Startups Archives - Serious Startups

Chicago Entrepreneurs Launch PlanFast A Simple Way Of Planning

Chicago entrepreneurs Dan Schneider and Brian Doxey have launched a new start up called PlanFast. It’s a free web based service that allows you to plan just about anything visually rather than in a list form. As their video tour says, planning using PlanFast is as easy as scribbling a plan down on a piece of paper or using a white board.

When you check out PlanFast the first thing you’ll notice is the simplicity of it. As Doxey writes on builtinchicago.com:

There are a million ways to “get things done”, hundreds of “highly effective habits”, and dozens of ways to “map your mind”. These things tend to be complex, rigid, systematic, and intimidating for the uninitiated.

So essentially dumbing down the planning process makes it easier to plan things out and in effect easier to actually get things done.

Their introduction video shows how people who make lists for plans have no way to branch plans out, erase or interject something into their linear plan. On a white board or a sketched plan it’s easier to readjust pieces of your plan, check them off and collaborate.

Both Doxey and Schneider are no strangers to start ups, just two years prior they launched a cloud based browser loyalty program designed to reward people for browsing their favorite websites. Frequent Browser is currently incognito as the team adds new features to that service.

Find out more about planfast here at planfast.us

information from builtinchicago contributed to this story. If you’re an Illinois based start up builtinchicago.com should definitely be saved in your bookmarks

British Start Up “Culture Label” Offering Swank Sophistication In One Stop Shop

South By Southwest Interactive prominently features start ups from other countries at this years SXSW Interactive Trade Show. One of those start ups, led by Peter Tullin, is Culture Label.

Culture Label is a one stop shopping point, similar in vein to Amazon.com, however with the ante upped in terms of quality of products. As Tullin explained in an interview with nibletz.com, they’ve curated items from around the world, up-scale shops, galleries, boutiques and museum shops to come up with a collection of purchasable wares fit for a king, or queen, at a reasonable rate. Tullin also fancied culturelabel.com to an upscale version of “etsy” as well.

When asked how he came up with the idea, he said that he and his business partner were into art and many people asked them where they could get art without going to Ikea. Tullin explained that Ikea is the single largest vendor of art in the world.

Tullin quickly realized that shopping museum gift shops, artists galleries, trunk shows and even high end craft markets, could take someone months, years and even a lifetime. So they curated some of the best of those categories under one umbrella.

Culturelabel.com has partnered with over 500 of the world’s leading creative brands. Some of the brands you’ll find at culturelabel.com include Tate, Saatchi Gallery, Andy Warhol Foundation and the Chateau de Versailles. They even have work from Abbey Road Studios.

The company is based in London’s budding start up district and was part of the UKTI Interactive Mission to SXSWi 2012.

Path, your contacts, and disaster response: Dave Morin takes the high road

Path co-founder Dave Morin takes the high road today, after the news that your complete contact list is being uploaded to their servers. This morning a developer named Arun Thampi released an article titled: Path uploads your entire address book to their servers. Included in the article were a number of screenshots and detailed instructions to replicate his findings. Though there is no time stamp on the article, the first comment was left by Dave Morin, instead of ignoring or running from the issues he chose to immediately respond. First with the comment:

Arun, thanks for pointing this out. We actually think this is an important conversation and take this very seriously. We upload the address book to our servers in order to help the user find and connect to their friends and family on Path quickly and effeciently[sic] as well as to notify them when friends and family join Path. Nothing more.

We believe that this type of friend finding & matching is important to the industry and that it is important that users clearly understand it, so we proactively rolled out an opt-in for this on our Android client a few weeks ago and are rolling out the opt-in for this in 2.0.6 of our iOS Client, pending App Store approval.

Dave Morin
Co-Founder and CEO of Path

*Italics – Emphasis mine

Start Up: Nicira Disrupting Network Providers With Software Defined Networks

As more and more companies move to cloud based servers there’s a huge market for cloud based server companies. Many cloud based providers turn to huge companies with huge server centers to get their information in the cloud.

A company called Nicira is using an old software trick originally used by spy agencies to challenge some of those traditional network providers. With their technology called “Software Defined Networks”

Software defined networks and virtualized servers basically trick servers into doing the taks of several. Virtualized machines run on cheaper components and cheaper semiconductors driving down the cost of hardware.

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Capsule Is Your One Stop Event Shop App For Android And iPhone

The group event space is becoming a crowded one, you’ve got e-invite for inviting, or eventbrite for ticketing, you have several group texting apps and others for group email. You’ve got Facebook events and some people even use Myspace for events still (I know Myspace….).

When Capsule’s co-founders Cyrus Farudi and Omri Cohen got together they didn’t want another group event app to add to all the others, they were looking for something to replace all the others. Capsule is that app.

According to Capsule’s founders in an interview with the Los Angeles Times they set out to cover the entire life cycle of a group event from start to finish. “No one has that complete solution over the marketplace, and I think that’s one thing that sets us apart,” said Farudi in the interview to the LA Times, formerly of Flipswap. Capsule “solves the event life-cycle management problem.”

The less than a year old start up came after the two founders collectively attended 14 weddings and nine bachelor parties in one year. They are based in the Manhattan Beach area of Los Angeles which is being dubbed “Silicon Beach”.

For more information you can check out trycapsule.com

CEA Opened Eureka Park In 2012

The Consumer Electronics Association, the producers of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), this year introduced a new area to CES. Over the years CEA has added several category specific areas to the ever-growing show floor. China, Korea and Japan all have their own areas in addition to the ability to spring for a full booth on the main show floor.

Eureka Park was housed in the Venetian hotel which was also home to the exhibits in the 70000 area and PMA which is the photography convention that merged with CES this year.

Putting Eureka park in the Venetian hotel as opposed to the convention center, allowed CEA to offer start-ups their own place to play and show off their wares, apps and ideas. It also allowed CEA to offer booth space at the largest trade show in the western hemisphere at a lower cost than the premium spaces at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

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Motorola Solutions Venture Capital Participates In $2.6 Million Round For Retailigence

Motorola Solutions Venture Capital, the VC arm of Motorola Solutions, has participated in a $2.6 million dollar round of financing for Retailigence Inc.

Retailigence Inc has partnered with 70 major retail firms to date. Their client base, which encompasses big names like Whole Foods, H&M and Nordstrom, just to name a few, gives Retailigence access to their inventory systems. Retailigence then extrapolates that data from the inventory systems and pushes it to the cloud. Once in the cloud apps like Shopsavvy, Pic2Shop and Layar access the data to offer end users real-time inventory data on the items they are searching for.

Retailigence has 20 employees at their Palo Alto headquarters. They are going to use this round of financing to improve analytics, and expand their reach into Asia.

“They have a great vision and the kind of data analytics that retailers want,” said Reese Schroeder, a managing director of Motorola Solutions Venture Capital. “We have a very broad reach into the market with so many retail customers. There’s a lot of opportunity for us to collaborate on bringing some of these next-generation solutions to our customers.”

Source: WSJ

Self Funeral Planning Start Up To Be Featured In Season Premiere Of Shark Tank

When the next season of ABC’s Shark Tank starts two women from Minnesota will be pitching their unique start-up called Mywonderfullife.com.

Mywonderfullife.com was founded in 2008 by Sue Kruskopf and Nancy Bush. The website helps people plan their own funeral. Although the business is 4 years old these two women have been bootstrapping mywonderfullife.com as a side project and are hoping to get a much-needed cash flow injection from the judges on Shark Tank.

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Start Up: Hitch.me Uses Your Linked In Profile For Dating?

A new start up called Hitch.me is taking love and social networks to LinkedIN. Social networks are very important parts of everyone’s life. A few years ago you may not have wanted your parents to know that you met your fiance on match.com, today it’s almost common practice to date someone from Facebook or Twitter.

Dating, after meeting through a social network, can get the small talk and the uncomfortable part out of the way. After all social networks typically reveal your likes, your dislikes and your personality at a more comfortable level.

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Android Focused A-Fund Yields 7 Great Android Start Ups

Earlier this year venture firm DCM announced a cooperative effort for a new venture fund. The fund calls itself the “A Fund” where the A stands for Android. The fund started with an announcement and $100 million dollars back in April and today they’ve announced their startups. DCM’s A Fund is a direct competitor to the $200 million dollar iFund at Kleiner Perkins.

Here’s the list:

Appia: a derivative of pocketgear and the original Handango is actually the longest running third party app store. They also offer private labeling for OEM’s and carriers to provide app stores. In the past, Eric Schmidt and Blackberry Ventures have financed Appia.

Billing Revolution: One click billing solutions for Android

Pappayamobile: Social mobile gaming for Android with 30 million users and 350 games already

Happy Elements: provides social mobile games for large social networks outside of Facebook.

Kanbox: Cloud storage firm in China

Loki Studios: specializes in environmental aware and location focused smartphone games

Kakao Corp: mobile messaging platform with over 25 million users.

Source: Venturebeat