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Bloomington Indiana Startup Weekend Is Back November 9th

Bloomington Indiana, home to Indiana University, is a hotspot for startups and entrepreneurial activity in Indiana. It was while attending the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University that Nick Tippmann not only helped organize Startup Weekend Bloomington, but also a Shark Tank Season Premiere Party with Mark Cuban.

Now, Startup Weekend Bloomington is back. While a lot of cities Bloomington’s size are embarking on their first or second official Startup Weekend event, this will be the fourth in the town of just 81,000.

This time around the organizers include Matt Burris, Jessica Falkenthal, John Adamson, Paul Simacek and Chris White. They also have Steve Bryant the Executive Director for the Cook Center for Entrepreneurship at Ivy Tech on board as a coach. They also have Kyle Johnston, President of Onsite OHS signed up to judge. They will announce more coaches and judges soon enough.

For those of you not familiar with Startup Weekend, it’s a 54 hour startup hackathon that starts on a Friday evening and finishes up on Sunday evening.

Friday kicks off with “Friday Pitches” those entrepreneurs and founders who have registered and have an idea they would like to see turned into an actual startup have 60 seconds to pitch that idea. After the pitches the crowd votes, by show of sticker, on which startups will be built over the next 52 hours. After the ideas are picked, teams form and breakout into groups for the next 50 or so hours to develop, build out their ideas and prove customer validation. This is a daunting task for some.

Some Startup Weekend venues allow the teams to work around the clock in true hackathon fashion. Others typically break for the evenings around midnight and come back first thing in the morning at 8am or 9am.

On Saturdays, teams dive head first into creating websites, designing mock ups for apps, and hitting the streets interviewing potential users about their idea. Some of the teams are lucky enough to have outside people they can go to by phone, skype or in person to work out the kinks. Coaches and mentors are also on hand to help answer key questions about viability, design, legality and everything else a business would need to know to launch.

Sunday is the day of reckoning for the remaining teams. At the end of the evening they will have five minutes to present their idea in it’s finished state and get grilled by a panel of local judges.

Startup Weekend’s are typically fueled by tons of food (Pizza, donuts etc) and plenty of caffeine.

Lunker, a social app for fisherman, was the winner of Bloomington’s last Startup Weekend event which was held in May. The team received a grand prize package featuring goods and services from local businesses and organizations, including three months of office space at The Solution Lab, legal services from Mallor and Grodner, accounting services from BKD, a free marketing campaign from BizProps and a free business plan review from Localstake.

If you’ve got what it takes, head on over to the official Startup Weekend website at the link below.

Linkage

Here’s the page for the next Startup Weekend Bloomington

Here’s our coverage of Startup Weekend

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Kansas Startup: Lead Horse Technology Launches MedLoom Patient Safety Tool Interview

A Junction City Kansas startup called Lead Horse Technology has introduced a new patient safety tool that provides critical safety information to doctors providing patient care. Adverse reactions to medication can be life threatening in any setting, but especially in a hospital setting where doctors and nurses are charged with the care of several patients at one time. While the move to paperless charting is welcomed by all, it can actually open up risk factors such as adverse reactions to medication at an alarming rate.

Medloom, the tool created by Lead Horse Technology, is designed to be an add on for electronic health information systems and provides important medical patient safety information to doctors, nurses, technicians, pharmacists and anyone else who comes in contact with the patient and their electronic medical record (EMR).

Medloom provides pharmacovigilance (the ‘assessment and monitoring of the safety of drugs as used in the real world’) support to clinical decision-making. Unlike other “clinical decision support systems”, Medloom does not rely on published data but uses an advanced artificial intelligence algorithm to create ‘at risk’ profiles from the FDA’s adverse event reporting system, then cross-references these profiles with individual patient records to scan for those patients who match. Patient identity is never compromised or even an issue, because Medloom only looks at the patient profile (meds, background conditions, age and gender) and never captures patient ID.

