Overnight Carriers Probably Owe You Money, This Florida Startup Will Get It For You

Every year more than $2 billion is wasted in unclaimed shipping refunds. While many people know that there are “guaranteed delivery times” for all of the major overnight carriers, very few actually know what those times mean and how they affect your bottom line.

Sure “guaranteed by 3pm” means guaranteed delivery by 3:00pm. Typically though, when a package arrives at 3:05pm we brush it off, thankful that the package arrived at all. What many folks don’t know is that UPS and FedEx both offer 100% refunds if a package is delivered even 60 seconds late. The package delivery time is scanned by the delivery driver, and chances are, if you ship a lot, you’ve even looked at packages that have been late and not thought a thing about it.

Well Jose Li, who at one point led FedEx’s retail and e-commerce practices, has started a company of his own that helps shippers get the money rightfully owed to them by the major overnight carriers.

71lbs is a software platform that analyzes customer’s shipping data and audits shipments against their guaranteed delivery times. 71lbs then retrieves the refund for the customer and takes a small commission when the refund is retrieved.

The service is free and according to the company it takes just 45 seconds to sign up. The rest is automatic. The best part is it’s totally legal and totally ethical.

What is your startup?

71lbs is a software technology company that is making it easy and automated for small businesses to claim shipping refunds. So when your FedEx or UPS package is delivered 60 seconds late, both companies have policies that entitle you to a 100% refund. Lots of people don’t know about this or don’t have the time to go through the tedious claim process. More than $2 billion dollars is wasted in unclaimed shipping refunds every year.

This inspired former FedEx executive, Jose Li, to create 71lbs, a software that automatically analyzes customer’s shipping data, audits shipments against guaranteed time commitments, and retrieves refunds for the customers. It’s totally free to use, takes 45 seconds to sign up, and is growing like crazy. 71lbs only collects a percentage fee when a refund is successfully claimed.

The company believes all businesses should have access to the same tools and resources that the “Fortune 500” utilize today. 71lbs also believes technology and software should enable small businesses to become as efficient, if not more, than their Fortune 500 counterparts. 71lbs believes in democratizing shipping.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

Jose Li, former FedEx executive, has 15 years in the shipping, logistics, and e-commerce industry. He experienced first-hand the lack of tools and resources while managing Jamba Juice’s supply chain of 450 stores, and also wore the carrier’s shoes, running a business unit for FedEx.

The management team has decades of experience in the shipping, software, and technology industries, with companies such as FedEx, DHL, and Tangoe Software to name a few.

Where are you based?

Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.

What is the startup culture like where you are based?

South Florida is gaining a lot of activity in start-up and tech, through a number of anchors like The Lab Miami, The Knight Foundation, universities, incubators and workspaces.

What is one challenge that you’ve overcome in the startup process?

Two particular challenges – raising funds and recruiting. We don’t call victory yet. It’s an on-going process. We call this ABR – Always Be Raising, and Always Be Recruiting. Being in South Florida the investor community is not as dense as other start-up tech places like Silicon Valley, New York City, Chicago, or Austin. So it just means we have to work harder at it. We leveraged a number of resources – old work colleagues, University alumni, networking, introductions, travel, conference calls, AngelList, LinkedIn, etc to share our story and mission with a number of potential investors. We were fortunate to get accepted into what is now Techstars Chicago and met a group of our investors there.

We faced and continue to face similar challenges with finding great people. We have taken the approach of sharing our story with community members, local media, Universities and continue to interview and recruit tech and business people to join 71lbs.

A.B.R. Always be recruiting. Always be raising.

What are some of the milestones your startup has achieved?

We were able to average over 50 customer sign ups per week and we hope to build on that momemtum.

What are your next milestones

We would like to continue developing our technology and go live with our next software release which includes invoice auditing.

Who are your mentors and role models?

I’ve been fortunate to have a number of mentors throughout my years. One piece of advice I was told early on my career was to recruit a personal “board of advisors”, which I personally invested a lot of my time and effort into making happen. Most recently, my former boss at FedEx was instrumental in helping me develop a number of skills, like leading without authority, influence and persuasion, and presentation.

What’s next for your startup?

We would like to continue to grow and offer additional cost saving products and services for our customers. We are working on adding a number of partners to our ecosystem, which will allow us to increase reach and distribution.

Where can people find out more, and what is your Twitter username?

71lbs.com

facebook.com/71lbs

twitter.com/71lbs

This Chattanooga startup aims to simplify your social life

Florida Startup Ziipa Helps You Navigate The Ocean of Apps

Sure there are a lot of app discovery startups out there, but ziipa, a startup based in West Palm Beach Florida, is helping people discover the diamonds in the rough. In the application discovery space there are two users, the app developers and the actual app users. Most app discovery platforms do one of those users well, but not both.

Ziipa is using their proprietary algorithms to help users really dig deep and find the apps that they need and want. It’s also helping app developers reach out and fund users they couldn’t’ get from a quick spike in the iTunes app store or Google Play store.

“This results in discovery of sites and applications that would most likely not have been discovered. The outcome is a benefit to the user as well as the developer,” ziipa founder Lee Starusta told Nibletz.

Starusta founded ziipa after getting frustrated that his other apps were hard to discover. Not only are there a lot of apps in the marketplace, but there are hundreds of new apps and startups coming out daily. Add to that the fact that a lot of the other app discovery platforms are “gameable” and the deck gets stacked against you quickly.

“Ziipa ranks applications using a passive approach that eliminates bias and cheating,” Starusta said.

Check out this Q & A ziipa below:

In layman’s terms, how does it work? (In other words how would you explain it to your grandmother)

Just go to ziipa and search for applications in a field of interest. As a user surfs ziipa for applications, ziipa identifies a users interest and anticipates any change in interest and recommends sites and applications to the user. This results in discovery of sites and applications that would most likely not have been discovered. The outcome is a benefit to the user as well as the developer.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

Lee Starusta – Founder & CEO. Creator, dreamer and out to disrupt! Industrial engineer by education, entrepreneur by genetic predisposition. self employed for 25 Years with loads of experience. 100% ziipa

Hugo Aponte – co-founder & CTO. Technology guru! Crazy amounts of experience running technology startups, patent holder and loves mathematics and artificial intelligence. (Who doesn’t!!)

Where are you based?

ziipa is based in West Palm Beach, Florida, United States.

How did you come up with the idea for ziipa?

The genesis for ziipa came from personal experience in trying to launch, run, and grow several internet start-ups. It is very difficult to get noticed and acquire customers as the underdog. ziipa offers a platform that gets you noticed quickly and connects applications with users based on interest.

Why now?

The explosion in mobile and web applications requires that there be more than a few players in the space. In addition ziipa offers a different approach to solving the problem of how to be found. ziipa helps by shortening discovery time, increasing the long tail and fairly ranking applications without money and bias.

What sets you apart from any of the other hundred+ app discovery platforms out there?

The main differences are as follows:

1- ziipa ranks applications using a passive approach that eliminates bias and cheating.

2- ziipa can recommend users not only based on interest but it can anticipate a user’s change in interest. This dynamic approach to recommending helps content stay fresh and relevant to the users.

What are some milestones you’ve achieved?

Considering that our marketing budget is zero, we are very proud of the fact that we have experienced steady growth and that tens of thousands of visitors find awesome apps on ziipa every month. Acceptance is a key metric, and I feel that our approach is certainly paying off for users as well as app developers.

What’s your next milestone?

ziipa will be rolling out a marketplace for applications where developers will be able to sell their applications.

Who are some of your mentors and business role models?

I could mention many and some would be obvious. I have been an entrepreneur for over 20+ Years and my mentors and models have to be the everyday person with a dream who actually stops talking and does it. Without these entrepreneurs life would be very boring!

Where can people find out more and what is your Twitter username?

ziipa.com @ziipa facebook.com/ziipa

Love Florida? Check out this developers conference on Atlantic Beach.

Belgium Startup Favebucket Is A New Way To Save, Share and Inspire

The founders of Belgium startup Favebucket have been burning the midnight oil lately so that they can bestow upon the word a new way to save, share and inspire, any kind of web content in an all in one, feature packed, but extremely easy to use web app.

Going all the way back to the Netscape Navigator days, bookmarks (or favorites) have been a way to save your favorite web pages. As internet browsers evolved they made it easier to share. Truth be told, in my opinion, sharing is easiest on the mobile versions of Safari and Chrome, however all of the current major browsers support url sharing through a number of channels.

Well what if you only want to share an image, video, or social media update? Sure you can right click a photo and then pull it out of your saved photos and attach it to an email, and of course you can always “pin” it using Pinterest or any of it’s clones, but Favebucket takes it one step further, making it about 5 clicks easier.

With Favebucket you simply use the bookmarklet on the content you want to save or share, add some tags to a quick pop up form and voila, it’s saved for your reference. If you want to share it, Favebucket allows you to quickly share it as well.

All of your faves, no matter what kind of web content they are, are saved to your Faveboard. You can go back to your Faveboard and decide if you want to heart it (making it a favorite fave), share it, go to it or see the details you saved about it. Sharing lets you share it directly from Favebucket (ala dropbox style), email it, share it through Twitter, Facebook or pin it on Pinterest.

While none of these ideas are new or earth shattering, bringing it all together as one, and making it so darn easy, is.

We got a chance to talk with the founders of Favebucket, check out the interview below.

What is your startup, what does it do?

“Favebucket is the assistant that helps you to save, recollect and share your favorites online!”

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds

CHRISTOPHE NOVALET: chief creative technology. hybrid guru between technology, user experience and design. loves guitars and good food. hates: web dev stupidity – noise & clutter. loves: creation – the web as we’ll make it – simplicity

MARCEL CRAMER: social media, online marketing, business development, guiding teams. more than 15 years of online expertise. innovative mind. hates: boxes & beaten paths – bad food – bad UX. loves: people – design – strategy. married. 2 daughters. a cooking aficionado

What is the startup culture like in Belgium?

It is a very open culture, obviously much smaller than US and still with a lot to learn. Benelux startups need to get out in the open more and established business and venture partners should stimulate the entrepreneurs more and transfer knowledge and spirit. Reinvigoration would be welcomed by many.

What problem does your startup solve?

We assist people to manage the massive amounts of information coming to us every day. Making their life online easier and save them time and effort when trying to find, remember and share content.”in a world where information is created constantly, at lightning speed, where clutter is everywhere, you need a place to go where all your personal favorites are. information you want to keep, recollect, and use. Just for you.”

What is one challenge that you’ve overcome in the startup process?

Keeping our heads together when the going got tough (thnx Billy Ocean). We have been creating and building what we just soft launched with our own time, sweat, effort, burning the midnight oil for months. And that is not easy, its a “make or break” test for a team. In that period you find if you fit together, if there is maximum trust and inspiration. And we found our modus, we got closer together, we actually did overcome.

What are some of the milestones your startup has achieved?

We as a team achieved many milestones. Big ones and smaller ones. The first one was the deciding moment to throw away the first version we built, and then the second. Another milestone was the soft launch some weeks ago and also setting up a larger team. We needed that and we made it. Not done growing yet by the way ;)

What are your next milestones

Mobile – Plug ins with partner (can’t disclose yet) – New teammates – Getting the needed investment in

Who are your mentors and role models?

Roles models is a strong word. We create our position based on a mix of what we learned from great brands and their forerunners but also look at people we have around us. People in the advisory board with entrepreneurial knowledge and all sorts of different skills. Also in our families, mothers who are the best operational managers, dads who are great thinkers and tinkers. Not just one example but many.

What are some of the advantages/disadvantages growing your startup outside of Silicon Valley

Being outside makes you want to prove more that you don’t need to be in a specific location as long as you are in the right market. It is about finding the right people, that is true, but we do not feel that being in the super heated center of all things “startup” is a good thing. It seems a very volatile culture with changing trends and a specific savoir faire that is not necessarily a good thing. People you hire might just leap away to the next big thing, the next “Meme”. That is not a fact in Europe. The bad thing is that the position investors and people take towards startups in Europe is held back. Less interest, lower investment levels and less specific knowledge in what you might call “typical Silicon Valley” ventures.

What’s next for your startup?

Keep the audience in our market interested like we do now, tend to them, assist them. Find a good partner for advice, support, investment and business development experience.

Where can people find out more, and what is your Twitter username?

favebucket.com or on Twitter at @favebucket

This startup, Cabcents, applies the “Priceline model” to ground transportation.

New York Startup Wants You To DoItInPerson

There’s a new kid in town in the event space, and it’s New York startup DoItInPerson.

Founder Aron Schoenfeld realizes that the event space is very crowded but it’s also very fragmented. There are event discovery startups, event community startups, event social networking startups, and event ticketing startups. DoItInPerson is taking all of these fragmented pieces and putting them together in one platform. Their all in one platform promises one place to go for managing, promoting, and discovering events and communities.

Schonfeld has covered everything about an event with DoItInPerson. Using their platform you can create and manage your community, find and book speakers and sponsors, create and sell tickets, create partnerships, invite attendees, and monitor how it all fits together. Schonfeld found, through putting his own events together, that he was using different tools for each thing.

There are already a handful of great event organizers who have turned to DoItInPerson and discovered that the platform delivers everything they say it will.

(Disclosure: We’re using this product to help organize our Everywhere Else Conference and it’s been extremely helpful.)

What is your startup, what does it do?

DoItInPerson.com is an online event platform that allows people to create, manage and promote events and communities. It brings all of the fragmented pieces of the event space together; from creating and managing your community, sending newsletters, booking speakers, selling tickets, adding sponsors to managing partnerships. Our goal is to simplify the event process and create data around events and communities that will help organizers sell more event tickets.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds

The company was founded by Aron Schoenfeld. Aron is an accountant by trade and has worked on multiple startups. His first startup, which he still currently runs, is DreamArtists Studios, a boutique music production company that has composed theme music for shows such as ABC’s Good Morning America and 20/20 and ESPN’s Year of the Quarterback.

Where are you based?

We are based in NY

What is the startup culture like where you are based?

Very intense. Everyone wants to work on a startup and there is a lot of hustle going on. Unfortunately, I think that in NY we see more ideas and less actual startups than in other cities.

What problem does your startup solve?

Our company aims to solve and eliminate the fragmentation in the event space to make it easier for organizers to create, manage, and promote their events in a way that adds meaning and relevance to their events. Currently organizers are forced to use multiple sites and platforms, which leads to a lack of cohesive data across the event space. Through consolidation, we will be able to provide organizers with the data they need to create better events and collect more event registrations.

What is one challenge that you’ve overcome in the startup process?

Getting people to see the value proposition and why we are different then our competitors. Many people are familiar with other ticketing sites or other community management sites. We spent a lot of time refining our message to show people we are not just a ticketing or community platform.

What are some of the milestones your startup has achieved?

We recently had our 100th event run on the site and have had over 1000 registrations.

What are your next milestones

Our goal now is to hit 500 events, get more activity in the community aspect of the site and focus on having people use the speaker portion of our site more, which I believe adds tremendous value to the events and seems to be a lot of people’s favorite feature.

Who are your mentors and role models?

My mentors include Sergio Fernandez de Cordova, who taught me a lot about what I know about entrepreneurship and has helped me any time I have had questions or issues.

My role model is my father who as a salesman, worked extremely hard all the time to make sure we had whatever we needed, but more importantly, always put family first. Whether driving to the Catskills in traffic every Thursday night in the summer to spend the weekends with us, or never missing a school event, he put family first, no matter how busy work was.

What’s next for your startup?

We just launched a redesign for the site and are focusing on making the site a more responsive design. We also plan to launch 5-6 new key features to give the site broader appeal and are hoping to get 4-5 large conferences using the site over the next few months.

Where can people find out more?

doitinperson.com

Speaking of events did you see these 50 startup stories from TechCrunch Disrupt NY

New York Startup Spotter Is A Location-Based Video Sharing Platform

What is Spotter?

Spotter is a mobile app that associates videos with places, allowing people to find and share videos in a new approach rather than the traditional way with only video titles.

It is a fun, new, exciting method to share places and videos with family, friends, and the world. It is simple and easy to use. Take a video with your iPhone, associate it with a place and share it privately or publicly. If taking videos is not your cup of tea, you can look up places and/or friends near and dear to your heart and watch their videos. Spotter also allows the unique experience of finding public videos that were taken near your current location by using the GPS signal on your phone.

Allowing people to find videos by places unlocks a new way of sharing videos with others.

In layman’s terms, how does it work? (In other words how would you explain it to your grandmother)

Spotter uses the GPS in your phone to associate every video uploaded accurately to a place or a location. Having the location on every video allows us to deliver videos to users in a new manner.

Users can follow locations and places like they follow people on Twitter or Instagram. Every time a video is uploaded to a location/place, the video is delivered to the users who follow that location/place. Users also get videos that were taken near their current location and videos taken by their friends.

Users can also search their favorite places and see all the videos associated with that place without following the place.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

Mike Groves graduated from SUNY Albany in 2005 with a BS in computer science. Since then, he has focused on bringing software products from vision to reality. His career has taken him through a variety of interesting fields such as mobile, semiconductor quality control, healthcare quality management, energy market validation, and government budget management. His latest vision, Spotter, aims to provide a new way to experience the places around us by connecting digital experiences (video) to the very places those experiences occurred. He believes that by making these connections we will change the way people communicate and experience our world.

Kevin Pytel graduated from SUNY Oswego in 2006 with a BS in Computer Science, and a minor in Mathematics. He quickly integrated himself into the corporate world as a software engineer while running his own IT consulting firm on the side. To progress his business skills he completed his MBA at Union Graduate College while working full time. He has progressed through the corporate ranks and most recently worked as a Senior Project Manager. His experience in large scale redundant applications and project management has helped Spotter with the product launch and vision to make sure our servers can handle high peak loads and are up 99.99% of the time.

Dan Graham graduated from Long Island University with a B.S. in Digital Design and has been working in the online and traditional marketing industry for over 12 years. At the age of 15 Dan was brought on board to manage marketing and web development for a family owned e-commerce company. For the past 8 years Dan has run a media and marketing consulting firm focusing on social marketing, information architecture and advanced content management systems. He has worked with companies both large and small including Panasonic, Madison Square Garden, and Warner Bros.. Dan is responsible for updating the Spotter interface in the 2^nd version of the application as well as heading up marketing to get Spotter the attention it deserves.

Where are you based?

We operate out of a virtual office. The 3 co-founders are all located near NYC.

What’s the startup scene/culture like where you’re based?

NYC is really starting to support startups, so there are a lot more opportunities for us to network then in the past. The problem is we’re working our full time jobs during the day and then at night coding and making Spotter better, so we haven’t been able to use our location to our benefit yet.

There is also a strong startup community to the north of us in the Albany/Troy region. There are a bunch of meet ups held by Grand Slam Alley and Tech Valley Mobile Developer Network. The guys who created Dark Sky and forecast.io are based out of that area as well as some other successful startups.

How did you come up with the idea for Spotter?

Mikes Groves and I (Kevin) worked together as software developers and we always had a common interest in starting a company that focused on mobile. From early on we saw the potential of new products emerging from the mobile space.

One day Mike approached me with this idea of combining location and videos, and I really liked the idea, so we dug a little deeper to see what was in the market. Then we thought about it a little more and really figured out there is no way for you to find videos that you know for sure were taken where you thought they were. Someone could post a video on YouTube and title it “The Empire State Building”, but in reality it could be a very funny video of someone in their house doing something stupid. And, yes, there are plenty of videos like that all over the internet. If the video gets the views and popularity, that video is going to show up in the top of the rankings when you search YouTube for Empire State Building… So we focused on solving that problem.

From there we created a prototype and started laying out the functionality the app would have. We really like the ability to follow a place. For me I was a BMX racer and skier growing up and love watching those types of videos, so I like to follow all the BMX tracks and mountains to see new videos on a daily basis.

Why now?

Why not? But seriously, when we came up with the idea, and even now, there are no apps that focus on location like ours. We are solving a gap in the current market.

Who are your competition?

It feels like and is pretty much every social media company involved with photos and videos. No one has zeroed in to do exactly what we’re doing, but most are tagging the location and using that in some way to enhance user experience.

We have to continue to focus on what we’re good at, and get even better at that, which is ensuring the videos tagged to the location were actually taken there and delivering those videos to the user in a unique and easy way.

And what’s your secret sauce?

It’s top secret, if I told you then I’d have to kill you. I’m sure you’ve never gotten that response.
Really though, there isn’t anything too secret about what we’re doing. We’re using a bunch of technology accessible to the average developer to our advantage to provide videos to the user in a different approach than other companies.

What are some milestones you’ve achieved?

Over 10,000 videos have been tagged to actual places, and not just cities or streets. These places range from One World Trade, beaches on Hawaii, ski resorts in Austria, to music houses in Japan.

What’s your next milestone?

We think the milestones we’ve reached are very cool, but the application and server systems were built to handle many more users and videos, so we’re focusing on marketing the app to get the users it deserves.

10,000 users are our goal by the end of summer, and 20,000 by the end of the year.

Who are some of your mentors and business role models?

Previous bosses and college professors have mentored me to get where I am in my career to even make it possible for me to start this company, and I am continually looking and listening to advice of those who have successfully or unsuccessfully started their own company. Knowledge is power, and having an idea without being able to execute it will not get you anywhere.

I have always found Shawn Fanning (Founder of Napster) an interesting business role model just because he always seems to start companies that he finds interesting and builds products he wants to use which I find pretty cool.

Also Paul Tyma, founder of many companies is a business role model of mine. He’s worked closely with Doug Lea a professor of mine, so I’ve had the pleasure of working on some of his code in college, and occasionally bugging him with an email here and there for help with Spotter.

What’s next for Spotter?

We want to expand and move to Android as well as build out our traditional web browser experience. Moving to Android has always been on the roadmap, but with only three people, it’s been difficult to get traction on that development effort. We have also been contemplating adding photos to our service as well.

We’re looking for a motivated Java developer interested in building out our Android application. Since we don’t have funding currently we’re looking for someone who is willing to work for a small percentage of company or as internship to get college credits. If you have interest email kevin@spotterinc.com

Where can people find out more and what is your Twitter username?

spotterapp.us Download spotter in the iTunes App Store here Follow them on Twitter here

Check out what this Chicago startup is doing with video for charity.

Buffalo Startup GripeO Is The Complaint Market Place

Have you ever had a girl that you tried to date… oh wait that’s not I was writing.

Have you ever been upset with something, be it customer service, product selection, feature selection or just any normal complaint? Has that complaint ever been enough to tick you off but not piss you off? Well with complaints like those they often die in your head. You may forget them later on, only to have them resurface the next time you go to that restaurant, store, or business or use that product. Then, you quickly remember that complaint.

Now, on the other hand if you feel you’ve ever been just totally wronged, or get really pissed off at a company, you may go through the motions of seeking out a contact form, email address or phone number and actually move forward with your complaint. This process can take a while and it too can be interrupted and die out.

A Buffalo based startup called GripeO is here to change that and disrupt the complaint space with a complaint market place that’s both easy to complain on and easy for companies to find their complaints. But lets establish one thing from the get-go and that’s the fact that GripeO is not a place to just bitch about everything under the sun.

“GripeO is a website and mobile application startup that’s going to disrupt complaint management. Consumers (people like you and I) can quickly and easily submit product or service complaints in one consolidated location. We notify and authenticate businesses who are then able to mediate the complaint via our system. During the process we encourage businesses to close as many complaints as possible with new savings and discounts. This won’t work for everyone, but for those that do it benefits both parties because it has the ability to please consumers yet drive new sales to the business. The real magic happens though when complaints are left open. The fact is, that information is far more valuable then people often realize. You have a qualified consumer who is frustrated with a business. GripeO offers those ignored complaints in a Complaint Marketplace where competitive businesses can search for complaints in an ad-market style and use our system to entice and lure those qualified leads away via our system. This is the revenue generating portion of GripeO and something that makes us truly unique.” GripeO co-founder and team lead, Mike Klanac Jr told us in an interview.

We’ve seen a few complaint platforms over the years but it seems that the founding team behind GripeO have worked out a lot of the kink and are poised to become the goto destination to sound off complaints and ultimately get them resolved. Check out the rest of Klanac’s interview below.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds

Our team is comprised of 6 co-founders who each are responsible for a different functional area. They include Mike Klanac (CEO/Team Lead), Nicholas Campanile (Finance and Business Development), Stephen Makula (System Architecture), Richard Panek (Development Lead), Jim Proux (User Experience), and Mark Taylor (User Interface and Mobile). The group has all worked together in the past and that’s really what ties everyone together. The corporate backgrounds of everyone actually created quite a link; working together in that environment allowed everyone to identify the best resources in their respective positions. When the idea and opportunity arose the team fell together quickly and naturally based on a mutual respect. Some of the other work the team has collaborated on includes Ellucian Inc., SimpleApply LLC, and ProfileFly.com.

Where are you based?

Our headquarters are in Buffalo, NY however we also have one co-founder in Boulder, CO and one in Houston, TX. We strongly believe that remote companies are the way of the future and actively debate the merits of Marissa Mayer’s decision to call all the cattle home. Our geographic location is also strategic. The core of our development is together, and we recently secured incubation and seed funding from Z80Labs Technology Incubator in Buffalo, NY giving our team a unified location to work from. Having strategic business representatives in Boulder, CO and Southeast Texas allows us to tap into the well established startup communities in those areas.

What is the startup culture like where you are based?

Buffalo, NY’s start up culture is actually very exciting right now. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s about to “pop” as a tech hub. For the longest time Buffalo has been a source of great technical talent coming out of the high density of Colleges in western New York. Unfortunately there just hasn’t been the jobs to keep them around. As organizations like Z80Labs start to develop the city is going to really be able to capitalize on the local technical talent pool.

What problem does your startup solve?

For consumers, we make it much easier to submit complaints, as well as more worthwhile. The fact is, searching through websites, filling out long forms, and wasting your time is something you only do if you’re extremely pissed off. With GripeO, a complaint can be filed in under 1 minute, from the convenience of your phone, right after the food comes out cold, the part is missing, or the airline delays. For businesses, we offer up a completely free way to manage complaints and provide instruction based on data trends on how to most effectively close out gripes. Lastly, competitive businesses are always in need of effective ways to generate new business. With pure advertising, your company can get completely lost in the ether. GripeO presents a strategic opportunity to target a prime consumer, ready to change vendors, who is also flush with demographic information.

What is one challenge that you’ve overcome in the startup process?

For us, it’s always been about generating the often talked about “warm introduction”. Unless you’re in the business, I can’t imagine a lot of developers are walking around with a rolodex of VCs and Angels. Let’s be honest – the whole concept is awkward, difficult, and quite frustrating. We’ve managed to break down some doors by doing several things. First, we started geographically. The people often willing to give you a first shot are the ones who are doing it for reasons outside of making money. Buffalo has a lot of economic initiatives and stimulation going on and that is an opportunity for us. Secondly, we try to be respectful and friendly to everyone in the startup space. We’re all people, and friends do friends favors. Finally, one tactic we’ve found to work quite well is to start small with a cold contact and build up. Rather then ask, “will you fund my startup with $500k?” a first contact might be more like a paragraph explaining the business, an attached executive summary, and one very simple request, “as we progress through build, beta, and traction, can I tell you more?”

What are some of the milestones your startup has achieved?

Finishing our web based MVP was a big step for us. It was kind of like the birth of a baby. So much time was spent preparing for it, yet once it came around you immediately start to realize the diapers are in the wrong location. Another major milestone was receiving our first term sheet. We try to leverage our talking points as much as possible. Telling one VC that you have a term sheet from another tends to pique their interest.

What are your next milestones

Right now we’re focused on getting the MVP ready for BETA testing and raising our remaining seed round. There is a lot going on – more so then at any other time in our existence. When I started preparing for this process I had read feedback from several entrepreneurs who’d had successful exits. Almost always you’ll hear the words “pivot” and “agile” in those interviews. With the amount of documentation, promotional sites, and network to keep apprised, that month 3 change to your revenue model means a lot of updating. Expect it.

Who are your mentors and role models?

Dan Magnuszewski and Jordan Levy at Z80Labs Technology Incubator has been great to us. It sounds kind of weird but we also let zeitgeist and data mentor us. I think it’s important to prolifically read Techcrunch, Mashable, Nibletz, and VentureBeat. Our role models tend to be operations that are mobile leaning or have innovative approaches to existing models. We like Mint, Groupon, Twitter, and Instagram.

What are some of the advantages/disadvantages growing your startup outside of Silicon Valley.

I’ll be honest here; I don’t know. I’ve never been to Silicon Valley. I would imagine a disadvantage is the investment strategy. To use a baseball analogy, regional Angel Networks go for hits. Institutional Investors swing for the fences. The reason is they get more at bats. Being out of the bubble is an advantage in itself. I think you’re able to rise up based on a micro level need or problem, whereas in the bubble your building around investment criteria “we’re a geo-targeted, mobile, big data, smart object”. What?

What’s next for your startup?

We’ve applied to pitch at Techcrunch Austin Meetup “1 minute pitch off” and SXSW V2V. We’re knee deep in MVP refinement and starting some planning to begin letting our BETA users try the system. We’re also ramping up mobile development a bit behind the web in order to follow its lead, and continuously meeting with investors to find the right fit.

Where can people find out more, and what is your Twitter username?

If you’re interesting in learning more about the product or being a tester, please LIKE our facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pays.to.be.heard We’re also on Twitter: @gripeo and of course you can always visit www.gripeo.com

Seattle Startup LocalBlox Is Kayak For Your Neighborhood

A wife and husband founded startup in Seattle Washington is quickly becoming the goto place for everything, and anything having to do with your neighborhood. It’s a social networking platform that connects neighbors through anything and everything that relates to them.

LocalBlox already has over 77,000 neighborhoods listed in their platform which covers everything from getting to know your neighbors, to neighborhood events and even lost pets.

The company was founded by Sabia Arefin, a Duke MBA with a rich background in technology management and business analysis for Fortune 500 companies. Her cofounder is her husband, Ashfaq Arefin, a Microsoft Engineer who’s been the lead technologist for several companies ranging from startups to large corporations.

LocalBlox is a one stop shop for information about any given neighborhood. It’s like a mashup of Block Avenue, Patch, the Yellow Pages and the local community bulletin board. The feature rich platform has several uses including:

Discover your neighbors, Learn about a neighborhood, its residents and social vitality. Invite friends to the neighborhood. Know your neighbors from their social media profiles.
Explore what the neighbors say and like about the neighborhood. Connect & share with your neighbors (Neighborhood Wall, Neighborhood Ambassador).
Find out what’s going on around your neighborhood (events & announcements, news feed, neighborhood watch).
Neighborhood News Feed based on Resident activities, Neighborhood watch & alert.
Pet Alert : Is your Cat missing? Ask your Neighbors! Find out the neighbors and their children that your kid is playing with
Nearby amenities and services: Find out your neighbors’ recommendation. Rate goods and services around the hood.
Engage in social vitality around your neighborhood
Find a job close to home: babysitter, dog-walker, stylist, landscaper
Check nearby public transit stops

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

What is your startup, what does it do?

LocalBlox is a highly-scaled hyperlocal neighborhood platform that combines high-volume, high-value content aggregation, curation, real-time augmentation and updates, along with syndication, mapping and crowdsourcing with business and personal profile claiming services. To create a vibrant, interconnected social, local, mobile marketplace of content and tool sets, profile claiming, automatic mobile and web campaign content creation tools help local businesses and neighbors connect more efficiently. Proprietary scoring allows automatic Web and mobile campaign creation for local business owners and event organizers. We aspire to be “the Kayak” for neighborhoods & neighborhood businesses & more!

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

The company was founded by me and my husband, Ashfaq Rahman.

I did my MBA from Duke University and I have years of experience in technology management and business analysis in Fortune 500 companies

Ashfaq is a serial entrepreneur technologist. He founded revolutionary technology platforms for companies ranging from startups to multi-billion dollar companies. An engineer from Microsoft in Redmond, he held the founding and key technologist roles in a number of successful companies, masterminding key inventions. He attended graduate school in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Where are you based?

LocalBlox is based in Bellevue, WA.

What is the startup culture like where you are based?

The startup culture here is a strong and easily accessible, with regular events and meet-ups. There are a lot of really smart, educated and successful people here who help support startups and encourage entrepreneurs.

What problem does your startup solve?

We bring a diverse array of information, resources, tool & technology together in one place, and make it meaningful and locally relevant. People don’t have to go to 10 different sites when it comes to finding information about their neighborhood. It’s all in one place and validated for higher relevancy and accuracy. We place information into a neighborhood context. The LocalBlox infrastructure consists of data acquisition, parsing and extraction engines aggregating content to 112,000 neighborhoods in the U.S.

We have a large aggregation of local businesses and local events with extremely rich data-points, generating boundaries of the top neighborhoods in the U.S., with unique features like hyperlocal news and neighborhood crime watch built on top of our aggregation engine. We created some disruptive self-serve offerings for local businesses to gain a targeted reach and build their profiles in a more efficient way. We’re leveraging these assets to build a sustainable business model.

We have the scale and use big data and technology strategically, leveraging them to build partnerships focusing on our key strengths. We are not just a social network or another local site. There is unique depth in each of the modules offered at LocalBlox, which makes it possible for us to build a lot of interesting business models revolving around interesting technologies, algorithms and big data.

What is one challenge that you’ve overcome in the startup process?

We realized that staying focused was critical and not to get distracted or diverted into multiple directions by different opportunities, as it would be deadly for our little startup. After the failure of sites such as Judy’s Book and EveryBlock, it was difficult to overcome the idea that another local neighborhood site was “absurd and not fundable.”

What are some of the milestones your startup has achieved?

LocalBlox is live in 112,000 neighborhoods with 23 million comprehensive business profiles, millions of aggregated local content, news and events, crime mapped into neighborhoods, with social integration and a Mobile SDK. We have over 200,000 claimed business profiles, over 200,000 Twitter followers and more than 60,000 Facebook fans. We have trademarks and patents for some of our core proprietary discovery, validation and mapping engines.

What are your next milestones?

We are redesigning our site for a better user experience and focusing on a couple of key strategic partnerships for revenue monetization.

Who are your mentors and role models?

Our advisors Merrill Brown, founding team member of MSNBC, and Dane Madsen, founder of Yellowpages.com, are very inspiring. They’ve been very kind and contributed much to our company. They serve on our advisory board and we’re very fortunate to learn from them. I am personally thankful to Dane Madsen and Rick Blair[SR1] for their constant encouragement.

What are some of the advantages/disadvantages growing your startup outside of Silicon Valley?

I really didn’t feel any advantage or disadvantage of being outside Silicon Valley, though I imagine it would be much harder for anyone in the Valley, where every other person has a startup. We have funded the startup ourselves, bootstrapped all the way and have a solid, viable revenue model. I feel we are very fortunate to be in Seattle. People here understand and appreciate the hard work and technical merit that goes behind a solid scalable product and value team & technology.

What’s next for your startup?

We are focusing our efforts in a few key areas, redesigning our site for a better and more user friendly experience, and exploring opportunities with a couple of key strategic partners to take our company to the next level.

Where can people find out more, and what is your Twitter username?

www.localblox.com and on Twitter at localblox

Startup Weekend and Startup America have joined forces, read more about that here.

This London Startup Is Cookies For The Real World

We’re not about to tell you the story of the latest spin on the All American Cookie Company, the Great Cookie or even Mrs. Fields. PresenceOrb is a startup based in London and they’ve developed a “virtual cookie” for the real world.

I’m hoping that it’s not too far reaching to expect readers of nibletz.com, the voice of startups everywhere else, to know what cookies are, at least in the internet sense of the word. Taking it back to internet 101 for those of you not in the know, cookies are the little tidbits of information transmitted from you, across the internet to other websites that help determine what you need to know.

It’s how the adservers on nibletz.com know to offer you an ad for kayak.com when the last website you visited was US Airways, that kind of thing.

Unarguably, having some kind of offline version of this very important tool would be amazing. Imagine if everyone that shopped at Old Navy went through some magic door that left some kind of radioactive film on you so that when you went to Abercrombie & Fitch, you could get some kind of message that says, “Come Back To Old Navy we’ll give you a discount right now”.

OK so it’s not that freaky, nor futuristic. However, PresenceOrb is that useful. The only thing you need to bring in the store with you to make this magic work is your smartphone.

Using the PresenceOrb app and your smartphone, if you walk into a business in the program your phone is “marked” or “noted” now that business can market to you in the best way possible. Using a profile you’ve completed and information locally at said business establishment, you’ll get relative, passive advertisements that may seem a little cray cray but actually it’s kind of fascinating.

For the sake of understanding, on the company’s video they show a customer with PresenceOrb activated on their phone. The customer walks into two different car dealerships, a Volkswagen dealer not using PresenceOrb and a Porsche dealer that is.

After taking a test drive at both dealerships the user ends up taking some time to think about it. Low and behold, he drives past a digital billboard also equipped with PresenceOrb and the billboard offers him a special price on that particular Porsche. Voila, it’s an offer the user can’t refuse and bam he’s driving a brand new Porsche.

When you dissect this form of targeted advertising it’s actually pretty amazing. The potential for real world advertising to be affected this way could lead to billions of dollars in sales.

We got a chance to talk with Thomas Sheppard the brilliant man behind this startup, check out the interview below.

What is Presenceorb?

PresenceOrb is the cookie for the real world. POB allows retailers to cookie consumers as they visit brick and mortar stores. Retails gain analytics previously only seen in the online realm, Footfall, Bounce rate, return customers, new customers, linger time …. the list goes on. With this information and via our expanding advertising partner network retailers can then action these analytics by targeting consumers on the street through such outlets as digital out of home billboards.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

Thomas is the founder of Presence aware tech. He has worked as an engineer in banking producing financial markets software as well as for a number of technology companies producing consumer software for desktop and mobile for the past 11 years. Presence aware tech additionally has a North American partner company who provide development resource and are additionally POB’s largest customer.

Where are you based?

Presence aware tech is based within the Cisco office in North Greenwich, London. Having recently been awarded the Raptor SME grant for which Cisco is a key backer.

What’s the startup scene/culture like where you’re based?

The culture is fantastic. We are surrounded by like minded companies (Oprillo, AMBX, Lamppost, Prod designs, Crowd Vision) the majority of whom are also current or previous Raptor grant winners. We collaborate, disagree, challenge and encourage one another.It’s the sort of environment where you can lift your head and hear conversations covering twenty different industries.

How did you come up with the idea for Presenceorb?

Presence Orb was originally intended as a security device. After a startled wake-up at two am one night our founder thought someone was in his home. Thankfully it was just a bad dream which had forced him awake however it got him thinking. How could a home owner detect if someone was in the home, not just movement but be able to “cookie” someone and see if they where supposed to be present or not. From there he began to research how that could be done and then things got interesting. Thomas then went on to form Presence aware tech, we produced a prototype and pivoted our focus from security to analytics. We are now 8 months further on and the path from then to now has been astounding.

Why now?

The market is ready, hardware is now cheaper to make. People are familiar with the concept of cookies and the adjoining technology is available. In short the market has come to meet our vision.

What problem does Presenceorb solve?

Presence Orb levels the playing field between physical and online retailers. For years online retailers have had analytics software and marketing which has allowed them to analyse consumer wants, needs and actions. Online retailers can then adjust to these findings very quickly. Physical retailers have been hampered by an inability to gain such rapid feedback. Typical collection methods such as surveys, in store spotters and analysis took months if not more to conduct and collate. With Presence Orb retailers can gain these analytics instantly similar to Google analytics but for the brick and mortar stores.

Who are your competition?

There are others in this space doing similar things and we are aware of them however we don’t overly concern ourselves with competition. We have a vision and direction as to how we believe our product should function what features it should include and how we are going to do that. We can only concentrate on our own game, we leave everyone else to concentrate on there’s and the results will come out in the end.

And what’s your secret sauce?

It’s no secret that good people make great products. We make sure that our people have the drive to produce something truly amazing. It’s no secret it’s just what makes us produce a quality product is a desire to do exactly that.

Are you bootstrapped or funded?

Bootstrapped and proud. We would take funding when it’s needed but at the moment we can survive on our own resources and steam. We don’t charge for the hardware which can meet initial ourlay is high but our SAAS business model then takes over and will allow us to grow as we bring on more customers.

What are some milestones you’ve achieved?

We’ve recently been announced as Digital innovation finalists in the advertising space at Digital shoreditch London. We are one of 21 companies presenting in the final for 7 awards. This was a hugely proud moment for us.

To be accepted onto the Raptor SME program run in part by Cisco was another huge milestone for us. This fueled a number of conversations that without which we might never have begun or had the good fortune to be part of.

Our first enterprise level trial was another amazing milestone. We have deployed within a household recognizable location and it blows our mind every time we walk into the location to think …. we’re deployed here.

Our second enterprise level trial with a global chain…. i’ll say no more.

Honestly there are loads of milestones that as a team we are exceptionally proud of but our main focus is our product and perhaps the biggest milestone was our first customer feedback from a small Cafe in North Yorkshire telling us there takings are heading north in no small part because of Presence Orb they knew where to focus there marketing spend. That’s when we knew our product was making a difference.

What’s your next milestone?

Taking on the Digital Innovations final on May 20th. We want to wow the crowd with whats possible. And we will.

Who are some of your mentors and business role models?

We are in an incredibly privileged position to have not only people as mentors but also companies. Cisco provide us with one to one mentors and also business units will email from time to time giving advice. We are really thankful for that. We have advisers in the advertising space and even companies who have installed our product who we view as mentors. They provide feedback on what they like and don’t like so much about POB and ultimately that’s the best feedback and direction we can ask for.

Where can people find out more and what is your Twitter username?

presenceorb.com Twitter @presenceorb

Now see how this Wisconsin startup puts checkins in the real world!

Designers You’re Going To Love This Madrid Startup, Concept Inbox

The best designers in the world hate having to deal with technology. As crazy as that sounds they want to create things and design things. They don’t have the time to worry about how to share it.

Now a lot of designers, at least the good ones, know that they need clients and need good relationships with them. In many ways good designers need these same personal traits that web developers have. But outside of that, great designers should be tasked with great design.

It’s that premise, and of course simplicity, that’s inspired Oscar del Rio, Miguel Angel Gaton, and Yesica Gonzalez, three entrepreneurs based in Madrid, to create “Concept Inbox”.

“As a designer, all you have to do is send your designs by email to an address that we provide, and automatically this will generate a workspace where your client and you will be able to interact quickly and easily. With Concept inbox, you can manage all your design projects with a single tool therefore avoiding distractions, and focusing on what really matters which is getting quick approval and saving time and money.” del Rio told nibletz.com in an interview.

Check out the rest of our interview with del Rio below:

What is Concept Inbox?

Concept inbox is a powerful, straightforward, and extremely easy to use tool for designers, to improve interaction with their clients, in order to get feedback, and quick approval on their designs.

In layman’s terms, how does it work? (In other words how would you explain it to your grandmother)

As a designer, all you have to do is send your designs by email to an address that we provide, and automatically this will generate a workspace where your client and you will be able to interact quickly and easily.

With Concept inbox, you can manage all your design projects with a single tool therefore avoiding distractions, and focusing on what really matters which is getting quick approval and saving time and money.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

Oscar del Rio (CEO): Studied Music (Bassoon / Piano) and Software development. Microstrategy Business Intelligence certified. 7 years experience working on design / development areas and 3 years as an entrepreneur. Started 2 companies, 1 success, 1 fail (this is third) and collaborate with others as an advisor / mentor

Miguel Angel Gatón (CMO): Computer Sciences Engineer, Master degree in Marketing. 5 yrs experience (Michelin) as Media Planner and Online Marketing manager. Co-founded 3 companies.

Yesica González (CFO): Computer Sciences Engineer, Master degree in Finances. Co-founded 3 companies.

Where are you based?

Madrid, Spain

What’s the startup scene/culture like where you’re based?

Madrid startup community is growing every day. We have great startup accelerators, tons of events and an extensive network of mentors

How did you come up with the idea for Concept Inbox?

Concept inbox is made by designers, for designers. We really love design, but it also can be very stressful …The questions, last minute changes, misunderstandings, endless calls and interruptions that can cause setbacks on deadlines.We suffered this for years, so we tried to simplify it. Concept inbox is as simple as sending an email.

How did you come up with the name?

The name came up thinking we’d like to have an unique tool with all the incoming feedback from our customers about our concepts / designs. Like an email inbox but with no penis enlargement or viagra messages and that stuff.

What problem does Concept Inbox solve?

Concept inbox provides an easy workspace to use, where designers can share designs with clients, get feedback from them and get approval faster, avoiding endless calls and misunderstandings that cause delays on deadlines

What’s your secret sauce?

We are focused on providing tools to drastically save time to both designer / agency and customer. Now we are developing the new version of the platform which includes some of that new tools.

Are you bootstrapped or funded?

We have received 40k € from Telefonica’s accelerator Way

What are some milestones you’ve achieved?

We’ve been up and running from September 2012, and we already have over 3000 designers from 17 countries using the tool.

Concept inbox was selected as one of the TOP50 Startups at Pioneers Festival, Vienna.

Also we were chosen from 450+ startups to participate in Wayra Madrid acceleration programme.

What’s your next milestone?

We are working hard to launch a new version of Concept inbox in two months.

Who are some of your mentors and business role models?

Since the beginning of the project we had the support of many different mentors, from serial entrepreneurs to multinational professionals with extensive experience.

They have helped us to look at the big picture and see things from other points of view.

What’s next for Concept Inbox?

We’re about to launch the new version and also looking for funding to let more people to know our service.

Where can people find out more?

conceptinbox.com

See the mobile email startup we like better than mailbox.

San Diego Startup Forward Metrics Is Strategic Planning Made Easy

San Diego startup ForwardMetrics is off to the races running. They specialize in simple, easy to understand strategic planning, but once you dive into ForwardMetrics it’s much more than just planning. The ForwardMetrics community is made up of entrepreneurs, c-level executives, executive and business coaches and people just starting out in the business world.

Last october at CTIA’s MobileCon event, ForwardMetrics founder Ozzie DiVinere told bnetTV.com that ForwardMetrics will become the goto place for anyone in business who wants to be successful.

Their enterprise class strategic planning software is based in the cloud and has two main products FM Navigator which any sized company can use to help brainstorm new strategies, hit goals and hold stakeholders accountable.

The other piece is Client Navigator which is a set of tools for executive and business coaches that offers new ways to work with clients.

Then they have the ForwardMetrics community which is designed to connect forward thinkers at any stage in their business lives, to ultimately become more successful.

We got a chance to talk with Andrew Hard the Marketing Director at ForwardMetrics. Check out the interview below:

What is your startup, what does it do?

Our startup is called ForwardMetrics, we have built enterprise-class strategic planning software that is based in the cloud. Companies can use our software (called FM Navigator) to brainstorm new strategies, hit their goals and hold stakeholders in key departments accountable.

We also have a Client Navigator product, a different version with a set of additional tools designed specifically for consultants and executive coaches that offers new ways to work with clients – along with powerful tools for acquisition, retention and revenue.

Our very unique go-to-market strategy is not to sell directly to companies, but to license our software to consultants and executive coaches, who are the individuals that actually conduct strategic planning sessions at the vast majority of companies.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

The founders are our CEO Ozzie DiVinere and CSO Scott Warner, here are their brief backgrounds:

Ozzie DiVinere is CEO/Co-Founder of ForwardMetrics.com. He Co-Founded the company in 2011 with a vision to bring enterprise cloud-based technology to the strategic planning, performance management and project management space. DiVinere’s passion is to transform organizations by connecting them with executive coaches and strategic planners to adopt cloud technologies to help each one achieve success and grow their businesses. A win-win paradigm.

In his previous role as Senior Vice President of the Private Client Group at Altegris, which was acquired by the Fortune 250 Company Genworth, DiVinere was responsible for delivering strategic sales and support to Altegris’ wealthiest customers globally. In addition, DiVinere created a very successful toy company, Skate Monster, which had Walmart as its primary customer.

DiVinere received his B.S. in Business Administration, Marketing from San Diego State University.

Scott Warner serves as Chief Strategic Officer/Co-Founder. After Co-Founding the company in 2011, Warner provides the vision for the company and is the Chief Architect of the FM Navigator and Client Navigator platforms.Prior to founding ForwardMetrics he was the Founder, CEO and Chairman of AccuSoft Corporation, the leading imaging technology company, which was acquired in 2008. He is also the founder of several other companies in areas including fitness and real estate as well as an angel investor and adviser to numerous organizations in the area of strategic planning and growth.

Where are you based?

We are based in Encinitas, Calif. Encinitas is just north of downtown San Diego.

What is the startup culture like where you are based?

The culture is San Diego is very strong for startups, BioTech especially. The downtown San Diego area is extremely friendly for startups. Very friendly and very strong startup culture. There are a number of incubators and angel investors in the downtown area, a lot of venture capital floating around and a very strong entrepreneurial spirit.

The startup capitals in the area are in Carlsbad (biotech), Sorento Valley and downtown there are several business parks (nearby the Qualcomm campus, etc.) There are definitely pockets throughout the area – San Diego has a very unique startup culture, but there a very friendly atmosphere, resources and money to be invested.

Most San Diego-area startups are Biotech, consulting or chipmakers – ForwardMetrics is very unique for the area.

What problem does your startup solve?

Eighty percent of companies DO NOT HAVE a strategic plan – a ship without a rudder. The other 20 percent do not implement their plans properly.

Most often, a consultant will come in to an organization and conduct a lengthy and highly expensive sessions – at the end of which he hands the company their strategic plan for the next one to five years in the form of a static Excel spreadsheet. That static, print document is not dynamic and becomes old just weeks after the consultant walks out of the building – most often it ends up in a desk drawer and is looked at never or rarely, and then only by the executive team.

ForwardMetrics’ new cloud-based software lets consultants and coaches offer companies a dynamic, living strategic plan that can be tracked and implemented at an organization after they leave. The software tracks goals from the plan in different departments, making it so the company leadership can track progress and make sure that the company is performing as needed.

What is one challenge that you’ve overcome in the startup process?

We have overcome a number of obstacles. We’ve overcome the typical obstacles around raising money from investors, skepticism and reluctance to take risks. Round A of fundraising will end this coming week – after really starting the process a full year ago.

We’ve also faced the challenges that many area startups have dealt with – difficulties with finding the right outside development team, marketing/design agency and video vendors. There are many resources of this kind in the area – but many of these companies overcharge, underperform and care very little about their clients.

Shifting from a dev team in India, to our current team in the Ukraine – along with having many different remote employees — has caused all sorts of interesting communications problems.

We’ve also face the problems that a lot of startups deal with of being understaffed – people are wearing multiple hats and there is more to get done than we have resources and people to do them. Through all of that, we have managed to launch a solid, enterprise-class software app with an eager base of prospective clients and a solid social and PR presence.

What are some of the milestones your startup has achieved?

On May 15, we will launch game-changing new technology – which helps organizations change the paradigm and operate on a results-based approach. It is a revolutionary shift in how companies are run, changing the focus from managing activity to a focus only on results.

We also have a thriving community site that has grown to over 500 executive coaches, consultants and business leaders sharing content and making connections. The membership growth on this site has increased very rapidly in just the last few months – and the growth is only spiking even more.

We’ve also forged an impressive number of strategic partnerships with hundreds of consultants, executive coaches and strategic planners – generated a lot of interest from surprisingly large companies – and have also gotten some good press exposure.

What are your next milestones?

Our next milestones are to launch the product and grow to at least $2-4 million in revenue by the end of the year. We also intend to grow our community site well into the thousands by the end of the year, and of course growing our client base to several top consulting firms and prominent companies.

We also want to receive that crucial customer feedback and greatly enhance our products so that they can be integrated into literally thousands of businesses around the globe.

Who are your mentors and role models?

Mark Cuban, Marc Benioff, Larry Ellison, Jeffrey Immelt, Steve Jobs, Steven Covey

What are some of the advantages/disadvantages growing your startup outside of Silicon Valley?

Advantages: Top talent is extremely attracted to the San Diego area, both because of the city’s reputation and the natural beauty of the destination. Top talent in sales and marketing can also be found at extremely discounted prices in this area as opposed to L.A., New York, etc. There is also a large base of VC and angel investors, along with retired businessmen, in the San Diego area – so the region also helped with fund-raising as well. San Diego also offers an interested array of strategic business partners and marketing boutique-type resources.

Disadvantages: Finding good development resources is definitely a challenge – this might apply to a lot of places, it’s probably something you her somewhat frequently, but it’s very hard to know what you’re going to get and also get good work back for your dollar. Through everything, we have ended up with a very talented dev team that we’re able to work with very closely. Another great advantage of being in the Silicon Valley area is access to input from a wide array of technology companies – however, at ForwardMetrics we have had access to great input from professional strategic planning professionals and received extremely positive feedback even very recently.

What’s next for your startup?

The way we reach the market is very unique: Instead of going after companies, we work with consultants, executive coaches and strategic planners – who introduce the technology to their clients and continue to work with them to create and execute plans that achieve goals.

From there, we launch FM University to train and certify our partner coaches and consultants on the use of FM Navigator and our other cloud-based tools, and conduct extensive trainings and virtual events – along with a massive PR blitz! We will also be hiring on more staff including a much larger, more robust sales team and more in-house marketing resources, heck, maybe even an HR person!

Where can people find out more, and what is your Twitter username?

To find out more, please visit www.forwardmetrics.com or visit our social: Our Twitter is @ForwardMetrics, our Facebook is facebook.com/ForwardMetrics and our LinkedIn page is http://www.linkedin.com/company/2537683.

Now check out Recruiting for Success: Tapping into Your Local University

New York Startup InBetweenJobs Is For People Who, You Guessed It, Are InBetweenJobs

Finding yourself in between jobs can be one of the scariest things on earth. Some people are lucky, and they know when they might have to start looking for work. Most people, on the other hand, have no idea that they are about to get laid off or that a company is shutting down. For anyone out of work though, uncertainty can be a very scary thing.

Not knowing where the next paycheck is coming from is typically the biggest threat in between jobs, but other things like health insurance, other employee benefits, taxes and resources can become overwhelming.

Big companies usually help out displaced workers through third party companies. These companies, chronicled in the George Clooney movie Up In The Air, connect people to job placement services, resume companies, skill builders and other resources. For the rest of us though, navigating in between jobs can be the hardest job of all.

InBetweenJobs is a New York startup that sets out to simplify and enrich the process of being in between jobs. The company offers access to resources for things like polishing your cover letter, updating your resume, improving your skills, researching trends and companies in your field and of course hunting for jobs. They’re also hoping to offer interviewing tips, information about COBRA insurance and anything that anyone in between jobs could need.

InBetweenJobs incentivizes the time between jobs by offering points for real life rewards. When a user participates in an activity like taking a quick online course in cover letters they earn points. Points can then be redeemed for things like metrocards and free coffee, which when you’re saving every dime you have, can come in quite handy.

Not only do the points come in handy because they provide value to the job seeker, they can also serve as even the smallest little morale booster which people often times need when they are out of work.

Check out our video interview below with CEO and founder Diego Orofino and to sign up to be notified when InBetweenJobs opens, head over to inbetweenjobs.com.

Check out over 50 startup stories from TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 here at nibletz.com

Create Your Own Flower Arrangement With Your iPhone Using NY Startup Fl3ur

H.Bloom is probably the most well known flower delivery app. They allow you to order flowers from your smartphone and have them delivered to that special someone for whatever occasion arises.

New York startup Fl3ur takes ordering flowers to an entirely new level. Using their proprietary mobile technology a user creates the arrangement they want on their iPhone and then, working with traditional brick and mortar florists, the arrangement is created in real life and delivered.

The big difference between the two is the customization. H.Bloom lets you customize to a degree however with Fl3ur (as you can see in the video) you start with a completely blank canvas. You can arrange whatever you want the way you want. The app also keeps track of the budget for you so you don’t break the bank with a $500 arrangement, unless of course you want to.

Fl3ur also allows you to send a screen shot of your arrangement via email, text or social media. You can also take a picture of yourself or the sender and place that virtual bouquet or arrangement in their hand to send as a virtual card. While they want you to use that virtual pic to show someone what’s coming in the real world, you don’t actually have to follow through with sending the order to a florist (but that’s the best part).

Fl3ur officially announced themselves to the world at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 two weeks ago in New York City. Check out our video interview below and for more info visit fl3ur.com

Yes as a matter of fact we have over 35 more startup stories & interviews from TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 here.

New TLD’s Are Making It A Jungle Out There, For That There’s Prague Startup Jungle Navigator

Last year ICANN and the powers that be with the internets announced that we were finally going to get some more “Top Level Domains” (TLD’s). For those not quite sure a TLD is an extension like .com, .co, .net etc.

Companies across the globe paid outrageous application fees in hopes that their top level domain names would be selected. The TLD’s applied for ranged anywhere form .llc and .corp to .porn.

As these new TLD’s come online there is room for a new category of startup to navigate through the jungle of TLD’s. In fact the founder of Portland startup AboutUs, has founded Top Level Design (yes also TLD) to hopefully become a registrar for several new TLD’s including one’s the company owns like .blog, .gay, .photography and .wiki.

Mirek Sekera, a Microsoft technologies programmer turned entrepreneur and startup founder in Prague has created Jungle Navigator to help people access information about the new TLD’s and connect them to what they need to get going. Jungle Navigator hopes to provide one stop access to everything related to these new TLDs. New top level domains are big money, in fact, as Sekera points out in an interview, some of the applications for these new TLD’s were upwards of $180,000. That’s just to apply.

We got a chance to talk with Sekera, check out the Czech entrepreneurs interview below.

What is Jungle Navigator?

It is a portal on new domain name extensions (new generic top-level domains – new gTLDs) which were recently introduced by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers – the organization that controls all the TLDs).

Jungle Navigator’s purpose is to provide information about those new gTLDs. It is available at http://www.junglenavigator.com/ .

The portal is operated through my company Glueo, s.r.o., which I set-up couple of years ago because of my previous project, which wasn’t successful.

In layman’s terms, how does it work? (In other words how would you explain it to your grandmother)

The website is all about domains. Domain is the leftmost part of a web page address, for http://twitter.com/junglenavigator the domain name is twitter.com. The second-level domain is twitter. The top-level domain is .com.

At the time, there is a TLD for each country (country code top level domain – ccTLD) like .us for United States or .uk for United Kingdom.

There is also about 20 generic top level domains (gTLDs), the most common are .com, .net or .org.

The situation about the gTLDs is going to change dramatically: ICANN (the organization that manages all the TLDs) recently introduced a program that allows any company or organization to come up with their own gTLD.

In the mid of 2012, ICANN revealed more than thousand such domains that almost two thousands companies and organizations applied for. They came with their company names (.google, .microsoft or .canon), city names (.nyc or .barcelona) or just common words like .blog, .app, .free or even .lol or .wtf. It is expected that the company-name gTLDs (brand gTLDs) will remain closed while most of the others will be open for (second-level domain) registration soon.

Jungle Navigator is a website that aims to help people to orientate in this jungle of the new gTLDs. It focuses to people and companies who do not want miss an opportunity to catch the best (second level) domains under the new gTLDs.

It provides information about them like:

– categorization and search;

– syndicated gTLD news from tech blogs and web-zines;

– information about pre-registration;

– general gTLD information and related links;

– discussion.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

Currently, it is just one-man show, operated by me, Miroslav Sekera, I am a Microsoft technologies programmer (.Net,C#,SQL) with about 10 years of experience and also have some graphic-design skills.

I have friends annoyed with their jobs and I hope I will take some as co-founders soon :-)

Where are you based?

In Prague, capital city of the Czech Republic, famous for architecture and beer with very good quality/price ratio :-)

What’s the startup scene/culture like where you’re based?

There were opened some nice incubators and accelerators in the couple of the last years.

My company is member of one – Czech Technical University’s incubator called Inovacentrum.

Quite often there are startup or startup friendly conferences, workshops or “movie nights”. Recently I was on BarCamp Prague conference (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcamp).

If you are any kind of startup person, go to Prague, everyone will want to talk to you as most people here want to be global and get in touch with anyone from outside of the Czech Republic.

How did you come up with the idea for Jungle Navigator?

I have read about the new gTLDs last year, and realized this is a big thing. Big companies like Google are investing huge money and effort into it. Cost for one gTLD application is $185k, and that’s just the beginning (they have other expenses like infrastructure, etc…).

I thought there will be required some place which will provide easy and simple access to all the related and required info, so I created the website.

Why now?

It’s just the highest time – this year, first gTLDs are expected to be operable – first startups will be launching with the domain names ending with the new gTLDs, and first corporations will be switching their websites to their corporate gTLDs. Then IMHO the big rush is going to come and Jungle Navigator must be ready to this.

Who are your competition?

There is one really handy encyclopedia, called ICANNWiki at http://icannwiki.com/ , which (among others) also provides info about almost each new gTLD. I’m not really sure if it is competition, I am massively linking it from my website :-)

Another interesting site is .nxt http://dot-nxt.com/

When listing other new gTLD information resources, I should not omit the official ICANN’s site dedicated to the new gTLDs at http://newgtlds.icann.org/

All the mentioned sites are targeted to domain name experts – while Jungle Navigator tries to provide information to anyone.

And what’s your secret sauce?

I try to watch what the others are saying and doing, but doing things my way.

I am fully aware that it is a cliche, but in my opinion, there many people around startups that are “cargo-cult followers” (http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/avoiding-the-cargo-cult-and-getting-the-trans-atlantic-startup-model-right/), they are just doing things because they saw other successful people doing it. And they think they only need to mimic them to be successful as well.

People asked me why I don’t make the homepage a bit simpler. They said: “Look at Google, how their homepage is simple. And they are a hundred-billion dollar company”. Why there is so much stuff on your homepage? Google was, IMHO, successful because of the pagerank, not because of the simplicity of homepage. I am saying that because I remember when I started to use Google instead of AltaVista – because it was giving far better results. Perhaps even their oversimplified homepage is just their kind of style, part of their brand’s “personality” for which people remembers them – I don’t know. Or perhaps it is really better for most of their users.

I am just saying I don’t understand why also my homepage should be that simple. I put there quite a lot of information so that users can see most without clicking.

On the other hand, I don’t insist on that style of homepage. Once I have a reason (perhaps some kind of A/B testing) the homepage should look different, I would think about changing it.

Are you bootstrapped or funded?

Bootstrapped. Working from quite old desktop PC and my biggest expenses are food & coffee, I probably spend more than other people on that :-) But not too much more :-)

What are some milestones you’ve achieved?

– I have managed to get my project up and running.

– On Twitter, Jungle Navigator has some nice followers from the industry, like people from ICANN and also registries (operators) of new or classic TLDs.

What’s your next milestone?

Currently, my product is quite ready, now I need to let people know about it.

In the terms of the product development, I would need to do some usability testing – to find out what kind and what structure of information people need.

Who are some of your mentors and business role models?

Lately, I read book called “Unsinkable Entrepreneur” from Irish entrepreneur Enda O’Coinneen who is currently living in Prague. He is convinced that the entrepreneurship is kind of art, rather than science. I share such opinion. I don’t believe that success in business can be algorithmized and replicated without putting something else into it.

In the book Enda also writes about his grand-grand-father who went to Alaska in 19th century when there was a gold rush. He noticed that the most successful people there weren’t only the most lucky gold-diggers, but also people who were selling equipment and providing services to the gold-diggers. That’s the approach I like – when there is a kind of some hype or rush, it’s good to be part of it, but it’s also good to start thinking if there isn’t something better to do than the most obvious thing everyone else does.

Where can people find out more and what is your Twitter username?

Jungle Navigator homepage: http://www.junglenavigator.com/

Frequently asked questions: http://www.junglenavigator.com/faq/

Further gTLD resources: http://www.junglenavigator.com/links/

Jungle Navigator’s Twitter: http://twitter.com/junglenavigator

What the hell is sneaker strapping?

Say Your Message In The Sand With SandSign [interview]

Well we’ve never seen this idea before. While we were at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 we met Anton Velikanov the CEO and co-founder of SandSign. This unique startup allows users to deliver a customized message in the sand.

In it’s simplest form, SandSign has a network of photographers across the globe. These photographers live in beach areas and are contracted through the website at sandsign.com.

A user goes to sandsign.com and can order a “sand sign” to say whatever they would like. Once the user pays for the order, the photographer is contracted to draw the message in the sand and then they take a photo of the name or message in the sand. They also offer candle signs, where messages are made from candles and signs with video. The company can also have your message designed in a field and than shot from an airplane or helicopter.

So you see what I mean, I’ve never seen anything quite like this. It makes a lot of sense and messages can cost anywhere from $20-$150 and it’s a unique message, but is it something that can build scale?

Check out the video below and for more information visit sandsign.com

Here are 35 more startup stories from TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013.