Startup Interview Archives - Page 25 of 34

Houston Startup: GoodDeedsGlobal Hopes To Make A Difference

Self proclaimed “Modern Day Renaissance Man” and entrepreneur Corey S. Davis of Las Vegas has teamed up with co-founder Ken Melancon of Houston Texas to create a new social startup called GoodDeedsGlobal network. GoodDeedsGlobal is a cause driven social business that intends to help put money in the hands of those that need “good deeds”.

GoodDeedsGlobal has a request a good deed page which is designed for those with needs to contact the organization. It’s unclear as to what specifically constitutes a need but the site says it can be anything. So if you’re in need, go for it here.

Davis gave us this example of how the platform is designed to work:

“Maybe someone like a single mom who is really struggling to make ends meet and can’t afford to pay all the bills on a particular month, plus on top of that feed and take care of the kids and everything else. If she wrote into our site asking for something like $150 to maybe $300 dollars to help make it through the month and pay a few bills (maybe help to keep the lights on or something like that). Then what we would do is contact her back as soon as possible and verify her situation as best we can, and then simply help her out by fulfilling that request (essentially sending a money order for her to pick up in her local area and/or city)”

Davis says that the GoodDeedsGlobal network is designed to touch one person at a time and is a change agent to promote doing good deeds for each other. He is hopeful that people will use the GoodDeedsGlobal platform to “pay it forward”.

Davis equates it to the “Make A Wish Foundation” for people that are over 17 and not going through the hardship of a life threatening illness.

Perhaps our interview with Davis, below, will provide my clarity.

Sports Fans Find Your Out Of Town Bar With Cleveland Startup: BackerBar

You see the tweets, Facebook mentions and Google+ messages all the time, someone in your timeline is out of town and wants to catch their favorite game at a team friendly bar. After all you don’t want to go into just any sports bar in Baltimore Maryland and ask to put on the Steeler’s game. Those special bars are what this Cleveland startup refers to as “BackerBar’s” which is where their name came from.

The team at BackerBar came up with this clever little definition:

backerbar: [n.] /ޖbakər/ bär/ – a bar that supports, or ‘backs’, a team foreign to the local market. Support can range from just a banner or two hanging up, or on game days packed wall to wall with fans wearing the teams’ jerseys…even the bartenders! Bar owners can choose to support a professional and/or college team. Examples include an Ohio State BackerBar in Chicago, Dallas Cowboys BackerBar in Los Angeles, or USC Trojans BackerBar in Boston. The combinations of teams/cities can be endless. We cover the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, as well as NCAA football and basketball.

As you can see if you’re a sports fan this is a very important startup. BackerBar has developed a gigantic database and interactive web based platform so that any traveling or transplanted sports fan can find out where their team’s “backer bar” is. They also told us in the interview below, that naturally a mobile app is in the works. No more worries about getting laughed, at made fun of or even injured for supporting your own team. You’ll find that special backer bar with BackerBar.

In the interview below BackerBar co-founder Michael Stratis talks about their startup and also building a startup in Cleveland which has become a town full of startups and innovation. In fact one of the biggest organizations that supports startups and entrepreneurs, Jumpstart Inc, is also based in Cleveland.

Check out the interview below:

Swiss Startup: RightClearing Simplifies Right Clearing For Artists INTERVIEW

Most musicians want to do one thing and that is, play music. Some want to play bars and clubs, others want to play in bands and orchestras, and others want to record and sell their music. One of the issues that stands in the way of an artists creativity is clearing their rights to their music. After all they’ve created a song, they want to make sure they get credit for it.

That’s where Zurich Switzerland based startup, RightClearing, comes in. They’ve simplified and democratized the market for music licensing by providing the technological infrastructure for musicians and content users to sell and purchase licenses. The entire process from searching for songs to creating and paying for binding legal licenses has been automated. Independent artists and labels can now earn money with the usage rights to their music. Advertisers, filmmakers or private persons can license songs for their own use with only a few clicks.

When you think about copyrights and music you may not think to the Swiss however RightClearing is planning a global rollout and founder Philippe Perraux is convinced that they have a platform in place that will become a staple in any artists career. When Perraux graduated law school in 2001 he knew he wanted to continue working on copyright law. What he ran into was an old antiquated system that needed innovation. Now, 11 years later he has that system.

We got a chance to find out more about RightClearing in the interview below:

Austrian Startups: GeoPieces GeoTag Your Content On A Map Of The World The Way You Want

An Austrian startup called GeoPieces has come up with a geo-tagged map based platform to share all of your worldly content. Whether you’re traveling to London to take in a football game or Barcelona for a quick romp through Spain you can now take the content that you produce and put it all together on GeoPieces map of the world.

