New York Startup Archives - Page 5 of 6

Humanity.TV Named Finalist In Startup America Contest INTERVIEW

Startup America teamed up with American Airlines for a huge contest. The grand prize in Flights, Camera, Action is a prize package which includes 80 round trip flights. Of course for any startup or entrepreneur this would be a great prize. Most startups need flights to get to important conferences or investor meetings. Humanity.TV, a New York startup, has something else in mind.

Humanity.TV is a technology startup that’s using technology, specifically video, to travel around the country and around the world and show the human side of life in the 21st century. They take a brief look into the lives of fascinating people. Obviously that seems like a daunting task.

“Our messaging and overarching goal is authenticity. We try to find people that have intriguing lifestyles and live passionately, regardless of their popularity or fame. Ultimately, we want to inspire people to visit countries around the world and get off the beaten tourist path to encounter unique experiences with people that will have long-lasting impacts on them.” Humanity.tv co-founder Gaston Blanchet told nibletz.com in an interview.

Humanity.tv strives to capture the lives of fascinating people in obtrusive ways, for a more natural look at the world we live in today.

Of course with a startup like this the lack of capital to travel is definitely a hardship (we know about that first hand). They’re hoping that if they win the Startup America/American Airlines Flights, Camera, Action contest, they can use the flights to continue working on their story telling video platform.

The contest kicked off in July with a video from Startup America CEO Scott Case. The contesting period went through August 20th and the finalists were announced earlier this week.

We got a chance to interview Blanchet their startup as well as the contest and the Startup America partnership. Check out the interview below:

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

Here’s more Demo Day Coverage

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Facebook Is What I Like, NY Startup Mirror is What I’m Like INTERVIEW

Mirror, a startup in New York’s bustling flat iron district, has created something innovative and different bridging parts in a few different spaces. Mirror says that Facebook is what I like, and Mirror is what I’m like. With Facebook you talk about the things you do and like. With mirror, other people talk about what you’re actually like. It’s in essence bridging online personals, online dating, and people recommendation engines in a unique way.

Where California startup Recmnd.me is about people recommendation at a professional level, mirror is more personal, and more free flowing. For instance if you’re a really nice guy, and a great romanticist, people on Mirror can vouch for you or as the Mirror team calls it, people can give their “take” on you. If you’re a passionate entrepreneur that’s helped a bunch of folks, one of your takes can say that. Or to borrow an example from their website, if you’re a really great DJ, people can add that to their take on you.

Mirror bills themselves as real recommendations by real people. The platform can be used for dating, to find new business colleagues and to make new friends. They leverage real contacts and real opinions of someone rather than trying to build around a social graph or recommend people based on whether or not you like Mark Zuckerberg’s dog. The Mirror platform has real potential.

We got a chance to interview Dan Mattio, check out the interview below:

Syracuse Startup: Coursespree, An Online Marketplace For Students INTERVIEW

A clever new EdTech startup in Syracuse New York is providing access for students to tutors, help, class notes, study buddies and more. Coursespree.

Coursespree is hoping to provide college students a more practical way to succeed academically and earn a little income on the side. In effect Coursespree has two different EdTech avenues for college students on one site.

First, students can virtually connect to tutors anywhere in the world using the Coursespree platform. Whether they need help in math, engineering, English, biology or any other college subject, Coursespree can connect them to help for an assignment or on-going tutoring.

Students can actually make money by selling their class notes (read class notes, NOT homework). On Coursespree.com students can take the notes from their class, set a price and sell them to another student at the same school or hundreds of miles away.

The very young startup was founded in May 2012 and is currently incubating in the Sandbox in Syracuse.

We got a chance to talk with Danish Nadeem the founder and CEO of Coursespree, in the interview below:

Startup Interview With New York Startup: tipspring

More and more social startups are beginning to harness the power of the social web to replace traditional “word of mouth” advertising. It’s always been said that “word of mouth” advertising is the best way to advertise a product, service, brand, store or restaurant. In fact, we reported earlier this week on Barrel of Jobs, a Washington DC startup using the social web for “word of mouth” connecting jobs to good quality candidates.

New York startup tipspring is using the power of the social web and it’s “word of mouth” advertising to promote major brands. On their website they call tipspring a marketplace for sharing and saving, and who doesn’t like sharing and saving. Not only that but tipspring allows users to accumulate points to win some really great gifts.

tipspring’s founder Greg Doran has said that users have won prizes like $1,000 gift cards and VIP invites to top fashion shows in New York City. What Doran has essentially done is taken many of the most popular brands who offer their own loyalty and reward programs and put them together in one central marketplace. Gone are the days that you have to sign up for twenty different reward clubs and then remember to go back and check them.

