Sales. Michelle Baker has also joined Venga as an account executive. Her experience includes marketing positions with Fishbowl and Open Table. They’ve also rebranded their consumer facing product as MyLoyalFamily.

“Bob and Michelle’s passion and demonstrated knowledge of the hospitality industry and its distinctive needs will be an invaluable asset to Venga as we continue to expand.”von Pollaro, said in a statement. “With Michael, we are getting one of the top software engineers in the area with expertise in scalability, which is critical in a business that collects and processes as much data as we do.”

Venga also beefed up their tech team by adding Michael Dumont as Lead Software Engineer.

Linkage:

Check out Venga here

Check out their consumer facing site here, MyLocalFamily

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