Start up Archives - Serious Startups

Las Vegas’s Newest Start-Up Tracky Debuts With A Huge Splash

Tracky is a new Las Vegas bred startup that allows users, both businesses and individuals, to collaborate and organize to-do lists, share files, delegate tasks and more project management functions. It’s like a Google Wave on steroids with a top notch social interface for many to be on the same page, working on the same project across the country and around the globe.

The startup led by CEO David Gosse and CMO Jennifer Gosse, held a media event and kick off party on Tuesday. The day started off with a press briefing at SuperNAP, a high tech data center that houses Tracky’s servers among others. According to 8newsnow Gosse briefed the press on the ins and outs of the Tracky application and the technology behind it.

Later that night the hobnobbing moved over to the mansion once owned by heavyweight champion Mike Tyson. While the party was absent of any loose tigers, hundreds of members of Vegas Tech showed out to support the Tracky Launch. Vegas Tech is a community of entrepreneurs, startups, developers, designers, marketers and “do-ers”.

While some other tech and startup communities proud themselves on competing with hot spots like Silicon Valley and New York, Las Vegas thrives on it’s own.

“There is an entrepreneurial boom taking place in Vegas, called Vegas Tech. More than 200 startups have recently formed in the valley and other businesses are migrating to Vegas from other cities like Silicon Valley, Seattle and Salt Lake. Rather than try to emulate these cities, Las Vegas is aiming to focus on being innovative collaborators that just get things done,” Tracky’s CMO Jennifer Gosse said in an interview with KLAS-TV.

Event: TechCocktail & Perkins Coie Present develop.idaho 2012

Entrepreneurs, software folks, and tech startups in Boise Idaho take note that this coming Tuesday TechCocktail and global legal giant Perkins Coie are presenting develop.iadho2012.

The event is a half day event highlighting software innovations and technology in the blossoming tech scene in Boise Idaho. The theme for the event is called “Software: Imagine The Possibilities”.

Speakers include Ken Schwaber, co-developer of the Agile Scrum process and founder of the Scrum Alliance, along with several other local entrepreneurs and visionaries who will provide their insights on the local software community, success stories about their companies and trends affecting the software industry.

The event will also feature an expo style showcase for startups and tech innovators. For more information or to register visit this site.

19 Year Olds Make YCombinator Winter Class With Private Family Facebook Style Social Network FamilyLeaf

Two 19 year old entrepreneurs from Bellevue Washington are on their second start up already. Geekwire’s John Cook reports that when he first met them they were working on a gift card startup that was called AvantCard. The teenagers have been friends since grade school.

The friends Wesley Zhao and Ajay Mehta have started something new. Their project, FamilyLeaf, is a closed social network that is similar to Facebook but allows family members to privately share contact information, photos and updates with each other. It’s biggest competitor is the Facebook app Family Builder which was recently purchased by Intelius.

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Illinois State Government Backs Startup Tech Center In Chicago: Who Says Chicago Isn’t A Tech Hub?

Last week Pando Daily’s Trevor Gilbert struck a nerve in the heart of the midwest when he penned this piece: The Midwest Mentality. He spoke about a Chicago that didn’t live the startup culture life and how entrepreneurs there didn’t get it and went home at five pm. Nothing could be further from the truth, just check out the news that comes out daily from sites like builtinchicago.com

We’ve even featured a bunch of startups based in Chicago including Planfast and KlutchClub and have plenty more on the way. Well it’s apparent that Illinois Governor Pat Quinn didn’t get that memo from PandoDaily as the Illinois state government announced yesterday they are backing a new 50,000 square foot tech center slated to open on May 2nd.

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DC Start Up Venga Pivots To Add More Of The Restaurant In Their Restaurant App Business

Venga is a Washington DC start up that is part of The Fort accelerator based in the nation’s capital. When they came onto the scene they wanted to offer an app that was a little more upscale than Urban Spoon or Open Table. They were able to get their product launched and actually launched it simultaneously across iPhone, Android and Blackberry at the same time.