We got a chance to interview Doran about tipspring. Check out the interview below:

New Jersey Startup: Hublished Is The Virtual Convention Connection INTERVIEW

Webinars have quickly become a new and great way to continue education and get large groups of people to view and hear presentations that they may not otherwise get a chance to attend. Major brands, educational firms, consultants and business development experts have all turned to the webinar format.

One of the main problems with the webinar format though is without a marquee speaker or presenter it’s hard to distinguish the junk and hacks from good quality content. You can sometimes make a safe assumption that various organizations would only put their stamp of approval on the best webinar speakers, however, as many have found out the hard way, that’s not always the case. Once you’ve committed yourself to an hour, three hour or even five hour webinar, the time is gone.

Hublished is a startup based in New Brunswick New Jersey and New York that aims to take the pain out of webinar presentation and discovery. They hope to become the go-to place for webinar content that’s been vetted and reviewed so that your webinar experience is educational and great quality.

Hublished has two customers the publishers and the end-users. The publishers now have a place to go to place all their upcoming webinars. They can also archive their old webinars on hublished.

We got a chance to interview the Hublished team, check out the interview below.

Win! Alcohol Discovery From New York Startup Drynk.me

This story doesn’t really need any fancy dressing up. You go out. You like to drink occasionally or perhaps more than occasionally. You try great drinks, but maybe you’re too tired (read drunk) to remember what drink it was you tried, or what was in it.

New York startup Drynk.me is here to help.

Whether you’re a beer connoisseur (or beer snob), or a purveyor of fine wines, or you just like a great new cocktail, you want to remember it right? Drynk.me allows you to do all that, share it with friends, crowdsource new drink ideas, take pictures of your favorite drinks all on your smartphone. You can even geo-tag your drink so you can remember where you were when you had that wonderful concoction. Yes, drinkers, this is your app!

Who has made such a great idea a reality? Well the co-founders behind Drynk.me are Fernando Garza, Chevon Christie and Preston Hall. They took a break from their extensive customer validation and market research to talk to nibletz.com, check out the interview below:

Interview with Toronto, Ontario & New York Startup RemoteStylist

Interior decorating can be a pain in the ass. You normally have to go from store to store and showroom to showroom. Not to mention the fact that you’ve got to deal with a pushy sales person at each showroom and each store. It’s more of a pain than it’s worth. That’s why so many interior decorating and interior design projects get put on hold. Or worse, people spend thousands of dollars on something they don’t necessarily like, just to get the process over with.

That’s where Toronto, Ontario and New York based startup RemoteStylist comes in. With RemoteStylist you simply sign up for your own free profile and then you can coordinate your style for your interior project with one of RemoteStylists’ interior designers.

As you work with your stylist from RemoteStylist you’ll see your rooms come together right before your eyes. If something doesn’t look right on the screen you can simply send your stylist back to the drawing board and they’ll continue to work, change and revise until you have the room you’re looking for.

Once the painful part is over, you’ll be completely satisfied with what you selected. Then the second magic part happens. Everything you liked is purchased for less than retail prices and then delivered and installed in your home. Yes 99% of this entire process can happen at your desk, in bed or at the kitchen table. RemoteStylist founder Kelly Fallis and her team have made sure that the interior design process is simple, and easy and that in the end the customers are happy.

We got a chance to interview the folks at RemoteStylist check out the interview below:

New York Startup: PubSlush Crowdfunding Book Publishing For Good

Writers and authors take heed we found an awesome startup in New York called Pubslush. Not only do they have an uber cool name but what they do is fantastic. We actually get amped up when we find a startup that has a unique idea that doesn’t fall under one of the normal categories like SoLoMo or discovery.

Pubslush is a publishing platform for authors to crowdsource the funds that they need to actually publish their works. Pubslush is building up a healthy following of people who love to read, write and check out new books from new authors. Sure there are authors out there crowdfunding their books on KickStarter and Indiegogo but with PubSlush there’s another great incentive.

With every book sold through Pubslush they donate a book to a child in need. This is perfect for the slacktivist set. You know the type, the people who buy Tom’s because they donate a pair of shoes to charity. Well PubSlush is even better. They’re putting more physical books in the world. Needy children are reading books and passing them along to the other children around them. Great idea right?

Pubslush has a trifecta of problem solving. New authors are getting their works read. Authors are also getting their works funded and books are going to people in need. Add in the fact that Pubslush is putting more books out there in the world at a time when print publishing is down thanks to the advent of e-readers, tablets, Amazon and iPads.

We got a chance to talk with Amanda Barbara the development director at Pubslush in the interview below:

Rochester Startup: Wi3 Expanding To Hospitality Industry, THANK GOD

We travel an awful lot. Most of our readers know that we’re on a sneaker strapped, nationwide startup road trip, which means we stay in the car a lot, but in hotels a lot too. The biggest challenge in hotels isn’t about bedding, towels, or even what’s on tv. We book rooms based on wifi, availability and pricing. The problem is even when you do a preliminary check on a hotels wifi it’s still slow as molasses and typically a horrible experience.

Outside of bringing our own wifi (which we do as backup) there hasn’t been much change since hotels started offering wifi. Free or not most hotels have less than subpar wifi.

Well a Rochester startup called Wi3 is doing something about that.

We first met Wi3 at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas back in January. They were demoing their innovation award winning WiPNET product. As you can see from the video above, WiPNET in home allows the user to set up access points with the bulk of the load making it from point a to point b over coax. This is ultimately the same thing that cable internet providers are doing from the node to your home.

WiPNET makes sure you have a clear wifi access point with very little (if no) latency or loss of signal from the entry point to the end user. Pretty magical stuff.

Well now they’ve announced that they are offering their product to the hospitality industry (hotels)

WiPNET allows many devices to simultaneously access HD and rich media digital Web content on the same hardwired network using existing coax cable infrastructure and a hardwired access point in every guestroom. This innovative application of MoCA technology eliminates the problem of network buffering caused when several devices are accessing the Web within the same environment. It also simplifies network management and oversight, even allowing hotel owners to create tiered-access services as an additional profit center.

“Serving hotel guestrooms or commercial properties with just one WiFi router or a few WiFi repeaters across a property does not meet the needs and demands of the ever increasing WiFi enabled mobile consumer,” said Wi3 CEO Bill Thompson. “Wi3’s patented in-wall Ethernet and WiFi products enable properties that have coax connections to convert every room or space into a full-bandwidth dedicated access point to satisfy even the most heavy of users, thus simplifying and eliminating today’s singular WiFi router approach.”

Now in a nutshell, every hotel guest in every room will have their own dedicated wifi access point and won’t overload the Belkin or Linksys routers that are typically not so strategically placed in hotels.

Linkage:

New York Startup: Hashable Shutting Down

Hashable was destined to become the best way to save and remember where and when you met someone. That’s why they debuted at South By Southwest Interactive in 2011. In fact we saw them at the Androidandme party that year where they pitched before a crowd of die hard Android fans. The technology was actually pretty good.

Hashable wasn’t people discovery, more of a way to do a virtual business card exchange in person and then take it from off-line to online.

The backbone to Hashable was the on-going history that the app kept for everyone you may have met and used Hashable to remember since their launch 18 months or so ago.

Well this evening they sent out their “lights out” email to users, saying that they are shutting down on July 25th.

Dear Hashable Users,

We regret to inform you that the Hashable mobile apps and Hashable.com will be shutting down on July 25th. The service will be unavailable after this date.

While we are still very passionate about making better connections and meeting new people, the time has come for us to focus our energy elsewhere.

Some of you have stored valuable information in Hashable, and we want to give you the opportunity to save that data for your own records. If you’d like to receive a file with your complete history, please log onto Hashable.com, navigate to the “Profile” tab, then to the “Your History” section on that page. You can download the file by clicking “Export full history to .csv” and accepting the dialog that pops up.

We are incredibly grateful for all the people we have met through Hashable. Thank you for all your support, and we hope to connect with you again in the future.

All the best,

The Hashable Team

No word on what the next project is, but if you’re a Hashable user at least you can save your history, which is the best part. It’s too bad, this was a great idea and had a lot of thunder at the 2011 sxsw.

Linkage:

Hashable.com

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NY Startup: Emotish Lets You Share Pictures With Emotion INTERVIEW

Emotish is a new mobile app startup in New York City. They’ve taken a twist of the standard photo sharing app and added an element to it that makes this app special. The element is emotion.

With Emotish you take photos of yourself or you and your friends and you can tag it with what you’re feeling at the time and then share it via Facebook and Twitter. Users will soon be able to keep tabs on the photos and tags and see what feelings are trending, how everyone was feeling in a given area, favorite photos and contextual tags.

Emotions bring a whole new life into photo sharing. Instagram is great with it’s filters and likes but with Emotish not only will you see photos and a smile but you’ll have a better context of what the smiles about, or even what the long face or frown is about.

What makes Emotish even cooler is this isn’t just about great coders or a cool mobile app development startup. Emotish Co-Founder Ryan Wegner is actually a PhD candidate in the clinical psychology program at Columbia University. So like Smurks in Chicago, there is actual real psychology behind this app and what emotion brings to the table in people’s every day lives, in context and in photos.

We got a chance to talk to Wenger in between saving the world and developing great apps, check out the interview below:

NY Start Up: Moteevate Keeps You Motivated To Get Through Your Plans

If you’re one of those people with great plans and bad follow through than this New York startup may be for you. Moteevate is a motivational site that helps people going on their goals and plans. This is achieved by offering a huge knowledge base of action plans that use easy and manageable steps for just about anything and everything.

Moteevate offers a ton of action plans on a wide range of topics like the arts, business and money, coaching and motivation, music, health and fitness, pets and many more.

You can also create your own goals and action plans and then recruit your social networks aka Facebook friends and motivate friends, to cheer you on and help you with your progress.

For instance, if you’re looking to lose weight you can set up an action plan for diet and exercise or use one of the suggested action plans via Moteevate. Either way, once you’ve picked your plan your friends can monitor your progress and help you out when you’re having an off day and cheer you on when you’re on target.

Moteevate has already helped users with job hunting, finishing their thesis, running, staying in shape while traveling and even conquering the medicine regiment associated with breast cancer. As they said in the interview below, Moteevate is for just about anything, and everything.

Check out the interview after the break.

Israeli Startup: GetTaxi Plans New York Expansion

New York City has reached out to all of the “mobile hailing” applications like Uber, Haillo and GetTaxi to submit proposals to become the official taxi cab hailing app for New Yorks millions of taxi cab users per week.

New York has an enormous amount of taxi cabs that are all sanctioned and controlled by New York’s Taxi and Limousine Commission. If you’ve been to New York you may have noted that the only cabs you see (and there are thousands of them) are yellow, they all run the same fares and have the same features.

Until now there was only one way to get a taxi cab in New York and that’s by going out on the side of the street and flagging one down. You can’t call the New York TLC and request a cab at a certain address. If you want to do that you need to use a sedan or car service, which can cost a lot more.

GetTaxi told nibletz.com in an email that the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission is specifically soliciting proposals for a mobile hailing app. They will only select one, and GetTaxi plans to be that app.

“The smartphone revolution is about to change the way we travel as profoundly as it has changed the way we communicate,” said Jing Wang Herman, CEO of GetTaxi USA and the proud holder of a New York City taxi license. “GetTaxi will take the guesswork out of the NYC taxi experience, making it easier to find a cab, share a ride and pay the fare. We are excited to help New York City improve mobility by better integrating taxis into the transportation ecosystem.”

Here’s how GetTaxi works:

· Find a cab: The GetTaxi App will provide a snapshot of transportation options, helping passengers see if their best option is a street hail, digital hail or booking a car.

· Pay any way you want: GetTaxi will be payment agnostic, enabling passengers to pay in any and every way possible, from a stored credit card to a digital wallet, through a monthly family plan to a direct company account, or even through alternative payment networks such as Dwolla or PayPal.

· Share a ride and split the fare: GetTaxi will introduce a simple ride-sharing feature that allows passengers to identify and join a shared ride, using GetTaxi to easily split the bill at the conclusion of the ride.

· Find an accessible or hybrid vehicle: With GetTaxi, New Yorkers will be able to track the location of special vehicles, making it easier to find the one you need.

· Earn loyalty points: Earn points every time you use GetTaxi that are redeemable for free rides and merchandise.

· Choose your language: GetTaxi will be available in New York in 16 languages, catering to the city’s diverse population and ensuring that it’s easy for tourists to get around as well.

· Rate your driver: Let your driver know they provided good service with a 5 rating.

· Find lost property: Because GetTaxi knows exactly which car you were in, we can quickly alert the driver that the passenger has left an item in the taxi.

GetTaxi has announced exciting partnerships with Des Moines Iowa based Dwolla for payment processing, and with HopStop which will allow GetTaxi users to combine their commute with more than one transportation method. Using HopStop users will be able to coordinate their cab ride with buses, subways and other transportation available in New York.

Linkage:

Find out more about GetTaxi here at gettaxi.com

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