Startup Interview Archives - Page 28 of 34

Canadian Startup: SWVLE Talent Discovery Tournament Style INTERVIEW

Talent discovery is a tough nut to crack. How can you judge whether someone is truly talented or not. There are a few startups in the talent discovery space and most of them are based on recommendations. Now of course recommendations are great, especially if you can get top shelf people in your industry to recommend you, but how can you tell your personal story?

You can make as many self YouTube videos as you would like, and those are great, but the next question then is how much talent do you have over the next guy?

SWVLE, a new startup brewing in Nova Scotia, is tackling that problem in a head to head, video to video bracket system. It’s like an all out talent tournament.

In terms of talent you can be talking about the next marketing rockstar or the next actual rockstar. When you use SWVLE it doesn’t matter what kind of talent you have you can put yourself up against someone else in your space, and let SWVLE work it’s magic.

What magic is that you ask? Well we needed to find out so we went right to the source and we interviewed SWVLE co-founder Sam Doyle. Check out the interview below:

Say It Forward With This Connecticut Startup INTERVIEW

By now everyone has seen the startups pop up that let you put all of your Instagram photos on just about every product under the sun. We’ve even reported on a startup that prints your tweets onto toilet paper. Connecticut startup Say It Forward, curates meaningful and inspiring social media content and puts them on greeting cards, with other products soon to follow.

Say It Forward says they do this to promote positivity and inspire people. Their goal is to inspire, share and connect. Surely the founders at Say It Forward know what the real world is like, which is precisely why they’ve created Say It Forward. Now rather than turning to the inspirational minds at Hallmark, Say It Forward uses messages from the public at large for their inspirational products. Think of it as crowd-sourced inspiration.

The Connecticut startup’s founders are two sisters Steph Centorino(22) and Allie Centorino (18) they’ve also enlisted the help of their mother as the chief ideas officer. Step and Allie are no strangers to the world of good. Their previous startup, which is still in operation today, is called CUREchiefs which are funky and soft bandanas designed for people with cancer who’ve lost their hair due to chemo-therapy.

We got a chance to interview mom, the Chief Ideas Officer, Sandra Centorino. Check out the interview below:

Iron Yard Demo Day Preview: Greenville Startup: MoonClerk

Iron Yard Labs is a 13 week accelerator program in Greenville South Carolina. It’s part of the Global Accelerator Network which was founded by Boulder Colorado based TechStars. The Global Accelerator Network affiliation gives the startup teams participating in the Iron Yard Labs session access to top shelf business benefits like free hosting, legal services, accounting services and more.

The inaugural class at Iron Yard will graduate next week on August 29th with a demo day in Greenville. In the week leading up to demo day we will have interviews with some of the exciting startups accelerating in the program.

We got to kick off this special section with Greenville ride sharing startup Ridepost you can read that interview here. You can also see our interview with Spent here.

Next up is: MoonClerk.

Sure it has a cute name but MoonClerk is a powerful platform making it easy for anyone to immediately and inexpensively set up branded, embeddable, and linkable recurring online payment forms with no technical skills required. It’s easier than creating PayPal payment forms and is perfect for anyone with any kind of service, product, digital product or even recurring donations.

While MoonClerk is a cute sounding name, Dodd Caldwell, co-founder of MoonClerk says in our interview below that there is a real meaning behind the name. First off they wanted to use the word clerk because it dealt with payments without having to say payment. Then, the team went with moon because it’s a satellite on a recurring orbit. Pretty smart huh?

Check out the rest of our interview with Caldwell, below:

Facebook Is What I Like, NY Startup Mirror is What I’m Like INTERVIEW

Mirror, a startup in New York’s bustling flat iron district, has created something innovative and different bridging parts in a few different spaces. Mirror says that Facebook is what I like, and Mirror is what I’m like. With Facebook you talk about the things you do and like. With mirror, other people talk about what you’re actually like. It’s in essence bridging online personals, online dating, and people recommendation engines in a unique way.