Restaurant apps have many avenues they can use to get off the ground. Although most avenues are very time consuming, the easiest way to a restaurant app is to draw from a location based API, crowd source reviews and voila. Well apparently that strategy didn’t set well with Sam von Pollaro or Winston Lord, the company’s founders. They actually went out to restaurants and got feedback for their app, what a novel idea.

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Marc Cuban Offers Advice To Startups Don’t Follow Your Passion?

(photo: Inqusitr.com)

Billionaire tech entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban offered a great tidbit of advice on his blog, blogmaverick.com last week. That advice “Don’t Follow Your Passion, Follow Your Effort”.

Now to many people this may seem a bit absurd. But if you’ve ever watched Mark in action on Shark Tank this season, or on his guest appearances in season two than you may agree with this advice. Religious watchers of the ABC reality show about startups and pitches have seen one too many “entrepreneurs” leave the shark tank in tears because their passion didn’t transcend to a true business model.

“Mr. Wonderful” Kevin O’Leary is usually the first shark with his jaws open asking the entrepreneurs “That’s great, where’s your sales”. On episode after episode you’ll see people turning out new versions of the snuggie, useless kitchen gadgets and one of my favorites a pet food remedy that the veterinarian promised would prolong a pets life without any data to back it up. The one common thread in many of these unsuccessful pitches was passion.

Start Up Spotlight: Artsicle For Renting Beautiful Art

Artsicle founders Alexis Tryon & Scott Carleton (photo: business insider)

Throwing a cocktail party and want a nice piece of art for your home? Are you having an open house at the office? Do you need a couple of nice pieces of art for prospective investors to look at your office before you can afford to go out and purchase them? These are all great reasons to check out New York based artsicle.com

Artsicle’s got a cute little name for a company that provides beautiful pieces of art for all of their customers. Artsicle isn’t in the business of brokering 6 figure pieces, they rent out their art collection for as little as $25 per month.

Being New York based gives Artsicle the advantage of being connected to some of the top emerging artists. The company uses those connections to curate beautiful collections.

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Valley Based Samasource Hooks Up Women Living In Poverty With Microwork And Income

Samasource founder Leilah Janah works with refugees in Kenya (photo boingboing.net)

Women lead non-profit Samasource is tackling a great social issue while helping to get some of the menial grunt work of today’s biggest internet companies complete. Leilah Janah is the founder of this incredible organization.

Samasource has trained women living in third world countries with basic computer skills and outfitted centers in India, Pakistan, Haiti, Uganda, South Africa and Kenya. These centers have basic computers, internet and access to samahub which provides the trained women with microwork. Microwork can include meta tagging, light data entry and other small digital tasks that many in the big companies that utilize Samasource don’t want to do.

Some of the corporate participants include Google, Linkedin and Intuit.

“Outsourcing is a one trillion dollar industry,” Janah tells 7×7.com. “We train these women and then we bring them work. We are serving an entirely new demographic. These are people who would not get employed otherwise. They were earning less than $3 per day before Samasource. They are all from rural areas or from the slums.”

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With Nukona Acquired by Symantec Citrix Accelerator Graduates First Class

Nukona, a start up focused on mobile app management, was just acquired by Symantec last week. Nukona was one of the first startups in the Citrix Startup Accelerator.

The Citrix Startup Accelerator takes early stage startups with a focus on enterprise and not necessarily integrated with the Citrix platform. In addition to monetary backing Citrix provides the accelerator companies with office space near their Santa Clara headquarters, mentorship and access to the Citrix customer base.

They also give the accelerator companies access to Citrix executives, networking opportunities and access to vendor partners like Symantec who can be instrumental in a companies next round of financing.

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Jessica Alba’s Baby Safe Start Up Honest.com Raises $27 Million From Top VCs

Yesterday we brought you a story about celebrities getting involved in the tech start up world. One name that wasn’t in yesterday’s story was Golden Globe nominated actress Jessica Alba. Alba has stared a company called “The Honest Company” which seeks to replace baby products laiden with harsh and untested chemicals, with natural products that are baby safe like diapers, household cleaners, soap, sunscreen, laundry detergent and even dishwasher gels.

Alba’s $27 million dollar round included investors have funded some of the biggest web start ups including Netflix, Twitter, Zynga and LivingSocial. It’s no wonder they’re prepared to get behind a company that offers something every new expecting family is going to want with a face everyone already knows.

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Ed Tech Start Ups Heating Up In New York

New York is a great city for start ups. There are a lot of hot marketing, web based and of course social discovery start ups out there. There are also a lot of culture start ups flourishing among the skyscraper of the concrete jungle where dreams are made of. Another important start up category is heating up in New York now as well. That category is Ed Tech, or Education Tech.

Douglas Crets, who works for Microsoft as the Developer Evangelist for the Bizspark program, founded the program, and then teamed up with Saad Alam CEO of citlighter, an online academic research tool, and came up with a new strategy to launch similar Ed Tech programs in Silicon Valley, L.A., Nairobi, Kenya and other countries.

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LA Entrepreneur Moves Into His Car To Build New Startup

Nibletz.com, twitter @nibletz, techcrunch, pandodaily, venturebeat, crunchfund

LA Entrepreneur Kurt Varner is bootstrapping it from his car (photo: Kurtvarner.com)

LA entrepreneur Kurt Varner has decided to turn his marriage into a long distance relationship and move himself, in his car from LA to Silicon Valley. Once he arrives there, the creator of Vloggo who’s working on his next start up, Daily Toaster, is going to live out of his Honda Civic.

He writes on his personal blog about his adventure, that his wife is a school teacher in Los Angeles and it’s not economically feasible for them to rent two apartments. Varner also insists because of the thriving culture in Silicon Valley that’s where he needs to be to continue working on the Daily Toaster and hopefully attracting a co-founder that doesn’t mind his infrequent showering.

Varner has arranged to work out of two collaborative work spaces, the first Hacker Dojo in Mountain View. He’ll also work out of Parisoma in San Francisco. Both work spaces offer Varner a desk, internet access, a chair to sit on and a kitchenette which is a vital part to this journey.

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Celebrities In Start Ups A New Trend

Nibletz.com, ashton kutcher, techcrunch, ignition, betabeat, venturebeat, pandodaily

Ashton Kutcher On Stage At TechCrunch Disrupt NY (photo: Nibletz.com)

The LA Times published a huge piece this week on celebrities lending themselves to new start ups. There are a couple ways that celebrities are doing this. Some celebrities of course, can be bought to lend their name, likeness and endorsement to a start up. Then there’s the path that singer and actor Justin Timberlake and Lady GaGa have gotten involved.

Timberlake invested in and led a consortium of investors who successfully bid for MySpace from Fox Media last year. The price $53 million dollars. While some thought that the investors were going to rip the data out of the social network and sell it, they actually pumped new life into it and for the first time in years MySpace has graced the top 50 ComScore list two months in a row.

Timberlake went as far as to be the MySpace pitch man at the International Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas in January. Pitching everyone that would listen to him both big time investors, and well just everyone. Teen pop superstar Justin Bieber was also at the Consumer Electronics show however in his case it was a paid endorsement of Tosy, a robot company banking on his star power attracting potential buyers to their booth.

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New Start Up Will Let Developers Sell Their App (as in the business) E-Bay Style

When I first heard about Apptopia and the words “app” “sell” and “purchase” were in the same conversation I instantly thought we had another third party app store on our hands. No, that’s far from what Apptopia is.

This Boston based start up is headed by Jonathan Kay and Eli Sapir. Kay was the Ambassador of Buzz for Grasshopper, the phone service for startups. Sapir was the former Entrepreneur in Residence at GreatPoint Ventures. Sapir also founded GPush a Gmail notification iPhone app. It was GPush, and his difficulty selling the business which prompted Apptopia.

Apptopia is a marketplace, not for downloads, but for app developers to sell their businesses, not just licensing either, the whole shooting match. Betabeat characterized Apptopia as an exit strategy for unprepared developers.

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