Startup Interview Archives - Page 31 of 34

London Startup: GreenLight, Not Just Another Social Discovery App INTERVIEW

Everyone could use more friends right? Well now that finding friends has turned to social networks and everyone wants to be the match.com for friends, social discovery has become a common household phrase (at least in startup circles).

Most social discovery platforms use your social graph to determine who you need to meet. For instance, before being acquired by Facebook, Glancee would use your likes and interests on Facebook to match you with likeminded people close by. We quickly realized how faulty this process was.

Case in point, I signed up for Glancee, and used it at SXSW. Now for whatever reason, when Mark Zuckerberg got a new puppy named Beast, I liked him on Facebook. Shortly after that when I attended SXSW this year I was matched up with 30 people who also liked Mark Zuckerberg’s puppy. Maybe we should have started a fan club and had a drinking party or something but really that raw data algorithm is flawed.

Gaz Evans, one of the co-founders of GreenLight, tells us that their social discovery platform is better. They actually ask personality driven questions about each user in order to match them up with other users. They also tap the users social graph so some of their likes are built in, but overall this may be a good alternative to other social discovery platforms.

We got a chance to interview Evans and the team from GreenLight, check the interview out below. You better read it quick though, before the next social discovery platform comes along.

New Jersey Startup: Hublished Is The Virtual Convention Connection INTERVIEW

Webinars have quickly become a new and great way to continue education and get large groups of people to view and hear presentations that they may not otherwise get a chance to attend. Major brands, educational firms, consultants and business development experts have all turned to the webinar format.

One of the main problems with the webinar format though is without a marquee speaker or presenter it’s hard to distinguish the junk and hacks from good quality content. You can sometimes make a safe assumption that various organizations would only put their stamp of approval on the best webinar speakers, however, as many have found out the hard way, that’s not always the case. Once you’ve committed yourself to an hour, three hour or even five hour webinar, the time is gone.

Hublished is a startup based in New Brunswick New Jersey and New York that aims to take the pain out of webinar presentation and discovery. They hope to become the go-to place for webinar content that’s been vetted and reviewed so that your webinar experience is educational and great quality.

Hublished has two customers the publishers and the end-users. The publishers now have a place to go to place all their upcoming webinars. They can also archive their old webinars on hublished.

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

Interview With European Startup: Bookappo

Bookappo is a new European startup based in the Czech Republic. They provide an online software platform for booking and scheduling appointments using a “book now” button.

Bookappo is perfect for small businesses and even startups. The “book now” button can allow small businesses to let customers check availability and timing and then book their appointment off of the company’s website or Facebook page. The customer side dashboard allows users of book now to easily create their own booking form, email reminders and calendar.

The company has also introduced a mobile version that is accessible from an iPad, iPhone or Android powered device which makes it easy for anyone to set up appointment calendars or book appointments while on the go.

Everyone starts off with a free 30 day trial of Bookappo and then after that it’s just $19 for the lite version and $39 for the pro version. After looking over both offerings the only significant difference between lite and pro is the ability to manage the appointment schedules of “unlimited” employees. That feature is included in the pro version only.

We got a chance to talk with the guys from Bookappo in the interview below:

Tired Of Giving Crappy Gifts? Check Out Baltimore Startup: NoBadGift INTERVIEW

Nobody likes a bad gift. Receiving bad gifts can be a very uncomfortable experience. As you’re looking at that sweater that went out of style in 1990 you’ve got to smile and say thank you. Then you’re tasked with having to decide whether to hold onto that sweater for the next time your auntie comes over, return it, regift it or throw it away.

The other problem with gifting is that even though you know darn well what you want for your gifts most people just say they don’t. No one wants to feel like they’re asking for anything.

Enter NoBadGift. As the name suggests, this Baltimore startup insures you give a great gift. Why, because the recipient crowdfunds the gift that they really want from friends and family members. The Mike Washington, one of the co-founders of NoBadGift, came up with the idea for the startup when his father wanted an iPad for Christmas one year. After pooling the money for the iPad from his siblings he had an epiphany “why not do this online”.

We got a chance to talk with the team from NoBadGift in the interview below. They tell us about their gift funding system an Baltimore’s explosive startup scene. Of course being from Baltimore we love reporting about Baltimore startups.

Pennsylvania Startup: Gateskip Brings The Off Line Networking Model Online

Before you jump into this story thinking that Gateskip is just another LinkedIn wannabe, that’s not the case at all. LinkedIn is a great social network for business professionals. It’s also a great place to graduate from your Facebook existence, to just about the rest of your life.

LinkedIn has several non-intrusive ways of encouraging networking among it’s members, but they shy away from meeting new people. In fact when you want to connect with someone it asks you how you know them. If you’re familiar with traditional Chamber of Commerce business after hours, or breakfast before hours models, the purpose of the “networking” element is to meet new people.

That’s where Conshohocken Pennsylvania based Gateskip comes in. Gateskip, along with sole founder Dan Esposito, want to bring certain elements from business after hours, breakfast before hours and BNI events to the web through this new network.

While I’ve personally used LinkedIn to outsource some work and projects to people I had some kind of connection with, the ultimate purpose for LinkedIn is to serve as a social network for professionals. Gateskip is more of a business network. If you’re not sure about the difference, read on to the interview below.

While LinkedIn is connecting you to friends you may have had in high school or relationships you’ve formed through business, Gateskip is about generating leads for new found colleagues and exposing one users services to another user. Alas, it’s about actual networking.

Esposito talks to us in the interview below about Gateskip and Conshohocken which Esposito says is the Silicon Valley of Pennsylvania. It’s also home to startups like the new Scott Thompson led ShopRunner, half.com and OpenDesks just to name a few.

Interview with London Startup Present.me

There is a new startup in London called Present.me. The concept is actually pretty interesting. Imagine if you took YouTube and SlideShare and mashed them together. Now imagine if you could make that mashup into one presentation and top it off by narrating it yourself into your webcam. Thats the premise behind present.me.

Now you can share highlights of your life in an entire presentation that’s quick and easy to produce. You can share it with your friends, your family and loved ones through various channels. Once you share it they will be directed to the presentation you made using present.me.

Present.me could actually be very useful to other startups as well. You could practice your pitch for your teammates and friends who are working in remote locations. Heck, if you did a good enough job you could send your preliminary pitch over to investors for review.

Sounds great huh?

Well we got a chance to talk with the team at Present.me, check out the interview below:

Interview With Los Angeles Startup: Teachmeo Learn & Teach Anything, And Everything

Teachmeo is a new startup in Los Angeles, “Silicon Beach”, their mission and purpose is to allow anyone who wants to teach anything, to teach it and allow anyone who needs to learn anything, learn it. They will facilitate this with a community of teachers and learners.

They describe it like this:

Say your son needs help finishing his math homework, it’s 9pm there’s no one around that can help locally, you wouldn’t think of calling his teacher and there’s nowhere else to go. He can go to teachmeo.com and find in just about real time, answers to his math questions.

The same thing goes for Brian who wants to teach guitar to someone, he can teach it via teachmeo. Really with the platform that teachmeo is building you can learn and teach just about anything, as their Rockstar CEO Natalie Novoa tells us in the interview below.

Boston Startup: Prospective Plus Wants To Give You More Prospective On Your Job Applicants INTERVIEW

Finding the best job applicants seems to be getting harder and harder every year. The applicant pool gets bigger every year and normal application/resume hiring practices aren’t providing enough background to possible employers in just about every situation. This is the pain point that Phoebe Farber and her team at Prospective Plus are hoping to solve.

Through their SaaS platform which targets entry level candidates, Prospective Plus is carving out a niche in the employment world by providing more robust feedback for candidates.

Prospective Plus calls their approach “Culture Fit” and it’s a holistic approach to applicant screening that provides recruiters and HR professionals with more well rounded information about prospective employees (hence the name).

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

Buenos Aires Startup: Citibuddies Wants To Be Your Buddy In Every City INTERVIEW

Citibuddies is a new startup that just relocated from Europe to Latin America, and they’re now happy to call Buenos Aires home. As you may be able to tell from the headline, Citibuddies wants to be your buddy in whatever city youre in.

It’s much like Poynt but a little more social. Citibuddies connects people with places and events in cities. They’re hoping to become the go to app that can tell you what to do, where to go and who to meet. Citibuddies uses a robust algorithm and collects data from your social network so you don’t have to input a bunch of information into your profile. From there it starts it’s magic by finding like minded people, events and places.

While they don’t do a badge system in Citibuddies they do have Citi Champions who are well versed in the local city and can help out the other users. CitiBuddies hope to make it easier for people visiting a city to connect as if they were locals.

We got a chance to interview Darja Gutnick one of Citibuddies founders below.

Track Job Applicants Easier With London Startup Pleekant INTERVIEW

There are a ton of startups these days entering the hiring and recruitment space. Most of them have to do with the actual hiring and recruitment process. There are startups like Houston Texas’s Job Plotter which helps applicants plot jobs on a map to know if they are close enough to their homes to apply. Another great startup in the job’s space is PitchPick an Austin based company that helps the pre-screening process with a video platform.

Pleekant is equally as useful to HR folks and recruiters. The London based startup provides a platform to better track job applicants. If you are running a good sized HR department you may have 20 positions open and hundreds of applicants to track. That’s where Pleekant comes in.

With Pleekant, companies can keep tabs on applicants,resumes, applications, notes and what position the applicant is applying for. Pleekant also makes it easier for recruiters within an organization to collaborate with each other. If your company has a multi interview process Pleekant makes it easy for each interviewer to keep their notes and records from the interview in one easy to find record, accessible to everyone in the hiring chain.

Pleekant’s founder Ramario Depass describes his startup as “A content management system for hiring employees, making life easier for recruiters. He’s identified Resumator as one of his key competitors but feels that Resumator is clunky, and has an early 2000s feel to it.

Depass’ description of Pleekant is rather fitting. It feels like a content management system where the assets are the job applicants.

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

Meet TellBob He’s A Canadian Startup Rewarding People For Taking Surveys On Their Mobile Device

Getting customer feedback can be tricky. Almost every kind of survey engagement tactic has been tried time and time again. It’s hard to get someone to take a survey for a chance to win $10,000 or even a free meal the next time you visit a restaurant. Companies need this valuable data, and the survey platform that can pull it off is going to win.

That’s where TellBob comes in. This Canadian based startup with a really cool name is all about having customers take surveys on their smartphone and then getting rewarded instantly for participating.

So TellBob isn’t really a guy named Bob in fact it’s two guys Trevor Howie and Dan Renaud. They came up with the idea back in 2007 after visiting a Home Depot and thinking how great it would be if you could get some kind of instant gratification for completing their customer service survey.

With TellBob’s reward program the customer is rewarded instantly and they can save or trade their rewards with their friends and even share the entire experience on Facebook. It’s a win for their survey customers as well. TellBob can give back some great information and even confirm that the person completing the survey was actually at the location.

We got a chance to interview TellBob, well actually Howie, check out that interview below.

Miami Startup: Sumpto It’s Like Klout For College Students, But Better INTERVIEW

Klout is still a big mystery to most, how do you get those crazy Klout scores. If you know how it’s really calculated feel free to send me an email. Klout Perks is a great program that puts manufacturers products into peoples hands. They presumably want the cream of the crop when it comes to Klout, but we have no idea who that really is.

Sumpto is looking to do something along those lines when they launch next week. They’re going to match products to college students with influential social graphs. Sumpto will rank a college students social clout (with a c not a k) and then link manufacturers with college brand ambassadors who can presumably get the word about those products out to the masses.

Manufacturers love it when they can get exposed to people with real influence. Ranking that influence can be a challenge but Sumpto’s Founder and President Ben Kosinski seems to have figured out the magic formula. Yes, Sumpto’s partners will most likely reach the hands of the right people.

The college demographic is a hard one to crack, with free stuff though it may be easier. When you add the free stuff to an exclusive layer of folks, your destined to gain exposure down the lines to the masses. That’s exactly what Sumpto is going to do.

We got a chance to interview Kosinski check out the interview below:

Interview With Romanian Startup: MonitorBacklinks

Don’t you just love it when a startup comes up with an idea and the name of the startup directly reflects that idea. Such is the case with Romanian startup MonitorBacklinks. Founder Razvan Girmacea has created MonitorBacklinks to make it easier for any publisher, webmaster, or blogger to monitor their backlinks.

Girmacea’s software checks all of a websites backlinks and then sends a notification when the status of a backlink changes, for example if it disappears, reappears or moves.

When vying for pagerank backlinks play a big part into the SEO of any website.

In the interview below Girmacea talks about MonitorBacklinks and how easy he has made it for the end user. He also sheds some light on the budding entrepreneurship and startup scene in Romania.

Interview With Portland Oregon Startup: Hively, Easy Engagement Feedback Platform

Businesses, retail establishments and restaurants have been using the internet for surveys for the past fifteen years. Lot’s of restaurants still resort to printing a phone number to call or a website to go to to enter a code, do a survey and get some kind of discount. The problem with this method of surveying is, despite the reward, there is still extremely low engagement.

Even customer service surveys at the end of a call to a cell phone carrier or cable provider go unanswered, and that’s after you’ve said yes you’ll answer the quick two minute survey. Most travel related surveys that I get in my personal in box go straight to a spam folder and never get completed. In fact the only time I typically fill out a survey is if the customer experience was bad, and there are a lot of people in the same boat as me.

An Oregon startup called Hively is looking to change that for business. They are hoping their platform will have a better engagement rate for two primary reasons. It takes just nanoseconds to complete and they make it happy and fun. Hively just asks one simple question, please provide feedback and with that simple question customers can quickly hit one smiley face, like the ones above, and that’s it.

On the side of the employee, employees who receive good feedback are awarded points that they can accrue for a prize.

We got the chance to interview Hively’s co-founder Jason Lander, check out the interview below: