Startup Interview Archives - Page 27 of 34

Memphis Startup: WorkForPie Prepares For TechCrunch Disrupt

If their name means anything at all than Memphis startup WorkForPie should have several walk in freezers worth of pie because they’ve been working really hard… for pie. WorkForPie was a member of the first class at Memphis’ accelerator SeedHatchery. They were also the first startup out of SeedHatchery to raise significant follow on funding.

After graduating from SeedHatchery co-founders Cliff McKinney and Brad Montgomery were able to attract a $300,000 investment round from Solidus in Nashville and a>m ventures.

They’ve been doing a number of things right and have a tireless work ethic. Montgomery and McKinney are also passionate about Memphis and the startup ecosystem brewing there. McKinney and Montgomery are very vocal about what they think matters, especially when you’re growing a startup outside Silicon Valley or New York City.

All of this leads to the reason why they are the first startup from Memphis Tennessee that will appear in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco next week.

We got a chance to catch up with WorkForPie and talk about TechCrunch Disrupt, brewing startups outside the confines of the valley and product, product, product. Check out our short interview below:

Humanity.TV Named Finalist In Startup America Contest INTERVIEW

Startup America teamed up with American Airlines for a huge contest. The grand prize in Flights, Camera, Action is a prize package which includes 80 round trip flights. Of course for any startup or entrepreneur this would be a great prize. Most startups need flights to get to important conferences or investor meetings. Humanity.TV, a New York startup, has something else in mind.

Humanity.TV is a technology startup that’s using technology, specifically video, to travel around the country and around the world and show the human side of life in the 21st century. They take a brief look into the lives of fascinating people. Obviously that seems like a daunting task.

“Our messaging and overarching goal is authenticity. We try to find people that have intriguing lifestyles and live passionately, regardless of their popularity or fame. Ultimately, we want to inspire people to visit countries around the world and get off the beaten tourist path to encounter unique experiences with people that will have long-lasting impacts on them.” Humanity.tv co-founder Gaston Blanchet told nibletz.com in an interview.

Humanity.tv strives to capture the lives of fascinating people in obtrusive ways, for a more natural look at the world we live in today.

Of course with a startup like this the lack of capital to travel is definitely a hardship (we know about that first hand). They’re hoping that if they win the Startup America/American Airlines Flights, Camera, Action contest, they can use the flights to continue working on their story telling video platform.

The contest kicked off in July with a video from Startup America CEO Scott Case. The contesting period went through August 20th and the finalists were announced earlier this week.

We got a chance to interview Blanchet their startup as well as the contest and the Startup America partnership. Check out the interview below:

Interview With Youngstown Ohio Startup: CampusShift.com

There is over $1 trillion dollars of student loan debt these days and with the economy in the situation that it’s currently in, it’s getting harder and harder for students to manage and payback that debt.

A Youngstown Ohio startup called CampusShift doesn’t have a secret recipe to make that debt disappear, but rather offers a set of tools that will help college students attack the student loan problem from a variety of directions. Whether you’re looking to make college costs more manageable by saving money on textbooks and other supplies. Or if you’re looking to make more money in college by starting your own business (startup) CampusShift has tools to go either route.

CampusShift has four distinct areas. It starts with a place to save money and compare costs on textbooks. There’s a social networking element available to students, that’s free of course. Campus area businesses can offer daily deals, discounts and rewards to students. Finally, CampusShift offers resources to those students that want to try their luck at their own startup business and test it within the confines of the school with minimal risk.

We got a chance to talk with Chris Haynes, co-founder of CampusShift, who was consequently the first one since we started this interview series (with well over 500 startups interviewed) who followed our instructions completely. So it’s with great honor we give you our interview with Chris Haynes of CampusShift.

We Speak With Washington DC 500 Startups, Startup: Speek

While a lot of people are talking about TechCrunch Disrupt NY Battlefield winner UberConference when it comes to conference calling startups, another conference calling startup has been brewing in the Washington DC area. We first got to check out Speek back in May at the Capital Connection and TechBuzz conference in Washington DC. After carefully checking out both UberConference and Speek, Speek seems to be the simplest, most easy to understand conference calling solution out there.

It’s no wonder that Speek has everything together, it’s founded by John Bracken the founder of e-vite and Danny Boice who attended Harvard and is a former executive with The College Board.

More importantly though is how easy it is to setup Speek and get started with your own special url.

Speek is working out of AOL’s Fishbowl incubator in the Washington DC area, along another great DC startup CONT3NT. But Boice and Bracken were on the road to startup success even before that.