In an initial clinical validation trial Medloom correctly identified 80% of the patients who were at risk for not just adverse reactions to medication but life threatening adverse reactions to medication.

We got a chance to interview Dr. Ramona Leibnitz, one of the co-founders of Lead Horse Technology about this exciting new medical startup. Check out the interview below.

Bull City Stampede Launches Seven New North Carolina Startups

Last week, people from all over the Raliegh/Durham/Chapel Hill area, known as the Triangle, showed up for the final presentations of the Bull City Stampede startup program. The end result was seven new North Carolina startups were launched.

Bull City Stampede is a sixty day accelerator program which provides startups with office space, furniture, wifi and other resources that they need to grow their companies. The 60 day program culminated with a demo day event to a packed house, at Beyu Caffe in downtown Durham, North Carolina.

This sessions Bull City Stampede Class included some tangible product startups in the fashion industry, jewelry industry, financial services, social media and even a jazz non profit. This variety showed off the new types of businesses and startups that are calling the Raliegh Durham area home. This is great news for the region as they plan for the launch of their Startup North Carolina regional partnership of Startup America which launches on August 20th.

“This was a special group of entrepreneurs that supported each other and built better companies because of their time with startups outside of their industry,” said Adam Klein, Startup Strategist for the Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce. “We had non-software companies receiving help from the techies and vice versa. It shows the power of putting creative people together in a creative environment.”

While the event launches seven startups out of North Carolina, one of the startups Alekto, relocated from Washington DC for the Bull City Stampede program and has decided to stay in North Carolina. Five of the startups will continue growing their business in NC.

The Bull City Startup Stampede also partnered with Pruvop, a digital products lab in downtown Durham, to award one startup a prize package including $5,000 in custom software development & consulting. Pruvop co-founder Adam Schultz announced The Art of Cool as the recipient of the software package. The Art of Cool is a jazz presenting non-profit working to launch an international jazz festival in Durham.

“In addition to sharing the vision of a prospering, culturally vibrant Durham, we were personally impressed by Cicely’s (AOC founder) drive, hunger for feedback and the ability to pivot and grow rapidly based on the feedback she was given,” said Schultz. “It’s organizations like hers that we love to work with.”

“The Stampede is the launching ground for startups in Durham,” said Matthew Coppedge, Director of Marketing at Downtown Durham, Inc. “We are part of the pipeline developing in Durham that helps early-stage entrepreneurs go from concept to market quickly.”

To date Stampede has done a good job of accelerating startups and then keeping them in North Carolina. So far 28 companies have gone through the program and 15 have remained in downtown Durham, a statistic that you don’t typically find with accelerators who open up their applications nationwide or globally.

Bull City Stampede has provided this list of all of this sessions class and their Twitter handles:

• Alekto empowers consumers through innovative credit reporting management services. @AlektoCo

• Directed Deposits helps individuals find and fund high interest, FDIC-insured savings accounts that are good for your wallets and the issues & communities you care about. @DirectedDeposits

• Freshly Given embraces minimalist style, creativity & sustainability through accessories, handmade from genuine re-purposed leather. @FreshlyGiven

• Offline Media is envisioning a world where “social” means more than just sitting behind a computer. @offlinemedia

• Seam Happy designs and makes custom promotional products, decor, and apparel. For business, home, and general happiness. @SeamHappy

• Social Media Phobia Solutions is a fearless digital media consulting and business management firm. @BreeLDavis

• Sweeps helps you get just about anything done by motivated college students for $25 per hour. @SweepsJobs

• The Art of Cool Project is dedicated to preserving, presenting, and promoting the local vibrant, varied, and surprisingly under-appreciated jazz and art scene in Raleigh-Durham. @theaocproject

Linkage:

Check out Bull City Stampede Here

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Chuck Gordon & Mario Feghali Storage Warriors With Austin Startup SpareFoot

Chuck Gordon (L) Has recently lost the Justin Bieber-esque mop top (photo: forbes.com)

When you think about tech startup and storage nine times out of ten you think about cloud storage, or flash storage, RAM, DDR and any number of things. Well Austin Texas startup SpareFoot is about real storage.

Think Uncle Fred’s Storage on the side of route 40 or Grandma’s Attic storage facility tucked away behind the rest stop. Those storage facilities, the ones featured on Storage Wars, are what SpareFoot is all about.

It’s understandable at this day and age you don’t have time to go up and down the highway trying to find the best deal for your extra things. That’s why SpareFoot allows you to go to one website, figure out where you want to store your stuff, how much stuff you want to store and how long you want to store it for. After you input a little data the magical SpareFoot platform comes to life and serves up suggestions for the best self storage facility and option for you.

Two UCLA implants into Austin; Chuck Gordon and Mario Freghali are the brain power behind this startup that is firmly entrenched in the $22 billion dollar storage industry.

SpareFoot is an alumnus of the Capital Factory accelerator and is funded to the beat of $4.5 million, not too shabby, or as Dave on Storage Wars would say “yuuupppppp”. We got a chance to talk to the SpareFoot team in the interview below.

Romanian Startup PagePeeker Provides An Easy Platform For Screenshots INTERVIEW

As an Apple and Mac user for over 25 years I’ve never really had to go elsewhere to find a screen shot. My fingers just inherently go command+shift+4 anytime I need a screenshot and we tidy them up in photoshop. Apparently though, it’s not as easy for those of you using a Windows based machine. Thank goodness for startups like PagePeeker.

PagePeeker is a Romanian startup that makes screen shots and thumbnails a breeze. They bill themselves as the first commercial provider of full page screenshots. Now in all fairness full page screenshots can be tricky even for a Mac. They also offer a superior two step thumbnail generation. Everyone needs a great place to find thumbnails, just take one look at the train wreck of a slide show that our theme creates.

PagePeeker keeps things quick. In fact they are so quick that they keep a current graph on their website that shows the load time for their site, often times with very little load at all.

Does this mean no ones using the service? Well according to PagePeeker co-founder Sorin Vinatoru, they have plenty of customers and their process is so efficient the load time is often next to nothing. This is important in the fast paced blog and websphere.

We got a chance to interview Vinatoru in the interview below:

Recipes Find You With DC Startup Mor.sl INTERVIEW

Recipes find you with Washington DC startup Mor.sl. This new startup in the recipe space has turned the traditional recipe website model on it’s head. Sure they have hundreds of thousands of recipes but rather than have you searching and sifting through thousands of recipes, their intuitive algorithm matches you to recipes based on a quiz you take when joining.

The quiz is fun and practical. It’s multiple choice and you can answer questions about your cooking habits with answers like “the microwave is my best friend”. The quiz also mixes up a bunch of “this or that” questions, like tacos or creamy soup. At the end of the quiz it actually served up results that I would find appealing. With my “the microwave is my best friend” answer, the recipes that mor.sl offered were relatively easy to cook. They also asked how well stocked my pantry was. Indeed I need to do some more shopping but I think me and this mor.sl could get along.

We got a chance to talk with Milli Mittal one of the co-founders of mor.sl. Check out our interview below.

Washington DC Startup: Urgnt.ly Lands Top Internet Executive As Product Lead

Back in April we got the chance to sit down with Urgnt.ly President and Co-Founder Ric Fleisher. Fleisher talked to us about the Fort, Fortify.vc and Urgnt.ly.

Urgnt.ly is a real time location based service that connects people with services that they really need rather than the typical social discovery paradigm of connecting people with things they may like, or want.

For a conceptual example Fleisher told us about the scenario that called for the creation of Urgnt.ly. Fleisher had put the dishwasher on a timer and gone to bed one Friday evening. One of his children woke him up the next morning because there was water in the kitchen. As he tells it there wasn’t a puddle of water, more like a river. Luckily Fleisher had enough knowledge to turn off the water supply to the machine, but after that he needed to contact servicemen, appliance repair people and more. From that experience came Urgnt.ly.

