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There Are Good Fitness Startups Everywhere Else Like Canada’s Pumpup.co INTERVIEW

For the second time since their launch new Silicon Valley startup website Pando Daily has had blinders on to great startups. As you know earlier this year they missed the memo on the whole Chicago startup scene. Apparently they couldn’t find any good fitness startups either according to Pando Daily Founder Sarah Lacy.

Well we actually went digging for good fitness startups last week and low and behold on the open public forum we all know and love called Twitter we found Waterloo based startup pumpup.co. That proves two things actually, that great fitness startups exist everywhere else and that there is more to Waterloo than Blackberry.

What makes pumpup.co so great a number of things. For starters the three founders behind pumpup.co know their roles and do them well. In an industry that can run a little top heavy on the ego side they have the entrepreneurial founder, the sales, marketing and bizdev founder and of course the athletic trainer founder. You couldn’t have a fitness startup without one.

Phil Jacobson is the sales, marketing and bizdev founder, but he calls himself the hustler founder. We got a chance to talk to him aboat (lol) this great Canadian startup.

What is PumpUp?

PumpUp is a mobile and web application that allows users to build totally personalized, trainer-quality workouts. On top of the amazing workouts, PumpUp tracks your progress over time and provides users with coaching and reminders to improve their fitness and keep them motivated.

Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

Garrett Gottlieb: Garrett is the Hacker of PumpUp. He is a current Bachelor of Computer Science candidate at the University of Waterloo. He has held co-op positions at numerous software companies, including RIM and TribeHR.

Phil Jacobson: Phil is the Hustler of PumpUp. He is a current Bachelor of Business Administration candidate at Wilfrid Laurier University. He has held co-op positions at a variety of fortune 500 companies, including Unilever, PepsiCo, and ConAgra Foods.

Ben Pickard: Ben is the Trainer of PumpUp. He is a current Bachelor of Kinesiology student at the University of Waterloo and a certified Personal Trainer. He is the current President of the Strength and Conditioning club at his University.

Where are you based?

We are based out of Waterloo, Ontario in Canada. We have been awarded space in the Velocity Garage (a startup hub managed by the University of Waterloo).

What problem does PumpUp solve?

PumpUp solves 3 key problems. First off, there are many people who are unsure of what to do when working out, are repeating the same workout, or just choose to not workout at all. Secondly, personal trainers are expensive and finding a good one is difficult. Lastly, there is no current solution that provides users with a trainer-quality workout that is personalized just for them.

There are a few fitness platforms and apps out there now, what is your secret sauce?

Our secret sauce is providing our users with a trainer-quality, personalized workout in a beautifully designed web and mobile application, all for free.

Who is your target user?

Our target users are 18-30 year-old males and females who consider themselves at the beginner or intermediate level of working out. They either currently workout or are interested in starting to workout, but need more direction on what to do.

What’s one lesson you’ve learned in the startup process?

The best lesson that we’ve learned during the startup process so far is that is it crucial to focus on the core product and ensure you build a beautiful experience that adds value for your customers. It is easy to get lost while endlessly adding features to the application. It is essential to build a high-quality product. We believe that quality is essential in keeping our customers satisfied and coming back.

When are you launching?

We are launching our Alpha version on the web within the next two weeks. Following our Alpha web launch, we will be releasing our mobile application as quickly as possible – we are aiming for mid-end of June. Sign up for access to our Alpha launch at http://PumpUp.co.

What’s next for PumpUp?

As mentioned, our next step is launching our mobile version as soon as we can. Following our mobile application, we plan on adding additional social features to enhance the appeal of the application.

Linkage:

Check out pumpup.co at their website here

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LA Startup: Lovvvit Video Interview With Founder Max Gotlieb At TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012

Hollywood producer turned startup founder Max Gotlieb had a genius idea in his head and started developing it into what is now known as Lovvvit. We reported on Lovvvit earlier this year. It’s a video review/recommendation platform for people to pronounce their love for their favorite things.