Where California startup Recmnd.me is about people recommendation at a professional level, mirror is more personal, and more free flowing. For instance if you’re a really nice guy, and a great romanticist, people on Mirror can vouch for you or as the Mirror team calls it, people can give their “take” on you. If you’re a passionate entrepreneur that’s helped a bunch of folks, one of your takes can say that. Or to borrow an example from their website, if you’re a really great DJ, people can add that to their take on you.

Mirror bills themselves as real recommendations by real people. The platform can be used for dating, to find new business colleagues and to make new friends. They leverage real contacts and real opinions of someone rather than trying to build around a social graph or recommend people based on whether or not you like Mark Zuckerberg’s dog. The Mirror platform has real potential.

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

German Startup: Carpooling.com Plans For US Expansion, INTERVIEW

Ridesharing is big overseas. There are a few standout startups working on ridesharing in the United States, including Iron Yard Labs startup RidePost. Established German ride sharing startup Carpooling.com is preparing for a big expansion in the US.

Carpooling.com has grown from 41,000 riders in it’s first year to well over 4 million today. They currently operate in 40 countries with their app available in 7 languages. Carpooling.com allows the rider to select someone to share a ride with based on vehicle, comfort, location and cost. This feature set insures that every rider gets to where they want to go, and how they want to get there. If you need to go 70 miles down the countryside you may want to ride with someone with a comfortable. If you’re just trying to get 15 miles to work you may be ok in a minivan. With carpooling.com the choice is yours.

Carpooling.com sees huge growth potential in the United States market. In their research they found that there’s an average of 3.75 seats available per car (not sure about that .75 part but ok) and over 3 trillion miles traveled per year. Now that startups like couchsurfing.com and airbnb.com have made it normal to share space with complete strangers, hopefully ridesharing startups can do the same for cars.

In our interview below carpooling.com tells us about their ridesharing startup, building a startup in Munich Germany and how they went from mitfahrgelegenheit.de to carpooling.com. Check out the interview below.

Interview With Chattanooga Feel Good Startup LifeKraze

While we were in Chattanooga Tennessee two weeks ago covering Gig Tank we got to meet some of the guys behind LifeKraze. LifeKraze is a social community built around encouraging other community members to reach their accomplishments. Whether you’re climbing mountains, preparing for a marathon, training for the Olympics or learning to eat right, with the support of the LifeKraze community you get the encouragement you need to do anything.

LifeKraz also has a rewards component where community members can encourage community members to reach their goals and accomplishments by giving them points for real world rewards for active lifestyle products or you can convert those points into charitable donations.

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

Seattle Startup: Hark Is The World’s Repository For Pop Culture Sound Bytes

Do you remember back in the day, the plethora of .wav based geocities sound bite repositories. We’re talking low budget, bad wav file audio from a handful of movies. No? Good because that’s not Hark.

Hark is the world’s repository for pop culture soundbytes. The best movies in the world, and even the hard to find treasures, have sound bites on Hark’s platform at hark.com. Everyone loves a great movie quote from “You can’t handle the truth” to the recent “You didn’t build that” quote from Obama, to “Do you want to play a game” the War Games sound bite that started it all. Hark is the one place to go to hear those soundbytes, embed those sound bites and download those sound bites.

All of this is legal as well. Rather than trying to dodge the movie studios, producers, and tv producers, Hark went with their best foot forward and showed how their website can promote movies, tv shows and other places where great sound bites originate. Through Hark, some of the best sound bites in pop culture and current events have quickly been able to go viral, and what movie studio doesn’t want a viral movie quote.

Hark has partnered with 5 major film studios including Paramount, Universal,Lionsgate and Warner Brothers, to offer over 3 million sound bites from popular movies, tv shows,video games, sporting events,and political speeches.

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

Iron Yard Demo Day Preview: Greenville Startup Spent

We got to kick off this special section with Greenville ride sharing startup Ridepost you can read that interview here.

Next up is Spent.

Spent is an ad platform that targets traditional brick and mortar grocery stores. Co-Founder Andria Trivisonno equates Spent to taking the recommendation engine found in Amazon.com shopping and applying it to traditional grocery stores. Spent is able to achieve this by leveraging a customers buying habits and purchase history.

We got a chance to interview Trivisonno who clearly shows the Global Accelerator Network’s influence in Iron Yards, by referencing “mentor whiplash” a phrase coined by Brad Feld at Foundry.

They don’t get too much into the nuts and bolts of the app itself but from what we’ve heard Spent may actually make some headway in a space that’s being tackled on many fronts. We’ll have more details about Spent after they debut on the Demo Day stage. They are working on their seed round to continue forward with their progress. Check out our interview with Trivisonno below.

Nashville Startup: Zeumo Is A Productivity App For Teenagers INTERVIEW

Here are some startling facts about teenagers: 53% of teenagers would sacrifice their sense of smell before parting with their mobile phone. The average teenager spends 31 hours a week online. Only 29% of students believe high school offers a caring and encouraging environment. What if there was one startup out there that could help bring these facts to more desirable levels. Well there is.

Hal Cato is no stranger to teenagers and the lives they lead. Cato spent ten years as the CEO of the Oasis Center one of the nation’s leading youth serving organizations. During his tenure there he received multiple awards including the “National Agency of the Year” award from the National Network for Youth in 2008, and the “Best In Business Award” by the Nashville Business Journal in 2010. Now Cato has taken all of that experience and developed Zeumo a productivity app that miraculously touches every aspect of a teenagers life in a way that’s appealing to the teenager and fulfilling for their support system.

In 2012 two of the best ways to communicate to a teenager and actually have them hear you is through texting and social networks. Zeumo integrates those two features in a way that compliments their already available social networks and myriad of text messages. Zeumo also integrates schools, community based organizations, colleges and universities, businesses and the teenagers social world.

The app, which will be the must have app for teenagers when it launches in the fall, is filled with things that matter to teenagers and a UI/dashboard that’s easy to understand, filter and use.

We got a chance to talk with Cato in the interview below:

Los Angeles Startup: Unbucket, Make Lists Of Things You Want To Do, Then Do Them

Elliot Darvick CEO & Co-Founder of Unbucket (photo: businessrockstars)

Sure everyone has a bucket list of must see places they want to go before they die, or amazing things they want to do before they die. You know the kind, skydiving, Mt. Rushmore, run a marathon, truly epic things. What about when you need a list of things to do that may get thrown to the wayside in the hustle and bustle of everyday life. That’s where Unbucket comes in.

Unbucket allows you to make your own unbucket lists, or do them with one friend, or many. The types of lists you can make are infinite. Unbucket suggests things like, recipes you want to try, places to dine in your city, movies to watch, things to do on vacation.

I’ve already signed up for Unbucket using the beta code nibletz and created a few lists of my own. I’ve made a list of things to do with my daughter when I’m home on the weekend, and movies that I want to watch when I’m traveling. Hopefully this list making via Unbucket will come in handy.

We got a chance to talk with Elliot Darvick, co-founder of Unbucket. Check out the interview below:

Ever Wanted Your Own Infographic? Oregon Startup Vizify Has You Covered

If you’ve ever wanted your own infographic, you can have it now thanks to recent TechStars graduate and Oregon startup Vizify. Their exciting new social media tool is more than just a dashboard it gives you a visual glance at the things you’ve got going on in your personal social graph.

Now people can use your interactive infographics from Vizify to figure out what you’re all about.

For instance Emma the chief security at the Portland company likes to talk about squirrels, went to happy-go-lucky kindergarten and tweets pictures of herself. Everything is visual in a graphically appealing UI. Vizify draws out your social web as you can see from the screen shot above and when you click on any of the webs bubbles you can dive more into the content.

Todd Silverstein, Vizify’s co-founder told Mashable that the root of Vizify stems from Zuckerberg’s law. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that online data about you doubles each year. That makes a total mess of disjointed content about one person. Vizify simplifies that data and makes it pretty, and easy to use.

Another place where Vizify comes in handy is in the job search. Now all of your content is aggregated in an easy to view and easy to navigate platform. Face it every HR person and recruiter in the world is searching for all your social data anyway, now you can just add the url for your Vizify page to your resume and in one click a recruiter can see everything about you and where it fits in to your social graph.

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

Chattanooga Startup: Nudge Gamifies Workplace & Daily Wellness INTERVIEW

While we were in Chattanooga covering their big GigTank Demo Day we ran into Mac Gambill the co-founder of Chattanooga startup Nudge. We were fascinated by the idea of a workplace wellness app, essentially gamifying employee wellness.

Employee wellness can be costly for employers and employees. An unhealthy workforce can lead to employee absenteeism, low employee morale, a rise in health insurance premiums and more. Employee wellness affects the employees themselves, the employer and the other employees in any office. Spending 8-12 hours a day with sick people, down people or just people not well, isn’t any fun and pinches on the budget.

Employees with fulltime jobs that don’t work at a plush Silicon Valley or New York City office with iPad docks on exercise bikes, often times find themselves behind the desk for hours on end. Cutting back on coffee or deciding to forego that chocolate bar or lose that M&M jar on a desk, may help improve your wellness.

In fact Matt S. who participated in the nudge beta said he lost 13 lbs and was able to cut out caffeine (not just coffee) completely. Imagine how life would be if you could cut out caffeine completely.

But nudge isn’t about just workplace wellness, it’s your personal cheerleader throughout your day. Nudge isn’t about changing your lifestyle a lot or a completely new exercise regimen it’s about highlighting the things you’re doing well, rewarding you for doing good things for your body and your wellness and sharing them with friends and co-workers.

We got a chance to follow-up with Gambill in the interview below.

Toronto Startup Venio Is All About Healthy Meals & Healthy Lifestyle INTERVIEW

Toronto startup Ven.io is all about healthy meals, and healthy lifestyles. This new meal plan startup, helps users set up structured meal plans that are personal, scientific and valuable.

Setting up your meal plan via Ven.io is a simple three-step system that learns your habits, tastes and dietary needs. This is a really great platform for those who have regular dietary constraints like diabetes and lactose intolerance. Ven.io can give you great suggestions for every meal that will help you reach all of your goals.

The Ven.io team is an international tapestry of talent. In fact in our interview below they answered the questions about where they were based by saying they were Georgian and Iranian, and yes the headline is correct they live in Toronto. Their marketing guy Karim El Rabiey suggests that it’s this patchwork of different nationalities that creates a special flavor (you see what we did there) for the Ven.io team and the Ven.io product. They actually have one of the best about pages we’ve seen in a while, you should check that out here.

We got to interview El Rabiey about Ven.io and how they’re unparalleled in the world of specialty meal planning platforms. Check out the interview below.

Copenhagen Startup: ClickATaxi Going Global Immediately, INTERVIEW

The transportation hailing app space is a hot one. In the United States the clear winner is Uber. They’ve expanded to many major cities across the country with plans for even more. Uber is being hit with a lot of challenges though because they are utilizing hired limousines and sedans rather than taxis themselves and they operate in a gray area when it comes to taxicab regulations. We actually use Uber quite a bit on the sneaker-strappend nationwide startup road trip.

In the UK, Skype backed HailO is the big taxicab hailing app. They recently received $17 million in funding to expand across the pond to the United States where they will go head to head with Uber.

A new Copenhagen startup is looking to shake up the whole space by launching globally all at one time. ClickATaxi is trying to build a network of worldwide cab drivers to make one all-inclusive app. ClickATaxi CEO and founder, Soren Halskov Nissen, thinks it’s ridiculous for travelers to have to have multiple taxi cab apps and then have to remember which countries or which cities each app works in. By taking on the entire world from the beginning they hope to quickly build scale with travelers.

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