Texas Start Up Blurtt Let’s You Make MeMes And Have Fun With Photos On The Fly

After a background in Finance at big name financial houses like Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, Texas based entrepreneur Jeanette Cajide started to work on something beautiful and fun. After a long twisty road she has finally launched Blurtt.

Blurtt is an iOS app that functions as a “tool that allows users to express themselves” with text overlaid on photos. You can use photos that you take or photos off the web. Although it’s not integrated (only hipstamatic is), you can take a photo, instagram it, bring it through Blurtt, re-instagram it with no filter and add words while it’s in Blurtt (I promise it’s a lot easier than it sounds).

Cajide started Blurtt with the idea of sending beautiful postcards to people. When she started it she had a co-founder in Nikhil Sethi who moved on. Cajide finished Blurtt on her own and with help from Archimede’s Labs acceleration program.

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The Forgiving Valley: Path Puts Privacy Issue Behind Them Takes Another Round At A $250 Million Valuation

Yesterday we brought you the story of how some folks are out for blood against New York deals start up Sqoot. They misspoke and came off sexist, not once but twice. While opponents of sqoot are begging anyone that will listen to stop supporting their start up over saying that women would be at their hackathon serving beer, Path the social media network started by Facebook Alum Dave Morin, had a much more severe issue and just got another round of funding.

Although I truly feel that privacy is in the hands of the user and that if you are that worried about your privacy than you should stay off the net, Path did something far worse than Sqoot. They uploaded the complete contents of users address books to their own private servers.

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OMGPICTURELIFE: Charles Forman’s Next Project Heating Up

nibletz, omgpop, zynga, picturelife

Charles Forman (left) with MC Hammer & Dan Porter (photo: Business Insider)

The news that Zynga has purchased OMGPOP for a reported $200 million dollars must have made Picturelife.com founder Charles Forman very happy, and very rich. While OMGPOP’s executive team has been running the show, Forman, founder of OMGPOP with Dan Porter, has been busy working on his new start up Picturelife.

Picturelife is the collaborative effort of three young executives experiences in the entrepreneur world. You’ve got Charles Forman who started OMGPOP as Iminlikewithyou iilwy, Nate Westheimer, who for 4 years with the Executive Director of the NY Tech Meetup, and Jacob DeHart, founder of threadless.

Picturelife is supposed to be the one central place to put and store all your photos from all your devices. Some in tech circles have called it a Flickr killer. Currently it’s in beta and it will cost you $7.00 a month of $70 for a year to get into the beta.  The founders do promise a freemium model when they launch to the public.

source: VB

Sqoot Puts Foot In Mouth With Sexist Comment, Now Move On

We’re just 10 days away from what was looking like a great even in Boston, MA, the API Jam. The API Jam, a hackathon of sorts, was set for March 31st to April 1st. However, after what people are calling a grave mistake the event may not happen after all.

In an event flyer, the company hosting the event, NY based deals site Sqoot.com said that one of the perks or benefits for participating was the fact that “women” would get beer for the participants.

Women as a perk set off a firestorm of comments on Twitter calling the team behind Sqoot sexist, and scumbags.  According to tech.li Heroku, Cloudmine, Levelup and MongoHQ have all withdrawn their support of the event. LevelUp was supposed to provide credit’s for the food trucks.

We totally think that the line may have been in bad taste what I’m having a hard time grasping is the difference between that line and the scantily clad women at the LevelUp/Amex party at SXSW in support of the Jay Z event, which were of course there to serve beer.

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Hotel Tonight Sticks To Their Core For SXSW Promotion Too

Hotel Tonight Founder: Sam Shank (r) with Hotel Tonight Team in front of their first Austin Room. (photo: Sam Shank)

Yesterday we brought you a story about SideTour and how instead of a huge alcohol induced binge party at South by Southwest, they hosted intimate “Side Tour” style gatherings with some successful start up companies like Tumblr and Etsy.

Another great start up, Hotel Tonight, stuck to their core of finding last minute rooms for their South By Southwest promotion.  Hotel Tonight Founder Sam Shank, rented an Airstream trailer for the companies on-site headquarters by day. By night, since rooms were scarce Shank and the Hotel Tonight team rented out the Airstream.

While it’s just an Airstream trailer, it was quite cozy. There was a couch when you walk in with a nice breakfast/dinner table, running water, a shower, bathroom, cooking area, king sized bed and a flat screen tv. Just what a South By Southwest go-er would need for the night.

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Side Tour Extends Intimate One Of A Kind Experiences To Their SXSW Events

The founders of Side Tour just posted their re-cap of the company’s South By Southwest experience in Austin Texas this year. Before we dive into that we need to tell you about Side Tour so you understand why their events at SXSW were a great reflection on exactly what they do.

By now many people in the United States are familiar with Richard Petty’s Nascar Experience. Petty’s Nascar Experience lets everyday race fans take a stroll around a Nascar track at nearly 200 mph. It’s a one of a kind experience that has now seen hundreds of thousands of customers. While the Petty Nascar Experience isn’t part of Side Tour, it’s that type of experience that makes this start up so unique.

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Even Oprah Can Have A Failed Start Up

When Oprah Winfrey announced almost three years ago that she was ending her run as the queen of daytime tv and instead, starting her OWN (no pun intended, ok maybe a little) Network, it was met with mixed response.  There was already Oxygen (which Oprah has an interest in), Lifetime TV, the Hallmark channel and other networks that are focused on the lives of women. I think because of Oprah being Oprah she was given a bigger chance than anyone else who would have started their OWN (there it is again) network.

Oprah brought some of her other daytime pals along, most notably Rosie O’Donnell who herself sat pretty high on the throne of daytime tv. Unfortunately, OWN hasn’t gained the viewership that Winfrey had anticipated.

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Start Up Interview: Patrick Ambron CEO Of The SXSW Award Winning Brandyourself.com

Have you ever looked yourself up on Google to find something less desirable?  Maybe Google has you confused with someone else with a similar name? Maybe there was that incident at that frat party 10 years ago that just won’t go away?

Typically with these types of scenarios there are reputation clean up companies out there that are more than happy to take thousands of dollars from you to help clean up your Google results. Now there’s a new game in town and it’s free. Brandyourself.com is a do it yourself utility that allows you to take control of your Google results.

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Chattanooga TN Opening Up The Gig City For The Gig Tank In $300,000 Competition For Start Ups & Students

Chattanooga TN is opening up their Gig City this summer for one of the biggest start up and student tech competitions in the United States outside of New York, Silicon Valley or Las Vegas.

The Gig Tank is part start up accelerator, part think tank, part contest and part summer camp. The Gig Tank is split into two main parts the Entrepreneur’s Accelerator and the Student Think Tank.

Entrepreneurs are invited to apply here to come to Chattanooga TN, the Gig City, from May 14th to August 16th. Each team selected to come to the Gig Tank will receive $15,000 in investment capital to spend the summer in Chattanooga.

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Synapse And Start Up Viableware Develop Mobile Payment Platform For Restaurants

As payments go more and more mobile the next industry that should naturally heat up is restaurants and hospitality.

Although it’s not a rampant issue there have been cases where restaurant employees have been able to swipe and clone customers credit cards and then sold the information on line or used it later to commit credit card fraud. Viableware’s new RAIL system will eliminate than once it’s implemented on a larger scale.

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UK Start Up Spotlight: Dead Soci.al

If you’ve ever watched Shark Tank than you know that one of Shark Kevin O’Leary’s favorite industries is the death industry. He always candidly jokes that everybody dies so it’s a sure market. That’s the market that deadsoci.al is in.

Dead Soci.al was founded by James Norris and unveiled at SXSWi in the UKTI booth at the South By Southwest trade show.

Dead Soci.al is a free tool that allows anyone to create private and scheduled messages. The messages can be distributed through email and across the social web once the user dies.  The main purpose for Dead Soci.al is to let users say goodbye the way they want to.  Dead Soci.al was prominently featured in the SXSW Startup village as well.

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And Here Comes The Spam, Pinterest Style

 

With over 11 Million unique visitors in January alone, it’s no surprise that Spammers have hit Pinterest, our favorite new Social Network that can’t stay out of trouble. While this isn’t anything new that people will post Spam, it’s just another black eye in what has been an interesting 2012 for the newest flavor of the month.

With the growth of the site it was no shock that Spammers would be flocking to it seeing how it gives more hits to sites compared to Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn combined.

The questions is now, how can Pinterest fight this latest issue they are having. They’ve already successfully fought off the other ones so it’ll be interesting how they fair with this.

 

Source: GigaOm

2 Kickstarter Projects Raise One Million Dollars Each On The Same Day

If you’re not familiar with Kickstarter, it’s a crowd sourced platform for seed investments of projects. It originally started as a launching pad for musicians who were trying to fund album and video projects.

An artist or band would make a kickstarter page for their next endeavor. Say the project would cost them $5000 for a limited cd run, art, photography and studio time. The artist or band would provide telethon type incentives for people and fans to pledge to donate money to the project.

For example my little brothers band with a decent sized local fan base used kick starter for an album project. They needed $4000. For a $10 pledge the donators (fans) would get a free copy of the cd delivered to their home once complete. For a $20 pledge they would autograph the CD. For a $100 pledge they would meet the fans backstage and so on and so forth. 50 fans pledged enough money to reach the $4000 goal. Once they reached the goal the funds were secured via credit card (that had been given when the donator pledged) and all the money was gathered and delivered to the band.

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Start Up Camp 5 At IT Expo East

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Tonight five Telecom, IT and mobile focused early stage start ups are going ti have the chance to pitch their ideas in order to get funding. They are pitching at the ITexpo East going on now at the Miami Beach Convention Center.

All five start ups will get five minutes a piece to give their best elevator pitch.  One company will walk away with the investment that they need to expand their company and ideas.