Indy’s Powder Keg Startup Conference Announces 12 Startups In The Super Bowl

Startup evangelist, entrepreneur and founder of Verge Startups (Verge Indy), Matt Hunckler has been hard at work producing the upcoming Powder Keg regional startup conference in Indianapolis. Powder Keg is taking place in downtown Indianapolis with one amazing opportunity for 12 great startups, in a startup competition of Super Bowl proportions (can we say Super Bowl?).

“The Big Game” startup competition (see what we did there) will take place at Lucas Oil Stadium next Thursday, which just happens to be the same venue for last years Super Bowl. You know, the one where another Indiana startup evangelist put together this little Shark Tank party with Mark Cuban.

Yes, Indiana has it like that and Powder Keg will continue the tradition of great startup events produced by Hunckler on a much larger scale. Powder Keg has a great list of speakers including illusionist David Blaine, Scott Case (who’s also speaking at everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference), Dave Knox from RockFish and co-founder of The Brandery,and Erik Martin General Manager at Reddit. The event will feature two powerful days of sessions, the Startup Bowl, Startup Showcase and three great parties (what’s a startup event without parties).

Yesterday, the Verge Startups team announced the 12 startups competing for a $15,000 startup growth prize sponsored by Microsoft and Elevate Ventures. Here’s the list:

CoatChex
CoatChex is focused on bringing innovation and value through today’s technology to an industry that hasn’t been touched in decades. The patent-pending process optimizes coat check-in and retrieval functions and reduces the risks that are commonly associated with checking coats, making it the hassle-free solution to running a secure, profitable, and efficient coat check station.

Team Mash
TeamMash is a daily email for sports fanatics. Every day, their editors scour the web for the best sports content. Each morning, they email you a mashup of what happened with your favorite teams in the past 24 hours. It even contains links to hand-picked articles from around the web.

FoundOPS
FoundOPS is developing an operations platform to help small field service operate more efficiently by gamifying carbon savings. In one, easy to use cloud based system, they’ve incorporated GPS technician tracking, drag and drop dispatching, and intuitive customer service management. The platform is provided for free, but customers are incentived to purchase premium features such as route optimization, QuickBooks integration, and BI reports in order to increase their carbon savings.

Adproval
Adproval is a service that streamlines the process of direct ad sales for small and medium bloggers while allowing them to maintain relationships with their advertisers. Working with an approved advertiser lets bloggers use their voice – by means of product reviews, featured posts, etc. – to back them as a sponsor, making ad space on that blog more valuable. Bloggers set up their sponsorship offerings with Adproval and put a page on their blog where advertisers can choose what they want and make an offer. If the blogger finds the advertiser suitable and approves of them, the ad image is automatically uploaded to their blog, the payment is automatically transferred, and the relationship is managed through their dashboard on Adproval.

Lisnr
Lisnr aims to change the way that consumers experience audio by turning what has historically been a passive experience into an interactive engagement platform. Lisnr is an app that allows music or any other audio medium to passively trigger consumer interactions, direct to their mobile device, during a consumer’s listening experience. Lisnr is completely source agnostic as notifications can be sent from audio being played anywhere.

PetBookings
PetBookings.com is the first and only website to offer instant and confirmed online reservations to the $3.5 billion professional pet care industry. They are launching v2.0 of their website platform Friday October 5, 2012 and are armed with some remarkable test data going to market. Pet owners (B2C) are not only experiencing the convenience and benefits of booking online with instant confirmation, but pet care facilities (B2B) are also seeing a significant impact on their bottom line.

Lesson.ly
Lesson.ly is a teaching and learning marketplace. It’s like iTunes, but with lessons and courses instead of songs and albums. It is “the simplest way to learn” and is currently in beta-testing.

Bonfyre
Bonfyres are private groups created around events where you can share chats and photos. All of these shared photos become part of group photostreams, called Memories, and are accessible only to others at that bonfyre. Simple event planning, private real-time sharing and collective group photos in one app, just like it should be.

Squarejive
Squarejive is a free mobile application that recommends things to do nearby. The app is built upon a mosaic design that allows users to seamlessly find and share events across Facebook, Twitter, SMS Text, and Email. With Yelp integration, the app also includes business profiles for over 400 venues in Indianapolis. They intend to launch Squarejive version 1.0 on October 13th at the Broad Ripple Music Festival.