The idea is great for world travelers or anyone who wants to keep a geo based record of everything they’ve done. The advantage to a site like GeoPieces over traditional check-in and discovery apps is that you can share as much or as little as you want, whenever you want and the way that you want. No other site gives you the freedom and flexibility to do this quite the same way that GeoPieces does.

You can also explore the map and see the things that other users are publicly sharing. You could end up finding the next great piece of art worth checking out or a truly great view on a sandy beach somewhere around the world.

GeoPieces was founded by Erich Drazdansky and Jorg Eibl two entrepreneurs who keep the same crazy founder schedule that startups in the states typically keep. Work, no sleep, more work. That shows in the UI of GeoPieces.

We got a chance to talk with the team behind GeoPieces in the interview below:

DC Women Startup Founders Are Old Enough To Be Zuck’s Mom; See What They’re Doing

We’ve had a lot of fun getting to know 68 year old Susan Jones and 54 year old Elizabeth Van Sant. These two mothers, business women and now startup founders in Washington DC are old enough to be Mark Zuckerberg’s moms. Their startup, Quad 2 Quad, was actually created because Van Sant and Jones have become somewhat pro’s at getting their kids off to college. They know the ins, the outs and “the ropes”.

We’ve interviewed and profiled quite a few college bound startups lately. Earlier this week we interviewed Cleveland startup CollegeSkinny who’s platform helps high school students transition from high school to college. We featured CiteLighter which is a highlighting bookmarklet app that allows users to easily make citations in their research. Exceleratr, a New York startup, connects high school students to much needed extra-curricular activities outside of the high school campus. We also recently interviewed Swedish startup Studemia, which is a collaboration tool for students as well as CampusShift, a Youngstown startup looking to take a bite out of college debt.

Jones and Van Sant’s startup aims to help parents of perspective college students, simpli

fy the college visit planning process. Quad2Quad essentially becomes the college visitor’s personal assistant.

Between Van Sant and Jones they have six children, all of whom have either graduated from college or are enrolled in college now. Jones told us in an interview that between her and Liz they visited over 30 college campuses between 1997 and 2011. Things were quite different, even back in the late 90’s. In 1997 it was unheard of to have to go throw hoops and bounds to schedule a visit. Now you need to schedule a tour, but even that’s not the hard part.

Navigating through the college’s rules and even temporary hinderances like for instance an assembly on an off Saturday night may close the important sections of campus off to students. Or some colleges require special access to even eat lunch at the student union.

Quad2Quad consolidates information from hundreds of sources about colleges, when to visit, how to visit, what you can do on the visit and where to go and who to call during the visit.

pandodaily,techcrunch,Quad2Quad,women owned startup,startup,startups,Washington DC startup,startup interview

Quad2Quad provides important information like admission office hours, admission office closures, interview and reservation policies and much more. They currently have 74 of the most sought after colleges in the Quad2Quad system and plan to add 300 more shortly.

In the interview below Jones highlights the community nature of the Washington DC tech community. Both ladies were shocked at how receptive founders half their age were to the Quad2Quad idea and to helping “two geriatric ladies” with their startup.

The fact is Jones and Van Sant are far from geriatric. They’ve both had great careers and are doing something that a lot of people their age would never dream of. I’ve personally been an entrepreneur and startup founder since 2003 and my mother, who is 64 I think (sorry mom), to this day still asks when I’m going to get a job. Both women have found the age barrier to be virtually non-existant in Washington DC and have big plans for their startup. Check out our interview with the golden girls of Washington DC’s tech scene below:

Georgia Startup: FameTube Hopes To Help The Truly Talented With Video Platform

Imagine if YouTube was stripped of all the wannabe’s, all the crappy singers and all the kids who’s parents don’t have the heart to tell them their voices sound like nails on a chalkboard. Imagine if YouTube actually showed the videos from up and coming stars that were truly talented. Well that’s the mission for Georgia startup FameTube.

FameTube’s founders Bryan Cornelius and Brad Buttimer hail from Atlanta and Savannah Georgia respectively. Both entrepreneurs love music, people, and media and bring great experience to the table.

Their new startup actually vets videos from people who claim to be artists and musicians and sometimes they don’t make the cut. Only those people who get past the FameTube team actually get their videos posted. As Cornelius explains in the interview below, once a video makes it onto FameTube artists are encouraged to drive traffic to the site. The community, outside of the artist and their friends and family are more inclined to check out the other artists and interact.

