Startup Interview Archives - Page 20 of 34

Boston Startup: BRIGHTdriver Has Mobile Games Even The Driver Can Play

Do you get bored in the car? Sure you do,everybody does. Now in a lot of states, it’s illegal to do anything on your smartphone that requires you to actually hold the phone. Playing Angry Birds at a stop light is a little too risky, you don’t want to get a ticket, or cause an accident.

Well there’s got to be a way to play games in the car without actually holding the phone. A Boston startup incubating at Dog Patch Labs, called BRIGHTdriver has the answer, audio games.

BRIGHTdrivers unique and fun games are audio based and don’t require you to actually hold the phone to play. BRIGHTdrivers audio games are as safe as talking hands free on your mobile phone or yelling out the answers to the dj’s trivia question on the radio.

Currently BRIGHTdriver offers three titles. Volley, is their pub style trivia game. Careoke is BRIGHTdriver’s sing-a-long Karaoke game and Best Mile is a game that challenges you to drive your best (and safest) mile. They have plans to introduce more games as the platform gets off the ground.

BRIGHTdriver’s platform is set up to allow you to play by yourself or against others on the BRIGHTdriver network.

The BRIGHTdriver team has taken to Kickstarter to help fund their official launch. You can donate to their Kickstarter campaign here and get cool perks like early access to this exciting new platform

We got a chance to talk with BRIGHTdriver founder Matt Albrecht about his unique new spin on mobile gaming. Check out the interview below.

Forget Seeing In The Data Center, Albuquerque Startup ProCog Lets You See In The Data

Last month Google made a historic move and let reporters in to see some of it’s many data centers. These data centers manage search, gmail and all of the many other pieces of data that Google stores. In the photos (like the one on this page), showed very colorful pipes, wires, and stacks upon stacks of servers.

Now imagine if Google let you see what it was like inside the data. More specifically, imagine if you could see how the results of your search were scrubbed and located throughout the vast internet.

That’s what Albuquerque start up ProCog is doing. ProCog is a full scale search engine which is totally transparent. ProCog users can see every little bit of information that ProCog uses to deliver it’s search results. Such open access to the data used in search can be very useful when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine research.

ProCog is short for “Proficient Cognition”. The site returns more data than you could ever dream of in a single search engine tool. Information you would need to scour the internet for hours to find, is all right there in your ProCog search results. Every entry has an seo report, scoring, duplicates report, site inlinks, traffic, cached data and reindex. All of it compiled together in one easy to use tool.

ProCog boasts 1 billion pages indexed so far and it continues to grow.

We got a chance to talk to Steve Cook, Co-Founder of ProCog. Check out the interview below:

We Talk Mobile Payments & Brazilian Startup Culture With 500 Startups’ UniPay

We’re continuing our series of interviews with the latest class of Dave McClure’s world famous 500 startups. One of the reasons we love 500 startups is because of McClure’s commitment to startups in and outside of the valley. Sure the top secret lair and command center for 500 startups is based in the valley but McClure targets startups anywhere and everywhere. He’s also known for his geeks on a plane startup events that are literally all over the world.

Fitting right into McClure’s rockstar requirements is a mobile payments startup from Brazil called UniPay. Mobile Payments definitely aren’t new. Brazilian startups aren’t new either, however when you put them both together it does become a new concept. This is partially because credit card payments in Brazil are a beast in themselves. Unipay’s co-founder Tahiana D’Egmont tells us in the interview below that because of bureaucracy, high fees and an ambivalence with trust that runs in the Brazilian culture, electronic payments are a tough nut to crack.

UniPay is addressing the needs of those smaller merchants that don’t have access to credit card processing. If Payfirma is the “Square” for Canada, than UniPay is aiming to become the Square for Brazil.

Check out our interview with D’Egmont below. She tells us all about UniPay but she also tells us about Brazilian startup culture. One of the things we found most interesting is that most Brazilians are deathly scared of their ideas being stolen, and “fail fast” doesn’t work in Brazil, just yet because Brazilians are afraid of failure.

Read the interview below, D’Egmont does remind us that she’s new to the states and he’s still learning English.

Romanian Startup Appscend Streamlines App Building For Performance

A Romanian startup called Appscend is already one of the most popular app development houses in the country. They have 250 apps published in the Google Play and Apple iTunes App Store already. The startup employs 12 people at their home office in Romania and they plan on expanding this year into the US (New York) and Latin America (Chile).

Appscend offers their app development customers a more holistic approach to app development with the ability to go multi platform/cross platform and native at the same time. They’ve also taken the best pieces out of over 100+ development tools and streamlined them with a focus on performance when building out apps on any platform.

Sebastian Vaduva, Appscend’s CEO and co-founder told us:

finding the right tools for each phase of the app’s lifecycle is by far the most time intensive and resource consuming process for businesses trying to embrace mobility. This is the reason most of them fail or they postpone the process.

Vaduva says that with his companies “Ignite Markup Language” they’re able to produce and develop apps up to ten times as fast with no learning curve. They also provide a cloud based content system that Appscend customers can access directly giving their customers the advantage of being able to update their app without needing the original developer’s help.

Check out our interview with Vaduva below.

It’s Tea Time At 500 Startups With Hawaiian Startup Tealet

Subscription startups are blowing up these days. It seems there’s a subscription service or subscription box for just about anything (and everything). We’ve reported on, or interviewed, quite a few here at nibletz, including KlutchClub, Bulu Box, FlavrBox and hip hop artist Nas’ subscription startup 12 society.

Today we’ve got Hawaiian startup Tealet. Tealet is about sampling tea just as much as it is about discovering tea. Tealet co-founder Elyse Peterson told us in an interview “Tealet tells the stories of tea growers around the world and allows tea drinkers to explore these teas through a bi-monthly subscription service.”

After the customer gets their tea bi-monthly tea samples they can go back to the tealet website and order larger quantities of the teas they like.

Tealet isn’t about mass produced coffee house teas or even the teas that you can pick up at your local Whole Foods or Trader Joes. Through Peterson’s personal experience, connecting with actual tea growers around the world, Tealet members are getting access to the most interesting and best tasting farm grown teas in the world. Check out the interview below to read how Peterson fell in love with farm grown teas and the farmers who make it.

Mississippi Startup YeHive Share & Attend Events Socially! Launches Today

Typically when we get an email or pitch that has the words “event” and “app” in the same pitch, we get skeptical. The event space is a crowded space and an extremely hard nut to crack. We were actually referred to YeHive by our lawyer who is one of the leads in the firms emerging technologies practice. In other words he sees a lot of startups. I told our lawyer of my ambivalence about “event startups” but he insisted we check it out.

So Thursday morning we got a walk through of YeHive from the startups co-founder Brad Fuller.

YeHive isn’t about event discovery, it’s about making events more social. YeHive combines photos, videos, comments and a timeline to any event. Users can easily create an impromptu event or participate in an ongoing event. When you log into your YeHive account and then an event on YeHive all of your photos and videos get uploaded to the event. You can comment on other users photos and videos and also comment on the events timeline.

YeHive then archives all of the photos, videos and timeline entries, right now “forever”, Fuller told us. If you’ve set up a YeHive for a wedding, birthday party or even a camping trip you’ll be able to go back and check out the memories. If you participated in a YeHive for a sporting event you’ll be able to replay all the action directly from YeHive anytime you want.

Fuller and his co-founders haven’t cut any corners in building out YeHive. The website is built and functioning and for mobile they are debuting in the Google Play store and the Apple iTunes App Store today, simultaneously insuring just about anyone who wants to try it, can.

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

Atlanta Startup Vir2o Sharing Everything In Real Time Improves In Person Relationships

Atlanta startup Vir2o, promises to be a whole new social experience. That’s quite a lofty statement, but after checking them out and talking with them, if executed correctly it will work.

Vir20 shares just about everything there is to share in real time, which improves actual in person relationships. You can go shopping with your friends on Vir2o. You can go to the movies with your friends on Vir2o. You can share photos with your friends on Vir2o. You can listen to and share music on Vir2o.