Now Urgnt.ly reports that longtime Internet product executive Rick Robinson has joined the company to help lead the product from Beta to public release. Robinson’s experience includes Xohm, Sprint and AOL.

“Having been a weekend adviser for so long it’s great to finally be taking the plunge with Urgnt.ly,” said Robinson, whose background includes mobile product development at AOL and Sprint and content and product innovation for startups and established concerns like National Geographic. “This is the right time for a location based utility service that goes beyond much of what we’ve seen and actually provides a critical service for people in need and those who can meet it.”

“We’re extremely happy Rick has decided to come aboard full time to help lead our product efforts,” said Ric Fleisher, serial entrepreneur and Urgnt.ly’s President and COO. “We’re ready for the marketplace and need to assure the product will continue to grow to meet the needs of consumers and service providers.”

Urgnt.ly has established relationships with service providers who will log in to the service and display their location to Urgnt.ly users on a map, via GPS and other locating technology: “Think of it a digital version of the ‘on duty’ light atop taxis, but people can see the light from our app and Website. And service providers can see urgent needs posted by consumers on the same map,” Robinson said.

Urgnt.ly is poised to be a big player in a space that they virtually created.

Linkage:

Check out our interview with Urgnt.ly here

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Toronto Startup ShopLocket Raises $1M For Simple Selling Platform

Two weeks ago we brought you an interview with Toronto startup ShopLocket. This innovative new startup has developed a simple selling platform, where selling anything online, in a one off sale, is as easy as embedding a YouTube video. From ShopLocket’s platform you can sell your digital camera, pair of shoes, dress, car or whatever else you want to unload on any social media channel, your personal blog, website or anywhere that you can embed anything.

There are three easy steps to listing an item on ShopLocket, just create your sale, share it and sell it. You can sell whatever you want. Got some old baseball cards? Sell them. Have an old cell phone? Sell it! Want to teach guitar lessons, no problem. Best of all there is no coding required. They also offer two payment options PayPal and Stripe.

ShopLocket was born after co-founder Katherine Hague had needed to sell some shirts for a consulting job she was working on. Setting up a traditional e-commerce site would have been too costly and too time consuming. Using an existing market place like e-Bay or Craigslist was too unprofessional. So ShopLocket was born.

We love the concept and it seems easy enough to quickly ramp up their user base. Rho Canada Ventures, Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, BDC Venture Capital, Relay Ventures and Extreme Venture Partners obviously see the vision as well as they all came together last week to fund ShopLocket’s seed round to the beat of $1 million dollars.

“The main use of the funds will be to grow the team, both for marketing and development,” ShopLocket co-founder Katherine Hague said in an interview with BetaKit. “Up until now we were a team of three; Andrew Louis my co-founder, Dan Kalmar our Community Manager, and myself. Already we’ve added two team members, Jaclyn Konzelmann for business development and Sumanth Ravipati as our second developer. We expect to be adding a full-time designer and a third developer later in the year.”

Hague reports that a lot of this round came from their participation in Extreme Startups accelerator program. That program gives startups a $50,000 seed in the beginning of the program and an additional $150,000 investment at the end of the program. Many of the other institutional investors that participated in the round, did so because of their relationship with Extreme Startups. Hague said the round took under two months from pitching to money in the bank.

Obviously for a round to come together that quick it’s more than just their participation in an accelerator. Hague says:

“I think what separates us from a lot of different ways of selling online is how easy and social it is to sell. In minutes, someone can have a professional way to sell online. In addition to that, if someone likes the product that you’re selling, they’re able to either share a link to that product with their friends, or even embed it right in their own site.” she told nibletz.com

When a product is easy to understand, easy to use and looks great, like ShopLocket, it doesn’t matter where you’re located, you have a better chance of winning.

Linkage:

Our interview with ShopLocket

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London Startup: GreenLight, Not Just Another Social Discovery App INTERVIEW

Everyone could use more friends right? Well now that finding friends has turned to social networks and everyone wants to be the match.com for friends, social discovery has become a common household phrase (at least in startup circles).

Most social discovery platforms use your social graph to determine who you need to meet. For instance, before being acquired by Facebook, Glancee would use your likes and interests on Facebook to match you with likeminded people close by. We quickly realized how faulty this process was.

Case in point, I signed up for Glancee, and used it at SXSW. Now for whatever reason, when Mark Zuckerberg got a new puppy named Beast, I liked him on Facebook. Shortly after that when I attended SXSW this year I was matched up with 30 people who also liked Mark Zuckerberg’s puppy. Maybe we should have started a fan club and had a drinking party or something but really that raw data algorithm is flawed.

Gaz Evans, one of the co-founders of GreenLight, tells us that their social discovery platform is better. They actually ask personality driven questions about each user in order to match them up with other users. They also tap the users social graph so some of their likes are built in, but overall this may be a good alternative to other social discovery platforms.

We got a chance to interview Evans and the team from GreenLight, check the interview out below. You better read it quick though, before the next social discovery platform comes along.

New Jersey Startup: Hublished Is The Virtual Convention Connection INTERVIEW

Webinars have quickly become a new and great way to continue education and get large groups of people to view and hear presentations that they may not otherwise get a chance to attend. Major brands, educational firms, consultants and business development experts have all turned to the webinar format.

One of the main problems with the webinar format though is without a marquee speaker or presenter it’s hard to distinguish the junk and hacks from good quality content. You can sometimes make a safe assumption that various organizations would only put their stamp of approval on the best webinar speakers, however, as many have found out the hard way, that’s not always the case. Once you’ve committed yourself to an hour, three hour or even five hour webinar, the time is gone.

Hublished is a startup based in New Brunswick New Jersey and New York that aims to take the pain out of webinar presentation and discovery. They hope to become the go-to place for webinar content that’s been vetted and reviewed so that your webinar experience is educational and great quality.

Hublished has two customers the publishers and the end-users. The publishers now have a place to go to place all their upcoming webinars. They can also archive their old webinars on hublished.

We got a chance to interview the Hublished team, check out the interview below.

Interview With European Startup: Bookappo

Bookappo is a new European startup based in the Czech Republic. They provide an online software platform for booking and scheduling appointments using a “book now” button.

Bookappo is perfect for small businesses and even startups. The “book now” button can allow small businesses to let customers check availability and timing and then book their appointment off of the company’s website or Facebook page. The customer side dashboard allows users of book now to easily create their own booking form, email reminders and calendar.

The company has also introduced a mobile version that is accessible from an iPad, iPhone or Android powered device which makes it easy for anyone to set up appointment calendars or book appointments while on the go.

Everyone starts off with a free 30 day trial of Bookappo and then after that it’s just $19 for the lite version and $39 for the pro version. After looking over both offerings the only significant difference between lite and pro is the ability to manage the appointment schedules of “unlimited” employees. That feature is included in the pro version only.

We got a chance to talk with the guys from Bookappo in the interview below:

Memphis Startup: Cloud For Good And Apsona To Get You Over The Edge

Cloud For Good, A Memphis based startup, that works with mission driven organizations to create and implement strategic soultions based on cloud technology, with a strong focus on Salesforce, has teamed up with Apsona. The two companies have released a new product called “Over The Edge”.

Over The Edge helps non-profit and educational organizations who have been using Raiser’s Edge for CRM and business management solutions, to migrate to the more powerful and more robust SalesForce platform. While that looks like a task any decent sized IT department could easily handle, it wouldn’t be with the ease nor the speed that “Over The Edge” brings to the table.

Cloud For Good’s Founder Tal Frankfurt, told us in an in person interview Wednesday night that the Over The Edge products takes under 30 minutes and just 4 clicks to have a non-profit, or educational organization migrated to Sales Force. Frankfurt has found, and many others have agreed, that migration and actually executing the switch-over from something else to SalesForce is the most painful part. Once companies are running on SalesForce it’s smooth Sailing.

While most non-profits and educational organizations know the benefits of switching to SalesForce, theyv’e also heard war stories that kept them from switching. A big data loss for a non-profit could amount in hundreds of hours of paid computer labor to get back up and running, and unfortunately the fees for that kind of service are often not within their reach. That’s one of the driving reasons behind the creation of “Over the edge”.

Cloudforgood has helped a number of non profit organizations and educational organizations with their data and cloud storage needs. While their big focus is on SalesForce they’ve also helped implement CRM systems, teach and implement Google Docs and a variety of other things for non-profits.

Linkage:

Check out Cloudforgood here

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Cincinnati Startup BringMeSomeFood Was One Of The Best Ideas At Startup Weekend

We’re not sure if the judges conceptually understood the concept behind Startup Weekend Cincinnati startup Bringmesomefood.com . The idea is simple, it helps party and event organizers keep track of attendees, themes and who’s bringing what. It’s the ultimate potluck platform.

Potluck has surged in popularity over the last few years s the economy has suffered. People love to go to parties whether times are good or bad. Presumably parties and social gatherings are a way to break away from the ups and downs of everyday life and a way to make people feel good.

Potluck events make it easier for the host or hostess to have a better party.

The problem with Potluck is typically people have no idea what to bring. Also, no one really keeps track of the potluck list as well as they should. Then, what ultimately ends up happening is the party is inundated with ice, red solo cups and chips.

Using bringmesomefood.com party organizers can keep up with who has RSVP’d for the party and who hasn’t. They can also pick a theme for the party and then Bringmesomefood.com will curate a menu based on what is typically served at whatever theme the party is. A tailgate party for instance will call for hamburgers and hotdogs. A toga party may call for gyro’s and baklava. Who knows? Bringmesomefood does.

Bringmesomefood, pulls from some of the best restaurant API’s to come up with great menus. It then assigns dishes to the guests attending the event and can supply those guests with the recipes for their dish.

Bringmesomefood also tracks attendance so when it gets closer to the event you can prepare the right amount of food. You don’t want to prepare a small bowl of potato salad for a party of 100 and you don’t want to prepare 100 brownies for a group of 10. Bringmesomefood keeps up with all that for you.

During their final pitch on Sunday the judges asked the Bringmesomefood team why one of the major event sites like PlanCast, eventbrite and e-vite.com couldn’t just incorporate that system into their existing system, which was a sharp indicator that they may not have understood the robustness of the concept. You can see for yourself in the pitch video below, the startup was explained well and hopefully will move forward into development.

Here’s more of our Startup Weekend Coverage

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Tired Of Giving Crappy Gifts? Check Out Baltimore Startup: NoBadGift INTERVIEW

Nobody likes a bad gift. Receiving bad gifts can be a very uncomfortable experience. As you’re looking at that sweater that went out of style in 1990 you’ve got to smile and say thank you. Then you’re tasked with having to decide whether to hold onto that sweater for the next time your auntie comes over, return it, regift it or throw it away.

The other problem with gifting is that even though you know darn well what you want for your gifts most people just say they don’t. No one wants to feel like they’re asking for anything.

Enter NoBadGift. As the name suggests, this Baltimore startup insures you give a great gift. Why, because the recipient crowdfunds the gift that they really want from friends and family members. The Mike Washington, one of the co-founders of NoBadGift, came up with the idea for the startup when his father wanted an iPad for Christmas one year. After pooling the money for the iPad from his siblings he had an epiphany “why not do this online”.

We got a chance to talk with the team from NoBadGift in the interview below. They tell us about their gift funding system an Baltimore’s explosive startup scene. Of course being from Baltimore we love reporting about Baltimore startups.