Check out our interview with this exciting startup from “everywhere else” here:

Columbus Ohio Startup: Resition Easing The Layoff Process INTERVIEW

Do we even need to say something like “Getting laid off is one of the hardest things in the world”. Probably not. Getting laid off is a fact of life though, especially in these trying economic times. There’s no way to sugar coat the lay off process but what happens immediately afterwards is crucial to the laid off employee.

Historically, the longer a laid off employee waits to start the next job hunt, the harder it gets. As time goes on people who are laid off tend to get disengaged from the work life experience and also disheartened by their lack of leads. Often times this is because people who have been laid off don’t know exactly where to go.

This is where Columbus startup Resition comes in. Resition is a platform created by Mike Chapman (CEO), Chris Domino (CTO) and Walter Akana (COO), to help facilitate a transition to another job and ease the blow of getting laid off. Resition is actually paid for by the company that is doing the layoffs. Adding Resition at the time of separation allows the companies that are laying people off to give those people access to career coaches, mentoring, and a socially driven job search. The companies then get valuable analytic data back from Resition that can help them manage the morale at the company for the remaining employees.

While the job displacement space is definitely not a sexy one, Chapman and his team have left no stone unturned and have made sure that Resition does exactly what they’ve set out to do.

How is it done? We got a chance to interview Chapman. Check out the interview below:

Interview With NY Startup: Marqueed Online Collaborative Visual Platform

If you could have the ultimate interior design online platform you would probably want features like, the ability to pin interior design pictures from the web, adding plans to your interior design, drawing right on top of the plans and pictures, collaborating with designers, getting feedback on your plans online from friends and family, and add comments. The ultimate interior design platform would be Pinterest meets the furniture catalog, Asana, meets Google Wave meets Facebook. Well guess what? That platform is here.

New York startup Marqueed has all of those features in a smart, graphically rich UI that also keeps all of your visual projects together in one organized place. Marqueed can be applied to just about anything visual. You could use Marqueed for do it yourself projects, recipes, landscaping, home alterations, heck even automobile customization.

The core set of functionality behind is a communication and collaborative platform around images. In the interview below with co-founder Zerna Karian she’s quick to point out that Marqueed isn’t about project management, but if enough users like it for that they would integrate with Asana or Basecamp. Karian’s other co-founder is her husband John. Both of them are career long creatives and it shows in the crisp UI and easy to use functionality.

Check out our interview with Karian below:

Put Your Email On Steroids With London Startup: Tray INTERVIEW

London startup Tray is an email companion app that pumps up the productivity of your email. Imagine if when you checked in on FourSquare, your email automatically started delivering your out of office notification. Then, after you checked back into the office your email was restored to normal. That would be amazing wouldn’t it? Well that’s just one of many, many functions that London startup Tray adds to your email.

The functionality that Tray adds to your email is really pretty incredible. You can set rules for email that go well beyond your current email client. For example you can tell Tray, if “John” emails me after 8pm send it to my mobile. You can tell Tray, if Mary, Mike or Stacy emails me a link to read, add it to Pocket so I can read it later. Another example of a very useful Tray rule is, if my email inbox gets too full, send an auto responder saying that it may take a while to get back to people.

Tray began as an idea to make group emailing easier. After talking to email users, Dom Lewis, Rich Waldron, and Ali Russell, the founders of Tray, they decided to make email much more powerful.

We got a chance to interview Dom Lewis about Tray and building a startup in London. Check out the interview below:

Read More…

NY Brothers Create Startup: SwapCycles A Marketplace For Motorcycles

Whether you’re a weekend warrior on a beautiful Harley or you prefer the speed and precision of the latest Honda or BMW bike, you may have noticed one of the things that the interwebs has been lacking is a decent all in one destination designed to help riders buy and sell bikes, and of course show them off.

Brothers Daniel and Myer Amer are your run of the mill Rutgers students, passionate about business and motorcycles (which of course makes them less run of the mill). With the blessing and mentorship of their father. The elder Amer built his own contracting business from the ground up and his business principles, skills and good ole fashion elbow grease have helped the brothers launch their business.

SwapCycles online marketplace allows both power sports dealers and private individuals to list their motorcycles for sale. They’ve also created a show off feature and a social network community for motorcycle enthusiasts who can use the platform to talk shop,sports,sales, even find riding buddies across the country.