Anytime an entrepreneur wants to create a new social network or new social media outlet it’s immediately compared to Facebook. When Facebook burst onto the college scene and then opened up their doors to anyone over 13, no one believed they would overtake Myspace, but they did.

In an interview we did with Vir2o’s Founder,Kayode Aladesuyi, he mentioned sharing a lot. When we think of sharing and social media we naturally think of Facebook. Spaulding explains how Vir20 is different than Facebook “…doesn’t necessarily enhance social interaction between people, especially if there is physical distance between them. We wanted to bridge the gap between people who live in different parts of the world and provide them with a real-time interactive tool to bring them closer together”

Since Vir20 is all about live sharing, in real time, they consider themselves a “Live Community” versus a social network.

Check out the rest of our interview with Spaulding below.

New Jersey Startup SmartTests Streamlines Professional Test Study Guides

Are you a licensed real estate agent? Do you have your series 7? Are you a CPA? If you answered yes to any of those three questions and you’ve become licensed, or taken your test in the last few years it may have involved a mobile app study guide. More and more professional accreditation and licensing tests have started to offer their study materials for mobile devices, and specifically smartphones.

Bryan Van Demark, the cofounder of New Jersey startup SmartTests discovered first hand how cumbersome study apps can be for professional testing when he was studying for the CPA exam.

In researching this story we found that the study apps available for real estate licenses and CPA certifications were either inundated with extra buttons and functionality no sane person would need, or so light, you might as well be looking at your test study materials on a text editor.

SmartTests has solved that problem by offering the most robust study materials in an easy to understand, easy to navigate and appealing UI. The SmartTests team has baked functionality into the app study guides for the CPA exam, based on the way professionals actually study.

Currently SmartTests is available in a whole suite of apps for the Roger CPA Review. The company plans on building on the success of their Roger apps by offering study guide apps for similar, important professional testing.

Sure this may not be the sexiest startup, but it’s definitely one of the most useful, especially taking into consideration the fact that tests like these often lead to more lucrative career opportunities.

We got a chance to talk with SmartTests Co-Founder John Ceniza. Check out our interview below.

Ohio Startup Huddlewoo Wants To Know What You’re Extraordinary At? Launches Today

A new startup based in Columbus Ohio and Phoenix Arizona, called Huddlewoo, is launching today. This video platform gives ordinary people like me and you access to people we admire. Huddlewoo also lets ordinary people show off the things that they are extraordinary at.

Through Huddlewoo’s unique platform you can schedule 1:1 video conversations with people that you may not get the opportunity to meet in person.

Huddlewoo users create a profile and highlight what they are extraordinary at. The user than sets up an availability calendar through a tool within the web app. Once those two things are in place the user can set a price for their time, they can then decide if they want to make a little extra income or donate the fees from the video sessions to charity.

Are you a Zen SEO master and want to share a few tips in private settings? How much do you think that information is worth? You can set the price and the times and wait for people to line up to have Huddlewoo sessions with you. Maybe you’re a great baker and want to share some kitchen tips for making the best cupcakes, you can do that too. Whatever you are extraordinary at and willing to share (even for money) can be added in your profile and easily discovered by other members of the Huddlewoo community.

This unique video, mentoring, online class hybrid, startup opens up in alpha today. We got a chance to talk with the Huddlewoo team as they prepared for their alpha launch.

Check out the interview below.

Meet Rhode Island 500 Startups Startup: Waigo Translate (Translate Abroad)

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.

New Louisville Startup To Tackle App Discovery (AGAIN), Check Out Appszito

App discovery is a beast. I remember two years ago at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York there were three app discovery startups. A few months later at TechCrunch Disrupt SF (2011) there were another three app discovery startups. The problem that all these startups are tackling is how to discover apps across multiple app stores and markets and finding apps in a somewhat logical way.

Louisville Kentucky startup Appszito is working on a search product that will allow smartphone users to easily find applications for iOS, Android and Windows Phone devices.

Appszito uses a proprietary relational algorithm that matches smarpthone users with the best and most cost effective app solutions for whatever it is they’re looking for.

