Omaha’s Straight Shot Accelerator & First National Bank Of Omaha Holding Code One Hackathon

CodeOne, First National Bank of Omaha, Straight Shot, Hackathon, Startups, Nebraska Startup, Code CrushOmaha’s new accelerator, backed by Dundee Venture Capital, Straight Shot, is making waves in Silicon Prairie. The cohort based accelerator, led by Faith Larson, is taking a big city approach to their accelerator class. Larson and her team have provided an intense amount of mentoring activities, speakers and networking events to make sure their teams are more than ready come demo day.

They’ve also taken a firm position in Omaha’s rapidly growing tech community. Their latest effort is a hackathon happening next weekend called CodeOne.

When Straight Shot partner First National Bank of Omaha decided that they wanted to see some new ideas and technology for their online web platform they turned to the team at Straight Shot. Together they decided to host a hackathon and engage the tech community to help with the banks platform.

The hackathon starts next Friday afternoon and runs through Sunday. Food, drinks, and plenty of caffeine will be supplied to the registrants. The bank is transforming their WinterGarden employee cafe space into a collaborative workspace for all of the hackers

Hackathons like this have created a stir in startup communities in the past. Perhaps most notably was Nashville’s “Code Crush” event. Some hackers are leery of corporations backing a hackathon for the sole purpose of developing their companies technology.

To that end First National Bank of Omaha has been a great partner to the Omaha tech and entrepreneurial community. Not only that but they are giving away $13,000 in cash for the top three teams. First prize is $10,000 cash. Second prize is $2,000 cash and third prize is $1,000 cash.

Throughout the weekend event First National Bank of Omaha will also be looking for potential candidates for their internship program which could lead to employment with the bank down the road. They’ve also made it quite clear developers will be developing for the First National Bank platform. I also hear that the food will be great, we’re not talking just chips,soda and pizza.

It’s looking like CodeOne will be an amazing event for developers, designers, coders and hackers. You still have a few days left to register and if you’re confident your three person team can knock it out of the ball park there could be some money in it for you as well.

Here’s a link to registration.

While you’re at it don’t forget to register for Everywhere Else Cincinnati, the huge national startup conference is just two weeks away. Dundee Capital’s Mark Hasebroock is one of our 30 top notch startup speakers.

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5 Startups Get In Motion At NMotion Demo Day

Nmotion, Startup Acclerator, Demo Day, Nebraska Startup

There’s so much talk about startup accelerators. We report on a lot of accelerators, with an emphasis on the ones accelerating companies outside Silicon Valley. NMotion is one of those accelerators. I spent a bit of time talking with NMotion’s managing director, Brian Ardinger, throughout the course of the program. I also did a mentor session with the five companies in the program about a week before demo day.

Ardinger is one of those accelerator directors that knows the most valuable lesson already: Demo Day isn’t the end for the startups, it’s the beginning.

“When we invest in companies, we help them for life, not just for the summer,” it says on NMotion’s website. On the surface Ardinger is a tech-transfer guy. As the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at NuTech Ventures, Ardinger oversees the crossover from the University of Nebraska and the private sector. However, NMotion was by no means a “student program.”

Each NMotion team received a seed investment of $15,000 which is par for the course for a city Lincoln’s size. The teams also received over $100,000 in important business services and access to a mentor network, which Ardinger stresses doesn’t go away on demo day.

HipPocket, PaperTale, Cinnamon Social, SynserScan, and Alumni Labs worked around the clock as hard, if not harder, than startups at some of the most prestigious Valley accelerators. When the time came on Thursday afternoon, they were ready to show off their summer’s work in front of a crowd of nearly 200 (not too shabby for an inaugural cohort in Lincoln, Nebraska).

Cinnamon Social is a software for automated and intelligent social media content curation led by husband-and-wife founders Jason and Holly Petersen.

SynerScan is a software to digitize hospital operations offering better health care through data led by founder Brett Byman.

HipPocket is a software offering families better context and confidence for financial decision-making led by founder Mark Zmarzly.

Alumni Labs is a software that simplifies and manages the college selection and application process led by founders Martin Wolff and Steve Scharf.

PaperTale is a new software product founded by Dan Castagnoli designed to help manufacturers curb the $500 million dollar loss in paper coupons. Omaha.com reported that Castagnoli revealed in his pitch that people are using photo editing software to change coupons and dupe manufacturers and retail stores out of millions of dollars. In some cases these crooks change $5 coupons to $10 coupons.

