Comments Off on Interview With Washington DC Startup: Distil, Content Protection Network0LikeLike 3,644
If you have a content based web site on the internet ( and who doesn’t) you may want to pay attention to Arlington based startup Distil.it. Distil focuses solely on protecting website owners’ content from data scraping, content theft, and competitive data mining.
Do you have countless sites just stealing your content with no linkback? Have you ever been totally plagiarized without your knowledge just to find in a Google search content that was obviously lifted from your site? Those are just some of the things that happen when your website content is scraped and your data is mined.
More importantly with the case of content scraping, you can actually lose page-rank and hinder your SEO. Most web crawlers discard duplicate content so sometimes when you’re writing articles to maximize your SEO return, you’ll actually lose that content when it’s scraped and thrown on another site without your permission.
In addition to identifying and blocking malicious content and data scraping Distil also accelerates content through 14 global nodes which improves site load time and reduces server load.
We found out all about this and more when we talked with Distil’s co-founder and CEO Rami Essaid in the interview below:
Comments Off on Xoogler Spotlight NYC Startup: Flatiron Health0LikeLike 2,684
In 2010 Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg sold their startup Invite Media to Google for $81 million dollars. At that time they were absorbed into Google where they spent the last two years. Now the co-founding team is back at it again, and navigating through unchartered territory.
Their new startup is New York City based Flatiron Health. FlatIron Health hopes to streamline cancer screening for clinical trials. Currently biomarkers among other diagnostics, are used to identify cancer patients for clinical trials however the team told Business Insider they feel that the process could be improved upon and streamlined.
“It’s actually very complicated to find out if you’re eligible,” Turner told SAI. “It’s like 120 variables and there’s no way to know quickly. We hope to speed that up for physicians because clinical trials are huge for cancer. In general, treatments fail and trials are the way to go.”
After both 26-year-old founders had loved ones suffer through cancer they knew their next mission would somehow be related to cancer. They admittedly don’t have their exact product yet however they’ve been holding weekly brainstorming sessions and have a pilot going with some of the major hospitals.
FlatIron Health is a far cry from the ad technology and bid manager platform Turner and Weinberg created with Invite Media. That platform allowed advertisers to manage online campaigns across multiple platforms.
Weinberg and Turner are in a better financial position than most new medical startups. They’re attacking this startup with the vigor of anxious entrepreneurs and aren’t intimidated by the fact that neither founder has any kind of background in medicine, biology or cancer.
“Flatiron Health is either going to be a great success or a horrible failure,” says Turner. “Hopefully we’ll do well by doing good.”
Comments Off on Zappos Alum’s Las Vegas Startup: Fandeavor Brings Fans Up Close & Personal0LikeLike 8,932
Tony Hsieh’s company Zappos, the online shoe and clothing shop, is fueling a startup movement in Las Vegas that’s hard to rival anywhere else. Hsieh himself is dumping millions into the Las Vegas tech scene. He’s also very supportive of Zappos employees who have left his company to start their own startups in Las Vegas. One of those startups is Fandeavor.
Fandeavor is a new startup in Las Vegas that’s looking to match sports fans with over the top fan experiences that can’t be experienced any other way.
8newsnow reports that last November Fandeavor’s co-founders Tom Ellingson and Dean Curtis, who both used to work at Zappos, did a fan experiment. They were able to procure two sets of tickets to the Las Vegas Invitational basketball tournament at the Orleans Arena. Two fans paid $250 for the experience to see the Rebels beat the University of Southern California in the semi-finals. The other two fans paid $275 to see the rebels defeat UNC in the finals. Their seats were in an arena suite. They also received a pregame talk with an assistant UNLV coach, floor access to pre-game warm ups and a presentation at halftime on the floor with autographed basketballs.
At an August 5th soccer match between Real Madrid and Santos Laguna Fandeavor auctioned off a prize packaged for $575 which included on field, hospitality tent seats, free food and drink and an off-chance meeting with one of the players. They’ve also been able to put together packages for fans of professional bullriders and other UNLV games.
Currently the Fandeavor roster includes: UNLV, University of Southern California, Arizona State University, and Texas Christian University. Both Ellingson and Curtis have plans to continue to expand through the world of college sports, who are known for their passionate fans.
“We want to give the colleges a revenue stream that didn’t exist before,” Ellingson told 8newsnow. “They have assets that they may not be using up, like sideline passes. We want to help them monetize their hospitality assets.
Ellingson Continued: “One thing we want to do is give out stadium tours, which is something that doesn’t cost the university anything other than to have someone give the tour. We’d like to have the ability to get a fan into a press box when the announcers are going through their pre-game routines. We’d like them to have access to the locker room and weight room. These stadiums are shrines.”
The duo is also courting the NFL, NBA and Nascar. Like most of the other Zappos alumni, Fandeavor has raised $525,000 in financing including an investment from Hsieh himself. They plan on using the cash to help with expansion and marketing.
Comments Off on Des Moines Startup: Proferral Taking On The Traditional Business Card INTERVIEW0LikeLike 2,429
Earlier this summer, we reported on a young Florida startup called Feathr that’s looking to replace the traditional business card by sending contact information and other relevant professional information via mobile app. Today we turn to the middle of the country and Des Moines IA, and a new startup called Proferral.
Des Moines app development startup iapps24 has designed Proferral to be a business referral app that also looks to eliminate the business card. They also have baked in premium features that will allow you to make calls and set appointments in a mobile CRM style solution that will execute and keep track of the call and appointment.
Proferral also takes into consideration the context for which business cards and contact information are exchanged. An integrated calendar allows users to set follow-up appointments right away. Other features baked into Proferral include a portal to offer discounts and rewards, a place to publish videos and testimonials, and other tools that help connectors make the most out of the networking experience.
Proferral also offers a rich networking community within the website, Android and iOS apps. Users can join an already existing network or create a new one.
This feature packed app, and thriving app development startup are percolating in Des Moines IA which is a hotbed of new technology startups. We got a chance to interview iapps24. Check out the interview below.
Just over a decade ago Bostonian Ray Walters and his family moved west. They landed in the barbecue capital of the world, Kansas City. While Walters mannerisms and sports influences are definitely still intertwined with the north-east, for instance he still says Wicked Pisah and is a die-hard Red Sox fan, his culinary artistry is firmly planted in Kansas City.
According to Ray Ray’s Rub’s Kickstarter page, Walters’ real fascination with barbecue started 10 years ago at a restaurant called Arthur Bryant’s Barbecue. Walters’ a connoisseur of fine meat, fell in love at first bite with the succulent, slow cooked ribs that were served up at Arthur Bryant’s. Walters was determined to emulate the mouth-watering flavor and then tweak the recipe until it was his own.
Walters has been doing private catering for friends and family over the past decade, he even owns a pair of “Double D” slow cookers that he hauls on a trailer behind his pickup truck to deliver the goodness to his buddies. In 2010 Walters was the official caterer of the first Big Android Barbecue event in Austin Texas. Sure there are plenty of great barbecue joints in Texas but after some of the organizers (buddies of Walters’) tasted his world-famous barbecue the decision was made that for the next two annual events he would deliver the goodness.
Personally after trying his barbecue at that first Big Android BBQ event I was sold, and I’ve experienced North Carolina, Memphis and St.Louis Barbecue as well. Ray Ray’s is most definitely top-notch.
Walters insists there’s no real secret to his world-famous barbecue rub, he just keeps innovating and never stops learning.
If you’re questioning why we are running a story about a barbecue startup, why not? But for validation, a Washington DC based barbecue company called Pork Barrel Barbecue attracted an investment from ABC’s Shark Tank Shark Barbara Corcoran. By day Corcoran is a power real estate broker in the mean streets of New York City, but even she loves great Barbecue.
While Walters doesn’t have the luxury of pitching in the Shark Tank, he’s had the opportunity to cook for tens of thousands over the last decade, who’ve always asked him to package his famous rub and send it mail order. That’s exactly what he’s hoping to do if he reaches his modest goal of $10,000 on Kickstarter. Walters’ isn’t that far off. He’s already raised nearly $4,000 at the time of publishing with over 20 days left to go.
By day Walters is a tech writer for ZiffDavis publications ExtremeTech and Geek.com he’s also been an editor for Androidguys.com, host of the AGTN podcast, co-organizer of the Big Android Barbecue, Youth Pastor and more, but all the while, there’s been something literally cooking in his kitchen, his front yard and his head. Walters is simultaneously working on a book about Ray Ray’s Rub, which is included in perk packages over $50.
On the meat, Ray Ray’s Rub is full of great flavor and not too strong. Sure it would be great if Walters could find a way to actually ship his barbecue creations fully cooked and ready to eat. Who know’s perhaps after Ray Ray’s Rubs takes off he could get complete brisket and other dishes with the rub baked in, into stores across the country. For now though, it’s all about the rub.
Walters preaches about honesty, integrity and hard work which are the keys behind this startup he’s launching on Kickstarter. He has a great video that you can see below that isn’t fancy and doesn’t have a lot of effects but it’s honest and, you’ll love the way this north-east transplant says barbecue.
His Kickstarter entry is $1 and it goes all the way up to $2,000. He’s raising $10,000 to rollout 1000 bottles of rub, create the business, and expand his website. We’re willing to bet this will be one of the rare hard good food projects that gets over funded.
Whether you’re a local history buff, looking to move somewhere new or just want to know what’s up with your block there’s a startup incubating at DogPatch Labs in Boston for you. That startup is called BlockAvenue and it’s going to be your one stop shop for anything and everything about your neighborhood.
BlockAvenue uses a number of ways to find out everything about your block. The startup utilizes geodata, local trends, local happenings and plain old crowd sourced information from your neighbors. This is valuable information for other neighbors, people thinking about visiting, and people thinking about moving to the neighborhood. Sure all of this information can be found on the net, but there’s not one single site that serves it up all together, and quite in the way BlockAvenue will.
We’re sure that BlockAvenue is going to be epic why? Because DogPatch Labs, a Polaris Ventures backed incubator, is also where great startups like Instagram and Apptopia grew up. In fact, BlockAvenue’s founder, serial entrepreneur Tony Longo wrote a blog post about what it’s like to incubate at the dogpatch check that out here.
Dogpatch just oozes startups. The building the Boston Dogpatch is in is One Cambridge Center which also happens to be the address for TechStars Boston. Not including the 13 startups in the current fall class at TechStars the building itself is home to over 50 startups, and is also the Microsoft office for the Cambridge area.
As for BlockAvenue, this is going to be an amazing resource for anyone that wants information on their neighborhood. More and more people are starting to have more civic pride on a hyperlocal level than ever before. They’re taking to other blogs, and social networks to share the kind of information you’ll find at BlockAvenue. Once there’s one place for all that information it will continue to grow as more people get engaged with the service.
We were able to break the BlockAvenue team away from the whiteboards, conference rooms, coding and ping-pong for a short little interview. Check it out below.
Ok so here’s a concept we’ve never seen before and it’s quite interesting. A Nashville startup called Street Jelly has put street performers online for the world to enjoy. But not only that they’ve created a system of using virtual currency called “tokens” so that you can fill up that street performers jar, guitar case, hat or bucket. Yes, any kind of street performer be it a clown, a mime, a great saxophone player, guitar player or any other street performer, can go virtual with Street Jelly.
The street performers can take the “Rocker Pins” that viewers have purchased with tokens and cash them out for real money via PayPal. Now you can sit in the comfort of your own home and watch street performers until your hearts content.
Have you ever come back from a trip and told people about a great street performer you’ve seen? Now you can take them online to Street Jelly and show them first hand.
Street performers add to most cities culture. Most street performers are actually really good and some just prefer to be street performers rather than working late night in smoky dark clubs or trying their luck at studios and record deals. Street Jelly captures the essence of great street performers and puts them online to share with the rest of the world.
This idea was born in Nashville, a city that has no shortage of street performers. In fact Nashville, because it’s Music City USA, has some of the best street performers in the world.
Street performers was founded by serial entrepreneur Frank Podlaha, who’s history with music goes way back to his childhood and playing in the drum line. He’s had some other successful startups which he talks about in the interview below.
Comments Off on Florida Startup: Path.To Is The E-Harmony For Tech Jobs INTERVIEW0LikeLike 3,540
Darren Bounds,the CEO of Jacksonville Florida based startup Path.To considers his startup the “e-harmony” for recruiting tech talent. There is a lot that goes into the backend of this job recommendation platform. Path.to must have something right because well known companies like Eventbrite, Evernote and Vimeo have already used the young startup to recruit tech talent.
When someone with a tech background is looking for their next tech opportunity and creates a profile with Path.To, they add their normal skills, and resume along with information that’s aggregated from their professional social graph including Behance, Dribble, Forrst and Github. This way a more accurate picture of the candidate is created for those recruiters and HR people looking to fill tech positions. The users score continues to grow as they apply to more jobs and make more choices.
We first covered Path.To when they expanded to Chicago, Boston and New York City. Now they’ve added; Austin, Dallas, Houston, Boulder, Denver, and Los Angeles. They’re adding their service to Philadelphia, DC, and Pittsburgh tomorrow. They’re also adding Silicon Prairie on September 4th and Atlanta Georgia along with Jacksonville Florida on September 12th.
Path.To will email job candidates available positions that the service feels are a good match for them. Path.To users searching for a job can opt out of certain employers if they feel that they aren’t a fit, and of course continue to apply for jobs that they feel are, the perfect fit.
We got a chance to interview Bounds, check out the interview below:
Comments Off on The Friend HookUp Goes Online With DC 500 Startups, Startup Hinge INTERVIEW0LikeLike 2,337
Dating sites have been around almost as long as the internet. I remember a time when it was actually odd to try and find a date online. Now it’s pretty much odd to find a date or relationship in real life. One thing that most online dating sites haven’t tackled though is hooking up friends of friends. Now we’re not talking about a one night stand hook up, rather the old school version where you introduce a friend to a mutual friend and voila.
Now Washington DC, 500 startups backed, startup Hinge helps achieve that… sort of.
Hinge uses the Facebook social graph to match users with compatible friends of friends. Now your market of available singles increases from what you normally see from online dating sites to your friends on Facbeook and then your friends’ friends who may be somewhat compatible with you.
What this also means is if your perfect match is single, but not actively pursuing dating or a relationship, you may still meet that person via hinge. You know the same way your buddies or girlfriends introduce you to that perfect someone, that may not actually be looking.
When you actually check Hinge out and what they’re doing, it’s hard to believe no one else has tried to do this. Hinge is a great idea and an awesome Washington DC startup. It’s so awesome that they’ve caught the eye of Dave McClure’s 500 startups.
We got a chance to interview Bennett Richardson, Hinge’s CMO. Check out the interview below:
Comments Off on Interview With Danish Startup: Rating WorkPlace0LikeLike 1,846
Workplace ratings startups are starting to pop up all over the country and now apparently, around the world. Now, thanks to the internet, people who are interviewing for jobs get the opportunity to vet the employer as much as the employer can vet them.
Startups in the United States like California based startup Worker’s Count, allow employees to rate their workplace either by name or anonymously, in hopes that these ratings improve culture and quality of life at the work place. Some workplaces fare well on ratings sites, while others have their dirty laundry aired out amongst millions on the web.
Denmark startup Rating WorkPlace, functions similarly to Worker’s Count. Employees can rate their workplace for culture, benefits, job satisfaction and more. They can choose to do it anonymously or by name. Steven Moller, Rating WorkPlace founder, is hoping that by offering his service, people will no longer work in bad environmens.
We got a chance to interview Moller below. Please note that Moller is from Denmark and English is not his first language.
Smart watches have done really well on Kickstarter. We’re all familiar with the millions of dollars that the Pebble watch has raked in and many of us have heard about the Android powered Metawatch Strata which raised three times the $100,000 they were looking for.
A new company called Martian Watches, based in Irvine California recently started a Kickstarter campaign for their smart watch earlier this month. While at this writing the project is still under $100,000 of the $200,000 goal there’s still over 30 days left in the campaign. Once this watch starts picking up momentum it will surely out do Meta Watch’s Strata.
Why? Well for starters Martian Watches is looking to sync their smart watch with the iPhone for the purpose of bringing voice commands and Siri interaction to the wrist. You’ll look like a secret service agent as you speak commands into the watch on your wrist.
According to this story in the OCRegister you’ll be able to pair your watch with your existing, Siri enabled iPhone and speak any normal Siri command into the watch. From there your iPhone will handle the Siri query as usual and give you the information that you’re looking for back as a text message on the watch itself.
The startups founders Jeffrey Hsieh and Stan Kinsey already have a working prototype and showed off a bunch of voice commands to folks at the OCRegister.
“Voice command to us was the ultimate solution for making the watch an extremely useful tool. More so than just trying to replicate what you can do on your phone,” Kinsey told ocregister.com
For now the voice commands work one way which seems to be causing a little bit of concern with the people commenting on the Kickstarter Page, but that shouldn’t effect their $200,000 project goal. The watch has already received great reviews from TechCrunch, The Verge and the OC Register.
Comments Off on Chicago Startup: WalkJogRun Keeps Track When You Walk, Jog Or Run INTERVIEW0LikeLike 2,230
Fitness startups are always great. Everyone wants to get fit, stay fit and monitor their fitness regimen. A startup in Chicago called WalkJogRun has a website and app that helps anyone who runs, walks, jogs, hikes and cycles, monitor their exercise, map their routes and track their progress.
As a compliment to their web and mobile app platform WalkJogRun also has a blog and podcast that provides inspiration to those using their platform. They also offer tips, as well as healthy recipes.
Whether you are a casual jogger, mall walker or you’re training for a marathon, WalkJogRun’s robust platform can cover your workout and be your walking, jogging and running companion.
The precursor to what WalkJogRun has become was originally created by co-founder Adam Howitt. Howitt was living in Atlanta and training for the PeachTree 10k when he got fed up with just doing quarter miles in the parking garage. He tells us in an interview below, that he created the first iteration of WalkJogRun in 2002.
Howitt’s co-founder Jeff Kenny redesigned Howitt’s original website as a surprise back in 2003 and then they realized that WalkJogRun could be beneficial to many running enthusiasts. This was of course, way before the fitness app boom, and GPS tracking boom that we’re currently experiencing.
The Chicago based startup has made plenty of refinements over the last 10 years to what the website and app have become today.
We got a chance to interview WalkJogRun. Check out the interview below:
Now in their third year the cohort based startup accelerator Jumpstart Foundry, in Nashville Tennessee has ironed out a lot of kinks. We got a chance to spend some time with Marcus Whitney a co-founder at Jumstart Foundry, who also serves as the accelerator’s Managing Director. Through each of the last three cohorts Whitney has spent the most day to day time with all of the classes.
Throughout the Jumpstart Foundry demo day the theme surrounding Whitney’s role was consistent. Whitney, while a great and likable guy, means business. He’s a serial entrepreneur himself who’s founded a handful of his own successful startups. That also means he knows the struggles first hand at what a founder and a founding team at a startup goes through. That’s why he’s one of the best possible people in Nashville to serve as Jumpstart Foundry’s Managing Director.
While a three month boot-camp style accelerator can be a fun and life enriching experience, Whitney is known for telling teams like it is and establishing the ground rules on day one. He’s also known for pushing entrepreneurs to their limit. As far as the program goes there’s no bs in the selection process. Whitney told us that they don’t take teams without a technologist. We’ve seen teams at accelerators all over the country who come with an idea guy, a business development guy and no developer or coder. Often these teams blow most of their seed money on outsourcing and barely have a product ready for demo day. One of the biggest things we noticed at Jumpstart Foundry’s demo day is that all seven teams had a product up and running. No wireframes, no mock ups, no business plans, every team had a working product you could go out on the internet and try right now.
We asked Whitney along with Baker Donelson’s Emerging Business Practice Chair, Chris Sloan, what team at the Jumpstart Foundry this year, was the most improved. They both unanimously and at the same exact time said PhotoRankr. In fact they both agreed that PhotoRankr captured the essence of what a cohort style accelerator program was all about.
Whitney talked about PhotoRankr’s day one pitch. Sloan, who is a pro-amateur photographer in his s
pare time recalled thatPhotoRankr’s pitch on day one included a slide show with no photos. Who does that? A photo platform slide show with no photos.
When Sloan introduced the PhotoRankr team on Thursday he spoke very proudly letting the audience know that not only was their pitch deck filled with photos, every photo in their slide show was procured from PhotoRankr.
So what is PhotoRankr, it’s an online community for photographers. It allows photographers to chat with one another, get advice, vote pictures up and down and the biggest part, it provides a platform to sell photos. As PhotoRankr co-founder Tyler Sniff pointed out in the presentation, the stock photo resources on the internet right now are relatively weak, most have had the same images for years and the ones with great photos are way too costly.
Now, someone looking for a photo for their website, book, magazine, movie or any other use can peruse the pages of PhotoRankr and find what they need. The photographers themselves set the prices for the photos, along with the licensing terms which typically means they will be fairly priced.
Sloan recently joined PhotoRankr and wasn’t sure what to expect. He had tried most of the other photo sharing services out there, but he was excited when he started receiving emails notifying him that people had liked his photos.
As for the team itself, they work and operate like a family. That could possibly be attributed to the fact that three of the four members of the founding team are actually brothers. Tyler serves as the company’s Head of Business Development. Their CEO is Jacob Sniff who will be graduating from Princeton this year. Their third brother Matthew Sniff serves as the company’s CEO. Noah Willard, a family friend, serves as the Creative Director.
Whitney said that one of the teams keys to success throughout the program was their reaction to criticism. Rather than being head strong and ego driven, the PhotoRankr team took every piece of criticism in stride, often asked questions about what their mentors were telling them, and then sought advice immediately after making changes.
From where we stand the biggest challenge for PhotoRankr is going to be exposing the features to the market place and what sets them apart from Flickr, Photo Bucket and that product formerly known as Picassa.
When you watch the pitch video below you’ll see what a great job PhotoRankr did during the Jumpstart Foundry program:
Comments Off on Nashville Startup: OurVinyl’s Final Pitch From Jumpstart Foundry Demo Day VIDEO0LikeLike 1,972
Demo Day at Jumpstart Foundry was amazing. The class was great and miraculously every single team that presented had a working product. Of course that’s the goal behind every accelerator but we’ve been to quite a few accelerator demo days where that wasn’t the case.
So what is OurVinyl, no it’s not an online record shop for vinyl buffs. OurVinyl is actually a music video platform that encompasses the user and allows the user to curate their own channels, playlists and discovery new music. Where most music discovery startups focus on just the audio, OurVinyl is all about video.
OurVinyl has started with indie artists and other video content that you won’t find anywhere else on the web. The founders have backgrounds in video and it shows with the intuitive user experience created within OurVinyl.
The OurVinyl team has equated most of their best practices to Spotify rather than Pandora. Of course neither Spotify nor Pandora actually do video, they are both just audio only. OurVinyl is changing that by offering a streaming video platform accessible by Google TV, Apple TV, Xbox and Roku.
They have an easy to understand subscription model which guarantees you access to all of your favorite videos on the platform and customization features for your specific tastes. Many don’t realize that YouTube is one of the top places people go to source not just videos, or music videos but music itself. OurVinyl is capitalizing on that fact with their unique new platform.
In their pitch video from Jumpstart Foundry’s Demo Day, they explain exactly how the platform works and how they plan on monetizing it through advertising and subscription plans.
Another feature that’s rather new and baked into OurVinyl is not just the ability to like or not like songs and music videos themselves, but the advertising as well. After an ad unit plays you can tell OurVinyl whether you like ads like that or not. If you say “no” you won’t have to see the same ad again.
Kyle
If you have a content based web site on the internet ( and who doesn’t) you may want to pay attention to Arlington based startup Distil.it. Distil focuses solely on protecting website owners’ content from data scraping, content theft, and competitive data mining.