Modulus
Modulus helps developers spend less time configuring servers and more time building products. Modulus does this by providing a complete platform that companies can use to host and scale their internet-based applications. We add to that an integrated database and file storage solution, and wrap everything under a powerful statistics engine.

Visit Apps
Visit Apps empowers Convention & Visitors Bureaus (CVBs = tourism agencies) to harness the mobile channel to deeply engage their visitors. Visit Apps has built a proprietary platform that allows any CVB – from the quaintest of towns to a bustling metropolis – to have their own mobile app. Visit Apps is a SaaS startup in the explosively growing mobile sector (available in iPad, iPhone and Android devices). The Visit Apps team is led by Santiago Jaramillo (serial entrepreneur of University Storage & MyMusicCamp.com).

Diagnotes
In an effort to eliminate the problems associated with effective communication and care during on-call medical encounters, Diagnotes has developed an integrated software solution that provides critical information, secure communication and convenient documentation for healthcare providers via their smartphones, focusing initially on on-call physicians and the 50-100 million such patient encounters conducted annually in the US.

Tickets for PowderKeg are still available for $299 check the link below.

Linkage:

Get your tickets now for just $299 here for Powder Keg

Source: Verge Startups

Then, we’ll see you in February for this

Indiana Startup: CoatChex Turns Down $200,000 From Fellow IU Alum Mark Cuban To Kick Off Season 4 Of Shark Tank

Derek Pacque co-founder and CEO of CoatChex (photo: Ibj.com)

Indiana University Kelley School Of Business graduate Derek Pacque’ took his startup CoatChex in front of fellow Indiana University alum and ABC Shark Tank Shark (and Dallas Maverick’s Owner) Mark Cuban on the season premiere of Shark Tank Friday evening.

Pacque’ has a great concept. CoatChex is a system that uses pictures to match customers up with coat checked items. His current technology is boxed up in a device that’s about the size of a Verbatim credit card reader. Now, instead of using an old fashioned ticket redemption system for coat check, it’s done with technology where pictures of someone’s face are tied to their items. It’s safer, greener and easier to use.

Pacque’ explained that CoatChex isn’t just about coat checks though, it’s about any “bailment” system. Bailment is when you charge someone else with taking care of your stuff, like coat checks, valet parking,dry cleaning, baggage holding services and other similar services. Pacque holds a patent on using technology for these bailment businesses.

The 2012 graduate hasn’t sold anything yet, which was of course a complete turn off to Kevin “Mr. Wonderful” O’Leary. In the beginning of the segment, Cuban didn’t seem very interested in the fact Pacque’ hadn’t sold anything yet. Cuban called Pacque’s idea “horrible” over five times.

It looked like things were going to turn around though after Pacque explained that CoatChex wasn’t just about coats. Pacque went into the Shark Tank looking for $200,000 for 10% equity in his company, valuing it at $2 million dollars. O’Leary and FUBU founder Daymond John were the quickest out. Barbara Corcoran didn’t get the concept at all and bailed.

Robert Herjavic and Cuban stayed in the longest but both were concerned about the value. Herjavic asked Pacque for a new offer and wasn’t pleased when the entrepreneur changed his valuation to $1.5 million dollars. Herjavic bailed.

Cuban was still in and made Pacque an offer for $200,000 for 33% of the business. That’s where some may think Pacque’ went wrong. Pacque made a call to his professor and business partner who told him to tell Cuban no. Pacque’ told Cuban no. PacQue’ countered with 20% for $200,000. Cuban quickly said no.

Before he walked away though he kept telling Cuban that he wanted more experience before he pitched again.

While there’s a lot of drama in Shark Tank after all it’s a Mark Burnett reality tv show, however based on Cuban’s history with companies that he likes and the entrepreneur’s he likes I wouldn’t be surprised if Cuban turns around and invested CoatChex down the road.

Linkage:

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Video Interview With Indiana Startup Squad, Collaborative Code Editing

Imagine if Google Docs (or Drive whatever you want to call it) was all about developers and coding. Imagine if you could work on code projects easily and together from around the world. Then imagine if you could upload those projects to DropBox. Well with Indiana startup SquadEdit.com you can.

