Gui.de Relaunches to Bring Video to Publishers Great and Small

There are good media pitches. I get them every day, and I love engaging with companies who are innovative and smart.

And then, there are GREAT media pitches that have me clicking reply right away.

Serial entrepreneur Freddie Laker, Jr is a master at pitching the media. When he contacted me about his startup Gui.de, I laughed, I clicked through, and I replied. Now, I’m writing the article.

Gui.de has already been working in the text-to-video space since 2012. The original product was consumer-focused, using virtualized avatars to read the news of the day. Unfortunately, they had a problem. The avatars were–well–creepy.

“It was fun, but extremely polarizing,” Laker told me. “People that hated it really hated it. One friend said the avatars would haunt his dreams. It’s some kind of psychological thing that people hated the avatars.”

Seeing as how they weren’t in the scaring business, Laker realized they needed a pivot. So last week, they relaunched with a product aimed at publishers instead of consumers.

The problem with producing good video rarely lies in the shooting or even editing. Rather, it’s incredibly time consuming to research and pull all of the pictures, maps, and other images from the Internet to accompany the story. Guide automates that process, using access to creative commons materials to tell a visual story. The product works well for fact-based content, but by Laker’s admission struggles with local or abstract articles.

Guide does still use computer voices for the free model of the product, but publishers can also add human voiceover, eliminating the creepy avatar problem of the earlier product.

Guide is based in Miami, but Laker was in New York when I talked to him, “shaking his tin cup,” as he says. I couldn’t help but ask, “Why not just base the company in New York?” The city is the home to the many, many publishers, and it seems the investment community would be easier to access.

Laker’s answer surprised me. “Talent.”

In his years in Miami, Laker has found and recruited the best tech talent in the city. While many entrepreneurs everywhere else struggle to find good tech talent, Laker shrugged off that suggestion.

“The best way to attract A-list talen,” he told me, “is to challenge them.”

Guide videos, while looking simple, are complex systems of programming that coordinate images, natural language processes, and editing. It’s enough to keep his developers busy for awhile, he says.

The new Gui.de product launched last Monday, and when Laker and I spoke on Friday, he said there were already 400 publishers using the platform. 30 of those had converted to full paying customers.

Some of those publishers are big, but Laker really sees opportunities for his product with smaller publishers who may not have the money for video departments. While the Internet initially democratized journalism, he says the growth of video gives bigger publications more of an advantage.

Gui.de, he says, can re-democratize digital journalism.

The company has already raised $1.5 million from investors like the Knight Foundation, Omar Epps, and Laker’s former employer Sapient.

Knight Foundation Refreshes Miami Startup Community With $150K For Refresh Miami

Refresh Miami, an organization that supports startups and entrepreneurship in Miami, has been connecting entrepreneurs to each other, growth capital, and resources since 2005, since before it was “cool”. The 5,000 member organization has held over 1000 events since it’s inception 8 years ago, according to Florida Technology Journal.

Now the organization is the recipient of $150,000 from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Knight Foundation is a philantrhopic cousin to the Knight Ridder newspaper family. They often support startups and startup communities, especially in the areas of media.

That’s where this funding will come in handy. Refresh Miami is looking to revamp its web offerings by generating more content for entrepreneurs, founders, and investors. They’re also looking to connect their user base to a an event calendar, job listings, and even member profiles.

“Its great to be a part of the growing climate for innovation in Miami, and we hope to contribute more with this support from the Knight Foundation,” said Brian Breslin, Refresh Miami founder and co-director.

“Through this expansion Refresh can continue on its mission of growing and refreshing the technology and entrepreneurial community in the city,” said Peter Martinez, Refresh Miami co-director.

“Miami’s start-up ecosystem continues to gain momentum, but people need the right connections and a central place for ways to learn and engage in the community,” said Matt Haggman, Miami program director for Knight Foundation. “Refresh Miami will fill this gap by providing entrepreneurs with the opportunities they need to build their ideas and inspire others to participate.”

Find out more about Refresh Miami.

Miami Startup Geopon Prefers “Mobile Advertising” Over Coupons, Loyalty & Rewards

While we were at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013, we got a chance to talk with Ido Meos, co-founder of Miami startup Geopon. As he explains it, Geopon is a mobile advertising platform, not to be confused with coupons, loyalty and rewards.

Obviously loyalty & rewards is the cramped up space this year, along with anything social, local and mobile. Meros says that Geopon, which offers mobile coupons, offers, and reward based digital punchcards, is actually a lot different. According to him, Geopon’s edge is that they are serving up menus for restaurants when they give away a restaurant coupon. When they have an offer or a loyalty deal with a movie theater, they also deliver the latest showings.

So Geopon is an all in one shop for merchants. They are able to create mobile advertising campaigns based on which engagement platform they, and the merchant feel, are the best to reach their customer base.

They also try and touch the users at least twice from every engagement. They want to give out a coupon to get a customer in the door and then help the merchant retain the customer through loyalty/reward based incentives.

Each of the individual spaces are pretty crowded, but providing a one stop destination for local businesses to try various programs could prove profitable for Geopon.

Check out our video below and for more information visit geopon.com

Check out over 30 more startup stories from TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013.

Juan DotCo Takes A Break From His Birthday Party To Talk To Nibletz [SXSW]

Several people lay claim to being “Mr. DotCom”. Of course there’s Mega Upload founder Kim DotCom who reportedly, legally changed his last name to DotCom, then there’s former Vice President Al Gore, who some still believe invented the internet.

One thing’s for sure though, and that is that Juan Diego Calle, is Mr.DotCo. As the founder and CEO of .co, it was his vision that turned an old country top level domain into the top level domain that’s being used by startups and their support organizations across the country. In fact we use a .co for our annual conference and conference series, “everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference”.

On Friday at SXSW 2013, Calle celebrated his birthday with about 100 of his closest startup friends at a luncheon held at the Capital Factory. The celebration continued late into the night at Pete’s Piano Bar, where Calle was a great sport as the piano players roasted him.

Calle celebrates his birthday with entrepreneurs, founders and Startup America by being roasted at Pete’s Dueling Piano Bar at SXSW

.co is actually the ccTLD for Colombia. Through a unique partnership and licensing agreement with Colombia, .co the company has become the official registrant for sites ending in .co. There are over 1 million domain names registered as .co and some of the biggest brands in the world, took advantage of single letter domains that .co had to offer. Of course there were only 26 of them and 9 of them are gone.

Google (g.c0), Twitter (t.co), Startup America (s.co) and Overstock.com (o.co) are just a few of the companies that have taken advantage of the single letter domain.

Calle is no stranger to entrepreneurship. The native of Colombia, grew up in a family of entrepreneurs in the beer and wine distribution business. When Calle was 15 though, his parents had him, his brother and his sister move to the United States for safety, while his family stayed back and ran the family business. He and his siblings’ first entrepreneurial roots came in the form of a car stereo installation company.

At age 22 he went for his first internet startup, a hybrid between goto.com and Askjeeves. That company succumbed to the internet bubble burst, but that didn’t deter Calle from continuing as an entrepreneur, and keeping the servers on at the company, TeRespondo. He eventually sold that company to Yahoo in 2005.

As for .co, before launching the registration company that is now known as .co, Calle commissioned a research study of the top level domain .co. 80% of the respondents thought that .co was short for company and 3% knew it stood for Colombia. The country Colombia soon realized there was opportunity to be had with the .co domain name but didn’t have the know how to execute a plan. Calle did, and he responded by providing an outline for all the problems that the country we need to overcome to start making money off the TLD.

“In addition to having very strict registration requirements, an ill-conceived effort to protect the country’s identity on the Internet resulted in the extension existing only in the third-level (for example, .com.co) prior to our administration,” Calle said. “It was also the reason why Colombia, the 30th largest economy in the world, with a population of 40 million, had only 28,000 .com.co domains registered as of February 6th, 2010. There were 4 times more .coms registered by Colombians than .com.co’s! If anything, the effort to protect the country’s internet identity through restrictive policy, was in fact killing it.” Calle said to dn journal in 2010

Calle ended up bidding on the administrative rights for the .co TLD and through a joint venture with Neustar Inc .co the company was born. With the partnership in place Calle declared “Colombia is now a player on the internet”.

Calle is still operating as a startup. His small team is based in Miami where they handle the administration duties of the domain extension. They are also deeply entrenched in the startup scene. They quickly realized that .co was becoming a preferred extension of startups. They also entered into a partnership as a major sponsor of Startup America. Startup America’s website is s.co.

