Comments Off on 500 Startups Company Waygo Talks To Nibletz [video][500 startups]0LikeLike 2,515
Earlier this morning we brought you the interview with Spinnakr founder Michael Michael Mayernick who talked with us about laying their foundation in Washington DC which helped them prepare for and then graduate from 500 Startups in Silicon Valley.
Ryan Rogowski, the cofounder of translation startup WayGo, also talked with us about their experience in Rhode Island before being chosen for 500 Startups.
In the video below Rogowski talks to us about the much lower cost of overhead in Rhode Island, and how it allowed them to speed up their development process. Waygo was able to catch the eye of 500 Startups founder Dave McClure, who is a very frequent traveler, the kind that Waygo was designed for.
As for what they do?
Waygo is a mobile app that allows you to hover your smartphone camera over text or images and get a translation. For instance, if you want to order Chinese Food from a Chinese menu written in their native tongue, Waygo would allow you to scan the menu and get real time translations. The best part? Everything is done locally on the device side which makes the translations come extremely fast.
Waygo is designed with the tourist in mind. You can use Waygo to translate Chinese food menus, and signs on the road, bars and restaurants.
The idea came about over two years ago when Rogowski was living in China and realized how hard it was to translate things in real time.
Comments Off on Meet Rhode Island 500 Startups Startup: Waigo Translate (Translate Abroad)0LikeLike 2,218
Here at nibletz we’ve been fortunate enough to be chosen as the first test site for Markerly, our good friend Sarah Ware’s DC based publisher tools startup, and member of the just announced, 5th class at 500 startups. Through this great relationship we’ve got an awesome tool on the site, in Markerly, and exclusive early access to some of their cohorts.
Earlier this morning as the embargo lifted on this years 500 startups class, we brought you an interview with Australian startup Kickfolio. We also brought you an interview with Boston startup Privy.
Now we turn our sites again to the north east part of the country and Rhode Island startup Waigo Translate.
Waigo Translate is one of those uniquely cool startups that Dave McClure, Paul Singh and the entire 500 startups organization prides themselves on.
Waigo Translate is an app that turns your iPhone camera into a translation device. Waigo Translate current works with Chinese, Japanese and Korean, with more languages on the way. Yes that means you could use your phone to translate the written lyrics to Gangnam Style.
We got a chance to talk with Waigo Translate’s Marketing Director, Rob Sanchez. Check out the interview below.
Comments Off on Providence Startup: LoveGov, Politician Dating0LikeLike 1,371
With the second Presidential debate behind us and the third and final debate just days away, politics is on the forefront of everyone’s minds. No one with a Twitter account or Facebook account can escape the political races this year.
A new startup in Providence Rhode Island, is looking to add its hat to the political ring. The new startup called Lovegov is applying an algorithmic like approach based on user entries to political questions and statements to formulate possible candidate choices for the user. In other words Lovegov is the match.com for citizens to find political candidates to possibly vote for.
Now of course this is a machine designed to make the process easier and no machine should dictate the way you vote, however Lovegov is providing extremely valuable information to its citizen users.
For instance, you may not know where a candidate stands on issues that may be of importance to you and not necessarily a whole lot of others. Lovegov is going to pair you up with candidates that have commonalities with you. You may be surprised to find another candidate aligns more with you than the one you planned on voting for. What Lovegov really does is empowers voters with information so they can make a more conscious decision.
“These matching mechanisms help people understand and identify causes and organizations to get involved with,” Lovegov founder Joschka Tryba told masshightech,com . “And we feel this matching mechanism is innovative because it enables users to get immediate intuition as to how they relate to another political entity, person or group.”
Lovegov has three employees in their Providence headquarters and is seeing sign ups rapidly increase. For now they’re focusing on politics in New England, but plan a nationwide roll out over time.
Comments Off on GM Ventures Invests In Rhode Island Startup NanoSteel0LikeLike 1,705
NanoSteel, a Rhode Island startup, with 34 employees is working on the future of steel. According to this report NanoSteel has created a new class of steel that will allow automakers to reduce the weight of vehicles without compromising the structural integrity needed for safety.