SquadEdit is like Google Docs for developers, except instead of working on papers, spreadsheets or presentations, you work on coding projects together.

With Squad you can have your coding project on several different “work spaces” and they have a plan for individuals and small groups, all the way up to 50 users. Everyone involved on the same Squad project can see everything updated and in real time. You can also create sub projects of projects. If one part of the team is working on one function and the other part of the team is working on a different function, each team member can see the task they’re working on and the entire community project.

This is one of those startups that is a great resource for other startups. Now you don’t have to have your developers in one room and you don’t have to take different conference calls, skype sessions and Google+ hangouts to make sure everyone is on the same page. As Squad CEO Hillary Cage explains in the video interview, it’s an all in one collaborative experience.

Oh and as for DropBox, you can save your Squad projects in DropBox and share them with others. Our West Coast editor Junaid Kalmadi got a chance to interview Cage at the The Innovation ShowCase in Indianapolis last month. Here’s that interview:

Linkage:

Check out Squad here at their website

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Indiana Startup: Volunteer Your Voice, So Easy A Congressman Could Do it VIDEO

An Indiana startup called Volunteer Your Voice has streamlined the phonebank process.

If you’ve ever had to execute a phone bank campaign you’ve probably experienced a long and tedious process. Most phone banks rely on volunteers which makes even finding out who’s helping a task in itself. After you’ve got your volunteers set up you have to set up the phone bank, print surveys and register the volunteers to the phone.

Then the next long step starts, which is training the volunteers on that particular banks mission, survey and goals. And then you wait…

Once the volunteers are done you tear down the phone bank, wait for results,and prepare reports.

Volunteeryourvoice.com has revolutionized this whole process from the top down. The biggest way they’ve changed the phone-bank industry is that you’ll use your own computer and headset and their built in telephony to actual make the calls. This saves the campaign huge amounts of money in overhead and means you can do the surveying from the comfort of your own home. If you have a PC headset and a high speed internet connection you’re ready to go and the quality is great.

If you don’t have a PC headset or a high speed internet connection you have the option of routing calls through your own personal phone, a landline or a cell phone/smartphone will work. The calls will be routed similar to the way Google Voice routes calls. This still insures that you can keep great data on the success of the campaign and that the people administering the campaign can still monitor your calls.

Volunteeryourvoice.com’s web based dashboard provides campaign administers easy access to real time reporting.

We got a chance to interview Jayson Manship the founder of volunteeryourvoice.com in the video interview below. He talks about their new SaaS platform and the industries that they serve. Naturally they are in the political space along with nonprofit surveys and alumni phonebanking for schools on pledge drives.

Check out this cool startup video:

Linkage:

Check out VolunteerYourVoice here

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Indianapolis Startup: Blab Bubble Is A DIY Platform For Pay Per Click Social Media Advertising INTERVIEW

If you haven’t noticed advertising is moving away from traditional online pay per click models of years past. Advertisers are reaching out to both mobile and social media channels for advertising.

Companies like Ad.ly,MyLikes and Sponsored Tweets allow individuals with good social media followings to capitalize on their tweets, likes and recommendations by offering cash based incentives. Blab Bubble is a new startup that’s coming into the same space with a new spin that may work out even better in the long run.

Blab Bubble spent a lot of time and money researching the market to find out where social media advertising is breaking down. They found two key areas that had the biggest pain points.

The first was that many advertisers felt that traditional social media advertising sites were too cumbersome when trying to create campaigns. The other area that needed improvement was in the startup and small business arena. Most social media advertising companies targeted big brands and enterprise. Of course, with that, they were pricing small businesses and startups out of the market.

Blab Bubble has created a simple, easy to use interface for businesses of any size to set up social media campaigns. The process takes just a few minutes and the campaign is off and running. Blab Bubble also offers very easy to understand pricing, how about $.40 per click no matter who you are.

We got a chance to interview BlabBubble to find out more about this Indianapolis startup and their spin on social media advertising.

We Talk With Matt Hunckler About Verge Indy And Verge Startup Events

Matt Hunckler made a name for himself while he was a student at IU in Bloomington Indiana. It was there that he made his first successful exit as an entrepreneur and founder, but he wanted more. He wanted more for himself and for the startup community in Indiana and with that he created Verge.

Verge is a community of tech entrepreneurs, startups, software developers, and investors that’s grown to over 1300 active members. They meet every last Thursday of the month, which Hunckler has affectionately renamed VergeDay.

With 1300 members though, Hunckler is hard pressed to find a place to hold an event with that many people where effective pitches, networking and discussions can go on, so he limits the size of the events to a couple hundreds. He pre-warns the membership the day before the tickets go on sale and they sell out quicker than One Direction tickets would sell out for a free show at an all girls middle school. The Verge events are that popular.

Hunckler is also selective about who attends the events. He keeps them open to the community which doesn’t let shiest SEO folks in or the guy who opened up the topless car wash down the road. There are plenty of other events in town for those guys.

Verge is all about growing the community and making sure that everyone knows each other. Verge is about creating synergy among Indiana’s startup scene.

Hunckler has also been instrumental in other events like startup weekends and innovation showcase. The innovation showcase is now in it’s fourth year and is a conference for fundable companies to present their business idea in the fields of IT,alternative energy,life sciences,medical devices and industrial products. This year’s showcase features 50 area companies and will be held on July 12,2012 at Developer Town/Speak Easy.

Just like Super Nick Hunckler has his hands in everything. Heck, he’s even the editor for the Indianapolis edition of the startup digest.

Check out our video interview with Hunckler below:

Links we’ve got em:

Verge Is Here

Here’s the page for the Innovation Showcase July 12

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We Talk With Matt Burris Founder Of Startup Weekend Crane In Indiana VIDEO

The Nibletz nationwide sneaker strapped startup roadtrip pulled up in Indianapolis Thursday to check out Verge Indy’s startup event. The event is held on the last Thursday every month and brings together a tremendous amount of people from Indianapolis and the surrounding areas’ startup and entrepreneurial tech scene.

We got a chance to meet Matt Burris who co-founded Startup Weekend Bloomington with Super Nick. Burris is a hardware and product guy that’s working on some awesomesauce in his top secret lab by day. By night Burris is a strong advocate and evangelist for the startup scene in both Indianapolis and Bloomington.

This October though, he’s headed to Crane Naval Base (well just outside of it) for one of the first Startup Weekend’s centered around a military base to date.

Burris already got his feet wet with the Bloomington event, now he’s able to focus on a truly unique Startup Weekend that he believes will produce a large number of hardware and product ideas vs the traditional mostly software and social media ideas that commonly come out of Startup Weekend events.

Check out our video interview with Burris below and check back with us in a little while to hear more about what Burris is working on at his company RT6:

Ahhh the Linkage:

Find out more about Startup Weekend Crane here at this link

Check out Matt’s daytime job where he is founder of RT6 here

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Bloomington Indiana Startup: CheddarGetter To Ring NYSE Closing Bell Today

The New York Stock Exchange has held a contest that’s got a lot of the startup world talking. They’re not giving away a million dollars, or magically making an IPO happen for the startup. The contest? Pick a startup to ring the closing bell.

The winner, a Bloomington Indiana startup called CheddarGetter, will ring the closing bell this afternoon.

CheddarGetter is a startup in the, not so glamorous, online billing space. CheddarGetter will stand alongside two other startups as they ring the bell together.

In an online video posted by CheddarGetter to garner support for their bell ringing conquest, Marketing Director Adam Quirk said:

“There’s a ton of cool tech going on here in Indiana, but you wouldn’t know it if you lived in New York. I lived there for seven years and never heard about an Indiana tech company. So we’d like to ring the opening bell to show that tech startups exist all over this country. There’s a lot of awesome stuff going on here in the Midwest, from Chicago, to Omaha, to Kansas City, to here in Bloomington, Indiana.”

CheddarGetters unique online billing platform has garnered some of the corn belt’s brightest graduates, who may have otherwise moved out of the state. They started as an in house billing solution for tech incubator SproutBox’s startups. Now they boast hundreds of clients in startups, SMB’s and larger business customers.

Congratulations to this startup from everywhere else, ring the bell and make the corn belt proud.

Linkage:

Find out more about CheddarGetter here

Source: InsideIndianaBusiness.com

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