As an entrepreneur himself Calle gets excited talking with and hanging out with other entrepreneurs, which is why his entire birthday was spent doing just that.

He took a break from his luncheon festivities to talk with us in the video interview below. For more information on .co visit go.co

We’ve got more sxsw stories here, a LOT more.

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Miami Startup SocialTyer: It’s What Happens After KickStarter

Kickstarter has become quite the phenomena as of late. Over $319 million dollars was pledged using the crowdfunding platform, across a myriad of products. After a company gets funded on KickStarter, what happens next?

Companies that reach their funding goals begin shipping their products. Those that have received a lot of traction may quickly land distribution deals, but those that don’t may have a hard time kickstarting again after their crowdfunding campaign.

That’s where Miami startup SocialTyer comes in.

“SocialTyer is a social-commerce website that helps entrepreneurs sell their early-stage products with the help of the powerful social media community. Inspired by the recent success of crowdfunding, we wanted to offer a way for entrepreneurs to make a direct impact immediately after getting funded for production. Apart from spending thousands of dollars on traditional marketing or getting absolutely ripped-off by wholesaling away, there aren’t many ways to do so in a fast and efficient way. . To do so, we came up with the idea of empowering the social media community and offering them the opportunity to become modern-day salesmen: they introduce these products to their network and get commissioned when a sale occurs. Entrepreneurs trusting our service pay us absolutely nothing to sign up and don’t have to worry about that until we actually create a sale for them.” Jonathan Gosper, co-founder of Social Tyer told nibletz.com in an interview.

Gosper, along with co-founder Girish Alwani, met at the University of Miami. Both young men come from vastly different international backgrounds. Jonathan grew up in France and was introduced to the entrepreneurial world after co-founding hi-tech luxury brand Colibri. His occasional struggles to market his products and the study of advertising greatly inspired him to come up with SocialTyer’s concept. Girish grew up in the Caribbean and studied finance. His belief that everyone should get a chance to be a micro-entrepreneur has fingerprints all over SocialTyer.

So far, spreading the word and communicating the idea behind SocialTyer has been the biggest challenge for Gosper and Alwani. The idea has started picking up steam after being in stealth mode for over six months. ” We had numbered goals for entrepreneurs to contact and sign up for beta listing, beta sign up requests and a people joining our social media accounts. Although some thought we were being too optimistic in our projections and goals, those milestones were all reached with 1/3 of the time we allowed us.” Gosper said in regards to their traction.

They hope to launch the full website atsocialtyer.com next month. Until then you can keep up with SocialTyer on AngelList.

The nibletz and everywhereelse.co team is doing a little crowdfunding of our own, more here on how you can help us on the sneaker strapped nationwide startup road trip part deux.

California Startup: RaffleForGood, A New, Easy To Use, Raffling Platform

As the holiday season continues we will continue profiling as many social entrepreneurs and their startups as we can. Greg Hoffman and Ben Daniel are two of those entrepreneurs. Their California startup, RaffleForGood, is exactly what the name suggests, a raffle platform to do some good.

With the rise in use of the internet businesses big, small, for profit and non profit want to use the internets vast reach to offer prizes in raffles to raise money for charity. The problem is, that posting a product on the internet, and raffling it off isn’t just time consuming, but there are mountains of legal red tape that prevent companies from raffling things off at their own whim.

RaffleForGood handles all of that for their users. They’ve simplified the raffling system down to just about listing a prize and starting the raffle.

“Basically, Raffle For Good is an online fundraising platform for organizations to raise money through an interactive, skill-based raffle system. Companies donate items to causes they support. The causes then list the items on their personal Raffleforgood.com subdomain, at which point they direct their supporters to purchase tickets. It’s a fun reinvention of the raffle designed to make online fundraising more effective, engaging, and exciting, for all parties involved.” Hoffman told us in an interview.

Check out the rest of our interview with Hoffman 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

Incubate Miami Startup: iCare Intelligence Optimizing Patient Information

iCare Intelligence, a highly promising innovative software company coming from Incubate Miami’s 2012 Class, is on the path to become one of the most important Health Care related startups emerging from South Florida in recent years. This is due to the magnitude of the problems it solves and the caliber of the team at its helm.

iCare intelligence is a data analytics and workflow collaboration cloud-based platform. The software increases the accuracy of the patient information while it changes hands between the government, insurance companies, and the doctors. The system optimizes profits and minimizes inefficiencies for every party involved in the health care value chain. iCare Intelligence data analytics work in coordination with Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems, feeding key data to health care practitioners. The brainchild of iCare Intelligence is industry veteran John Suarez, with 11 years of domain expertise in the health care sector across the functional areas of information systems and operations.

John Suarez explains from his Incubate Miami workstation: “There is an estimated 10-20% loss of revenue for both insurance companies and doctors due to inaccurate patient information. The current structure depends on human intervention and many important pieces of information are being lost along the way. Our platform brings real time data into this complex and fragmented exchange of information, to provide insurance companies with proactive solutions to costly compliance errors. This thereby maximizes insurance company payouts and reduces their level of risk. As the entire fee for the service is paid for by the insurance companies and management service organizations, doctors will receive the benefits of the platform free of charge”.

Continue reading at Startropica.com

Linkage:

More Miami startup coverage from Startropica & Nibletz

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Miami Startup: Clearci Simplifies Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence, a critical part of corporate strategy, and also one of the most misunderstood, has evolved tremendously since it was officially inaugurated in the mid 80’s. Now,clearCi, a company based out of Fort Lauderdale, FL, arrived to transform it by making information simpler and more accessible than ever. The practice, innocently confused by many as ‘spying’, consists of collection, classification and distribution of information about the competition in order to facilitate better strategic decisions.

The Internet changed the form in which secondary intelligence was collected since instead of retrieving it from supermarket aisles, pamphlets, books, and TV commercials, now it’s available online, and for the most part, what Competitive Intelligence (CI) professionals need to do is surf the Internet to gather information from numerous websites; still a time consuming proposition. Recently, with the evolution of search crawlers, some companies simplified the task, but now clearCi is making a big push by simplifying the process to unprecedented levels thanks to patent-pending algorithms and technology.

When asked to explain what the cloud-based SaaS platform does Co-Founder Joe Levy is reluctant to offer complicated explanations, rightfully using one sentence: “We offer software tools that help you keep track of your competition.” How so? The marketing team breaks it down further by saying that the technology works as an automated CI informant hired to monitor any competitor webpage or data source related to products, industries, markets, customers, vendors and even key partners. The tool cuts through the clutter caused by Big Data, and only relevant information is gathered and stored into an online portal that organizes data into channels, sharable folders, and reports, making data more manageable across an entire footprint.

Continue reading at our partner site Startropica.com

Meet The Founders Of Miami Startup: CloudShopper

This story originally appeared on our content partner site StarTropica.com

“We didn’t set out to do a Startup we’re doing a Business”, Ulises Orozco, co-founder ofCloudShopper, a free shopping comparison add-on already popular in the market place told me when our conversation turned a little too much into startup blabber as if wanting to draw the line between the social and fashionable side of “having a startup” and the simple execution of a business plan.

Simple it is, and also lean. So lean it only appears in your browser at the exact time that you need it, nothing more nothing less. Unlike most existing browser add-ons CloudShopper is invisible and it only pops up when you search for a specific product in a shopping portal offering you price comparisons of the exact same item in other websites, so that you can choose the lower one. One click and you are off to see it, and very probably buy it.

It’s sleek, non-intrusive, efficient, and accurate, no longer it has amassed 17,000 downloads in almost a year with very limited advertising; as big as that number is it’s not even near to what their goal is, they actually need much more than that to really start seeing the kind of return they are expecting, that’s why they are conquering every browser platform in the market. It is already available in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Explorer, and Opera, and they are soon releasing the iPhone app.

What’s so amazing about CloudShopper is how simple it is for the user but how complicated it is to implement on the back-end. The add-on is available in 2,500 e-commerce websites from Amazon and Wal-Mart, to Sears and Target, you name it, and they are there. This implied setting up connections with many of those portals through their APIs, but at the same time making a different piece of software for each of the existing Browsers to then bring it all together under a clean user interface. And they did it all in just under a year of work.

Continue reading at our partner site StarTropica

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Miami Startup: Sumpto It’s Like Klout For College Students, But Better INTERVIEW

Klout is still a big mystery to most, how do you get those crazy Klout scores. If you know how it’s really calculated feel free to send me an email. Klout Perks is a great program that puts manufacturers products into peoples hands. They presumably want the cream of the crop when it comes to Klout, but we have no idea who that really is.

Sumpto is looking to do something along those lines when they launch next week. They’re going to match products to college students with influential social graphs. Sumpto will rank a college students social clout (with a c not a k) and then link manufacturers with college brand ambassadors who can presumably get the word about those products out to the masses.

Manufacturers love it when they can get exposed to people with real influence. Ranking that influence can be a challenge but Sumpto’s Founder and President Ben Kosinski seems to have figured out the magic formula. Yes, Sumpto’s partners will most likely reach the hands of the right people.

The college demographic is a hard one to crack, with free stuff though it may be easier. When you add the free stuff to an exclusive layer of folks, your destined to gain exposure down the lines to the masses. That’s exactly what Sumpto is going to do.

We got a chance to interview Kosinski check out the interview below:

Miami Startup: CleanTie Makes Laundry A Cinch

A new startup in Miami is looking to take the pain away from laundry. Forget making time in your busy schedule to take your laundry to the laundromat, and forget having to fold baskets of clothes. CleanTie, a new startup in Miami has taken laundry referral to the web.

That’s not all though, CleanTie will help you find a laundry service that picks up and delivers from your home. That means you can make your laundry appointment wearing that last clean pair of boxers, from your iPad or laptop. CleanTie is adding to the growing list of services that have been able to generate business via the internet.

CleanTie is all about convenience for the customer. The search engine part of the site matches you with your closest laundry service and then you can drill down to the one you want to use from the available laundry services that pick up and deliver from either your home or office. Some of the laundry services even offer same day service.

“This is a great way for brick and mortar laundry services to reach an untapped market of busy people searching the internet for help with their laundry. Better yet, they can take advantage of the CleanTie marketing platform, without spending money or time on internet marketing themselves.” said Blair Nastasi PR Director at CleanTie.

The new startup reports that they plan on running tv commercials in their first market, of course Miami. They are also working on an official mobile app which will allow you to easily schedule your laundry pick up and delivery from your smartphone.

Linkage:

Check out CleanTie here

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Interview With Miami Startup: PitchShark A Social Network For Launching Film Projects

Social networks are a staple in just about everyone’s daily lives. In the Facebook generation it feels like everyone who has any kind of internet access is online and part of some kind of social network. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ have a strangle hold on mainstream social network needs. LinkedIn has the business sector covered, but now social networks are emerging for specific industries.

We’ve reported on Memphis based “Work For Pie” which is a social network/linked In of sorts for developers, there are social networks for real estate agents and now a social network for those working on films.

When we first heard about Miami startup PitchShark we weren’t exactly clear on the need for a social network, where did the real problem lay? Well co-founder Justin Perez talked with us in the interview below and there are a ton of reasons that PitchShark makes sense.

For instance, casting an indie film or a film not sanctioned by one of the major studios, can be a long and painstaking process. Perez explains in the interview that it’s not just about casting either. There are other resources that film producers need in order to get the project off the ground.

Check out the interview below:

Miami Startup: Senzari Raises $1 Million Dollars For Global Expansion

Miami music startup Senzari has just raised $1 million dollars for global expansion.

Leading the round was Dave McClure’s 500 startups. Other investors from both Miami and Silicon Valley also participated in the round for this unique global music service.

Move over Pandora, Senzari has over 11 million songs (compared to Pandora’s 900,000) and the best part is that it is available outside of the United States. The service is available in the United States as well as Spain (in a partnership with MTV) and Brazil (in a partnership with VH1).

Aside from it’s gigantic catalog of songs Senzari separates itself form other on demand listening services like Pandora, Spotify and Slacker Radio by partnering with music distributors instead of the record labels directly. Some of their partners include SoundExchange, and publishing companies ASCAP, BMI, and SEASAC.

“We are excited about joining the 500 family as it allows us to leverage its impressive mentor network and global relationships,” says Senzari COO Demian Bellumio to techcrunch.com. “As a matter of fact, we created a special section in Senzari with radios for each of the stops of the tour with music that represent current and classic hits.”

Senzari also offers a proximity based service called “Around Me” that allows users to use social media data to find songs that people in close proximity to them are listening to, very similar to Berlin startup wahwah.com

Linkage:

Check out Senzari for yourself here

Source: TechCrunch

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