As Boice tells us in the interview below, Speek was created when two internet entrepreneurs attacked the group calling problem with startup vigor. Both Boice and Bracken had come from big corporate jobs and were always on conference calls. It was the clunkiness that is typical of big conference calls that drove these two to create Speek.

Check out our interview with Boice below:

West Virginia Startup: Reel Deal LLC Uniting College Students Through A Set Top Box

Interesting is the first word that comes to mind when checking out a new startup based in Wheeling West Virginia of all places. Reel Deal LLC was founded by Ramee Naja, Broderick Colaner and Phillip Mshelbawla, three students at Wheeling Jesuit University. These guys obviously aren’t afraid of a big idea. Rather than a straight up online social network, a new movie streaming site, they’re offering will come in the form of a set-top box for college students in the spring of 2013.

Reel Deal is combining a social network of college students, through their University while simultaneously offering over 1000 movies via the set-top box, that college students are known to love. The set-top box will offer ways for students to interact, important classroom and institution information and of course some entertainment content.

Reel Deal plans to offer their service in conjunction with the universities and colleges that sign up. After the partnership is formed the students enrolled at those colleges will be able to access the service through the set-top box that will be a one time $49.99 fee via their technology account.

“Our company is based off our own ideas of what we think would help improve higher education. We focus on giving kids an avenue in which they can receive all their academic and social information, while being rewarded for choosing Reel Deal,” Naja said in a statement.

Beyond the initial $49.99 (which barely covers the hardware) Reel Deal will make money through targeted advertising delivered directly to the set-top box.

We got a chance to talk with Naja about Reel Deal and what it’s like to launch a startup in Wheeling WV. While the Wheeling ecosystem is still in it’s infant stages, they are just 40 minutes away from Pittsburgh which is flourishing.

Check out the interview below:

Interview With Washington DC Startup: Distil, Content Protection Network

If you have a content based web site on the internet ( and who doesn’t) you may want to pay attention to Arlington based startup Distil.it. Distil focuses solely on protecting website owners’ content from data scraping, content theft, and competitive data mining.

Do you have countless sites just stealing your content with no linkback? Have you ever been totally plagiarized without your knowledge just to find in a Google search content that was obviously lifted from your site? Those are just some of the things that happen when your website content is scraped and your data is mined.

More importantly with the case of content scraping, you can actually lose page-rank and hinder your SEO. Most web crawlers discard duplicate content so sometimes when you’re writing articles to maximize your SEO return, you’ll actually lose that content when it’s scraped and thrown on another site without your permission.

In addition to identifying and blocking malicious content and data scraping Distil also accelerates content through 14 global nodes which improves site load time and reduces server load.

We found out all about this and more when we talked with Distil’s co-founder and CEO Rami Essaid in the interview below:

Madison Wisconsin Startup: SnowShoe Validates Actual Check Ins INTERVIEW

The headline for this story about Madison Wisconsin startup SnowShoe was actually rather difficult. In some ways we wanted to say that SnowShoe brings Foursquare to real life. In essence Foursquare is already in real life and takes people to different spots for check-ins. The next idea was to say that SnowShoe brigns Foursquare off-line, again Foursquare kind of does that, but SnowShoe does it with actual offline objects.

We first met Claus Moberg founder of SnowShoe when the sneaker-strapped nationwide startup roadtrip cruised through Madison Wisconsin. The team explained that with SnowShoe your phone actually interacts with an aluminum object at the check in establishment, to check-in and receive loyalty points and rewards.

There is definitely value in this “extra step”. When you’re actually forced to check in using, what SnowShoe calls the “SnowShoe Stamp” or if you have to scan a QR code, you get engaged with the establishment and you can’t do the infamous drive-by checkin. I actually live near a place that has a free breakfast special with 3 check-ins. I live close enough that I can check-in there everyday without actually going, and then on the third day, voila breakfast is free. Some people call it ripping off, others call it gaming the system.

With SnowShoe though, that drive by check-in or checking in while walking by just for the glory or the special is cut out of the equation.

The SnowShoe stamp is literally a block of aluminum with no circuitry, batteries or power of any kind. It does however, have five uniquely arranged capacitive touch points which authenticate the transaction on your smartphone. It’s actually more reliable and better than a traditional QR code on a piece of paper.

Innovative huh?

