Comments Off on Share Your Predictions For The Future With Syracuse Startup: PsyQic0LikeLike 1,986
It’s not everyday that you find a startup that wants to help you predict the future and share your predictions. That’s of course as long as you throw all the “weather” startups to the wayside. PsyQic a startup from Syracuse New York, does just that.
PsyQic is an iOS app that makes it easy to proclaim and than share your predictions. Do you have a prediction for next week’s NFL football games? Do you see something in the future that not everyone else sees? This may be just the app for you.
PsyQic goes beyond the predictions themselves and gamifies the process by giving you points when your predictions comes true. The points are called Qi’s which is actually a Chinese word for “spiritual energy”. Founders Gabrielle Gosselin and Keisuke Inoue wanted to design something different and fun. PsyQic fulfills just that.
Inoue and Gosselin are currently incubating their startup in upstate New York at the Syracuse Tech Garden after graduating from the Syracuse Student Sandbox this summer.
We got a chance to talk with the team behind PsyQic in the interview below:
The college application process can be a long and daunting task. Yesterday we brought you the story about a startup in New York that helps high school students prepare for college by offering a platform to find extra-curricular activities outside of the school. Today, while this story is about a college focused startup, it to is more about pre-enrolled high school students.
Cleveland based startup CollegeSkinny provides incoming students everything they need to know about the colleges they want to apply to. It also helps them keep all their prospective college applications and information organized so that they can continue to access it until the time comes to make a decision.
According to founder and CEO Bryant Hardy:
“Students browse colleges and Universities hosted on the CollegeSkinny network and learn everything from How to Apply all the way to the specific Greek Life organizations on campus and everything in between. We also provide interactive tools for the schools themselves to recruit and connect with potential students.
Our features include: How to Apply, Important Dates, Where to Live, What’s on Campus, College Process, Greek Life, Packing Checklist, Meal Plans, Things to Know, and The CollegeSkinny Connection (feature that provides a link between a student and the University).”
The entire focus of CollegeSkinny is to help transitioning high school students, pick and then transition into college. To get a better perspective on what CollegeSkinny is all about we interviewed Hardy below:
Comments Off on Easily Make Citations For Your Research With NY Startup: Citelighter0LikeLike 2,985
We’ve been having a lot of fun using Washington DC highlighting startup, Markerly. Markerly is a simple, easy to use browser plugin that allows anyone to highlight virtually anything on the web. From there you can share it six ways to Sunday and beyond. IT’s a great platform for grabbing pieces of text and sharing them with your friends, colleagues and social networks.
New York based Citelighter works similarly to Markerly in that it allows you to highlight text on the web. Now though, instead of sharing that Citelighted content with your friends, and social networks, Citelighter compiles a bibliographical style note sheet for the end user to reference back. Citelighter is a great companion for anyone who is going to highlight something and then reference it later on.
Citelighter joins the browser plugin and highlighting space at a great time, as everyone is seeing what web browser plugins actually meet their needs.
We got a chance to interview Citelighter cofounder Lee Joki. Check out our interview below:
High school students applying for college are finding more and more that extra-curricular activities within the walls of the high school they’re attending are no longer adequate when it comes to moving your college application up the chain. Sure class president, yearbook, and maybe a high school Habitat for Humanity project are great, but more and more high school students are gravitating towards extracurriculars outside of the school.
These extra-curricular activities can include anything from unique volunteer opportunities to internships in a career field that the student wants to study. There are a broad range of extra-curricular activities for high school students out there, but until now Google was the easiest way to find them.
A new startup called Exceleratr, based in New York, has designed a platform to link high school students to extra-curricular activities that make a difference in both their lives and their college applications. Ezra Mosseri, one of the co-founders of Exceleratr warns though, if you’re a high school senior this year, it could be too late.
The Exceleratr platform is aimed at high school students of any age and of course the earlier you start racking up your extra-curricular resume the better.
Whether you’re looking for a traditional high school internship, an academic program, or a non academic program, Exceleratr covers all the bases.
With Exceleratr students can create profiles, and manage their extra-curricular applications the same way you might if you were looking for an actual job. Of course there are a lot of job platforms out there. There are also a fair amount of startups out there catering to college students looking for internships, however Exceleratr is the first platform designed specifically for high school students looking to add to their pre-college resume.
We got a chance to talk to Mosseri. Check out our interview below:
Comments Off on London Startup: EmbedTree Gives You A Bird’s Eye View Of Web Content INTERVIEW0LikeLike 2,110
We live in a world of social media. Nowadays sifting through all the tweets, instagrams, YouTube videos and other social content can take hours if not days. Many people have turned to one social media dashboard or another in hopes of procuring the content you actually want to see. A London startup called EmbedTree is hoping to make that process easier for you.
EmbedTree says they give users a bird’s eye view of the web. Their unique platform serves as a filter for social media sites like Twitter. They liken themselves to a hybrid between an aggregated content blog and a “handsome Twitter feed”. The EmbedTree platform takes the cluttered mess of tweets and sorts them out in a way that makes more sense.
The startup is still in it’s early stages, but they offer a great demo of what EmbedTree will look like, here. For their demo they’ve aggregated content from TED,Mixcloud,Instagram and YouTube and made it much more visually appealing and easier to interact with. In fact the two co-founders, Richard Morgan and Matt Rawson met while working at Mixcloud.
We got a chance to interview the team from EmbedTree. Check out the interview below:
Comments Off on We Caught Up With Charlotte Startup Rawporter At The DNC 20120LikeLike 2,225
While we were at the DNC 2012 we got the opportunity to crash at the Rawporter crib in Uptown Charlotte. Rawporter co-founder Kevin Davis, recently relocated to New York to help grow the citizen journalism startup. Rob Gaige, the other Rawporter co-founder remains in Charlotte to continue their grassroots efforts in their hometown.
For those of you who aren’t aware, or for those of you who hear the name Rawporter on our videos, Rawporter is a social e-commerece platform for citizen journalism.
On Tuesday evening in the thick of an enormous rain storm, and just before the evening session at the DNC where First Lady Michelle Obama brought the house down, I actually got to join Gaige and Davis for a meal at the Dandelion Market in Uptown Charlotte (that’s their downtown), which is the restaurant where Rawporter was born. It was while eating at Dandelion that Gaige and Davis witnessed a horrific car accident. Like any event like this in 2011, people quickly emerged from every establishment on the block with their smartphones, and immediately started shooting pictures and videos.
Davis and Gaige both noticed that it wasn’t until after the emergency personnel had left and the wreckage was almost cleared that the news trucks began to arrive. When the Rawporter duo got back home and watched the news, sure enough there were no pictures or videos of the actual wreckage.
Sure national cable networks like CNN and Fox News, encourage their viewers to send in videos, but there had to be a way for citizen journalists, and the average people to get their videos to news outlets. In effect there needed to be a crowdsourced video news platform. So Rawporter was born. Davis and Gaige also decided to add another spin and make an e-commerce platform for the buying and selling of these videos and photos.
On the e-commerce side it was quickly discovered that Rawporter was a great way for bloggers with a small staff, or even newspapers and other media outlets with bare bones staff and bare bones budgets, to utilize the platform for great content.
Now news editors and the like can sift through and buy uploaded files, but what’s even better is they can commission a Rawporter user to actually do the work they need. For instance, if there is a convention or conference that the news outlet can’t get to, they can post an “assignment” with what they are willing to pay and the Rawporter community can bid for the assignment. Rawporter even facilitates the transaction.
Naturally with the Democratic National Convention in their back yard, it was an excellent venue to show off their product.
The Rawporter team also pitched at DEMO this past spring and Chicago TechWeek back in July.
Comments Off on Austin Startup: Lumos Pharma To Develop & Prepare Autism Treatment Discovered In Cincinnati0LikeLike 2,503
There may be some great news for parents of Autistic boys in the coming years.
A research team at the University of Cincinnati has announced that they’ve successfully treated an animal model of Creatine Transporter Deficiency (CTD). CTD is what causes Autism in boys. Over 50,000 boys in the US are afflicted with CTD.
Creatine Transporter Deficiency causes symptoms including seizures, mental retardation and speech defects.
CTD was discovered at Children’s Hospital in Cincinnati in 2000. Almost all of the research on CTD has been performed at Children’s Hospital and at the University of Cincinnati.
This is actually a wonderful, tremendous Cincinnati-centric story,” Joe Clark the UC Neurology Professor who led the research team said to newsrecord.org.. “The disease was discovered at Children’s Hospital, the animal model of the disease was made here in Cincinnati by UC, and the drug was made to treat those mice here at Cincinnati.”
The research team found that cyclocreatine, which has been dubbed CincY, has been incredibly effective at reducing the symptoms of CTD models in animals.
Clark reported that the time from discovery in 2000 to the discovery of this possible treatment in just twelve years was actually a rather short time frame. While this work has been done on animals, it may be another two to three years befor CincY can be used to treat humans.
Clark is quick to point out that this is just a treatment for the disease and not a cure.
“Essentially, a cure is fixing a broken pipe at the break, and a treatment is making a bypass around the afflicted area without fixing it, but in a manner that eliminates the symptoms” Clark said.
Comments Off on Arizona State Startup G3Box, Finalist In Dyson Competition0LikeLike 1,942
An Arizona State University startup in the colleges Edison student entrepreneur initiative, has been selected as a finalist in the global James Dyson Awards Competition.
The startup, called G3Box, has done something amazing for healthcare in rural areas. G3Box is converting freight shipping containers into small medical clinics. G3Box provides engineering design and manufacturing towards the conversion of steel shipping containers into durable, semi-mobile, stand-alone facilities that are ideal for remote environments.
“G3Box is honored to have been selected as one of the 10 U.S. finalists in the Dyson awards. From the start, G3Box has been about solving problems specifically in healthcare provision,” said Susanna Young, Co-founder and CEO of G3Box. “The Dyson awards are, at the core, about solving problems with new and creative ideas. We do that with a commitment to integrity, humility, and collaboration.”
Of course the Dyson Awards competition is held annually by Jes Dyson’s charitable trust. Dyson being the inventor and founder of the vacuum cleaner company with his same name.
The James Dyson Award is open to product design, industrial design and engineering university-level students or recent graduates who have studied in countries including the USA, Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, and the UK. The James Dyson Award supports students not only with monetary prizes, but also by promoting and recognizing good quality entries. The US winner will be announced later this year.
Comments Off on Can’t Wait To Crowdfund Your Startup? Try London Startup: Up And Funding0LikeLike 2,101
Crowdfunding is all the rage these days. Kickstarter seems to be one of the quickest way to get a tangible product startup, movie, or book off the ground. The downside to Kickstarter is that you can’t invest in businesses and startups.
The JOBSAct was passed earlier this year and the SEC is currently working on the rules and regulations that will apply to those crowdfunding their startups. Until the JOBSAct, to legitimately invest in a startup as an accredited investor you typically had to have a net worth of over $1 million dollars excluding your residence. This made it tough for those that wanted to invest in startups but didn’t monetarily qualify from an accreditation standpoint.
There’s no doubt that crowdfunding for startups will be hot but truthfully it probably won’t officially roll out until the spring of 2013, regardless of what others are saying.
If you’re jonesing to get started with crowdfunding your startup, you could incorporate across the pond and then use UpandFunding which is a UK based crowdfunding site that’s starting to pick up some serious traction.
UpandFunding isn’t just about startups though, you can also invest in established businesses and establishes businesses can go to upandfunding.com to raise capital at anytime for any need. UpandFunding, because they are based in the UK, can already allow small, crowdfunded investments for actual equity.
We got a chance to talk to UpandFunding in the interview below:
Comments Off on Memphis Startup Accelerator ZeroTo510 Sets Record With Over 80% Follow On Funding In Less Than 30 Days0LikeLike 2,076
That headline is a true testament to the power of the cohort based ZeroTo510 startup accelerator in Memphis Tennessee. Five of the six startups in their recently graduated class received $100,000 or more in follow on funding from MB Ventures and Innova Memphis.
Four of the startups received follow on funding to continue acceleration of their businesses. Those four companies were:
BioNanovations has developed a device that uses bionanotechnology for rapid diagnosis of bacterial infection.
EcoSurg has developed an environmentally friendly alternative to traditional foam patient positioners used in surgeries.
Nanophthalmics has developed, through the use of nanotechnology, a surgical device to more effectively treat corneal abrasions.
Urova Medical has developed a minimally invasive treatment to address feminine stress urinary incontinence.
“In each case, we believe these four companies have shown the progress, the growth and proof-of-concept that were expected to move to the next phase of funding,” said Allan Daisley, director of innovation and sustainability initiatives for Memphis Bioworks Foundation and program director for ZeroTo510. “It is extremely rewarding to us as an organization, because the funding of four companies exceeds what we considered to be a measure of success when this program was launched.”
The fifth startup to receive follow on funding was Restore Medical. Restore Medical wowed the audience when Co-Founder Shawn Fynn announced during their presentation that they had already secured a purchase order valued at $3.75 million dollars pending 510k approval. In the case of Restore Medical, they decided to skip the acceleration investment and went directly to a Series A round. MB Ventures and Innova Memphis are leading that Series A round with an undisclosed investment, assumed to be more than the $100,000 Restore Medical would have received with the acceleration funds.
Handminder, a startup that has developed a rehabilitation device for people who have suffered a stroke, to regain use of their hands, did not receive follow on funding.
With an 80% success rate, by the standard of “follow on funding” Zeroto510 is the most successful accelerator in Tennessee.
Zeroto510 is a joint venture between Memphis Bioworks with cohort based accelerator programming provided by SeedHatchery a product of LaunchYourCity.
LaunchYourCity CEO & President Eric Matthews said: “The results speak for themselves. 35 companies have entered our incubators because of our efforts. EmergeMemphis has a waiting list for the first time. We have invested time and money in 12 promising startup technologies at our research institutions, two of which have started up as new companies. Over 20 companies have received pre-seed capital of $50,000 or less. Of those 8 have received follow-on capital of $100,000 or greater.”.
In addition to Zeroto510 and SeedHatchery LaunchYourCity has a sister program for independent filmmakers called “FuelFilm”. Also the local music incubator, The Memphis Music Foundation, has replicated some of the LaunchYourCity programming into their music resource offerings.
Comments Off on Israeli Startup: Managed For Mimi Provides Content Solutions For Your Company Brand INTERVIEW0LikeLike 1,848
So you’ve got your own company and everyone around you has a blog. This isn’t a new situation for today’s business owner. More and more businesses are adding blogs with actual content as part of their web presence. Content can be anything from a CEO’s daily ramblings, to content related to their business type.
More often then not, you’ll find great travel blog entries on hotel and airfare booking sites. If your favorite insurance agency has a blog they may talk about events they are going to sponsor and insurance needs. If you run a hunting and fishing store your blog may contain your personal hunting and fishing exploits or tips on the best gear to buy.
No matter what your business is, blogging and social media are some of the best ways to market yourself and your company.
The problem faced by most business owners though is that they are too busy to write a blog every week or every month, much less everyday. That’s where startups like “Managed For Mimi” come in. This Israeli startup helps provide, aggregate and churn out branded content for others’ sites.
We got a chance to find out all about this lucrative new startup, growing up in the Startup Nation. Check out our interview with “Managed For Mimi” below, and no we didn’t find out who Mimi is.
Comments Off on South Carolina Startup: OpenMenu Standardizing Restaurant Menu’s Online0LikeLike 2,016
It all started over 2 years ago in Columbia South Carolina, over a piece of “death by chocolate” cake. It was Chris Hanscom’s birthday and in like most relationships is wife asked him a simple question, “where do you want to eat tonight?”. It was Hansom’s night and he didn’t really care where he ate, but he wanted a piece of death by chocolate cake.
This search, online and through phone calls, almost brought the death of him (or perhaps his smart phone), but Hanscom was determined to find his favorite piece of cake. What he found was a mess of websites for local restaurants. Some had mobile pages, some had scaled down pages, others had flash that he couldn’t get to load, and still others had text that didn’t look right. When he went to the computer, it was much of the same. There was no consistency in the online menu.
With Hanscom’s battle with the chocolate cake, an idea for OpenMenu was born. Now what Hanscom is proposing is a daunting task and he is well aware of that. He’s hoping to make a platform attractive enough that most restaurants will streamline their menus utilizing the OpenMenu platform.
Lets make this abundantly clear though, Hanscom doesn’t have some groovy restaurant app that he wants to sign restaurants up for, he wants them to JUST streamline their menus. The framework around the websites can remain the same, the graphics are all the restaurants, however the menu part, if streamlined and then tied to an API could become a very welcomed thing for restaurant patrons, and a very lucrative startup for Hanscom.
We got a chance to interview this bold entrepreneur. Check out the interview below:
Comments Off on Drexel Students Launch Philly Startup: Tagitbest0LikeLike 2,241
Nicholas Pirollo, a self proclaimed serial entrepreneur and an undergraduate student at Drexel University and his team have launched a new and exciting SEO product. Sure you’re saying what’s new and exciting about an SEO product? Well first off Tagitbest is about Twitter and Instagram, moving SEO to two of the hottest spaces on the planet right now.
Rather than search engine optimization Tagitbest is a “hashtag optimizing engine”. Tagitbest is actually solving a huge problem for people. Take the DNC for instance. We’re on the ground in Charlotte NC operating out of Startup Hub “Packard Place” at the PPL blogger/online journalist lounge. Now in a room full of 500 journalists no one could tell us the “official” hashtag for the DNC on Monday morning. Some are using #DNC2012, some are using #DNC12, Some are just using #DNC and then some are using #obama and #4moreyears.
If you head upstairs to the official Politico convention studios and hub they use their normal tag #Politico and then a different tag for each event that they’re hosting which has been a minimum of 4 events per day. All of these various tags can get a bit confusing, and that’s just for this one event.
Tagitbest will optimize your content, whether it be a picture, tweet or other piece of media and tell you what tag will be best to get your content in front of the most people.
Tagitbest comes in three flavors, web, iOS and Android and you can find their app in both the Google Play Store and the iTunes app store.
The interface is easy to use and as long as you know what a hash tag is you’re in business. Now if you’re a developer they do offer an API as well so that developers can embrace their new backend technology.
Comments Off on Canadian Startup: BufferBox Had Amazon Locker Idea A Year Earlier, INTERVIEW0LikeLike 2,996
By now we’ve all hearda bout Amazon’s new locker service. Amazon Lockers is a system of lockers at public locations that Amazon customers can use for picking up their packages in a safe, secure and more private area. These lockers are a great idea for people who aren’t home and can’t get home for a daily delivery, and also can’t get personal deliveries at work. They’re also great for those of us that shop for nosy kids and spouses around the holidays. Of course you can read between the lines for other reasons that you may not want your Amazon shipments going to your house.
A Canadian startup called BufferBox, actually had the idea a year earlier. The difference between BufferBox and the Amazon Lockers though, is that online e-commerce channels outside of Amazon can use the service.
When BufferBox co-founder Mike McCauley first heard about Amazon Lockers he was disheartened and felt their idea had been ripped off. He was later able to turn it into a much more positive spin when he said: Amazon “put credibility behind the technology,” McCauley said. “Now there’s a big new market Amazon has created. Because Amazon controls 30% of the e-commerce market, you need a third party to offer the service for everyone else.” to the Wall Street Journal
We got a chance to talk with McCauley ourselves about the service that could easily be utilized by the other 70% of the e-commerce industry.
Kyle
It’s not everyday that you find a startup that wants to help you predict the future and share your predictions. That’s of course as long as you throw all the “weather” startups to the wayside. PsyQic a startup from Syracuse New York, does just that.
