Knoxville Based bounceit Launches Social Decision Making Platform

A group of Knoxville entrepreneurs has launched a new and exciting social decision making app called bounceit. Now social decision making isn’t anything new, we’ve seen several startups try and succeed in this space.

Startups like Brooklyn based JustDecide come to mind when we think about social decision making platforms. Where others have fallen short in the past though, the crew at bounceit has figured out ways to make social decision making more fluid, easy to take in and easier to decide and vote on. Their highly visual platform makes the entire process more intuitive.

Users begin by uploading a question or statement, accompanied by a photo: “Should I buy this outfit?” “Is this car cool?” “Want to go out after the game?” Other users vote your question up or down for yes/no, or like/dislike. A realtime line graph shows you all theirresponses over time to aid in your decision making!

Until bounceit, many people relied on Facebook and their own social networks to help make decisions; “With bounceit!™, a user can post an opinion, decision, idea or just a cool photo, and thanks to our unique line graph they’ll actually see instantly if people agree or not. It’s crowd-sourced decision making at its best! With our graphing capabilities, a user immediately sees if something is a like or a dislike. You can see whether there is overwhelming agreement or any struggle it has gone through among users. That tells a much more powerful story than a bar graph or percentages.” co-founder Gary Hardin told nibletz in an interview.

Hardin explained, “People today research and bounce ideas off friends before they do something or buy an item. bounceit!™ streamlines that process for them. Crowdsourced sharing and decision making is everywhere now. We just make it more fun and in one centralized location!”

Bounceit is now available in the iTunes app store, download it here. For more information visit bounceit.com. Check out Bounceit in person at Everywhere Else Cincinnati.

Stopped.At Launches In Super-Super-Beta

As the Entrepreneur-In-Residence of the new Upstart Accelerator in Memphis, Mara Lewis has spent the last week telling women to just do it. Women have to fight perfectionism, and if they try to make a product perfect before it launches, it’ll never launch.

“You iterate. You put it out there. It can’t be pretty. If you wait until it’s perfect, you’ve waited too long.”

Lewis’s co-founders back in California were shocked when she took her own advice and made the announcement about their own product: Launch it. Put it live.

And that will forever be the story of stopped.at’s launch into the world. But, of course, it really isn’t the beginning. The beginning happened two years ago when Lewis and her team pivoted their old “Foursquare for the Web” site and began formulating stopped.at.

In the last two years, they have perfected an algorithm similar to Pandora. A user signs up for stopped.at, drags the bookmarklet to their browser, and goes about their business. As they use the web, they “check in” on each site via the bookmarklet. Over time, stopped.at’s algorithm will begin to read the traits of the websites a user visits. Then, it suggests new sites, apps, or services the user might be interested in.

Stopped.at has all the features we love about social sites. You can connect it with your Facebook or Twitter account and you can follow friends. There’s also a rewards system. For each task you do, you earn rewards, which you can then redeem for prizes.

They also have “folders,” similar to boards on Pinterest. Using the folders it’s easy to create collections of the websites, apps, and services you use every day. Then your friends can browse your folders and discover their next must-have app or website. This feature is the one stopped.at’s team is most interested in testing during beta. They want to know if and how people will use them and if they are a good value for the site.

Right now stopped.at is only available on the web. “One regret is,” Lewis admitted with a sigh, “at the time, I wish we had done mobile-first. But, we know it, and we recognize it, and it’s top of our priority list.” Since more than half of American adults use their smartphones to browse the Internet, stopped.at will probably see a lot of growth when they launch on mobile.

The team hopes to launch out of its “super-super-beta” at the end of August, and the goal is to have 50,000 monthly users by October.

Lewis has been at the entrepreneurial game for a long time. This is her third company, and this version of stopped.at has been in production for 2 years. Kyle ran into Lewis during SXSW this year, where she pitched in the Dolphin Tank.

Those of us in the tech world could find stopped.at to be the perfect engine to discovering the best apps and websites out there. Join the public beta and let the team know what you think.

Minnesota Startup Theory.io Launches NoteSuite, A Safer Syncable Notebook

Ever since Prism and Edward Snowden became household words, people that resort to keeping their lives managed on their mobile devices have been worried about the security of their personal, professional, and most intimate notes. If their notes are living in the cloud, are they actually safe from prying eyes?

The other big problem with note taking apps and notebook apps today is that users are worried about being trapped in a proprietary ecosystem. What happens if the app they’re using shuts the service down, or they just don’t feel like paying anymore? Sure there are a ton of simple notebook apps that may work. There are also a ton of Microsoft Office solutions, but familiar names like Evernote mean you’re stuck in the Evernote ecosystem.

That’s why Peter Tamte, President of Theory,io is releasing NoteSuite for iPad. This new notebook app has all the syncing functionality of other cloud-based note taking apps, but the notes live device side. Also, equally as important, they can be quickly exported.

NoteSuite for iPad is also the only mobile app that allows users to take notes, manage to-dos, clip web pages, annotate almost anything, and read/search PDFs, MS Office files, and web clips together in one app. It makes it easier to stay organized while mobile. NoteSuite for Mac automatically syncs with NoteSuite for iPad and combines note-taking, to-do management, web clipping, and document organization.

Different from most note-taking apps, NoteSuite does not require a subscription. NoteSuite stores users’ data safely on their iPad or computer, employing popular cloud services for syncing and backup rather than primary storage. This ensures users’ never pay extra to access notes offline, data will not vanish if their web service gets cancelled, access to notes will not be jeopardized by security concerns or lost Internet connections, and users’ data can never get held hostage for higher fees in the future.

NoteSuite is a sequel to Theory.io’s Projectbook, which launched in August 2012 as the #1 best-selling paid iPad productivity app. NoteSuite is an original app, with more than 100 new features and changes and is available as a free upgrade for Projectbook users.

“Web services are ideal for syncing, backup, and collaboration. But, our notes hold our most important ideas and information,” Tamte said in a statement. “Our research shows that 62% of notes app users are worried about trapping their data inside a proprietary, subscription-based system. NoteSuite lets users stay on top of everything that matters in one organized place and never lose control of their data.”

Here are just some of NoteSuite for iPad’s features:

– Capture Anything: Type, make lists, take photos, record audio, and capture to-dos collectively within notes pages. The iPad version also lets users draw and handwrite directly on notes pages.

– Clip Web Pages: Save clutter-free, fully searchable articles, shopping pages, recipes, and PDFs directly from the web into the app to enjoy anytime, anywhere – even offline.

– Manage To-dos: Track due dates and start dates, set reminders, and match to-dos and projects with relevant notes and documents using comprehensive to-do management features.

– Annotate PDFs: Markup, highlight, sign, fill out forms, type, draw freehand, write, and more on iPad using the PDF capabilities.

– Annotate Anything: Convert MS Office and Apple iWork documents to PDF on iPad, draw or type directly on photos, and convert PowerPoint slides into notes pages for note taking during meetings and lectures.

– Read and Search Documents: Read and search Word docs, PowerPoint files, PDFs, notes, web clips, and to-dos.

– Find Things That Aren’t Organized: Find notes, Word docs, PDFs, and PowerPoint files even if they haven’t been tagged or filed in folders, and without having to remember keywords.

– Sync Across Devices: Tapping one button allows users to sync their data automatically via iCloud from that point forward, without creating a new account or remembering more passwords.

Normally priced at $4.99, NoteSuite for iPad is available at a special introductory price of $1.99 through July 15, 2013 and is a free upgrade for Projectbook users. NoteSuite for iPad is available on the App Store here.

Normally priced at $9.99, NoteSuite for Mac is available at a special introductory price of $4.99 through July 15, 2013. NoteSuite for Mac is available on the Mac App Store here.

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If You’re Serious About Email Ditch Mailbox For Boxer, Launching Today

Earlier this year the startup world was abuzz about the brand new Mailbox app. You remember, the one that made you download a countdown timer, and for most, wait several days before getting your hands on the app. However, people who get high volumes of email, quickly saw that Mailbox was a hype machine. The hype got so loud they quickly got acquired by the team at DropBox.

While all that was going on, tens of thousands of people descended upon Austin, Texas, for the annual Woodstock of startups, SXSW Interactive. It was there, at the Capital Factory and then on one of the startup stages, we found Taskbox.

We got to hear about the meat and potatoes baked into Taskbox during a pitch session focused on startups that were immune to the series A crunch. All the startups in that pitch session had an investment ask at the end of their decks, but we were just longing for a really good email app designed for people that actually get email.

Taskbox proved to be that app. In fact, the Taskbox team accelerated at Capital Factory which just happens to be founded by Joshua Baer, who made most of his fortune in–you guessed it–email.

After downloading, I discovered immediately that the team behind Taskbox had loaded the app with easy to use features, an appealing UX/UI, and had actually considered people who received a lot of email.

I receive anywhere from 350-500 fresh email messages a day that can’t be marked as spam. If I factor in “spam,” we’re closer to 1000.

So Andrew Eye tipped me off a few weeks ago. He told me that during SXSW he had met Xoogler Jason Shellen. Shellen has a very strong background having worked with Google, AOL, and his own startup Brizzly. During their time together at SXSW, Shellen told Eye that he was working on something new called Boxer. Boxer had even simpler, easy to understand features. The Taskbox team quickly acquired Boxer and brought Shellen on as head of product.

Shellen helped the Taskbox team revamp the UI by flattening it and adding some features that I’m really excited about, like the ability to “like” an email. This feature will let the writer know “Hey, I’m not ignoring you.” Sometimes that’s all you need to say in an email: message received and understood! It’s like a 10-4 button.

Other features include:

Powerful swipe gestures to help triage, respond, and manage on-the-go
Inline profile images & helpful contact cards
Works with all your existing email accounts (including Gmail, Exchange, Yahoo and more)
Dropbox integration for adding files to email from the cloud
Adds elements of social tools to email to make email more fun and like-able again

While the Taskbox team had a great product to start with, in reforming and launching under the Boxer name, they’re going t take email to yet another level. They also added more heavyweights to their founding dream team. Adam Cianfichi. formerly with Accuvant and Ciphent, and Ian Ragsdale who worked with Baer on OtherInbox and also Skylist, round out the new Boxer team. Andrew is the CEO, Adam heads up Design, Ian runs Engineering, and Jason runs Product.

The app is gesture based (yes like Mailbox), but what you can do with the gestures is infinitely more powerful. You can swipe to earmark an email for a set later date, you can archive it, like it, use a quick response or add it to the “to do” list. They’ve also integrated a favorites list and the ability to call up all email exchanges between you and another person with a click of a button. It’s almost like a mobile email based CRM.

Currently, Boxer is only available for iOS. Find out more here at getboxer.com

Now read: Am I the only one on earth who thinks Mailbox Sucks?

DC’s Free & Easy Conference Call Startup Speek Throwing Free And Easy Mega Launch Party

A Friday night party at 1776 will be a who’s who of the startup world. Evite co-founder John Bracken and the legendary Danny Boice, the founders of Speek.com, are throwing their official launch party.

Speek eliminates long dial in numbers, bridge codes, and awful elevator music for conference calls. To use the Speek platform to conference call somebody, you just go to their Speek page and click one button. For example, if you wanted to conference call me you would just go to speek.com/kyle.

Speek went into beta last summer and has been iterating over the course of the last year. They’ve added robust mobile apps and packed the website with easy-to-use and easy-to-understand features.

Boice is a party animal, diehard tech guy, and a startup aficionado. In fact, he spoke at Everywhereelse.co with a great talk called “You Only Launch Once”. We next saw him at SXSW in Austin, Texas. As part of his speed pitch he said that if Speek got the most votes in a pitch contest, the slightly more reserved Bracken would get a tattoo of their monkey logo on his ass. Needless to say they won and Bracken got the tattoo.

So to celebrate their official launch, Speek is hosting the launch party of all launch parties at 1776 in DC. Because Speek and the DC tech scene are so intertwined with the fine folks at Startup America, this party will include dueling pianos (will Scott Case be back from Seattle?). In addition there will be an open bar, raffles and giveaways. The picture above is the temporary tattoos of the Speek Monkey that you can put on your ass, to match Bracken’s which it doesn’t come off.

The party starts at 8pm on the campus of 1776: 1133, 15th Street NW, 12th Floor, Washington DC 20005. It’s free, all you have to do is register here.

Chicago Startup Project Travel Launches Peerfunding For Students For Educational Travel

It seems that more and more things we did as younger students are making their way to online platforms. Memphis startup Boosterville is disrupting the school fundraiser and bringing it online and to the mobile phone. Gradfly is helping students manage their online portfolio. Boston startup Abroad101 is the trip advisor for students studying abroad, and that’s just a few.

Now, a Chicago startup called ProjectTravel has launched their crowdfunding platform to the public.

ProjectTravel allows students that are going on educational trips to crowdfund that trip well beyond their tiny network of local family members who have been left holding the boot.

“We help students take an active role in affording their program when financial aid and scholarships aren’t enough,” said Jennifer Thomas, Project Travel Founder & CEO. “Financial barriers should not block a motivated person from having an educational travel experience.”

Project Travel partners with academic institutions, non-profit and third-party program providers to help more students and program participants go abroad, while directly advising them on how to successfully peer-fund and offering online international education resources. The fundraising platform launched its private beta in January 2013 and has been honing the online experience for travelers in preparation for its public launch. Taking advantage of current web design trends and online crowd-funding best practices, the platform offers a user-friendly way for Project Starters to connect with potential donors and supporters.

Thomas has just completed an extensive beta test of the platform and sure enough there is wide interest. Now the “peer funding” site is launched and anyone who is raising money and support for educational travel experience through a school or organization can use the platform. To Project Travel, educational travel includes: studying abroad, volunteering, interning, teaching, service language, language and cultural exchanges and much more.

Project Travel vets all of the applicants before their projects show up on the site but they’ve left the criteria incredibly open ended so almost anyone can take advantage of it that has a legitimate educational travel mission planned.

You can find out more about Project Travel here.

Check out this other recently launches Chicago travel startup BTSocial, the social network for business travelers.

SocialNightlife, Customer Management, Engagement & Loyalty For Night Clubs

A Los Angeles startup a year in the making has finally launched a product that night club owners and other nightlife venues will get a lot out of. SocialNightlife is a complete platform designed to help nightclubs and other establishments keep track of their VIP’s and loyal customers.

Nightlife professionals will now have the ability to digitally check-in guest-list and VIP customers and track activity by team member, venue, event and client. Venues will also be able to setup custom promotions and reward their loyal guests as a result of the social media features built as a front-end to the professional business tool.

They already have a handful of popular night clubs on board like the famous Marquee nightclub in Las Vegas. Using the SocialNightlife platform VIPs, loyal customers and social media rockstars will be able to get into clubs quicker and their information will be utilized more efficiently providing a service to both the patron and the establishment.

“We’re breaking down physical barriers,” said Artin Nazarian, SocialNightlife’s co-founder and CEO. “Front door staff can finally put a face to the names on their list and send targeted event promotions to fans of a specific DJ or celebrity.”

Patrons have access to key features as well, that were originally released in a public beta at CES 2012 (last year)

· Location based check ins to gain insight on frequent patrons

· Ability to offer loyalty rewards like complimentary tickets, drinks and other VIP services

· Instant reviews of the line queue, music quality, and venue energy level

· Public photo gallery with advanced photo editing and hash-tagging functionality

· Branded social media business pages

· Performance reports for promoters and hosts such as reservations, guest check-in and sales

· Event promotion and direct marketing tools

· Gamification through virtual “bottle” badges

· Customer analytics and automated guest lists

The company has already partnered with strategic advisors and stakeholders in clubs in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Miami.

For more info visit SocialNightlife on the web here

You’ll find an amazing night life experience at the biggest startup conference in the U.S. everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference, limited tickets still available.

CES 2013 Preview: Indian Startup Emo2 To Launch Large Touch Screen OS

An Indian startup called Emo2, or Emotional Squared Technologies is set to launch what looks to be a great operating system and large multi user touch screen tablet. The device itself is 42″ and allows multi user input at the same time.

The 42″ touch screen surface is great for hotel lobbies, operating rooms, electronic casino gaming, retail environments and collaborative work spaces. The underlying operating system is designed to support the hardware without any hiccups, lag or delay, making for a pleasing user experience no matter what the application.

The company based in Chennai India, has been working on the technology since 2010 under the leadership of CEO and cofounder Mir Abid Hussain.

Emo2 is venture backed with an early stage investment from Indian firm Blume Ventures. Although the exact funding has not been reported Blume Ventures specialized in angel, and seed investments between $50k and $250k. Rajan Anandan, Zafar Baig and other angels also contributed to Emo2’s angel funding.

To date emo2’s technology has already been deployed in a coffee shop chain with 30 locations.

Although they weren’t specific early on, Emo2 has officially announced that they will launch Tuesday when the International CES show opens in Las Vegas. Before returning back to India they will be showing off their technology in Silicon Valley and New York the weeks immediately following CES.

After CES but before SXSW you can come to the biggest startup conference in the U.S. everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference

Michigan Startup: Meritful, LinkedIn For Students?

One of the hottest spaces for startups these days actually seems to be high school students. Recently we’ve reported on a handful of startups that are geared towards this demographic.

Washington DC startup Quad2Quad is a mobile application geared towards high school students and their parents who are going on college visits. The two lady entrepreneurs who founded the startup have over 100 college visits between their two families. A startup in Cleveland OH called CollegeSkinny aims to give high school students applying for college a place to vet their college selections and keep track of them. Back on September 10th we featured Exceleratr, a New York startup that helps high school students select and keep track of extra-curricular activities outside of the school itself.

Meritful founder Azarias Reda (photo: annarbor.com)

Meritful is a new startup based in Ypsilanti Michigan, was founded by Azarias Reda, a former researcher and data analyst for Mountain View based LinkedIn. Meritful is a social network for students. High school students build a profile on the platform that highlights their achievements in high school along with their extracurricular activities.

Reda told Xconomy Detroit that students are creating a lot of content online but it’s not positive content and nowadays it’s starting to take a toll on people down the road when employers and college admissions offices Google these students. “They’re actively generating content, except not a lot of it is useful to their future selves,” Reda explains to Xconomy. “It’s starting to bite them back—employers and school admissions offices Google you. It’s important to build a positive presence on the Web.”

Reda has already planned ahead incase inappropriate predators take to Meritful. “Students have complete control over who they interact with,” he says. “The interactions are public and monitored by teachers and parents.”

Meriful has a few meritful missions. The first of course is to provide a gateway to admissions offices and perspective employers. The second is to promote positivity and achievements in high school to friends, family and peers. The third is to curb some of the content currently being produced online that some may perceive as inappropriate. Reda would like those that use Meritful to have a more positive online graph for their student users.

Linkage:

Find out more about Meritful here

Source: Xconomy

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