We got a chance to talk with Moberg more in depth in the interview below:

Des Moines Startup: Proferral Taking On The Traditional Business Card INTERVIEW

Earlier this summer, we reported on a young Florida startup called Feathr that’s looking to replace the traditional business card by sending contact information and other relevant professional information via mobile app. Today we turn to the middle of the country and Des Moines IA, and a new startup called Proferral.

Des Moines app development startup iapps24 has designed Proferral to be a business referral app that also looks to eliminate the business card. They also have baked in premium features that will allow you to make calls and set appointments in a mobile CRM style solution that will execute and keep track of the call and appointment.

Proferral also takes into consideration the context for which business cards and contact information are exchanged. An integrated calendar allows users to set follow-up appointments right away. Other features baked into Proferral include a portal to offer discounts and rewards, a place to publish videos and testimonials, and other tools that help connectors make the most out of the networking experience.

Proferral also offers a rich networking community within the website, Android and iOS apps. Users can join an already existing network or create a new one.

This feature packed app, and thriving app development startup are percolating in Des Moines IA which is a hotbed of new technology startups. We got a chance to interview iapps24. Check out the interview below.

Find Out Everything There Is To Know About Your Hood With Boston Startup BlockAvenue

Whether you’re a local history buff, looking to move somewhere new or just want to know what’s up with your block there’s a startup incubating at DogPatch Labs in Boston for you. That startup is called BlockAvenue and it’s going to be your one stop shop for anything and everything about your neighborhood.

BlockAvenue uses a number of ways to find out everything about your block. The startup utilizes geodata, local trends, local happenings and plain old crowd sourced information from your neighbors. This is valuable information for other neighbors, people thinking about visiting, and people thinking about moving to the neighborhood. Sure all of this information can be found on the net, but there’s not one single site that serves it up all together, and quite in the way BlockAvenue will.

We’re sure that BlockAvenue is going to be epic why? Because DogPatch Labs, a Polaris Ventures backed incubator, is also where great startups like Instagram and Apptopia grew up. In fact, BlockAvenue’s founder, serial entrepreneur Tony Longo wrote a blog post about what it’s like to incubate at the dogpatch check that out here.

Dogpatch just oozes startups. The building the Boston Dogpatch is in is One Cambridge Center which also happens to be the address for TechStars Boston. Not including the 13 startups in the current fall class at TechStars the building itself is home to over 50 startups, and is also the Microsoft office for the Cambridge area.

As for BlockAvenue, this is going to be an amazing resource for anyone that wants information on their neighborhood. More and more people are starting to have more civic pride on a hyperlocal level than ever before. They’re taking to other blogs, and social networks to share the kind of information you’ll find at BlockAvenue. Once there’s one place for all that information it will continue to grow as more people get engaged with the service.

We were able to break the BlockAvenue team away from the whiteboards, conference rooms, coding and ping-pong for a short little interview. Check it out below.

Street Performers Go Virtual With Nashville Startup: Street Jelly INTERVIEW

Ok so here’s a concept we’ve never seen before and it’s quite interesting. A Nashville startup called Street Jelly has put street performers online for the world to enjoy. But not only that they’ve created a system of using virtual currency called “tokens” so that you can fill up that street performers jar, guitar case, hat or bucket. Yes, any kind of street performer be it a clown, a mime, a great saxophone player, guitar player or any other street performer, can go virtual with Street Jelly.

The street performers can take the “Rocker Pins” that viewers have purchased with tokens and cash them out for real money via PayPal. Now you can sit in the comfort of your own home and watch street performers until your hearts content.

Have you ever come back from a trip and told people about a great street performer you’ve seen? Now you can take them online to Street Jelly and show them first hand.

Street performers add to most cities culture. Most street performers are actually really good and some just prefer to be street performers rather than working late night in smoky dark clubs or trying their luck at studios and record deals. Street Jelly captures the essence of great street performers and puts them online to share with the rest of the world.

This idea was born in Nashville, a city that has no shortage of street performers. In fact Nashville, because it’s Music City USA, has some of the best street performers in the world.

Street performers was founded by serial entrepreneur Frank Podlaha, who’s history with music goes way back to his childhood and playing in the drum line. He’s had some other successful startups which he talks about in the interview below.

Florida Startup: Path.To Is The E-Harmony For Tech Jobs INTERVIEW

Darren Bounds,the CEO of Jacksonville Florida based startup Path.To considers his startup the “e-harmony” for recruiting tech talent. There is a lot that goes into the backend of this job recommendation platform. Path.to must have something right because well known companies like Eventbrite, Evernote and Vimeo have already used the young startup to recruit tech talent.

When someone with a tech background is looking for their next tech opportunity and creates a profile with Path.To, they add their normal skills, and resume along with information that’s aggregated from their professional social graph including Behance, Dribble, Forrst and Github. This way a more accurate picture of the candidate is created for those recruiters and HR people looking to fill tech positions. The users score continues to grow as they apply to more jobs and make more choices.

We first covered Path.To when they expanded to Chicago, Boston and New York City. Now they’ve added; Austin, Dallas, Houston, Boulder, Denver, and Los Angeles. They’re adding their service to Philadelphia, DC, and Pittsburgh tomorrow. They’re also adding Silicon Prairie on September 4th and Atlanta Georgia along with Jacksonville Florida on September 12th.

Path.To will email job candidates available positions that the service feels are a good match for them. Path.To users searching for a job can opt out of certain employers if they feel that they aren’t a fit, and of course continue to apply for jobs that they feel are, the perfect fit.

We got a chance to interview Bounds, check out the interview below:

The Friend HookUp Goes Online With DC 500 Startups, Startup Hinge INTERVIEW

Dating sites have been around almost as long as the internet. I remember a time when it was actually odd to try and find a date online. Now it’s pretty much odd to find a date or relationship in real life. One thing that most online dating sites haven’t tackled though is hooking up friends of friends. Now we’re not talking about a one night stand hook up, rather the old school version where you introduce a friend to a mutual friend and voila.

Now Washington DC, 500 startups backed, startup Hinge helps achieve that… sort of.

Hinge uses the Facebook social graph to match users with compatible friends of friends. Now your market of available singles increases from what you normally see from online dating sites to your friends on Facbeook and then your friends’ friends who may be somewhat compatible with you.

What this also means is if your perfect match is single, but not actively pursuing dating or a relationship, you may still meet that person via hinge. You know the same way your buddies or girlfriends introduce you to that perfect someone, that may not actually be looking.

When you actually check Hinge out and what they’re doing, it’s hard to believe no one else has tried to do this. Hinge is a great idea and an awesome Washington DC startup. It’s so awesome that they’ve caught the eye of Dave McClure’s 500 startups.

We got a chance to interview Bennett Richardson, Hinge’s CMO. Check out the interview below:

Interview With Danish Startup: Rating WorkPlace

Workplace ratings startups are starting to pop up all over the country and now apparently, around the world. Now, thanks to the internet, people who are interviewing for jobs get the opportunity to vet the employer as much as the employer can vet them.

Startups in the United States like California based startup Worker’s Count, allow employees to rate their workplace either by name or anonymously, in hopes that these ratings improve culture and quality of life at the work place. Some workplaces fare well on ratings sites, while others have their dirty laundry aired out amongst millions on the web.

Denmark startup Rating WorkPlace, functions similarly to Worker’s Count. Employees can rate their workplace for culture, benefits, job satisfaction and more. They can choose to do it anonymously or by name. Steven Moller, Rating WorkPlace founder, is hoping that by offering his service, people will no longer work in bad environmens.

We got a chance to interview Moller below. Please note that Moller is from Denmark and English is not his first language.

Chicago Startup: WalkJogRun Keeps Track When You Walk, Jog Or Run INTERVIEW

Fitness startups are always great. Everyone wants to get fit, stay fit and monitor their fitness regimen. A startup in Chicago called WalkJogRun has a website and app that helps anyone who runs, walks, jogs, hikes and cycles, monitor their exercise, map their routes and track their progress.

As a compliment to their web and mobile app platform WalkJogRun also has a blog and podcast that provides inspiration to those using their platform. They also offer tips, as well as healthy recipes.

Whether you are a casual jogger, mall walker or you’re training for a marathon, WalkJogRun’s robust platform can cover your workout and be your walking, jogging and running companion.

The precursor to what WalkJogRun has become was originally created by co-founder Adam Howitt. Howitt was living in Atlanta and training for the PeachTree 10k when he got fed up with just doing quarter miles in the parking garage. He tells us in an interview below, that he created the first iteration of WalkJogRun in 2002.

Howitt’s co-founder Jeff Kenny redesigned Howitt’s original website as a surprise back in 2003 and then they realized that WalkJogRun could be beneficial to many running enthusiasts. This was of course, way before the fitness app boom, and GPS tracking boom that we’re currently experiencing.

The Chicago based startup has made plenty of refinements over the last 10 years to what the website and app have become today.

We got a chance to interview WalkJogRun. Check out the interview below: