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New Hampshire Startups Look To 2032 At Disruptivate Oct 9th

New Hampshire startups and innovators are looking forward to the second Disruptivate event scheduled for October 9th at Wentworth By The Sea in New Castle.

Mark Galvin, the Managing Director at the New Hampshire Innovation Commercialization Center was ecstatic with the turnout at the first Disruptivate event held in April. According to seacoastonline.com Galvin was hoping for 100 attendees. Over 250 folks came to they event with most staying into the night, and the after party.

“We were hoping we could break 100 participants,” Galvin told seacoastonline.. “We were pleasantly surprised that 250 people showed up and we sold out. Many people stayed from registration in the morning through the after-event party until 8:30 that night. A lot of people were really jazzed up. ”

The first event was broad in scope, highlighting technology innovation across a variety of sectors. For the October 9th event Galvin and the team are highlighting the healthcare and education sectors. Afternoon panels at the event will take a look at what healthcare and education may look like in 2032.

“We are looking to highlight 12 disrupters who have a company, an idea or even a piece of legislation that can actually change and move the innovation agenda in New Hampshire for health care and education,” Galvin said. “The woods are filled with disrupters and serial entrepreneurs. We need more people to help move the needle on disruption to benefit the state, the country and the world.”

Jeff Carlisle, the founder of an EMR startup and author of the book “We Love Innovation, so Long as It’s Nothing New”, was named a top Disruptivator of 2012 at the April conference. He will be on one of the healthcare panels at the October Disruptivate conference.

If you’re in the North East it looks like this is going to be a great event. Hit the link below to register.

Linkage:

Source: seacoastonline

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Charlotte Startup: Rawporter Raises $300,000 Seed Round With Two Inaugural Investments

We are very excited to report that are good friends, and longtime supporters of Nibletz and our previous ventures, have raised a $300,000 seed round.

Rawporter is a socially driven market place where citizen journalists can post their photos and videos of interesting news events. Rawporter has an e-commerce platform built in where users can sell their pics and videos to news sites, bloggers and even tv stations.

The idea was born when co-founders Kevin Davis and Rob Gaige were eating dinner in Uptown Charlotte. They saw a pretty intense auto accident outside of the restaurant. What they noticed was that all of the people passing by ( including themselves) had snapped some pictures and videos. However by the time the news crews arrived the accident had all but cleared.

Both Davis and Gaige thought that there had to be a way, outside of emailing the photos and videos unsolicited to a news director, to get eyewitness news to the media.

That’s the core to Rawporter now they’ve added social features and more.

Rawporter was able to attract funding from two new funds in their home state of North Carolina. This the first investment by the newly formed IMAF (Inception Micro Angel Fund) Cape Fear and the N.C. Fund of Funds.

Gofman Holdings also participated in the round.

“We formed IMAF Cape Fear to invest in emerging technology businesses. Rawporter is an exciting way for us to take advantage of the photo and video-sharing momentum. Additionally, our expertise in Mobile and eCommerce will better prepare Rawporter for success,” said Dallas Romanowski, Fund Director at IMAF Cape Fear.

As mentioned above, Rawporter is also the first investment by the N.C. Fund of Funds program, a component of the N.C. Small Business Credit Initiative, which was created through federal funding under the Small Business Jobs Act.

“We will be investing in early stage North Carolina companies, like Rawporter, with the potential for exceptional job growth. Our financial support will lead to exciting employment opportunities in the ever-growing North Carolina technology sector,” said Timothy Janke, Director of Private Equity Initiatives for North Carolina’s Small Business & Technology Development Center.

“Although we’re pleased with the progress to date, this funding provides the opportunity to expand faster and introduce functionality our community’s been clamoring for,” said Rawporter Co-founder Kevin Davis.

Linkage:

More coverage of our friends at Rawporter

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Houston Startup Demo Day November 7 2012

UPDATE: This event was moved to November 7, 2012 because of election day.

If you’re a Houston area startup and you’re looking to pitch to a room full of your peers than take note. November 6th 2012, starthouston.com is holding a demo day for up to 15 startups.

Houston startups should prepare a pitch highlighting:

-Product Explanation & Demo
-Growth Strategy
-How you will monetize your product or service
-Explain if you are bootstrapping or seeking funding

Each interested startup should put together a three minute pitch, complete with deck and should also be prepared for up to two minutes of mentor feedback and then a group 30 minute Q&A with those in the audience.

This event, being held at 1179 Delano Street, in Houston at 6:00pm on November 6th will be a great place for startups to practice delivering their pitch to investors and groups. If you’re a startup interested in pitching you should reach out to contact@starthouston.com to be considered.

If you’re an angel investor,vc, startup enthusiast or media you should head here to pick up your ticket, they’re sure to go fast.

After the startup presentations, there will be time for networking with the startups and others in attendance. This is not a monetary pitch contest, but you never know who will be in the audience.

Linkage:

Here’s Houston Demo Day on wherevent.com

Here’s the Houston Demo Day Facebook page

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Pittsburgh Startup: DuoLingo Raises $15 Million In Latest Round

Pittsburgh startup DuoLingo has just completed their latest round of funding to the best of $15 million dollars, rounding out a great week of funding for startups outside the valley.

DuoLingo isworking on a large scale crowd sourcing platform for language and translation. It was founded by Carnegie Mellon University Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Louis Von Ahn.

If Von Ahn’s name sounds familiar its because he is the same man behind Captcha the extra layer of privacy control used when logging into many websites. Captcha was eventually purchased by Google. Google uses the technology to help prevent computerized logins, but perhaps more importantly to verify addresses for Google Maps.

It’s that large scale verification that has been reworked and made into a platform to grow the largest translation database in the world.

Union Square Ventures and New Enterprise Associates led the $15 million dollar series B round. Back in June we reported that celebrity angel investor Ashton Kutcher had invested $3 million dollars into the company.

Linkage:

Find out more about DuoLingo here

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Birmingham Startup: VIPAAR First To Receive Funds From Central Alabama Angel Network

The Central Alabama Angel Network, formed last February, has found it’s first startup to invest in. The company called VIPAAR works out of Birmingham’s Innovation Depot.

The Birmingham startup is led by CEO Drew Deaton and is based on a technology licensed from the University of Alabama At Birmingham (UAB) School of Medicine. VIPAAR is a telemedicine startup which allows surgeons and others in the OR to communicate with other ORs, galleries or consult.

VIPAAR works with cameras that are extremely light weight but provide great pictures, and also two way audio communication that allows the surgeon to explain whats going on in the camera shot, and if appropriate, answer questions. VIPAAR, and telemedicine for that matter, allow surgeons who often lecture by showing and explaining surgery through video, to actually show surgeries in real time, using VIPAAR and transmitted via the internet, keeping those speaking doctors in the OR for more surgeries.

VIPAAR’s VIP system can be applied in other teaching scenarios as well. The system combines two major parts an image processing server and a video conference unit. In the surgery setting a video image of the surgery site is shown and an image of the surgeons hands is super imposed within the image.

VIPAAR has a variety of uses in the operating room. The system could be used to offer close up teaching videos to students in an observation deck. It could also be used to transmit surgeries from an operating room in Baltimore to a class of students in Los Angeles using high speed internet. The VIP system could even be used in a one on one setting such as a consult or if a surgeon wants a second surgeon at a remote location to sit in on the surgery.

Medcitynews reports that VIPAAR has raised more than half of the $1.2 million dollars they are looking for in this round. It has not been disclosed how much the Central Alabama Angel Network contributed.

Linkage:

Check out VIPAAR here

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Baltimore Startups: Abell Foundation Looking For Next AccelerateBaltimore Class

The Abell Foundation is back again, teaming up with the Emerging Technology Center’s (ETC) in Baltimore Maryland. They’re looking for the best high growth potential startup businesses for the second class of AccelerateBaltimore. The Abell Foundation is backing AccelerateBaltimore with $150,000 in seed funding, to provide six new businesses with $25,000 each. The Baltimore Business Journal reports that this is a 50% increase in funding from last April’s class.

Emerging Technology Center’s CEO Deborah Tillett is hoping to attract national and even international startups to Baltimore’s growing technology hub.

“It’s about innovation in Baltimore,” Tillett said to the Business Journal. “We’ll open it up as far and as wide as we can to get a message out to make sure we get great quality companies.”

AccelerateBaltimore runs much like many other cohort based accelerator programs. In addition to the $25,000 in seed funding the six participating companies will also receive boot camp style intense training for thirteen weeks. They’ll also get free office space at one of the two ETC locations in either Johns Hopkins or Canton.

Both locations offer access to mentors, potential investors and other resources. However, the Canton location’s lease is up in September of next year. That won’t affect this next batch of startups going through the program. Tillett told the Business Journal last Thursday that no decision has been made as to whether or not they are renewing the lease at the Can Co building. The building also houses one of Baltimore’s most successful startups, the now publicly traded Millenial Media.

AccelerateBaltimore attracted some great startups in their first class, of them we’ve covered Kithly and NoBadGift.

Linkage

Apply to AccelerateBaltimore here

Source: Baltimore Business Journal

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Paris Startup: HeyCrowd Lets You Poll And Be Polled INTERVIEW

An interesting new startup in Paris is dealing with the realization that surveys are no fun anymore. Startups like Seattle’s PlayMySurvey are the exception not the rule. Paris startup HeyCrowd is all about polling rather than surveying.

This cool new platform allows users to set up their own polls about whatever they like and then poll the crowd. They can participate as well. Users can also participate in any of the other users polls, and then after they vote they can see where they stack up to the rest of the crowd.

HeyCrowd has positioned their platform and mobile app as “the addictive question game” gamifying the polling process rather than making it a long, lengthy list of questions. It could be looked at as a distant cousin to Quora but the questions are meant to be voting/polling type questions rather than long drawn out, ask and answer questions.

When you go to the heycrowd website or download the mobile app, the service keeps asking you questions that originated from the user base. The questions could go on forever if you’d like. HeyCrowd’s website says there are over 41,000 active questions. You can stay at the top of the page and let the questions keep moving up or you can sneak down to the questions you want to answer. You can answer as many or as few as you would like.

You can also ask whatever questions you would like and give multiple choice answers. Your question immediately goes into the rotation.

So far the questions seem playful enough. Once you answer a question it shows you in a graph how the rest of the user base answered.

We got a chance to interview Matthieu Rouif, co-founder of HeyCrowd. Check out the interview below:

Guest Post: Observations from a Demo Day Junkie

This guest post comes to us from Patrick Woods. Woods is a director at a>m ventures, the venture capital arm of archer>malmo a regional leader in advertising, pr and marketing. Disclosure: nibletz.com is one of a>m ventures portfolio companies.

I’ve been to five six demo days already this year in my travels for a>m ventures, and many more over the past 18 months. The following points are my observations on the good, bad, and nasty of startup accelerator demo days.

No one of these points will sink your demo day ship, but taken together, when done right, these elements will help to give your teams better odds of getting to that next step on and following the big day.

The idea is to reduce the variables involved in your event in order for you to craft a meaningful experience.

Caveats

These are my observations, not gospel.
If you’re YC or TechStars, these points apply less to you; these are for everyone else.
Yes, there are a lot of seemingly minute details here, but that’s the point.
We can all agree there’s no substitute for great companies, and none of these observations are meant as such a substitute.

In general, be mindful of your goals for demo day, and curate all experiences to achieve those goals. Some goals might include:

Connect investors to companies
Connect investors to investors
Strengthen your ecosystem’s network of founders, angels, VCs, services providers, and those on the periphery
Generate buzz at various levels by raising the visibility of early-stage activity in your region
There are plenty more; the point is that you should be aware of what the goals are, then align every facet of demo day to achieve each goal.

Your accelerator is a marathon, demo day is not

3 hours is pushing the upper limit of peoples’ attention span.
Limit team intros to something really short, like, 60 seconds or less.
Sorry sponsors, no one cares about you. At least not anyone in the audience.

Relatedly, more pitches, less bravado, fewer speeches

Yes, we all get it: your city is a great place for starting up. Being a mentor is an amazing experience, and you always need more. Okay. Now let’s get on with it.
Remember that running an accelerator isn’t an end to celebrate, but that it’s a means to an end that will produce celebration-worthy events.
Everyone’s got an accelerator these days, so let’s reduce the back-patting and celebrate the big wins.
That said, brief updates from alumni can be a great point of pride.
Also, no student “idea” pitches, please. Or anything else irrelevant to investors.

Pitch quality matters

Stage presence, pitch structure, and pitch content are all really important.
The companies shouldn’t be delivering bullet-point fact transfers, but rather telling a relatable, investable story.
Slides should be used as visual aids, not as core components of the presentation.
Long before demo day, require your teams to write a script for their pitch. They don’t necessarily have to recount it verbatim onstage, but the process of formalizing their thoughts will prove invaluable.
Coach your teams and enlist mentors who know how to pitch, like successful founders, folks who have been onstage before, and advertising people, many of whom pitch for a living.
Strongly consider bringing in a speaking coach a couple of times: first at an early point and later, closer to demo day to track improvements.

Continue reading at Patrick’s Tumbler here

Linkage:

Patrick Woods’ Tumbler

Here’s some of our own demo day coverage

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New York Robotics Investment Firm Makes First Startup Investment: Double Robotics

A Y-Combinator graduate and California startup, Double Robotics, is the first startup to receive an investment from New York based Grishin Robotics. Grishin was started by Dimitry Grishin who’s been dubbed the “Russian Mark Zuckerberg” by the fine folks at BetaBeat and others.

The investment into Double Robotics marks the first investment made by Grishin Robotics with more on the way. Grishin invested $250,000 into the startup.

Double Robotics has already sold 600 units ($1.2 million) of their first robotic product. The product, called Double, is a robot that puts an iPad on wheels and then gives you a mobile telecommunications device. Think that robot that Sheldon used on Big Bang Theory in the episode where he wanted Steve Wozniak’s autograph, but much more refined.

Grishin’s investment will be spent primarily on scaling, manufacturing and hiring for further development. Double Robotics plans on shipping the 600 pre-orders in the first part of 2013.

“We are thrilled to have Grishin Robotics and Dmitry Grishin, in particular, as our largest investor to date,” said David Cann, Co-founder of Double Robotics. “We read about the new investment firm and Dmitry’s experience in the field of robotics in June 2012 when the fund was announced. The timing was perfect, as we were just beginning the Y Combinator program with our prototype robot. After our public launch in August, we met with Grishin Robotics and were immediately impressed with their mission and deep knowledge of the robotics industry’s past mistakes and potential future. We look forward to working with Grishin Robotics in the years to come as we build our business.”

Grishin is the Chairman of the Board and CEO of Russian firm mail.ru who holds major investments in players like Facebook and Zynga. He became Chairman of mail.ru after global venture capitalist Yuri Milner stepped down. Grishin Robotics is Grishin’s own venture capital firm, which as you can tell from the name, invests in robotics startups.

“Investment in Double Robotics perfectly fits our strategy,” said Dmitry Grishin, founder of Grishin Robotics. “It is a consumer-oriented product with potential to fit a broad range of applications and has already generated strong consumer demand. It’s also important that the price of the product makes it accessible to the wide audience. In addition, the team has creative approach to design and is keen to build user-friendly products — both are very important focus areas for next-generation personal robotics companies. Double Robotics is well positioned to leverage the unique potential of the prominent telepresence robotics market. We have a great belief in Double Robotics team and its product.”

Linkage:

Check out Double Robotics Here

Check out Grishin Robotics Here

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Los Angeles Startup: Contur Launches To Turn Your Email Into Tasks!

When this pitch came across our editors box on Friday it was like Eureka. Los Angeles startup Contur has done something amazing with email. They’ve created a platform that beefs up the functionality of email, and the most important part of that, they’ve turned it into tasks.

When we have an idea for a longtail story or a feature story that requires more indepth reporting we typically add it to starred email and then set a reminder in the calendar to go back and work on it. The problem is the important starred email box fills up and the calendar does as well. This is hardly an effective process. Unfortunately with the volume of email we get, we sometimes get a reminder email from the startup we’re working with on the story.

If we could turn email into tasks, projects and add notes to them it would make our work flow go much better. Now thanks to Los Angeles startup Contur we can do that. The Contur app lets users treat any of their emails as tasks, organize them by projects, and add notes and non-email related tasks. Contur makes email more manageable and easier to put into context, manipulate, prioritize and search, moving users closer to “Inbox Zero.”

Contur CEO Justyna Wojick validates the fact that our current method of starring messages and making calendar entries is outdated at best.

“Contur is aimed at the 90 million knowledge workers and professionals in the United States who are experiencing email overload,” said Contur co-founder and CEO Wójcik said in a statement. “Contur takes email beyond such outdated tools as tags and priority inboxes, which have long lost their power to help users not only tackle the ever-growing volume of their incoming email, but to act on that volume as well.”

Monday-Friday we typically receive 300-500 email messages a day, making us power users by Contur standards. Contur was designed for power users and hopes to help get people to “inbox zero” something i haven’t seen in years.

“The demand is high for a solution like Contur to manage email inboxes; 500 people have already signed up on the Contur waitlist. In the United States alone, over a billion dollars are lost each year due to workers having to do necessary, but unproductive, tasks related to email, such as organizing them, keeping track of follow-ups, and other tasks. Contur will help recover some of that lost time and revenue,” added Wójcik.

Contur launched out of Start Engine the LA based accelerator founded by Howard Marks one of the co-founders of Actvision.

We’re on the Contur waitlist and can’t wait to use it. Contur is compatible with pop email and also gmail, or Google apps mail so most business power users can use it.

Linkage:

Check out and sign up for Contur here

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Boston Startup: BlockAvenue Officially The New Kid On The Block

We got a sneak peak at a great freshly launched Boston starutp in August, BlockAvenue. This unique startup has been described as a yelp for neighborhoods, and to some extent it is, but it actually offers a whole lot more.

While BlockAvenue is a bit of a discovery, and recommendation startup, it’s also a big data startup wrapped up in a really sexy frame. To that end, BlockAvenue, in it’s current form, touches over 50 million data points of neighborhood information. BlockAvenue helps you discover, and research neighborhoods any way you want.

Picture this, you’re thinking about moving to a new neighborhood. You want to find out about crime, schools,restaurants, transits and sex offenders. These are the typical things people research online before moving somewhere. Before BlockAvenue that would be five different websites and of course if you didn’t go to the right site you may be out of luck with outdated data and searching even more. BlockAvenue lays it all out for you.

“Until now, location-based information, has not been aggregated in an easy and useful way for people to understand and consume,” said BlockAvenue Founder Anthony Longo. “By providing an intuitive platform powered by both geo-data and social conversation, we can help people understand what the makeup is or where the trend is heading at virtually any location throughout the U.S.”

BlockAvenue lays everything out for you across a map. It aggregates a ton of data to give you a “block score” this block score is an A-F grade based on some of the information about like crime, sex offenders, schools, transit and crowdsourced reviews. As you can see from checking out DuPont Circle, a trendy neighborhood in Washington DC, there are already a few user reviews in the neighborhood.

The hope is that more people will join in the conversation to add to the data sets provided by BlockAvenue. As more and more people add their block reviews the platform will grow exponentially. This is another case where most of these resources have already been online but never aggregated in such an easy to use way.

BlockAvenue was built in DogPatch Labs at the Microsoft building in Boston Massachusetts.

Linkage:

Check out our interview with BlockAvenue here

Check out BlockAvenue for yourself here

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Australian Startup: School Hours Helps People Find Jobs Around, School Hours

We’re hopeful that either this Australian startup will come to the United States or someone will do something very similar. School Hours is a new startup, based in Australia that helps Australian parents find flexible jobs. Sure not every person that uses SchoolHours will have kids, but all of those using it will require some kind of flexibility.

After checking out SchoolHours even further you begin to realize that people taking night or even day classes can utilize the platform. People with second jobs can utilize the platform. Even those people that have a hobby they pursue at a set schedule can utilize SchoolHours to find the best jobs with flexibility in mind.

It’s no secret that more and more job seekers are taking culture into consideration when looking for those jobs, and of course flexibility in hours can play a big role in that.

SchoolHours is packed with a variety of jobs and a variety of schedules.

We got a chance to interview the founders of SchoolHours. Check out the interview below.

I Have An Idea For A Startup Now What: Just Decide Dilemma Of The Week

We’re back with another JustDecide.com startup dilemma of the week. We’re sure that a lot of you reading this today, had this exact same dilemma at one time or another.

” I have an idea for a startup, now what”

There are a lot of answers to this question. In the case of this startup dilemma of the week, it’s specifically about co-founders. What happens when someone has a great idea for a startup and no technical expertise. This exact dilemma can be the make it or break it point for a good idea.

In this week’s dilemma of the week there are a few good options:

Find a technical co-founder
Raise money to outsource development
teach myself to code and become my own technical co-founder.

Finding a technical co-founder can be tough. With a technical co-founder, most founders and entrepreneurs are looking for someone to work for equity. This can be a risky proposition to the designer, developer or coder that you’re considering as a co-founder. They may worry that, regardless of the great idea and their technical skills, the startup may never see revenue, or worse, funding.

On the flip side to that of course, is a proposition which could mean millions of dollars to the technical co-founder, should your startup take off.

Raising money without an actual product can be a tricky thing. It gets even harder when you’re trying to do it without an actual product, or a working demo. Outsourcing development can be an entirely separate headache as well. Who knows what you’re going to get when ou outsource and in most cases it’s hard to manage outsourced developers

The final suggestion, teaching myself to code, may seem like a great way to go, after all knowledge is power. The downside to that is regardless of who does the technical work, there will be a ton of other things for the original founder to do, outside of coding.

This startup dilemma of the week turns out to be a lot tougher than you might imagine.

Linkage:

Click here to weigh in now

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Interview With Kansas City Startup: Truckily Accelerating At Ark Challenge

Food Trucks are all the rage these days. Most metropolitan areas now have a plethora of delicious food available in converted bread trucks. If you’ve ever been to Austin Texas, especially during South By South West we’re sure you’ve seen some great food trucks. When we were in Chicago for Chicago Tech Week lunch was catered by a dozen delicious food trucks outside the Merchandise Mart.

Aside from big events though, finding your regular food truck can be a tough task, especially when you have a limited amount of time for lunch. Or perhaps you’re in the mood for food truck food but you’re not sure about the cuisine. Well mobile food truck apps are becoming just about as hot as the food trucks themselves. In fact, Pennsylvania startup TruckyLove has incorporated both a food trick finder and a social network surrounding food trucks.

With Kansas City startup Truckily, it’s a little more cut and dry, but the guys behind Truckily have taken into consideration the diner and the driver.

As is with most of the other apps being built in the space, Truckily provides a function that allows diners to locate their favorite food trucks by name, or cuisine. They can also do a generalized browse type function where they can see what food trucks are around them.

On the driver side Truckily provides a function that allows food truck owners to find the best spot to set up shop.

Truckily is based in Kansas City but they’re currently accelerating at the Ark Challenge accelerator in Arkansas.

We got a chance to talk with Derek Kean one of the two co-founders of Truckily. Check out that interview below.