Nashville Startup: OurVinyl’s Final Pitch From Jumpstart Foundry Demo Day VIDEO

Demo Day at Jumpstart Foundry was amazing. The class was great and miraculously every single team that presented had a working product. Of course that’s the goal behind every accelerator but we’ve been to quite a few accelerator demo days where that wasn’t the case.

So what is OurVinyl, no it’s not an online record shop for vinyl buffs. OurVinyl is actually a music video platform that encompasses the user and allows the user to curate their own channels, playlists and discovery new music. Where most music discovery startups focus on just the audio, OurVinyl is all about video.

OurVinyl has started with indie artists and other video content that you won’t find anywhere else on the web. The founders have backgrounds in video and it shows with the intuitive user experience created within OurVinyl.

The OurVinyl team has equated most of their best practices to Spotify rather than Pandora. Of course neither Spotify nor Pandora actually do video, they are both just audio only. OurVinyl is changing that by offering a streaming video platform accessible by Google TV, Apple TV, Xbox and Roku.

They have an easy to understand subscription model which guarantees you access to all of your favorite videos on the platform and customization features for your specific tastes. Many don’t realize that YouTube is one of the top places people go to source not just videos, or music videos but music itself. OurVinyl is capitalizing on that fact with their unique new platform.

In their pitch video from Jumpstart Foundry’s Demo Day, they explain exactly how the platform works and how they plan on monetizing it through advertising and subscription plans.

Another feature that’s rather new and baked into OurVinyl is not just the ability to like or not like songs and music videos themselves, but the advertising as well. After an ad unit plays you can tell OurVinyl whether you like ads like that or not. If you say “no” you won’t have to see the same ad again.

Check out their pitch video below:

Linkage:

Check out OurVinyl here at ourvinyl.tv

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New York Startup Jamplify Presents At Jumpstart Foundry Demo Day

What do you get when you take a bunch of good ole Goldman Sachs financial guys from New York and throw them into an accelerator in Nashville Tennessee? You get a social media, hybrid, promotional, crowdsourcing platform called Jamplify. Now at the first glance of the description I just gave them you may think we’re dealing with another Vooza, no that’s not the case at all.

Jamplify’s finished product, that’s actually available now (what a novel idea building an actual product at an accelerator), you get the most logical promotional vehicle for bands, musicians, and bloggers that’s available to date.

Jamplify crowdsources people for promoting the bands that they love. Rather than crowdsourcing for actual capital Jamplify is crowdsourcing for social capital and human capital, and then there’s the payoff.

Jamplify is like the kickstarter for fan based, crowd based musical promotion. As a fan of a band or a promotional ambassador you can agree to promote a band or musician. Based on your social graph and the amount of people that you actually touch with the campaigns short, trackable url you will become eligible for prizes from the band or artist you’re promoting.

The most interesting promotional “reward” or “perk” to date has been from a hip hop band where the artist actually recorded the outgoing voicemail message for that Jamplifier’s personal voice mail. Cool huh?

If you’re lost, you really shouldn’t be, but it would be great to check out the pitch video from JumpStart Foundry’s demo day in Nashville below:

Linkage:

Get Jamplifying today here

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Nashville Startup: The Skillery Pitches At Jumpstart Foundry Demo Day VIDEO

The Skillery CEO Matt Dudley pitching at Jumpstart Foundry demo day (photo nibletz llc)

Jumpstart Foundry demo day continues with the team from The Skillery. When their mentor introduced the team she talked about how CEO Matt Dudley started his entrepreneurial roots when he was just 7 years old and put up signs in his neighborhood advertising his services as a GhostBuster.

The Skillery in it’s simplest description is a platform to sell tickets to workshops. They are in the same space as Dabble and Skilshare but with a twist. Dudley and his team are specifically targeting small business owners who want to teach classes.

For instance, the local woman who owns a shop selling hemp and weaved products could start a class on The Skillery. Here in Nashville they’ve had teachers come out of the community that did whiskey tastings and even classes on the value of cotton diapering as opposed to disposable diapers. In fact the woman with the disposable diaper business saw 25-30 people come to her workshops that were listed and promoted on TheSkillery, and she was able to convert students to customers.

Dudley is charismatic and explained his pitch in a way that everyone in the room understood exactly what he was talking about but with the passion that would come with the next Instagram and not a learning platform. As for a learning platform, Dudley is quick to point out that The Skillery is not about online classes, it’s one of those startups that bridging the online world back with the real world, something that will be vital to the next wave a startups, according to the New York Times.

Check out Dudley’s pitch below:

Check out The Skillery here

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Nashville Startup Evermind Pitches At Jumpstart Foundry Demo Day VIDEO

Today marks the end of Tennessee demo day month with demo and investor day for Jumpstart Foundry in Nashville. Jumpstart Foundry is a nationally known startup accelerator currently based at the Entrepreneur Center in Nashville. They were recently recognized with an honorable mention in the 2012 national accelerator rankings, reported by TechCocktail just yesterday. This is the second year in a row Jumpstart Foundry has appeared as an honorable mention.

Evermind is a very unique new, “ambient monitoring” solution geared towards family members that care or are worried about the care of their elderly family members and loved ones.

Evermind is not nearly has obtrusive as many of their competing products. The founding team, who was part of the founding team at Griffin Technologies in Nashville, has approached this product with care and with always keeping both the end user and the consumer in mind, never losing site of that.

To that end, some of the things that immediately stood out to me with Evermind included:

– The non obtrusive design. The Evermind product looks sleek and it doesn’t look like a medical device
– The pricing is at $199 for three Evermind units
– easy to use website
– non obtrusive monitoring.

As for the way the system itself works, it’s simple. You plug an appliance that your elderly loved one uses everyday into an Evermind remote unit and every time your loved one uses that appliance it sends a message to the Evermind cloud and then to the loved ones phone. For instance if your grandpa John makes a cup of coffee at 7:30am every morning, you would plug the coffee maker into the Evermind unit and when he made his cup of coffee it would signal you. If he misses the cup of coffee you’re alerted, maybe there is something wrong. These remote plug devices can be set up on any small appliance, can openers, tvs, bedside lamps etc.

There is no need to worry about a life alert pendant or security cameras, it gives the elderly person privacy and the care giver, piece of mind.

Check out their pitch video at JumpStart Foundry video below:

Linkage:

Check out more Demo Day coverage here

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Check out Jumpstart Foundry at jumpstartfoundry.com

Nashville Startup: Zeumo Is A Productivity App For Teenagers INTERVIEW

Here are some startling facts about teenagers: 53% of teenagers would sacrifice their sense of smell before parting with their mobile phone. The average teenager spends 31 hours a week online. Only 29% of students believe high school offers a caring and encouraging environment. What if there was one startup out there that could help bring these facts to more desirable levels. Well there is.

Hal Cato is no stranger to teenagers and the lives they lead. Cato spent ten years as the CEO of the Oasis Center one of the nation’s leading youth serving organizations. During his tenure there he received multiple awards including the “National Agency of the Year” award from the National Network for Youth in 2008, and the “Best In Business Award” by the Nashville Business Journal in 2010. Now Cato has taken all of that experience and developed Zeumo a productivity app that miraculously touches every aspect of a teenagers life in a way that’s appealing to the teenager and fulfilling for their support system.

In 2012 two of the best ways to communicate to a teenager and actually have them hear you is through texting and social networks. Zeumo integrates those two features in a way that compliments their already available social networks and myriad of text messages. Zeumo also integrates schools, community based organizations, colleges and universities, businesses and the teenagers social world.

The app, which will be the must have app for teenagers when it launches in the fall, is filled with things that matter to teenagers and a UI/dashboard that’s easy to understand, filter and use.

We got a chance to talk with Cato in the interview below:

Are Your Outside Sales People Really Working? Nashville Startup: CallProof Can Tell You

Anyone who owns or runs a business with an outside sales force has undoubtedly experienced cheating sales people. You know the type, the ones who come in for the sales meetings, report that they’ve seen a bunch of clients and that none of them were interested in your services. For all you know they could have been sitting at Starbucks all day, running around doing personal errands or even worse, at home sleeping.

Business owners and operators with outside sales forces have probably tried a few CRM solutions, but even those can be ineffective. Sales people forget to update them, or they fudge their entries just to prove they’re doing a great job.

Not all sales people are bad, of course you know your top producers, they’re out there making sales.

A startup in Nashville aims to help those with outside sales forces. CallProof keeps call logs and appointment records and can allow a manager to monitor the progress of their sales people, even if they’re using their own phone (with permission of course). This way you can see if your sales people are making a bunch of one minute phone calls or they’re actually going through the sales process.

With CallProof you can also see if your sales people are making appointments. CallProof isn’t just about the underperforming or lazy sales people. Managers can use the data provided by CallProof to help coach their sales people as well.

Robert Hartline the CEO and Co-Founder of the Nashville based startup, created out of necessity. He was actually one of those managers managing an outside sales force for a wireless company. He created CallProof to make sure that sales people were doing the necessary activity to actually produce results.

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

Jumpstart Foundry Nashville Startup Rentstuff.com Moves To Chicago & Pivots Away From Core

Earlier this year we brought you an interview with Rentstuff co-founder Chris Yaeger. The Nashville startup had quickly rose to prominence in the peer to peer renting category, with the idea they cultivated as part of the JumpStart Foundry program.

With $600,000 raised to help them along the way the startup relocated to Chicago’s 1871 in July and debuted their Chicago based team at TechWeek earlier this summer.

Their original idea, had a lot of holes in it in terms of insurance to the renter, and market viability but the concept was rock solid. One user could rent that DSLR camera that sits in the closed for $30-$50 a day to their local neighbor and make a few bucks on the side. You may have even been able to go as far as to call the idea “AirBnB for Stuff”.

At last look you could find anything from tents and sleeping bags, to weed-eaters and iPads. While I admitted to a friend on the phone just the other night, I would never rent out my personal iPad, if there was a market for it, I may pick a used one up off Craigslist just to rent out on rentstuff.com.

While couchsurfing and AirBnB made it ok to crash at a complete strangers house or even on their couch, it seems that letting a complete stranger rent my crock pot, serving trays or video camera, wasn’t in the cards.

The company, now based in Chicago, has pivoted to a more mainstream, portal to connect folks with businesses in the “Rent To Own” industry like RentACenter and Aarons. Now, you go to rentstuff.com and you can fill out a form which lets you request rental quotes from local companies. You can attempt to rent anything from a limousine to a laptop, to a sofa, whatever you need you should be able to get it.

A note on the site tells you that letting a rental company call you can get the process done faster. Of course, bidding out your rental should also mean that you get better deals.

Call me crazy though, the original idea was much more innovative. In fact the crazy guys that produced the Wipple video below, used a leaf blower that they rented from the “rentstuff.com marketplace” to produce this video.

There is definitely a market for the new version of rentstuff, similar to the way that there is a market for the pivoted SpareFoot.com which we covered earlier this month.

Linkage:

Check out rentstuff.com new site here

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Nashville Startup: InQuicker Gets You In The ER, Well Quicker, INTERVIEW

If it’s the weekend and you break your arm, or your toe, perhaps your nose or have some semi-emergency that requires you visit the ER but isn’t life threatening than I’m sure you’ve experienced the extremely long wait time that is the ER waiting room. Whatever the reason you’re in the ER, I’m sure you’re experiencing some kind of discomfort and ER waiting rooms are far from comfortable. What if you could use a web app to speed up the ER waiting process.

Well Nashville startup InQuicker is here to help. InQuicker is an online waiting room. In conjunction with their hospital partners someone who needs the emergency room services and is not in a life threatening emergency can sign in at the InQuicker online waiting room. InQuicker gives the patient a projected wait time. When the patient arrives at the hospital or clinic they are greeted by a healthcare provider.

InQuicker reports that eight out of ten patients that use InQuicker get seen within ten to fifteen minutes of the time they arrive. For just a rough idea on the value of InQuicker, they recently ran a study with their ER partners and found that patients can wait up to 208 minutes to get into the ER to see a doctor. That’s a lot of time you could be nursing your injury or ailment in the comfort of your own home.

InQuicker is very beneficial in the emergency room, but they also work with doctors offices as well.

We got a chance to interview InQuicker. Check out that interview below:

Nashville Startup: ClockOut Gamifying Taking Off From Work, Small Business Will Love This

The Startup Weekend Memphis team has taken a few solo entrepreneur projects and given them a spot to present in tomorrow’s finals for $1000 a piece. One of those solo entrepreneurs Brandon Heller from Long Island NY by way of Nashville.

Heller is working on ClockOut. When pitched Friday night it was a simple app to take the process of asking off a shift at work and making it social. Through the ClockOut app smaller restaurants, franchisees, bars and small businesses, with shift type work, would have the ability to let their employees take ownership of swapping shifts.

With the app, integrated through Facebook, two employees could swap shifts, or get a shift covered, have a historic log of it on a private Facebook network, and then inform the manager. This way the manager knows the shift is covered, and everything goes on like a well oiled machine.

To take any need for fees away from the small business Heller also decided (with the help of one of the Startup Weekend coaches) to ganmify the process. Now employee A who needs a shift covered pays $5.00 to ClockOut. ClockOut holds onto the $5.00 less their fee. Now employee B who picks up the shift gets a point for every shift they covered. When employee B has covered 10 shifts they get all the remaining money in that pot of $5.00 payments.

For some shift workers $5.00 may be a little steep but it also may be worth it for whatever reason they are calling out. The $5.00 shift covering game encourages people to pick up shifts, knowing that when they’ve covered enough shifts they’ll get the money they earned plus an incentive from ClockOut.

Definitely an interesting concept. Check out the initial pitch video from Friday below:

Linkage:

Check out more from Startup Weekend here

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Nashville Startup Populr.Me Could Be A Game Changer

Tennessee has some great startups. We saw a slew of them this past weekend during 48 Hour Launch, you can check out all of that coverage here. Now we move our coverage of startups “everywhere else” east to Nashville.

There’s a startup in Nashville called Populr.me which is bubbling under the radar. Populr.me is a self publishing platform that the company dubs a “Personalized One Page” or pop. They were aiming for a Q1 release, right now they are currently doing a beta sign up on their home page.

From what we can tell Populr.me’s POP platform has a variety of uses. You can use it for your resume and include multimedia. On the other end of that spectrum, companies can use it to build a one page for welcoming new employees, or a flier page for talking about a company event.

The company’s motto is “Richer than email and Faster than a website”. While there are plenty of self publishing platforms, Populr.me seems to offer simplicity and quickness as their top selling points. There isn’t a service out there that allows for this quick, one page publishing. Sure you can set up a Blogger blog or Word Press blog in just a few minutes but you have to fidget with themes, produce content, figure out what plugins you want for multimedia and then you can publish.

The Nashville based startup was founded by CEO Nicholas Holland and the rest of the team includes Jared Scheel (Chief Product Officer) and Daniel Nelson (Chief Technology Officer). A couple of weeks back the company tweeted that someone in their beta test had embedded a Starbucks gift card, pretty neat stuff.

Some folks around the web have compared Populr.me to popular site about.me. I think the concepts are inherently different. About.me is my one online destination site to link all my links in the world. Of course it can include my resume and other things, but it’s not the same. Populr.me is going to allow the user to make a resume page, or maybe a birthday party page, an invitation, all kinds of other easy to use tasks.

Nashville music and technology entrepreneur Mark Montgomery, is an investor in Populr.me because he feels that the service could be “a game changing venture that could boost Nashville’s position on the digital map” that according to Getahn Ward at the Tennessean.

Linkage:

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Nashville Startup: Interview With Rentstuff CEO Chris Jaeger

If you’ve got nice stuff that sits around a bit you can make money by renting. Say you have a mountain bike that you never use or perhaps a lawnmower that only gets a work out very two weeks? Well with rentstuff.com, a Nashville startup, your stuff can make money for you.

Rentstuff.com is a localized marketplace set up to help local people rent stuff to each other. Everything from dome tents to Dyson vacuum cleaners can be found for rent on rentstuff.com at a decent rate. The site even offers a quick calculator to show you an idea of what your stuff should rent for by the day.

The company protects your stuff by allowing you to charge a security deposit that puts the deposit amount on an authorization hold on the renters credit card. Provided everything goes well, the user gets their stuff back and the renter gets their deposit back. Rentstuff also has a community feedback system for renters and users. This way the renter knows that the person renting the property is trusted and vice versa.

We got a chance to interview the CEO of Rent Stuff, Chris Jaeger.

Who are the founders for rentstuff.com and what is your/are their backgrounds before starting rentstuff.com?

I founded RentStuff.com back in January 2010 along with my twin brother Robert Jaege (COO) and Adam Albright (CTO). Prior to starting the company, Robert and I were both working in Finance in New York City, and Adam was completing the first year of his MBA at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. Robert and I connected with Adam through mutual friends.

How did you come up with the idea because it’s brilliant?

Robert and I came up with the initial concept back in 2008. We were both frustrated after spending countless hours trying to track down kayaks and bikes to rent for weekend trips from small rental shops all over New York City. At the time, we were both living in a high rise building and knew there was a good chance that someone in our building or at least in our neighborhood had what we needed. However, there was no organized system to easily connect people who had stuff with people who wanted access to that stuff on a temporary basis. Our company solves the need to connect renters and lenders in a better way.

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Nashville Startup: Taigan Lets You Shop The World From The Comfort Of Your Own Home

The days of wandering the halls of a mall in search for rare shops with cool, exquisite, beautiful things are long gone. It’s rare that you find an independent shop keeper who is willing to put in the overhead it costs to be in the nicer malls typically anchored with a Nordstrom, Neimans, Bloomingdales or Crate and Barrel. Boutique shops can be found on the strips of the more popular touristy towns but more often than not you find yourself paying 2 to 3 times more than you should because of the address.

If you’re one of those people that enjoys shopping boutiques and loves a good treasure hunt at a store off the beaten path, then you need to pay attention to Taigan and how they let you shop the world from your computer chair, or smartphone.

Taigan is like an online mall comprised of boutiques and individually owned shops. Maybe you’ve shopped at a handmade jewelry store nestled into a backstreet in Georgetown. Perhaps you found nice cashmere sweaters and artisan designer clothes at a shop on Main street in middle America. Those kinds of stores and more are curated and then added to the wide array of merchants you can find at Taigan.com

As you will find out in our interview with Taigan’s CEO Elizabeth Nichols, this unique, well curated online community of shops is the brain child of Mary Catherine McLellan and Mark McDonald. Nichols was a hired CEO who had built her own shopping center development company from start to going public. In our interview Nichols highlights how Taigan is uniquely different and an amazing experience.

The other thing that sets Taigan apart from anything even remotely similar is that they vet all of their merchants, you can’t just sign up and have a store front at Taigan. The Taigan team travels around the country, and the world to see the merchants using their service. If they can’t get to a merchant they require a chance to review the products in hand to make sure that they are good quality and that the merchant isn’t fly by night.

One other thing we will touch on in the interview is how when we began working on this story I noticed that while the items in the merchant stores may be on the high end of the quality scale, the Taigan team isn’t snobby or snooty and just about everyone feels like they belong at Taigan and can find something they like using Taigan.

Interview after the break
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Nashville Startup: Justapinch Wins Two Big Honors; Validates Series A Round

Justapinch, is a Nashville startup in the coveted recipe space. Although it may seem it’s the average recipe repository, they do boast the largest online collection of user submitted recipes in the world. In fact they have over 90,000 recipes available on the site.

Justapinch is a subsidiary of two year old American Hometown Media. As the company name suggests they like to build communities, like justapinch, that focus on user submitted content. That’s been a recipe for success so far for AHM and it’s CEO Dan Hammond (you see what we did there?).

How successful has AHM and justapinch been? Well they were recently named one of Nashville’s 25 most innovative technology companies by the Nashville Post. While that’s an honor in itself, Hammond was named Nashville’s Entrepreneur of the Year by both the Nashville Post and the Nashville City Paper.

Just five months ago the social media startup received a series A round of 4 million dollars. Nashville Capital Network’s Tennessee Angel Fund and affiliated angels, Tennessee Community Ventures, Limestone Fund, and Solidus Company participated in the round.

“The site’s fast growth, engaged user base and proprietary programming were key factors for our group’s investment decision,” says Sid Chambless, Executive Director of Nashville Capital Network. “We were also drawn to the strong management team and their successful track record in previous business ventures. These recent awards only reaffirm our group’s decision to support Just A Pinch.”

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