“We are investing in NanoSteel because of the opportunity associated with their new steel alloy technology,” said Jon Lauckner, GM’s chief technology officer, vice president of Global R&D and president of GM Ventures LLC told the Detroit News. “Over the next several years, light-weighting of vehicles will be a major focus area to improve fuel economy. NanoSteel’s nano-structured alloys offer unique material characteristics that are not available today, making them a potential game-changer.”
While it’s no secret that innovation is needed in the auto industry, automakers in the United States are tasked with the fact that U.S. Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards will almost double to 54.5mpg in 2025. While that’s still twelve years away GM is aggressively trying to start development on this project. Finding a lighter steel product, thereby reducing the weight of vehicles is definitely a viable option.
GM Ventures is General Motors $100 million dollar venture capital arm. In 2010 they invested $3.2 million into an Ann Arbor startup called Satik3 Inc. They are a battery company working on developing advanced solid state rechargeable technology for cars and electronics.
They also invested in Bright Automotive, a Rochester Hills company which is developing a plug in hybrid commercial vehicle set to launch by 2014.
GM Ventures has also invested $7.5 million in Sunlogics. That company is also based in Rochester Hills and is producing solar powered charging stations. GM plans to deploy these charging stations at GM dealers and at their other facilities.
The terms in the NanoSteel investment were not disclosed. They are joining NanoSteel’s current investors; EnerTech Capital, Fairhaven Capital Partners, and others for this Series C round.
Comments Off on Portland Startup: Overhead.FM Making Headway At Home0LikeLike 1,721
2012 Brown University graduate Stephen Hebson and his co-founder and fellow Brown graduate Parker Wells have developed a new startup called Overhead.fm. The company has decided to tackle a market that hasn’t had much disruption in a number of years. That market, is over head music at venues like restaurants, coffee shops and some retail outlets.
While many may think that business owners just hook up a sirius satellite radio, mp3 player or cd player, there can be serious ramifications to that. While they don’t wear uniforms or carry badges, “inspectors” for lack of a better word, from ASCAP and BMI are constantly visiting businesses to see what type of music they are playing overhead. If a business owner isn’t paying for licensing of music being played for the “public” they can find themselves staring down the barrel of a business life threatening lawsuit.
Muzak, one of the world’s leaders in overhead music charges establishments by their capacity and traffic. Restaurants and businesses can pay anywhere between $30 a month to nearly $200 to play music overhead. While it may seem logical to just not play music, music keeps patrons in their businesses longer and spending more money.
According to Mainebiz, Hebson had received some insider knowledge on the ins and outs of overhead music by first working at a coffee shop and then holding an internship at ATO Records in New York. After learning how high the fees were for licensing music he thought there had to be a better way, thus overhead.fm was born.
Hebson and Wells are building up a great library of music that is heavily weighted by more successful local acts in Portland and Providence. The company is offering the bands a great value proposition by allowing them access to analytics for plays, locations, frequency and more in exchange for licensing their music. The band wins by getting access to the proprietary information that overhead.fm collects. Overhead.fm wins by not having to payout actual fees.
Overhead.fm is going to start curating more “paid” for music shortly. They recently won the student track in the 2012 Rhode Island Business Plan Competition. With that honor came a prize package of $40,000 including some seed capital and legal services to the tune of $10,000.
Hebson told Mainebiz that they plan on using some of those legal services to construct a contract for licensing music to the company.
Hebson feels that businesses will enjoy overhead.fm because of it’s eclectic library featuring local artists. Right now in their test phase, the service starts off as a 30 day free trial and then goes to a $25 per month subscription model. Now remember that may be a little heavy for a streaming service on a personal side but it’s quite affordable when it comes to music being used for overhead systems in businesses.
We are treating [Providence and Portland] as test markets. We know these cities have pretty big independent music and retailer cultures and are small enough that we can get a lot of saturation pretty quickly and use that data” to build out the model, says Hebson said to MaineBiz. “We’ve already had a lot of success at businesses that are already playing off the independent or local vibe already,” he says.
Kyle
Earlier this morning we brought you the interview with Spinnakr founder Michael Michael Mayernick who talked with us about laying their foundation in Washington DC which helped them prepare for and then graduate from 500 Startups in Silicon Valley.