While some accelerators immediately start taking applications for the next cohort the day after demo day, Ardinger is making sure that the teams that just graduated into the real business world adjust well. He’s also knee deep in Lincoln’s Startup Week going on all week long. NMotion’s demo day and then Startup Weekend were the official kick off events for Startup Week.

For more information on NMotion click here. Here a  re some of our interviews with NMotion teams in our Startups In The Fastlane feature.

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Startups In The Fastlane: NMotion Startup SynerScan

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While EMR (electronic medical records) are nothing new, and innovation continues to change the doctor’s daily life, there hasn’t been nearly as much innovation centered around the nurses. Specifically, nurses that are making rounds at any hospital or treatment facility.

Nurse rounds are still often documented using a clipboard, pen, and paper. If nurses need to enter something into an EMR, they often do it at the nurse’s station, transcribing it from that pen and paper.

It takes so long that Bryan Health in Lincoln, Nebraska sought the help of a Lincoln startup called SynersScan to help solve that problem. Typically it’s the other way around. The startup comes up with an idea and then tries to sell it to the user. Now there are users built in, in the case of Bryan Health, with more users waiting in the wings.

SynerScan, Nmotion Accelerator, Lincoln Startup, Nebraska StartupSynerScan, which is currently accelerating at Lincoln’s NMotion accelerator, is creating a digital platform to manage nurses rounds.

Synerscan is the latest startup in the “Fastlane” interview feature that talks with a startup currently in an accelerator program. Check out our interview below.

What is the name of your startup
SynerScan Technologies, or simply SynerScan.

What problem are you solving
What we’ve done is develop a software solution that enhances the benefits of hourly nursing rounds in hospitals.  This process is currently documented on a physical sheet of paper, causing a couple problems.  1) That sheet of paper is typically thrown away, providing little to no feedback to management, and 2) Backlogging and accountability of nursing staff has become an issue as a result.  What we’ve done is digitize the entire process, uncovering a number of value adds in the process.  For example, we can now provide visual cues for any staff member to know when a round is due, real-time operational insight for management, and revolutionary communication to friends and family.

The best part about our solution is that we began with market validation.  We are currently partnered with Bryan Health in Lincoln, who actually came to us to solve this very problem.  What most companies do is spend months developing a solution only to find out that nobody actually wants to use it.  We had a top 50 cardiovascular hospital come to us and say “here is our problem, who is able to solve it for us?”.  That validation out of the gate has had a huge impact on our traction and chances of success moving forward.

The ultimate goal in changing the process of nursing rounds is to increase patient satisfaction in hospitals.  Hourly rounding has been proven to increase patient satisfaction, decrease falls, and provide greater quality of care as a result.  A hospital’s patient satisfaction score is what determines the amount of reimbursement a hospital receives from Medicare and Medicaid.  These scores also determine the salary and benefits of a hospital’s executive staff.  For these reasons alone, incentives are very high for a hospital to increase patient satisfaction.  Our solution provides just that.

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Why now?
A lot of these incentives have come about as a result of recent healthcare reform.  Hospitals will be compared to one another relative to patient satisfaction, infection rates, and many other metrics. Hospitals will be driven by quality, service, and costs in order to compete. Government sanctioned funds will be given or taken dependent on where the hospital ranks in regards to these metrics. For this reason, it will become imperative that hospitals implement tools to maintain a competitive advantage in the industry.

The US healthcare system is at a critical point in increasing quality of care for patients.  Hospitals will no longer receive reimbursement based on a “pay-for-reporting” model, where they were simply required to post patient satisfaction scores.  Every hospital in the country will now be reimbursed on a “pay-for-performance” model, where the quality of those scores will determine each hospital’s reimbursement rate.

Who are your competition?
There are a number of companies recognizing the potential of increasing patient satisfaction in hospitals.  What’s great is that there is no one single way of doing so.  What’s frustrating is that there are a lot of unknown and unavoidable factors that affect a patients perspective of their care.  First impressions, last impressions, and unforeseen occurrences can drastically alter a patients perception of their care.

Although companies like Scan Am and Walsh Integrated have similar solutions in the healthcare space, we have a few tricks up our sleeve that help differentiate us as serious players in the industry.

What’s your secret sauce?
What really sets us apart from our competition is the communication platform we have engineered to provide friends and family with relative insight on the condition of their loved one.  With our solution, we are able to push nursing round information to a family members smartphone, tablet, or PC.  If you have to be at work or home with the kids, no longer do you have to wonder about the kind of care your significant other is getting.  The feedback we’ve received on this aspect of our solution alone has been outstanding.  Since our launch at Bryan Health, we have helped family members from San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, Minneapolis, Kansas City, and everywhere in-between see the quality of care their loved ones were receiving, all in real-time.  Imagine you had a child or spouse in the hospital and the importance of a tool like this because quite clear.

Where are you/were you based before NMotion?
Born and raised right here in Lincoln.

Why NMotion?
There are some really cool and innovative things happening in Lincoln right now.  Most people are oblivious to this fact.  We are still highly referred to as a flyover state and this simply isn’t the case.  Our entire founding team is comprised of University of Nebraska – Lincoln alumni, and one of our primary goals is to change the perception people have about Lincoln and the potential that remains untapped here.  Jumping on the opportunity to be a part of Lincoln’s first accelerator program was a no brainer.

What’s one lesson you’ve learned since the NMotion session has started.
Before NMotion, our team was progressing at a steady rate.  We were making informed decisions, building relationships, and learning everything as we went.  What we realized very quickly after starting NMotion is that we weren’t moving fast enough.  We were doing too much strategizing and needed to simply begin executing.  We are now moving faster, breaking things, learning quickly, and repeating.

Where can people find out more?

Check out our website at SynerScan.com

Email us at info@synerscan.com
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SAHM Turns Digital Scrapbooking Hobby Into Lincoln Startup GottaPixel

gottapixel, Lincoln startup, Nebraska startup

Stacy Carlson isn’t your everyday startup founder. She’s not a caffeinated-up hackathon junkie, or a gamer chick turned business developer extraordinaire. She’s a stay-at-home mom from Lincoln, Nebraska, who turned her digital scrapbooking hobby into a startup that now has a team of 21 designers, and 13 employees.

Silicon Prairie News reports that Carlson was never one for paper scrapbooking (me neither). But when her daughter started getting older she wanted to find a way to preserve those hundreds of digital pics that every parent has of their kid. She got back into computers and immediately picked up digital scrapbooking as a hobby.

NmotionadWhen Carlson started gottapixel in 2005, it was a place where digital scrapbookers like herself could share layouts with online friends. The layouts that were publicly available weren’t nearly as good as what the user base at gottapixel were uploading to the site.

“When my cousin Brenda, and I started in 2005, it was a hobby. We started with just a few members, a gallery, and a desire to create a digi home that was reliable, friendly, and fun. 7 years later, we have over 25,000 members in our forum, 7,000 active products and over 275,000 layouts in our gallery…but even though the site has gotten bigger, the family feel is still there!”  Carlson told scrapstacks.com

GottaPixel has become one of the most respected and trusted sites among people who do online scrapbooking. Some of the designers who make digital scrapbooking layouts for gottapixel have their own websites and galleries, and Carlson told SPN that the best designers make more than $1000 per month for their work.

Now that her kids are in schoo,l and the company is running on all four cylinders, Carlson is active in the startup community via Startup Lincoln, AwesomeCamp, and Ladies Who Launch.

Are you a digital scrapbooker? Try it out at gottapixel.com

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Startups In The Fastlane: NMotion Startup FiscalCircles

Accelerator, NMotion, Nebraska startup, startup, HipPocket

Whether you have an MBA or a GED, startup accelerators are often the biggest push that startups need to go from idea, or earliest MVP, to actual startup and company. Startup accelerators come in all sizes and shapes from YCombinator, 500 Startups, and Techstars to The Fort, The Brandery, and Seed Hatchery. In our Accelerating in the Fast Lane stories we’ll feature an interview with a startup currently going through an accelerator.

Nebraska is filled with startups and entrepreneurs. Warren Buffet hails from Nebraska, as does the Silicon Prairie News and their Big Series of award-winning conferences. On a recent trip to Nebraska, we got to hang out with Eric Moyer the co-founder and CMO of a startup that went into Lincoln, Nebraksa’s NMotion accelerator as Fiscal Circles and has since taken on the name, HipPocket.

HipPocket helps connect consumers to loan products in a more efficient and transparent way. Find out how in our interview with Moyer below.

What is the name of your start-up?

The name of our start-up has long been a loaded question. I am however happy to report, Fiscal Circles, Inc. is now doing business as HipPocket.

What problem are you solving?

We provide insight into consumer finance which until now has lacked any form of transparency. Consumers hoping to improve their financial situation have been forced to call around or ‘take a chance’ on a loan offer that may not be in their best interest through websites like lowermybills.com, quickenloans, etc.

Why now?

Consumer adoption of online banking and more specifically, personal financial management (PFM) sites like Mint.com is trending up. Further, interest rates are poised to increase markedly in the near term. We predict that timing is right for a vast number of consumers who have been on the fence about optimizing their finances will be motivated by a changing rate environment.

Who are your competitors?

The biggest competitor in the PFM space is mint.com, but we’ve also been diligently researching other providers in the space. We’ve seen some companies doing limited comparisons of budget or FICO score but none appear to be leveraging market and peer comparison data in a significant manner. We also have a secret sauce that we’re hoping you ask us about…

What’s your secret sauce?

Our proprietary process for taking users through the comparison process is our secret sauce. We help them build a complete financial picture and provide the clearest possible explanation of where they stand now and an easy-to-understand path to a better future. This process emphasizes simplicity and fairness. Instead of utilizing persistent reminders, info-graphics and a myriad of other tactics to change consumer behavior, we’ve chosen to concentrate on saving people money on the things they already buy.

By concentrating on making refinancing or finding a new mortgage easy and providing unbiased loan recommendations, we give the consumer a fair shot at getting the best deal.

Where are you/were you based before NMotion?

Prior to NMotion, our team split time among coffee shops, Turbine Flats (a co-working space) and of course, the founder’s homes.

Why NMotion?

We applied to NMotion to gain access to resources and best practices in an effort to improve our chances for success. Plus, NMotion is dedicated to developing the start-up community of Lincoln, Nebraska. We recognize that for our venture to succeed, the area needs to be seen as a viable place for new companies to gain a foothold. Brian Ardinger and his staff at NMotion have given participating teams every opportunity to develop and successfully launch compelling products and services.

What’s one lesson you’ve learned since the NMotion session has started.

One lesson we’ve learned is that the time spent validating assumptions might be worth more than what you’re building.

Where can people find out more?

You can find us on Facebook, Twitter and now, YourHipPocket.com.

Stay tuned for more stories from accelerators everywhere else.

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Valley Couple Moves To Nebraska To Launch Startup Bulu Box

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We hear about startups moving from “everywhere else” to Silicon Valley to build scale and raise funds. Although we are huge advocates of the startup ecosystems across the country, regardless of how big or small, we know this happens all the time.

What we don’t hear of often, are entrepreneurs moving out of Silicon Valley to “everywhere else” to launch their startups. That’s exactly what husband and wife entrepreneurs Paul and Stephanie Jarrett have done.

The Jarrett’s startup, Bulu Box, is a subscription box of vitamins and supplements. The boxes are filled, put together and shipped from the Jarrett’s offices in beautiful Lincoln Nebraska, reports our friends at Silicon Prairie

Bulu Box recieved angel funding from Nebraska Angels. The Jarretts decided that with that commitment from Nebraska Angels and the much easier to manage costs of living, Lincoln was the place to launch.

So far Bulu Box has no direct competitors. Paul Jarrett told SPN that they know of a company doing muscle building boxes. There’s also health & wellness subscription box startup KlutchClub. As for just vitamins and supplements though it seems to be just Bulu Box.

Bulu Box also adds a social element to their subscription box model. The Bulu Box subscribers are part of a community. They can review the products in the box and talk with other users of the products.

Paul Jarrett told SPN that they are doing better than they forecasted in their business plan. They told SPN that their revenues were in the thousands after just one month of being in business and their subscriber number is higher than they thought it would be.

Linkage:

More on Bulu Box here at their website

Source: Silicon Prairie News

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Nebraska Startup: Footwork To Take Some Of The Pain Out Of Political Canvassing

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A startup in Nebraska is looking to optimize the footwork of door to door canvassers for political campaigns. The startup, appropriately called Footwork, couldn’t come at a better time as the United States prepares for a Romney vs Obama battle for the Presidency.

If you’re thinking that footwork takes canvassing to the Internet, you would be incorrect. Political candidates and those behind political causes know that in order to really make an impact, door to door canvassers are still a huge part of the equation.

Instead, Footwork helps organizers of canvassers optimize the canvassers route. In the past the door to door canvassers would typically have to jump out of a van, take a clipboard with the par affiliation data and find the house numbers that match printouts. With Footwork the data about the resident’s party affiliation is plotted on a mobile app on a smartphone typically supplied to the canvasser.

Now, with Footwork in hand there’s no need to match addresses over 100 sheets of paper.

Tegan Snyder and Phil Montag are the co-founders of Footwork and both gentlemen have lots of experience in grass roots political canvassing.

“When a canvasser is going door to door in today’s world they get a map and a list of voters by street. It’s up to them to determine what path to take and which houses to hits first,” Montag said to Betakit.com

Although most people who get involved in political canvassing do it for the cause itself, more and more political action committees and candidate campaigns have resorted to sites like Craigslist to recruit temporary workers. This sometimes results in canvassers pencil whipping signatures for a petition, or lying about actually visiting a house, or block of houses, just to get paid.

Footwork provides real time location monitoring for the canvass team leaders so you know that the paid canvassers are actually out the knocking doors and meeting people and not just pushing a button on an app.

The final piece to Footwork is social integration. Canvassers can now share their location is their social media channels which can at times spark conversation and awareness of the campaign.

Footwork charges 1 cent for every house that the canvassers visit using the app. Snyder and Montag say that with Footwork in hand canvassers are seeing up to 30 houses per hour, thus making it cheaper than mailings, traceable and mor efficient.

There are some competitors out there but none seems to incorporate all three functions in such a robust way.

Footwork is in Beta now, and plans to be in a full public release in August when the election races begin to heat up, and also just ahead of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, which will have a huge startup presence this year

Linkage:

Find out more about Footwork here
Source: Betakit

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Nebraska Startup: Arch Get Photo & Video Answers To Your Questions From Anyone

A Nebraska based startup called “Arch” has a different spin on the recommendation space. With Arch, you join the ArchCrowd network and then you are tasked with the duty of helping your fellow Arch network members with their requests for information, pictures and video.

Suppose you live in Kansas and you’re about to partake on your first trip to our nation’s capital in Washington DC. If you sign up for Arch you can ask questions, like “what is there to do in Washington DC”. From there Arch will find someone in the Arch network in Washington DC who can answer your question.

The Arch person answering your question can take photos or videos of things to do in DC and send them back to you. You’ll receive a push notification when a fellow Arch member has responded to your request. As more and more Arch members arrive in Washington DC to start their day or what have you, they will also get a notification to answer your question. Soon you’ve crowd sourced a bunch of things to do in Washington DC.

Archcrowd,Arch,nebraska startup,silicon prairie,pando dailyArch makes it easy to supply answers via photos, videos or even just text. If you’re looking for things to do, hotels to stay at, places to eat, places to walk or just a quiet corner to read a book on a trip, Arch lets you connect with real people who have decided they want to help people, by signing up for Arch.

The Arch platform at archcrowd.com is still in private beta. In fact Co-founder Joe Smith attended Apple’s WWDC conference in San Francisco CA this week and was fielding Arch requests from the San Francisco area all week long.

The Arch team of four co-founders spoke last month at Cornstalks a monthly forum for individuals interested in high growth entrepreneurship.

The team includes: (from their website)

Tim Hermanson: (top left) Arch project manager – Tim received a B.S. in business administration/finance from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2006. Tim has over 5 years of experience managing various projects at a large, local bank with a focus on compliance and operations.

Mike Ackerman: (top right) Webserver architecture and API specification for Arch – Mike graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2006 with a B.S. in Computer Engineering and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering. He has since worked in Industrial Automation and Software Engineering focusing on .NET.

Joe Smith: (bottom left) Mobile client application design and implementation – Joe received a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Joe has 6+ years experience as a software engineer designing and implementing both server-side and user-facing software projects using a variety of technologies and platforms.

Kari Petsche: (bottom right) Arch graphic design lead – Kari graduated from The Art Institute of Pittsburgh with a degree in graphic design in 2001. In the past ten years, Kari has won several design awards working with clients such as Tim Burton, Warner Brothers, NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA, 20th Century Fox, Tavern On The Green & The Bonnaroo Music Festival.

Linkage
Check out Arch at their website here
Follow them on the Angel List here
Big props to our homies at Silicon Prairie For this story and that pic we borrowed
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