Typically when we think Silicon Alley we’re not thinking motorcycles but SwapCycles is right in the thick of it. We got a chance to talk with Daniel and Myer about SwapCycles and growing a startup, outside of the mainstream, in Silicon Alley. Check out the interview below:

Seattle Startup: Zulily, Daily Deals For Kids INTERVIEW

(photo: Zulily/people.com)

So what do two men who have entrepreneurial and technology backgrounds do when they become dads? Create a startup of course. That’s what Darrell Cavens and Mark Vadon have done with Zulily. Zulily is an online marketplace that offers daily deals on stuff for kids.

Zulily offers a variety of products for any kid ages 0-8 and of course starts off with maternity needs for expectant mothers. With their daily deals, parents can save up to 90% on things that they really need for their kids.

A site like Zulily is a recipe for success. Just how successful? Zulily grew so fast last year that Cavens told Xconomy back in May that their backlog of orders was over 300,000 units deep “So we sat down in August of last year and said, `Oh shit—we’re in a world of hurt,’” Cavens told Xconomy. In June Zulily topped Seattle’s list of hottest startups, edging out StartupWeekend, Big Fish Games and even SEOmoz, which powers Zulily.

Zulily already has over 5 million email subscribers that get their deals everyday. They employ over 300 people and add 5,000 products to their private sale site daily. Zulily keeps stock of products in house, which is a definite change from the way that most daily deals sites work. Those sites, when dealing in hard goods, drop ship merchandise via the manufacturer or vendor.

This ride for Cavens and Vadon is so wild that it’s hard to believe we were able to get a chance to talk with a spokesperson from Zulily. Check out our interview below:

Move Over Rosetta Stone, Prague Startup: SpaceTeacher Has A New Way To Teach Languages

When it comes to language learning Rosetta Stone has one of the best reputations and best success rates in town. Well in Prague, David Brhel, Milan Mahovsky and Kamil Mahovsky are three entrepreneurs who hope their startup SpaceTeacher becomes the easiest to use language learning platform in the world.

One of the easiest ways to describe SpaceTeacher is to say that they are crowdsourcing for language. They hope to become the ultimate platform for language learning by crowdsourcing both the content and the teachers.

Co-founder Brhel says that the company is still bootstrapping it but that angels in the area are starting to show interest. The startup is also growing at area accelerator StartupYard.

The core reason for developing SpaceTeacher is that in the CzechRepublic they offer a “one size fits all” type of learning. The shocking statistic is that 79% of the population is not fluent in a foreign language.

We got a chance to talk with Brhel in the interview below.

Share Your Predictions For The Future With Syracuse Startup: PsyQic

It’s not everyday that you find a startup that wants to help you predict the future and share your predictions. That’s of course as long as you throw all the “weather” startups to the wayside. PsyQic a startup from Syracuse New York, does just that.

PsyQic is an iOS app that makes it easy to proclaim and than share your predictions. Do you have a prediction for next week’s NFL football games? Do you see something in the future that not everyone else sees? This may be just the app for you.

PsyQic goes beyond the predictions themselves and gamifies the process by giving you points when your predictions comes true. The points are called Qi’s which is actually a Chinese word for “spiritual energy”. Founders Gabrielle Gosselin and Keisuke Inoue wanted to design something different and fun. PsyQic fulfills just that.

Inoue and Gosselin are currently incubating their startup in upstate New York at the Syracuse Tech Garden after graduating from the Syracuse Student Sandbox this summer.

We got a chance to talk with the team behind PsyQic in the interview below:

Cleveland Startup: CollegeSkinny Gives You The Skinny To Apply To College

The college application process can be a long and daunting task. Yesterday we brought you the story about a startup in New York that helps high school students prepare for college by offering a platform to find extra-curricular activities outside of the school. Today, while this story is about a college focused startup, it to is more about pre-enrolled high school students.

Cleveland based startup CollegeSkinny provides incoming students everything they need to know about the colleges they want to apply to. It also helps them keep all their prospective college applications and information organized so that they can continue to access it until the time comes to make a decision.

According to founder and CEO Bryant Hardy:

“Students browse colleges and Universities hosted on the CollegeSkinny network and learn everything from How to Apply all the way to the specific Greek Life organizations on campus and everything in between. We also provide interactive tools for the schools themselves to recruit and connect with potential students.

Our features include: How to Apply, Important Dates, Where to Live, What’s on Campus, College Process, Greek Life, Packing Checklist, Meal Plans, Things to Know, and The CollegeSkinny Connection (feature that provides a link between a student and the University).”

The entire focus of CollegeSkinny is to help transitioning high school students, pick and then transition into college. To get a better perspective on what CollegeSkinny is all about we interviewed Hardy below: