Memphis Startup Xtrant Could Be The Tumblr of Project Management

At SXSW David Karp talked about his motivation for building Tumblr.

I tried all of the great tools that were around at the time—WordPress, Blogger—and obviously all the specialized tools—Flickr for photos and YouTube for videos—and I kept falling down. I was perfectly happy with all these tools but at the same time, constantly frustrated by the limitations imposed by all of them.

So, with that love/hate thing going on, Karp set out to iterate on the “tumblelog,” and turned it into a business worth $1.1 billion dollars (at least to Yahoo).

The guys behind project management company Xtrant feel the same way. Email, Dropbox, and chat all have their good parts, but they also all have frustrating limitations. (Missing email thread, anyone?)

Back in February, before I joined the Nibletz team, I helped a friend get ready to show her startup in everywhereelse.co’s Startup Village. In the months leading up to the conference, we used the soft launch version of Xtrant to keep our team organized and on task.

That version worked really well for us. My friend was able to upload diagrams of the booth, logos she had designed, and schedules of our milestones. We kept a running conversation on the project page, as well as a calendar for all our meetings. It was far better than 50 emails for each task.

Over the last few months, though, Xtrant has rolled out several new features that make the experience even better.

Person status–Now users can see someone’s contact info and when they last visited the project page.
Pending/Send Reminder & Invite Permissions–You can see if someone hasn’t accepted the invite to a project yet and send them an email reminder. You can also allow other users to invite their team members.
Email Notifications–This is probably the biggest change to date, and one that is a huge win for UX. Previously the emails simply noted that the project had been changed. So, you had to click over, sign in, and find out if the change involved you or not. Now the emails are well-designed, with a brief rundown of the actions taken. Of course, you still click over to the page if you need to be involved, but if the changes don’t concern you, you can keep moving.
Coming soon: iOS and Android apps

Like Tumblr, Xtrant is iterating on many other project management systems. By making themselves both a “social media for work” and a “project/task management” platform, they are also streamlining the work experience, getting rid of a lot of the clunky-ness we deal with every day. With these new features, they could be poised to live up to their promise.

Sign your team up for Xtrant and keep an eye out for mobile apps this summer.

Ernst & Young Partners With Cincinnati’s Cintrifuse

Cintrifuse is a huge regional initiative in Cincinnati, Ohio, designed to support high potential startups in the region. It’s backed by the Cincinnati Business Committee, with it’s initial venture capital investors including Proctor & Gamble, Cincinnati’s Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Duke Energy, University of Cincinnati, and Western Southern Financial Group.

In addition to a venture capital fund, Cintrifuse links entrepreneurs and startups with business partners, research institutions, mentors, and investors. They have partnerships with every startup-facing organization in Cincinnati including CincyTech and The Brandery, organizations we’ve written about here quite a bit.

On Friday the Cintrifuse and professional services giant Ernst & Young announced a partnership that will include capital, professional services, and annual operating support. The Cincinnati Business Courier reports that the parthership is slated to run for five years.

“Cintrifuse is just kind of a startup itself – it’s really just been starting its activities this last year,” Julia Poston, Managing Partner for Ernst & Young in Cincinnati told the Business Courier. “Tax considerations, organizational considerations, human capital, that’s what we are offering as part of our contribution to Cintrifuse.”

Ernst & Young’s Erica Patterson is on loan to Cintrifuse. She previously worked in Ernst & Young’s growth market in Chicago.

Find out more about Cintrifuse here.

Ohio Startup Crowdentials Launches Crowdfunding Compliance Platform

Crowdfunding is the hottest space for startups right now. And now, with changing regulations, it could get even hotter.

The Jumpstart Our Business Startup Act was passed over a year ago, paving the way for crowdfunding startups to offer equity. After the bill passed in both the Senate and the House it was then referred over to the Securities And Exchange Commission (SEC) to come up with the regulations for crowdfunding.

The JOBS Act has a lot of regulations to follow, including the fact no individual making less than $100,000 can invest more than $2000 or 5% of their net worth. Crowdfunding is going to spawn a whole new type of investor and there are currently no regulatory software programs out there. That’s the guts behind Crowdentials.

Richard Rodman, the cofounder of Crowdentials, spoke about crowdfunding in February at the Everywhereelse.co Startup Conference in Memphis. He founded the company with Chief Operating Officer Rohan Kusre and Chief Technology Officer Max Heckel. The three came up with the idea for Crowdentials in April and were recently accepted into the Cleveland-based FlashStarts’ startup accelerator program.

While the SEC is still finalizing its regulations, the Crowdentials technology is ready to go. “Our compliance solution is all variable-driven and will adapt to any regulations put forth,” Rodman said in a statement. Once the regulations are officially complete, the entrepreneur plans to launch “within minutes.”

In the meantime, Crowdentials is preparing a collection of multi-media resources and guides for both crowdfunding rookies and experts. In addition to teaching the basics, the comprehensive suite will cover the nuances, regulations, risks, and opportunities associated with equity crowdfunding.

Crowdentials’ technology ensures that investors, businesses, and platforms are following the SEC’s rules. According to Rodman, “Crowdentials is the vital link between the SEC regulations and all crowdfunding parties”.

Individuals who gain compliancy through Crowdentials can trust that they are abiding by the regulations, and startups can feel confident that they are raising money through compliant individuals. Rodman believes the SEC’s regulations are meant to protect the new crowdfunding population from fraud and financial distress. “That’s why compliance is so important,” the entrepreneur said. “When everyone is aware of their level of compliance, we can make more educated investment decisions.”

Crowdfunding has spawned hundreds of crowdfunding sites that will help connect would-be investors to startups and other small businesses’ needing funds. Now startp founders are finding ways to support the crowdfunding economy. Cowdfunding vetting companies, insurance companies, and even discovery companies have all popped up over the past year with more expected when the rules change to allow equity investments.

In the meantime feel free to check out Crowdentials at crowdentials.com

7 key elements of a successful crowdfunding campaign.

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Truckily Connects Food Trucks & Fans, Closes Seed Round

Food trucks are becoming popular in cities across the nation. Hot food–often gourmet–out of a truck? What’s not to love?

Well, for one thing, you can never find them. Seriously, never. No matter how closely you watch Twitter or Facebook, you always seem to just miss the truck you’re craving.

That’s what happened to Truckily cofounders Derek Kean and Matthew Berkland on a trip to San Francisco. Their frustration with downloading several apps, watching trucks drive by, and STILL not being in the right place at the right time led them to dream up a one-app stop for food trucks and their fans.

Enter Truckily. For $30 a month, trucks can use the service to update their location just once. Then, the new location appears on the Truckily map, Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare. The app is free for users, and when they open it up, they see a map of where all the food trucks are parked.

We talked with Truckily back in September. They were fresh from their time with the ARK Challenge and credited that experience with the ability to focus on the business and make important connections. At that point, their next step was to raise funding to continue building their product.

Now, according to Silicon Prairie News, they’ve done it. This month Truckily closed a seed round of $120,000. The round includes Gravity Ventures and Kea Ventures. The money is technically invested in RTF Logic, but the founders will use it to build out the Truckily platform.

Cofounder Derek Kean gave Silicon Prairie News a hint about what they’ll do with their new funding.

Once our team is comfortable with our progress, we will begin expanding the platform into other areas that are currently identified, while keeping our ears open for markets that are open for growth. We are ramping up our efforts once we iron out any remaining ‘face-palm’ errors.

When Truckily launched its public beta for iOS in April, they focused on the Midwest. According to their blog, they are also seeking to expand into the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. They hope to be available for Android by the end of the summer.

You can check Truckily on their website.

Canadian Startup SpotSquad: Crowdsourced Parking Vigilantes

The “crowd” has been used for a variety of things in the startup world lately. There are startups utilizing the crowd to find the best restaurants, events, websites, and even parking spaces.

We got the chance to talk with Berlin startup ParkTag in May during TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013. Their company uses the crowd, or rather a peer-to-peer platform, to help people police themselves and find parking spots.

Now we’ve heard about Canadian startup SpotSquad that is using the crowd to snitch on people who are illegally parked. Of course it’s frustrating to find someone double parked outside the mall or the local WalMart. It can even be frustrating seeing someone with a nice car, and two perfectly working legs, park in a handicapped parking spot.

SpotSquad, developed by a 10 person team in Winnipeg Canada, is an app that allows vigilantes with a smartphone to report people who are illegally parked. What’s in it for these good Samaritans? Well, according to the Daily Mail, the people who report these traffic violators will receive a portion of the fines collected.

How does it work?

The DailyMail reports that users with the SpotSquad app installed will take a picture of the violating car. The picture is then tagged with a GPS location. The reporter then assigns the picture a violation, and it’s uploaded to authorities. The reporter and SpotSquad will get a portion of the fee collected. As reporters report more and more violators, their cut of the fees will increase and their ranking will increase within the system from Private to General.

The company plans to begin a beta test of the app next month in Winnipeg.

Find out more here at SpotSquad’s website

This Canadian startup has a new way to display brands for marketers.

List.ly is the Slideshare for Lists

Have you ever read a “Top 10…” list and thought, “Hmm, they missed something”?

Now, with Listly, brands and content companies can make lists interactive and embeddable. Communities love it because they can share a whole list or just part of one. They can even contribute to a list by interacting with it right in blog posts. No more scrolling through comments to find out if people agree with your list.

Listly is also great for brands. As we all know, these days, content is king, and the more content a brand can produce, the more opportunities they have to reach their audience. Lists are easily the most popular content on the web, and Listly makes it easy for brands to create and use those lists.

What is your startup, what does it do?

List.ly.

We take the most effective form of content marketing, the numbered list post, and we make it collaborative, interactive, and embedable. Human beings simply love to consume information in the form of numbered lists. This explains who 30% of posts are in the familiar form of “10 ways to..” “17 tips to…” “27 things you must not …”. We simply bring life these blog posts by letting people vote and contribute directly on the list. We make it easier to share and embed these interactive lists. You can share the whole list or just an item. You can embed the whole list or just an item. We track where and when your lists are seen and we also track who and how people interact with each list.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

Shyam Subramanyan & Nick Kellet

We’ve both got a background in startups and building brands. We make a great team. We complement each other.

Where are you based?

We’re based out of California in the Bay Area. I live in Canada.

What is the startup culture like where you are based?

San Fran is about a tech as it gets. I live in Kelowna in BC, which has an aspiring tech culture. Exits like Club Penguin, Vineyard Networks, and Workfire put Kelowna on the map. Plus there’s an event called Metabridge that is really working to connect Kelowna to Silicon Valley.

What problem does your startup solve?

We help brands get found and we help them foster engagement with the community.

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

The list hasn’t evolved since the invention of HTML. That is the opportunity we are creating. We are to lists what slideshare is to slides. You put your lists on Listly and embed them back on your blog. The model has been proven for static content like slides, videos and audio. Were just taking that model one step further as lists evolve over time and can be contributed to by many. People are always skeptical when a new type of data is created. The challenge we have overcome building the credibility needed for people to place their lists with Listly.

To this point with have lists embedded on 5000+ blogs. We have thousands of publishers who’ve signed up and used the platform.

What are some of the milestones your startup has achieved?

Lots of iterations along the way, but three major:

V1 – Simple social embeddable lists

V2 – Scaling / cachable lists and synchronizing the experience between listly and blogs

V3 – Responsive Listly – A simpler, consistent experience across smart phones, tablets and desktops.

All these build on Listly as a publishing platform and a serious piece of internet infrastructure.

What are your next milestones?

We’re focused on small incremental steps right now and in driving our adoption metrics and our monthly active user count. Our core focus is to get more embeds. We’re also building out our API so people can build the use of Listly lists into their applications and workflows.

What’s next for your startup?

More of the same. Were focused on removing friction, driving up the number of embeds, and on building brand awareness so people are happy to jump in and vote or contribute to a list. We’ll also be putting more focus on our premium product to cater to the needs of bigger brands and publishers.

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

@listly, @nickkellet @shyamster

Today Entrepreneurship Is A Mindset, oDesk Infographic Reveals!

Although some are suggesting that the worst is behind us in the current economy, the situation over the last 10 years sent more and more people into freelance and entrepreneurship. People found that they could no longer look for a job; they needed to create one.

That’s one of the things that’s driven the success of oDesk, a marketplace for just about anyone with any skill that can be done on a computer.

While many websites and companies devoted to remote working have an emphasis on development, design, and programming, oDesk is different. In fact, any startup anywhere could find the workforce they need via oDesk, right from their own hometown. Whether you’re looking for software developers, engineers, business development people, researchers, administrative handlers, or PR people, you’ll find them on oDesk.

Since 2005 oDesk has been one of the driving forces behind remote working. Now millions of people have been connected to jobs across the street, or around the world through the power of oDesk.

As more and more people turn to freelancing and remote work, oDesk released this very interesting infographic that shows not only are they onto something, but freelancing, remote work, and entrepreneurship are rising at a lightning fast paced.

According to their research, today 90% of people think that entrepreneurship is a mindset rather than starting a company. With that in mind, oDesk has found that 72% of people still in “regular jobs” want to quit to be entirely independent. 61% have said they’re likely to quit within 2 years. Freedom seems to be the driving force behind this trend.

Check out this very interesting infographic below, and if you’re looking for [fill in the blank] check out oDesk.com

Check out the welcome PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy gave oDesk CEO Gary Swart at the Southland Conference.

NY Startup StoryKid, Born At The TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, Prepares For Launch

Two literature PhD candidates from Columbia University decided to attend the TechCrunch Disrupt NY hackathon this year with their startup idea that bridges their love of literature, kids, and technology. Tianjiao Yu and Lu Xiong, have created StoryKid, an app for the iPad that allows children to create stories of their own using images and features created by StoryKid.

If you’re a parent (like me) with a kid who uses an iPad, then you’re well aware that there are thousands children’s books in the iTunes app store. Some of the books are interactive, others are simply read along stories. Yu and Xiong’s app allows kids to make the story up from start to finish.

After the child has created a story, they can save it to the iPad and also share it across multiple channels.

When the app releases next month, it’s going to be fun for all young children, but naturally as a child gets older and starts developing their comprehension skills, the stories will start flowing better. StoryKid will help kids foster those comprehension skills. This feature could be very helpful to early education teachers, a market that Yo and Xiong hope to penetrate.

What is StoryKid?

StoryKid is an app on iPad that encourages kids to create their own stories by using images provided by us.

It is known to all that kids love stories, but listening to stories created by adults is one thing, creating something according to their own minds is quite another adventure. Kids are surprisingly good at this. They have totally fresh ways to think, and they don’t abide by many rules. So unlike other interactive apps in the store that let kids play with existing stories, StoryKid provides an exciting stage for the youngest to create new relationships: organizing characters, locations and all elements seen in stories according to their wish. It allows kids to fully play with their imagination.

Because of it’s both fun and educational, we think this app can be both used in families and in schools. Teachers can use this app to let kids rewrite stories they are just told about. We believe this app can also be used for the sake of special education.

In the meantime, StoryKid will make the time parents spent with their little ones really fun and will make that fun last. When papa & mama sticks in getting a new story for the bed time, StoryKid is a good source. The stories finished by kids can also be saved and exported, so that the intimate moments in the childhood could always be preserved and revisited.

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

First, the youngest selects a situation that interests him/her mostly to start with. For example, a situation could be “Jesse finds he can suddenly understand his dog’s barking….” Along with each situation, several images would be provided as the elements to help kids structure the development of the story line. Then they will enter the creation page. There are a number of possibilities of how to arrange the images and how to note down what they want to express. The finished stories can be exported and shared by parents.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

Tianjiao Yu and Lu Xiong are co-founders of StoryKid. We are school mates from Columbia University; we were both literature Ph.D students. Lu had great experience in humanity book publishing before joining the Ph.D program. Born to inherit and soak in literature, Lu gives the soul to this app. She is the content producer. Tianjiao is a kind of hard to find: thinks profoundly, executes efficiently and handles multitasks at ease. She manages the product, runs business and designs UX. We are very supplementary in a good way.

Where are you based?

We are based in New York. Btw, to show off, we have three roof windows in our apt/office.

How did you come up with the idea for StoryKid?

It was born when we were at Techcrunch Disrupt Hackathon NY 2013. One spirit we both greatly value is being creative. As literature students, it’s natural for us to favor the space provided by fictions/stories that allows people to be as creative as possible. So we thought it would be exciting to build a tool for people to easily and freely tell stories. Immediately we decided to focus on kids, who haven’t had boxes to jump out of yet and who will naturally unfold all kinds of possibilities in stories. iPad is just right for this idea.

Why now?

In short, the timing, the New York City, and the people we meet are just very right for us. We left the graduate program to explore other possibilities to make use of our knowledge. We soon realizes using current technologies, for example, the iPad, can introduce humanities subjects to more people and let people have fun with them, because to interact with the content is actually inviting users to become a part of the content, which automatically increases the intimacy. The tablet market grows like a rocket, and the early childhood education is also booming. That always receiving encouragement and suggestions from parents and teachers is another big incentive for us to start this marching. In addition, New York doesn’t frighten you when you are on the threshold of touching something new.

And what’s your secret sauce?

As with cooking, sometimes the amazingness is the result of lacking of something. In our case, we do not have a technology co-founder. Hence, almost all our product and UX ideas derives directly from daily life experiences, very intuitive, human, and breathing, which cannot be more appropriate for kids. We’d like to say that our product itself is like a kid. We hope StoryKid and other kids will be good friends.

What are some milestones you’ve achieved?

Our first milestone should be the demo presented at Techcrunch Hackathon. The demo day was the birthday of this app. We immediately received lots of great suggestions, pushing the baby app to grow really fast. We also got lucky that Ms. Ingrid Lunden from Techcrunch gave us an interview immediately after the presentation, so we got a bit viral in that week.

The second milestone we achieved was under the help of Mr. Trip O’Dell from Audio Book of Amazon. He gave us fabulous suggestions on how to improve our feature and UX when we met at Big Apple Redux 2013 in Bloomberg. That short conversation was a magic.

Most recently, we were contacted by several schools and online platforms who are interested in forming partnership with us in the long run.

What’s your next milestone?

We will have our BETA version in early July. We will invite kids to test the app and the teachers to review the app.

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

We so far suggested people to go to Techcrunch website where the interview was posted: http://tcrn.ch/Yfbcej. But we will soon finish the construction of the app intro site: storykid.me Our twitter account: @imstorykid

Check out over 50 startup stories from everywhere else at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013

Image: TechCrunch

We Found The Future Of Loyalty & Rewards At Southland

Loyalty and rewards, loyalty and rewards, loyalty and rewards. It’s like a broken record. Everyone thinks they’ve stumbled onto the next big thing with loyalty and rewards. But maybe Nashville-based startup Facedeals actually has.

Facedeals uses a 100% opt-in facial recognition platform that is non-obtrusive to facilitate in person loyalty and rewards in a very passive way.

Users simply sign up for a Facedeals account using Facebook, and the magic starts. When that person walks into an establishment using Facedeals, their face will be captured using an eye-level, inconspicuous camera. In fact, the facial recognition software in the camera can capture the person’s image at their normal pace. They don’t have to do anything but simply walk past it.

The backend software in Facedeals already knows what that user likes and doesn’t like and their habits when patronizing a Facedeals establishment. Facedeals also specializes in relevance as co-founder David McMullen told 60 Minutes’ Leslie Stahl in this interview that aired last month.

In that 60 Minutes piece, McMullen and Stahl walked into a participating merchant, and as they were getting ready to decide what to order, Stahl was delivered a deal to purchase a Ceasar Salad and get a free Diet Coke. Both items, were things that Stahl actually likes. McMullen was offered a different deal on a local beer that he likes.

The secret to this relevance is that when users opt-in to Facedeals and let the service see their Facebook page, it builds a profile based on things they’ve liked..

McMullen told us (and 60 minutes) that the beauty behind Facedeals is that the deals are coming when you’re ready to make a purchase and not in an email first thing in the morning.

The company is working with a variety of different merchants including retail, restaurants, and bars. The robust back-end makes it the easiest way to do loyalty and rewards for any business. In fact they don’t have to do much of anything except let the customer redeem the deal.

Check out our own interview with McMullen from the Southland conference in Nashville.

You can find out more about Facedeals here at getfacedeals.com

Here’s more of our Southland coverage.

Banyan, The Git Hub For Science, Shows Off New Features & A New Deck At Southland

On Wednesday, Chattanooga transplant startup Banyan was selected to pitch on stage as part of the Southland Summit in Nashville. You may remember Banyan; they won the entrepreneur track at the GigTank demo day last summer and took home $100,000 dollars. Although it wasn’t a condition of receiving their prize, the Banyan team–Toni Gamayel, Travis Staton, and TJ Weigel–decided to relocate their startup from Florida to Chattanooga late last year.

Banyan billed itself as a collaborative research tool that could handle enormous amounts of data. They were the only GigTank participant that really talked about the effects of 1gb ethernet and big data during last year’s Demo Day. To make his point, the company’s pitch man, Gamayel, point it this way: To take two terrabytes of data from Stanford to London, it would be faster to get on a plane with two hard drives than it would be with conventional Internet speeds. In contrast, Chattanooga’s 1gb ethernet pipe would allow that data to transmit in just four hours.

During the Southland pitch Gamayel revealed that scientific research hasn’t fundamentally changed since the 1700’s. Even in present day scientists have a really hard time collaborating because they need to keep control of their authorship. Gamayel also said that universities are very protective of their researchers as well. Gamayel pointed to a case where Stanford University lost $50 million dollars when they couldn’t clearly state whether or not a professor worked on a certain piece of research under his university role or independently.

The newest iteration of Banyan solves all of these problems. For starters they’ve added profiles for scientists and researchers on the system. Scientists can clearly list their accolades and achievements, skills, and research they’ve authored. There is also the base tool for collaboration as well as a way to leave comments and feedback. Finally Banyan has incorporated a system that can time and date stamp each iteration of the research and correctly credit the author. So in that case at Stanford, it would be clear whose “time” the professor was on.

Although we thought Gamayel did a fine job pitching their exciting product, he was a little hard on himself, stating after the pitch that it was the first time that he’s talked about the new features to a large audience, with some of their investors in the crowd.

Banyan is a fascinating product and is sure to continue changing the way researchers and scientists work. Check out Gamayel’s Southland pitch below.

Here’s more of our Southland Coverage at nibletz.com

7 Key Elements Of A Successful Crowdfunding Campaign

Crowdfunding can be an effective tool for accomplishing your startup goals. Whether you’re looking to jumpstart your marketing efforts, expand your customer base, or reach out to friends and family for funding, crowdfunding provides a platform to rally support around you and your company. Having worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs who have conducted successful fundraisers, we have distilled seven key strategies for launching a successful crowdfund:

Tell your story. As the old adage goes: facts tell, stories sell. When it comes to eliciting customer engagement, a campaign with a good story is an unparalleled strategy. Did you experience some kind of obstacle on your path to entrepreneurship? Did a major life event influence your career choice or business decisions? Tell your story in your crowdfunding pitch to make a connection with backers and encourage engagement.If you don’t have a personal story to share with your audience, share facts and highlights about your startup, product or vision instead. Describe the problem (and severity of the problem) your product will solve, or discuss the vision for your startup. Keep your tone and messaging personal to make backers feel closely connected to you and your project.
Provide value for value. Crowdfunding campaigns hinge on reciprocity. If your startup offers fantastic products, rewards or opportunities, you’ve created a huge incentive for backers to pledge to your campaign. When choosing your reward tiers, reflect on whether the incentives would appeal to you if you were the consumer; ask friends, family members and business acquaintances for their honest opinions as well.
Introduce scarcity. A basic law of economics dictates that scarce supply inherently creates greater demand. Create greater demand for your startup by limiting one or more of the higher level rewards to just a few — this will inflate demand for those rewards and result in higher pledge amounts for your crowdfunding campaign!
Create a marketing event. People love to feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves. Try to build a feeling of excitement and rally others around your crowdfunding campaign by tying the launch to a large, well known event. You can connect your product to a holiday, sporting event, or season to increase the momentum surrounding your launch. You can leverage the emotional connection surrounding these events to get people excited about your product and engage them in discussions.This is especially useful for connecting with backers through social channels, capitalizing on trending topics and popular hashtags to get more eyes on your fundraise!
Highlight examples of social proof. Going back to the human desire to feel like a part of something bigger than themselves, most people don’t want to be the first or only supporter of a crowdfunding campaign — they want to see other influential advocates joining in. Do you have someone notable as an adviser, backer or endorser of your startup? Share your list of partners and patrons to give confidence to new backers and let them know that they won’t be the only one at your party.
Build credibility and legitimacy. Many backers will believe it when they see it. In other words, they require some kind of evidence that your startup is legitimate and picking up steam before deciding to back your crowdfunding campaign. Show your backers what they’ll be supporting in detail — how it works, how you came up with the idea, and even pictures or videos if you have a prototype. Remember that you will likely never meet your backers, so the more proof you can provide that your startup is legitimate the better.
Interact with your supporters. Don’t leave your backers in the dark for weeks after they’ve supported your project. Interact with your audience through frequent updates, thank-you emails or social media outreach, and responses to their questions and feedback.You can build anticipation and increase engagement in many ways. Post updates counting down to a big surprise regarding your project, conduct a product giveaway, or even host a contest involving your crowdfunding campaign. The opportunities here are endless and can be tailored for your specific startup.When interacting with your backers, always encourage an open dialogue and engagement. In general, people would rather talk than listen. Treat your updates and outreach as a conversation rather than a one-sided message.

Eric Corl is the Co-Founder and President of the crowdfunding site Fundable.com. Eric has been on the founding team of three successful startups including Fundable, IdeaBuyer and Startups.Co, all of which have focused on getting early-stage startups to market quickly and effectively. He is also a partner at Virtucon Ventures, an early stage incubator that brings new ideas to market.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

Now that you’ve got that down check out 12 Tips For Crowdfunding Your New Startup

EdTech Startups Here’s How K-12 Students Are Using Technology [INFOGRAPHIC]

EdTech startups are on the rise. More and more educational institutions, universities, school systems and students are using technology to assist with learning, student privacy, teaching aids and more. Educationweek.com recently polled 1600 teachers and administrators in K-12 schools to determine how well their schools are using digital technologies.

The infographic below provides a snapshot of technology in the classroom as well as how students are embracing mobile technology.

According to Piper Jaffray’s 23rd semiannual “Taking Stock With Teens” report 34% of teenagers already own a tablet computer. A whopping 86% of teenagers say their next device will be a smartphone.

On the school side privacy and security seem to be the biggest area for technology in K-12 schools. Personal e-portfolio’s for students had the lowest ranking in data compiled by The Software and Information Industry Association “Vision K-20 Survey”.

Probably the most interesting, and positive data was among school districts. According to the Center For Digital Education’s “2011-2012 Digital School Districts Survey” of respondents, 65% of school districts have some kind of digital content strategy. 67% of school districts have data dashboards in place and 76% have a classroom technology standard.

How does your EdTech startup fit in? Check out the infographic below and you decide!

Check out this Florida startup that is working on the first ever educational MMORPG

Kauffman Foudation’s Million Cups Now Brewing In Chattanooga

While many know Chattanooga, Tennessee for it’s choo choo, the city has actually been on the cutting edge of a lot of things in the startup and technology space. First off, regardless of what anyone says, Chattanooga was the first city in the country to offer 1gb ethernet to residents and businesses city wide. They actually rolled out “the gig” two years ago, a year ahead of Google in Kansas City.

Last year, Chattanooga hosted the first ever startup accelerator focused on “the gig” and appropriately named it the “Gig Tank”. They have a great co-working space called co-lab and a very engaged startup community. In fact they’ve held startup events in Chattanooga attracting some of the biggest Silicon Valley names like Paul Singh.

Now Chattanooga has teamed up with the Kansas City based Kauffman Foundation to bring their 1 Million Cups program to the city. Chattanooga will mark the 7th city nationwide to implement the weekly morning gathering program that is building startups over coffee and conversation.

1 Million Cups began in April 2012 in Kansas City, the hometown of its founding organization, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Foundation leaders intend to expand the 1 Million Cups network to 20 cities by the end of 2013. To support the growth in its partner cities, the Kauffman Foundation also introduces today an enhanced website for the program and microsites for each participating city to share information with local followers.

“We’re thrilled to add Chattanooga to the 1 Million Cups family, because this city is making big strides in entrepreneurship,” said Nate Olson, a Kauffman Foundation associate and co-founder of 1 Million Cups. “Great ideas are found everywhere, and we’re excited to see the startups and community forming in Chattanooga.”

The 1 Million Cups program started in Chattanooga this past Wednesday and featured Chattanooga Whiskey Co., which has had an exciting month. Legislation signed May 16 by Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam cleared the way for the company to manufacture its product in the city, and a week later the startup successfully concluded a $10,000 Kickstarter campaign.

Chattanooga’s 1 Million Cups program is being spearheaded by Bill Brock, computational engineer at SimCenter Enterprises and managing director of engage 3D, Andrew Holliday co-founder of Harvest Creative and Allie O’Connell manager of the GigTank accelerator.

“When visiting Kansas City this spring, we were struck by 1 Million Cups’ success in harnessing the energy of the city’s entrepreneurs,” Brock and O’Connell said. “We’re confident the simplicity of this program will resonate with Chattanooga’s growing startup ecosystem and become a weekly ritual for our innovators and entrepreneurs to connect.”

Chattanooga joins Kansas City; Des Moines, Iowa; Houston; St. Louis; Cedar Rapids/Iowa City, Iowa; and Reno, Nev. in offering 1 Million Cups locally. Each Wednesday morning in each city, 1 Million Cups gives two early-stage startups the opportunity to present their companies to an audience of mentors, advisers, researchers, builders, makers and other entrepreneurs. Each founder presents for six minutes and then fields audience questions for another 20 minutes.

Interested in attending 1 Million Cups in Chattanooga click here. Want to check it out in another city, click here.

Tennessee is preparing for this huge startup and cultural conference

Cyanogen Gets Caught With The Startup Bug, Looking For Developers In Seattle

Cyanogen, Steve Kondik, Startup, Seattle Startup

(photo: Talkandroid.com)

Cyanogen, Steve Kondik, is a name we wrote quite often at thedroidguy.com but a quick perusing through the archives of nibletz and since focusing on startups “everywhere else” (3/2012) we haven’t gotten a chance to talk about the Android developer who’s Cyanogenmod open source firmware changed the landscape of Android for millions of users.

After creating the initial Cyanogenmod the project became a community effort with several developers working on future releases of the firmware that when installed, allows users to take advantage of many of the benefits Google has in the Android Operating system.

Android’s biggest manufacturer, Samsung, took notice of Kondik and his work with Cyanogenmod. Kondik moved from his Pittsburgh roots to Seattle to work on Samsung’s Android team.

Now it turns out that he’s left Samsung and while it was unclear at first why the change, things are starting to come to the surface. Apparently Kondik has been hit by the startup bug.

Granted Cyanogenmod was like a startup itself, except for the revenue part, however it came to market before “startup” was such an uber cool thing. With years of development experience it’s really no surprise that Kondik is involved in a startup himself.

We reached out to Kondik earlier today who said the startup he is working with is still in stealth mode. He wouldn’t comment as to whether or not he was a cofounder but did tell us he hopes to release more information on the startup later this summer.

Kondik did however confirm that the startup he is working with (or is it on) is based in Seattle and it’s a mobile focused startup. To that end he’s looking for developers, and shocker, they don’t need to be just Android developers.

Kondik told us today that remote working is a possibility but ideally a developer interested on working with this startup should be in the Seattle area (or perhaps willing to relocate).

Here’s what we can tell you about Kondik, since meeting him in person in 2010

– He’s an incredible guy to know, he’s extremely smart and willing to share his knowledge in a collaborative way, much the way Cyanogenmod evolved to today.

– Cyanogenmod turned into an astronomical success. While it’s open source and free, there are millions of Android users using the firmware.

– You can count on the fact that Kondik wouldn’t waste his time with something not worthy.

Cyanogen is looking for developers, interested in working on his next big thing? Venture over to his Facebook page.

This Athens Georgia startup started with a honey bee dance.