When you enter a specific type of app or need, like CAD for instance, into the Appszito engine it combs the iTunes app store, Windows Market Place and multiple Android app stores to find the most relevant search results. Appszito provides pricing information, platform and a brief description of the application that’s met the search criteria. In true search fashion it serves up the most relevant matches first, but the list of apps can be plentiful.

Users are directly linked to the download site for each particular app.

Appszito is hoping to solve the pain of searching multiple places with less than stellar results for the smartphone user. They are also looking to provide a resource for app developers to drive downloads based on relevancy.

We got a chance to talk to Appszito co-founder Rahul Ahir about his startup and the Louisville startup scene. Check out the interview below.

500 Startups Unveiled Today: Meet Australian Startup Kickfolio The Easiest Way To Test iOS Apps

The startups that were selected to convene in the top secret 500 startups lair in Mountain View California this fall were revealed today. Dave McClure, the founder of 500 Startups along with Paul Singh have assembled another cohort of ass kicking, startup crushers, including Australian startup Kickfolio.

The rare breed of talent chosen to undergo the top secret 500 startups program come from all facets of the tech world. There are publishing startups, web tools, integrated browser plugins, analytical startups and even developer resources. That’s the category that Kickfolio fits in.

McClure and his team pick startups for a variety of reasons, undoubtedly the fact that this team has a co-founder named Diesel, must play into the flavor of startup monsters McClure is currently working on. Couple that with the fact that these Aussie founders swear Kickfolio is the best way for developers to test iOS apps and you have a recipe for startup inhalation.

We got a chance to talk with that particular founder, yes the one who goes by Diesel. Check out our interview with Diesel Laws below.

Manage All Your Bookmarks, Logins & Passwords With LA Startup MySocialCloud

Over the years browsers have become much more intuitive. All of the commercially used browsers have a keychain feature which allows you to save your logins and passwords, and even pre-populates them for you when you visit websites frequently. The problem with this current password storage method is it’s a cinch for anyone who gets access to your computer to view all of your passwords. In fact, one of the only real negatives I have with Mac’s is that they keep a similarly unsecure key chain on your hard drive as well.

There are a few startups out there that are tackling this problem with various password vaults. Most of these options keep your passwords in one spot and you need to remember the password to your vault and then look up the password by service.

Los Angeles startup MyScocialCloud is looking to streamline this process for you by storing your logins in the cloud. They make your passwords easily accessible by a browser plugin or bookmarklet. The best part is that they also keep your bookmarks organized as well. You don’t have to go searching through a password vault to find the password. MySocialCloud gives you the simplicity of a browser side or hard drive based keychain, but in the cloud, and more secure.

We got a chance to talk with Stacey Ferreira, the founder of MySocialCloud about her startup. Check out the interview below:

Boston 500 Startups Startup: Privy To Make Online Advertising Easier And Transparent

By now every new business owner knows that they need to have some kind of internet presence. Many also know that they need to advertise online. After business owners decide they need to advertise online, where to go and what to do often becomes a headache.

Google’s AdWords product is typically one of the easiest points of entry into online advertising. If you live in a small or medium sized market AdWords can work perfectly for you. However, when you get into larger cities, signing up and using AdWords can be a shot in the dark.

AdWords algorithm based advertising can be confusing to someone with very little online experience. Naturally, the more money you put into a platform like AdWords the better your conversions will be. Or at least that’s what many advertisers think.

When a company with a new online presence sprinkles in social media and other possible revenue streams, the overall plan can become a disorganized mess. It doesn’t take long to lose track of where your ad dollars are going, and how different efforts are paying off.

Boston startup Privy is creating a much easier online advertising platform to use and understand. Privy’s founder Ben Jabbawy is hoping to add a layer of transparency to online advertising that hasn’t existed before. Jabbawy wants to make it easy for local businesses to buy online advertising and know exactly how many customers they get for every dollar they spend.

Sounds easy enough right?

Dave McClure liked the concept enough to bring Privy out to Mountain View California for the current session of 500 Startups. We got a chance to talk to Jabbawy about Privy, his hometown of Boston and what makes advertising work. Check out the interview below.