After a few minutes with Gottlieb I quickly grabbed hold of the concept and it’s indeed genius. I thought back on the past seven years (the youtube years) and how many videos I’ve taken and shared from my favorite places. The number is quite large, but none of them ever talked about the places I actually love.

Sure there are birthday party videos, bachelor party videos, playing around videos and other funny stuff at my favorite haunts but not once did I walk in and do a video saying, “I love this place”. Imagine how cool it would be to have crowd sourced video reviews of peoples’ favorite places. It would be genuine, and engaging for both the loyal customer and the merchant.

Right now merchants are growing tired of the group-coupon (Groupon) deal space. Merchants are finding that they are losing their ass in margin to attract one time customers. Now they want better tools to target their frequent customers. Lovvvit provides a platform for just that, and it’s engaging, innovative and fun.

There’s a reward benefit on both sides of the platform as well. If you’re the customer and you do a video review of your favorite places you can earn Lovvvit dollars and upgrade to a premium status. As with any site the more reviews you do of your favorite places, the more trusted you become in the Lovvvit community.

On the side of the merchant, they are granted access to the videos in Lovvvit. They can share them across their own websites and their other social media channels. They can also add coupons and deals to the videos as well.

All of that makes Lovvvit a three fold community of reviewers, people looking to discover places and the merchants.

Check out our video interview with Gottlieb below:

Check out more of our TechCrunch Disrupt NY coverage here

Video Interview With Diego Saez Gil Founder Of wehostels.com (formerly inbed.me)

Back in March we reported on a world traveler turned entrepreneur, Diego Saez Gil and his startup inbed.me. Inbed.me is a service that connects travelers to hostels across the world. In addition for finding, booking and discovering hostels, it has a back bone social network that helps users recommend hostels, suggest things to do and meet up while traveling.

Inbed.me was Diego’s second startup. His first startup was called Off Track Planet, the ultimate backpackers online guide to travel.

Diego recently changed the name of inbed.me to we hostels.com because it’s a little more politically correct. Inbed.me has some risky connotations.

Wehostels.com is exhibiting in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 check out our video interview below:

TechCrunch Disrupt: I Shot A 50 Caliber Rifle At A Fax Machine, Thanks To Twake

Twake, a new big data startup, had a great attention grabber at their booth at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC’s Startup Alley. Twake hired a man in a wooded area in a remote location with an arsenal of high-caliber fire arms and a junk pile of computer gear. Old cpus, monitors, fax machines, radios and other electronics were put in the pile for the man with the guns.

Meanwhile back at TechCrunch Disrupt Twake had an iPad app where passerby’s could choose a device they wanted to shoot, and the gun they wanted to shoot with. After they made their selections they would hit a button labeled “fire” which sent a signal back to the man with the guns to go ahead a fire away at the old computer junk.

This was very reminiscent of Tommy Jordan, the laptop shooting dad in North Carolina. Now even though I didn’t get to fire the gun myself, I could feel the thrill and satisfaction of popping a cap in that fax machines ass. The boys from Office Space would be proud.

So what kind of company goes through this much promotion to attract people to their booth? That would be Twake, a recently launched big data startup.

Twake is a secure, agnostic, scalable recommendation service. In their own words they describe Twake as:

“Twake’s cloud-based service maps anonymous referential data on customers, products and services with behaviors such as view, like, buy, and comment along with the sentiment and significance of each. Our wave propagation and interaction algorithms analyze patterns, recognize highly relevant items that are far removed from the source and synthesize recommendations that resonate”

We would say it’s a predictive recommendation engine. The idea of being able to recommend what a customer may buy next is often the competitive edge companies need, provided the data is right.

Twake’s platform is scalable to most industries. Their unique adaptive recommendation engine can handle e-commerce, app discovery, deep personalization, restaurant suggestions, smart pre-fetching, sentiment analysis, genome research, social discovery, travel planning, business intelligence, and network planning.

Is that too many verticals? Twake is so new that we’ll have to wait and see how it all comes together. It will be great to see what developers can do using Twakes API’s.

Check out the video here:

TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Interview With Connecticut Startup Shizzlr

Shizzlr is a new group platform social event platform with a website and cool mobile app to bit. In a way it’s similar to the startup we saw last year at Disrupt NY called “Salsa” unfortunately that startup had a very short life. Shizzlr has promise though, because of it’s unique feature set.

Shizzlr’s mobile app is available for both iPhone and Android. It allows you to discover local events and places nearby. After that you can share them into a group chat with friends and then decide what you want to do. Afterwards you can even run a poll and get feedback about the event or activity.

Shizzlr was founded by Nick Jaensch and Keith Bessette in the fall of 2009 while they were both students at UConn. They kept working on it after college and saw an official launch in 2010. Now both co-founders are here showing off Shizzler in TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley because they know its the shizzle.

Shizzlr is designed for smaller groups of friends between say 5 and 20. It aggregates local events from Facebook. Once the events are aggregated, users can decide which ones to do and make plans.

It’s an interesting new spin on the social event app. Check it out for yourself at shizzlr.com and watch our video interview below:

See more nibletz.com TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 coverage here

TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Interview With NY Startup hoppit

We got a chance to talk with the founder of hoppit at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2012. Hoppit was the winner of the best “Big Data” startup at the recent NY Tech Day.

So what is hoppit? Well hoppit is a discovery platform that lets you discover places completely based on atmosphere. Yelp, Urban Spoon and other restaurant recommendation sites use reviews that focus on cuisine to attract customers. With hoppit their engine takes into consideration keyword phrases that describe ambiance.

For instance, hoppit looks for multiple instances of groups of words like “romantic dinner” from there it would be able to dig deeper and determine that a restaurant is smaller and more intimate. This may be exactly what someone is looking for.

Right now hoppit lets you choose from eight different vibes; classy & upscale, hipster, watering hole, romantic, cozy & quaint, mad men,swanky & posh, trendy & chic, vintage & old world, and chill & relaxed.

After a long work week you know what you want and hoppit will help you find it. Check out our interview Steve Dziedzic below:

See more of our Disrupt coverage here

TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Interview With: Bar & Club Stats VIDEO

There’s no cutesie name name, no outrageously loud logo, no booth babes and no crazy animation talking about Bar & Club stats. It’s very straight forward and like a great name, their company name says exactly what they do. What a novel idea, Bar & Club Stats provides bar and club stats. It’s how they do it and exactly what they do with it that makes it cool.

Bar & Club Stats founder, Ben Silbert, said he started the business after finding most of the places he went to were really crowded. He developed an app and id scanner and then the back end piece which collects data.

Bar & Club stats is an app and id card reader that allows bouncers and door men to scan IDs. Fake IDs will not scan which makes it easier to weed out bad IDs and actually get rid of the offending person. Sometimes when someone presents a fake id they go into a temper tantrum yelling and screaming that their ID is real. After the ID is actually scanned the argument becomes a moot point.

As we reported earlier, the entry validation portion is just the beginning. Bar & Club stats take the data from the ID scans, anonymizes it and then analyzes it for the bar or club. This is invaluable information to a club owner. Were there more 18-21 year olds on Monday or Thursday? Did ladies night draw more men? Did our midtown club attract a slew of customers from Hoboken? All of this information is now available to the venue for marketing and business development.

While it’s not cute or quirky Bar & Club stats solves a problem for bars and clubs, well actually two. Check out their video interview here:

Arizona Startups: BioInspire BioTech Medical Device Incubator Taking Applications

Earlier this month we reported on a brand new biotech/medical device startup incubator opening up in Peoria Arizona. BioInspire, a partnership between the city of Peoria, BioAccel and Plaza companies, is looking to fill the incubator with early stage companies in the biotech/medical device field.

BioAccel announced at the AZBiz Expo last Thursday, a call for applications to identify companies that can advance medical device development and popular BioInspire. Tenants will get office space, access to labs, mentorships and up to $300,000 in seed funding.

“We want to build on our significant health care footprint” said Scott Whyte, director, economic development services, city of Peoria. Nearly 19% of the jobs available in the city are in health care. Whyte added “The new facility provides a unique focus, including resources for medical device development that will hopefully attract attention across the US and bring the best technologies to Arizona.”

Bioinspire is managed by BioAccel, a Phoenix–based non-profit that works to accelerate the commercialization of life-science technologies. BioAccel partnered with the City of Peoria to leverage its assets to provide Bioinspire with a sound foundation, comprehensive infrastructure and significant experience needed to launch the new enterprise and to drive positive economic impact and job creation. BioAccel’s commercialization programs are embedded in Bioinspire’s operations, which provide for ongoing deal flow and new company formation.

More after the break
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Austin Startup: Cyfeon To Kick Off Disrupt NY Battlefield

The first company presenting in today’s TechCrunch Disrupt startup Battlefield is an Austin based startup called Cyfeon.

Cyfeon has only been beta testing for two months. They are a very early stage, non-funded startup. They’ve created a tool called “Answer Factory” that lets any business pull data from anywhere, anytime in any format to get better answers to queries. Answer Factory is the answer for the headaches that can come from big data.

“Businesses are being overwhelmed with the amount of data they have to rely on to make decisions,” Cyfeon CEO Brandon Smith said. “And they are missing important information that might help drive better financial or operational performance. We’re convinced there is a market for technology that makes use of all available data to improve answer quality.”

The Answer Factory dashboard allows businesses to pull data from any source at any time. The data being pulled can be structured or unstructured and then unified using the Answer Factory platform. Businesses without huge IT departments can benefit from Cyfeon’s drag and drop solution.

“Data isn’t worth anything if it cannot be effectively used,” said Cyfeon CTO Chance Coble. “When we started developing Answer Factory, we knew there were tools out there to provide answers to database queries. But we didn’t see any product that effectively brings all that information together to deliver the best possible answer. We wanted to make big data a big benefit to businesses.”

Although Austin has a thriving tech scene and TechCrunch has held events at South By Southwest, Cyfeon is the first Austin startup in TechCrunch Disrupt’s five year history to be invited to participate in the highly coveted startup Battlefield.

Thirty startups will launch during the Battlefield competition but only one will go home with the $50,000 grand prize and the Disrupt Cup. The Disrupt Cup isn’t just about the money, previous winners of Disrupt Cup have secured millions in funding after winning the prize.

Judging this years Disrupt NYC Battlefield are: Michael Arrington (founder TechCrunch/Crunchfund), Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital), Chi-Hua Chien (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Beyers), Chris Dixon (co-founder Hunch), Marissa Mayer (VP Google), Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures).

Linkage:

Find out more about Cyfeon here

Check out our coverage of TechCrunch Disrupt NYC here

Check out TechCrunch’s coverage of Disrupt NYC here

We’re on a nationwide sneaker strapped startup road trip, help us out and find out more here

TechCrunch Disrupt NYC: Get Me Listed To Launch New Platform

We are reporting tonight from a Times Square hotel that actually has good wifi, something very hard to find in New York. We are here for TechCrunch Disrupt. This will be our third year bringing coverage from TechCrunch’s signature event in New York City. The previous two years we covered for our former site thedroidguy.com

In case you didn’t know, nibletz.com unofficially launched at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC last year. We still owned and ran thedroidguy.com at the time and we were looking for a place to put content from startups that really appealed to both Cameron and I, but didn’t really fit in the Android space. The fact that we were launching the site out of disrupt is exactly why our SM tagline was “small crunchy bytes from the tech and startup scene”. Most know that we’ve now pivoted to “the voice of startups everywhere else”. That’s exactly what we will find here, startups from Silicon Valley, New York and everywhere else.

One of those startups that will be in startup alley is are the folks from “Get Me Listed”. The New York based startup specializes in local marketing solutions. Get Me Listed’s technology allows marketing professionals to manage hyper local marketing campaigns from a simple easy to use dashboard.

At Disrupt this week (starting Monday morning), Get Me Listed CEO and Co-Founder Michael Mire and Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder Ravdeep Sawhney will be showing off their brand new Get Me Listed platform.

“We are excited to showcase our new platform to the public for the first time. We worked closely with our clients to develop a system that is even more versatile and offers an all-in-one solution for location-based marketing,” said Ravdeep Sawhney.

We will post more including an interview and video later on this week from Disrupt NYC.

Preparing For TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2012

The Nibletz Team is ready to bring you round the clock coverage of what is sure to be the bet Techcrunch disrupt event to date.

First off, you may remember that last year was when Michael Arrington the founder of Techcrunch got into a very public dispute with both AOL and their queen of the Blogsphere (at the time) Arianna Huffington. That dispute of course was what fueled Arrington to wear an “Unpaid Blogger” T-shirt as the emcee of last years event.

After missing a few TechCrunch events, including the most recent Crunchies in San Francisco, Arrington was invited back by the current TechChrunch regime for virtually the same duties as previous Disrupt events. We are curious to see what Arrington wears tomorrow morning when the official event kicks off. The hackathon started two days ago and is the lead in to the event.

We are also looking forward to some of the usual suspects like SV Angels, Ron Conway who is a Battlefield judge this year, as well as MC Hammer.

We are also looking forward to an interview with Hollywood Producer and founder of the LA based startup, Lovvit, Max Gottlieb. We are also hoping to sync up with our friend, rapper and tech investor Chamillionaire during this weeks festivities.

TechCrunch Disrupt NYC will be a great showcase of startups from everywhere including the Valley, NYC and “everywhere else”. If your startup is either pitching in the Battlefield, exhibiting in Startup Alley or just attending the event make sure to drop us a line at disrupt@nibletz.com

Nibletz Sneaker Strapped Road Trip Fundraiser, Now That’s More Like It

First off we wanted to thank everyone who contributed to our Nibletz sneaker strapped road trip fundraiser. We appreciate the donations and they are being put to good use on the road.

However it’s no secret that we had no idea what we were doing when we set it up and we had an extremely lofty goal of $25,000 we were hoping to fund the entire 14 month road trip in the bus but as a startup ourselves we’ve realized that was a ton of money and also with $25 the first donation someone could make, that could be even too much for some of our startup friends.

We consulted with a few of the crowd-funding startup founders that we’ve covered so far and some people who’ve been successful at indiegogo and kickstarter as well as some of the people that work for those two sites. We’ve revamped our entire fundraiser. We’ve added a $2.00, $5.00 and $10.00 donation option and decreased our goal to $5,000.

We’ve also worked out some strategic hubs across the country where we could safely park the bus and have friends and colleagues either help us with transportation to surrounding areas or hop on a low fare bus like MegaBus and BoltBus to get to some of the other towns on our journey.

We’ve started our road trip back up again in the Prius. We will immediately move to the bus quasi-full time when we hit our $5,000 goal (within 1 to 2 weeks of funding), and until then continue our mission, goal and project in the Prius.

Thanks for all your feedback. If you want us to come to your city please email us at tips@nibletz.com let us know who you are, and we’ll make a trip of it.

Please check out the new indiegogo page at http://indiegogo.com/everywhereelse and help if you can.

Thanks,

Kyle, Cameron and Brent

Here’s the link again indiegogo.com/everywhereelse

Justin Bieber On The Cover Of Next Months Forbes Magazine As Venture Capitalist?

Forbes is publishing their “Celebrity 100” list in their next issue. The June issue which is making it’s way to stores now features Oprah Winfrey in her spot at the top of the list. Number three is singer Rihanna and now in the number two spot, and on the cover of the issue, Teen mega-star Justin Bieber.

Justin Bieber is trying desperately to not be a dying teenage pop star. He’s also kept his image clean for the most part and hasn’t succumbed to the gossip rags the way that Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and even Miley Cyrus have in recent days.

Bieber has recently jumped on the startup investment bandwagon. His portfolio isn’t nearly as robust as say Ashton Kutcher, but he’s not nearly as tech/startup savvy as the Two and A Half Men star either (Yet).

Bieber tells Forbes that his manager Scooter Braun has a team of people that help “the biebs” invest in startups. Bieber told Forbes magazine:

“Scooter has a team that helps find investments. Usually we work together. If I find something, I bring it to the table.”

Forbes Zack O’Malley Greenburg says that Bieber takes a Peter Lynch approach to investing with the artist adding: “I’m not going to invest in something I don’t like; I have to believe in the product”. Bieber’s manager said that philosophy has led Bieber to invest millions into 12 startups. Forbes was able to verify four of those including Tiny Chat, New York startup Stamped, Sojo Studios and Spotify.

Bieber also talked on video about his investing in social charity startup WeTopia, which Bieber described as a “Farmville” with real money going to people who need it.

O’Malley Greenburg, makes it clear that unlike other celebrities Bieber isn’t doing endorsement for equity deals, rather he’s investing real money into startups.

Braun is very protective of Bieber’s startup portfolio but says that all of his investments are still in business. The investing came about when Braun realized that Bieber was too young to sell vodka and his fans wouldn’t buy $150 pairs of shoes. What Bieber did know very very well was web 2.0 and social media. That’s why they’ve invested in web based startups like Spotify and WeTopia.

Braun said that Bieber’s startup portfolio was reflective of 2-5% of his net worth and Forbes estimated that to about $3 million dollars.

Bieber has supported other companies like Tosy a company that’s making an entertainment robot. There’s no word as to whether Bieber is invested in Tosy or he was just doing an appearance for them at this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show.

Bieber’s longtime girlfriend singer/actress Selena Gomez is also involved in startups like Postcards On The Run that allows you to send physical postcards from your mobile device.

Check out the entire story at Forbes Magazine

Israeli Startup: Jinni Is Powering Big National Sites With Pandora Like Movie Engine

You may not have heard of Yosi Glick, the founder of Israeli startup Jinni, but one things for sure you will probably agree with his fundamental principles behind video discovery.

Glick talks in this story with Bloombgerg’s Cliff Edwards about how most video (movie) discovery/recommendation sites have things all wrong. Edwards uses the example of the movie The Usual Suspects. When you watch The Usual Suspects on most video platforms it’s going to recommend Se7en. While both could be characterized as crime thrillers, the audience for Usual Suspects is hardly the audience for Se7en.

Glick’s startup Jinni has put a lot more into discovery when it comes to movies. They provide in-depth algorithms and matching, making it more like a Pandora for movies. Jinni has created an “entertainment genome” that weighs thousands of different parameters to serve up like minded suggestions for movie viewers.

In addition to offering a much more thorough recommendation engine for movie viewers, LG Electronics invested $5 million into Jinni for voice recognition software. The voice recognition software taps into the platform where a user could say “I want to watch a Harrison Ford action movie” and it would serve up Indiana Jones or Star Wars.

LG and Jinni are mum on whether the technology has gone into this next round of smart tvs that the Korean manufacturer is putting out.

They must be doing something right because some of the top companies in the world have employed Jinni’s technology. Best Buy’s movie rental site uses Jinni and Microsoft entered into a deal last September to incorporate Jinni’s software into the Xbox 360 service.

Linkage:

Put Jinni to your own test here at their website

Source: Bloomberg

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else”