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NY Startup: Iwannanom Has Reinvented The Cookbook INTERVIEW

Sure there are a lot of recipe startups and websites out there. But how many were started by men, and how many are looking to reinvent and simplify the cookbook? That’s a lofty goal but it’s just what Iwannanom co-founders Danny Nahtan and Chuck Masucci have in mind.

Co-Founder Danny Nathan tells Nibletz.com:
“I Wanna Nom is a reinvention of the cookbook for the digital world. It’s a recipe bookmarking and discovery tool that allows the user to keep track of recipes they discover anywhere on the internet and easily share them, rate them, comment on them, and find new recipes and dishes by following friends and fellow foodies.”

The two co-founders met at POKE NY a creative technology and innovation consultancy based in New York. Masucci, a four year veteran of POKE has recently moved on to be the CTO of ske.dj an upcoming mobile/web startup and Nathan is approaching his fifth year there.

“We’re both ardent believers in the approach of creating simple, smart, and social products/services that add value and utility to people’s lives. (This thought process is largely what sets POKE apart from other innovation companies and has helped make it what it is today.) That thinking is certainly pervasive throughout the I Wanna Nom experience and has shaped our plans for the future of the product.” Nathan said.

We had a chance to interview Nathan about iwannanom and how they hope to (uggh i don’t want to say it), disrupt the recipe and cookbook space.

What are the differentiators from iwannanom and other online cookbook communities?

“The idea came about because recipe sites have become overwhelmingly difficult to use. There are too many, they’re too crowded, and many don’t show off food in a way that makes it appetizing. We were discovering more things that we wanted to cook on other sites – blogs, newspaper sites, tumblr, etc. – and we were usually drawn in by an image more than anything else.”

“The problem was, there was no way to keep track of those recipes other than bookmarking (which feels like too much of a commitment) or another social service that was crowded with anything and everything that people felt like saving (which feels like drinking from the firehose). The inevitable result was a bunch of good dishes and recipes floating around the internet that we’d never cook because we’d forget about them.”

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New DC Accelerator Acceleprise Embracing Enterprise Tech Startups

Acceleprise is a new Washington DC based accelerator that is targeting new startups in the Enterprise space. TechCrunch recently said that Acceleprise wants to be the “500 startups for Entreprise”

Acceleprise has great DC based founders in Sean Glass, Allen Gannett and Collin Gutman. They also have some great mentors that include well known founders, executives, venture capitalists and experienced operators. Their mentor list includes Scott Case, head of Startup America, Katharine Weymouth CEO of Washington Post Media, Maria Thomas former CEO of Etsy, Sonny Ganguly CMO at wedding wire and many more.

Their website says they are “The Enterprise Technology Accelerator”. Enterprise was a natural sector to pursue, Glass told TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez that he started thinking about how he wanted to do his personal angel investing. He found while evaluating his portfolio that he had the most success with and was able to help the most in early stages, were all enterprise focused.

Washington DC is also the perfect location for an enterprise focused accelerator. Of course the federal government is the largest enterprise customer in the country. In their immediate surroundings you have most of the largest defense companies and contractors in the world. Accelleprise is also a quick 4 hour drive to New York City and not to far from Atlanta as well.

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Atlanta Startup: MyCouponDoc Gets You Coupons For Your CoPays, Presents At DEMO

An Atlanta startup in the healthcare industry that just launched this month, demonstrated their web app that connects patients with real, legitimate coupons for their medications.

Kishore Eechambadi, Co-Founder of MyCouponDoc has built the startup to battle the increasing cost of co-pays for medication. According to Eechambadi co-pays have doubled in the last 10 years. According to the Wall Street Journal the costs of co-pays will continue to increase 15% annually.

MyCouponDoc has already been accepted into the Healthbox Accelerator Program that provided them with $50,000 in seed funding. They’ve sourced over 400 coupons on the most popular prescription and over the counter medications. According to Eechambadi mycopondoc.com’s coupons are accepted at pharmacies and doctors offices.

MyCouponDoc also plans to roll out their technology to 500 pharmacies across the country so that the coupons are available at point of sale. They’re also partnering with a major EMR (Electronic Medical Record) service provider that will help integrate their sourced coupons in the doctors office at the time of prescription. This would give those doctors the option to recommend a prescription knowing the coupon is there and tell the patient about the discount during the exam.

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Startup Quick Byte: Birmingham Al Startup Inks Deal With Zillow

A Birmingham AL new media startup called magiccitypost.com, which is a community news and lifestyle site in Birmingham Alabama has inked a new deal with real estate giant Zillow. The startup operates out of Birmingham’s Innovation Depot a local tech accelerator.

The Birmingham Buziness Journal reports that a new co-branded web product will launch next month. Although the details are scarce it would make sense that it will be some sort of real estate directory or interactive listing section for the site.

Emily Lowery, founder of Magic City LLC said that the launch will include rebranding and new marketing. She would not disclose the financial details of the deal to the Business Journal. It has been reported that the deal is expected to double their annual revenue.

Source: Birmingham Business Journal

Chicago’s Lightbank Invests In Santa Monica Startup LifeCrowd

LifeCrowd is a Santa Monica based social startup that helps consumers participate in social events in their city. Lifecrowd users can browse activities ranging from a night full of board games, to rock climbing, band jamming, and wine tasting. They can then invite friends to join in the activities.

They’re different from other sites like Meetup. Meetup lets anyone create groups centered around one focus. LifeCrowd offers all kinds of singular events which strangers can join in on, and in effect be more social. LifeCrowd users create the events but LifeCrowd curates them to make sure only the best events show up.

This $5 million dollar round of financing was led by Chicago’s LightBank and included Bullpen Capital, Baroda Ventures and Prism VentureWorks. As part of the round Lightbank partner Paul Lee will join LifeCrowd’s board of directors. Lightbank is a venture firm formed by Groupon co-founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell.

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Denver Startup: Forkly Giving Foodspotting & Nosh A Run For The Money

Forkly is of course a food based mobile app. It’s the brain child of Brightkite alumni Brady Becker and Martin May, so they went into Forkly seasoned startup founders. Back in September 2010 Becker and May left Brightkite. As TechCrunch reported at the time they left a farewell note at Brightkite and rumors started surfacing that they were starting something called Forkly.

Forkly was in stealth mode. Back then there was just a splash page that said “We are Forkly”.

A year later Forkly was revealed. Forkly was a food and restaurant discovery engine of sorts. By the time Forkly launched last summer the food recommendation app space was filling up. The two most well known competitors are FoodSpotting and Nosh. Foodspotting is more visual while Nosh uses both ratings and photos. Forkly does both.

Some tech pundits weren’t too sure about Forkly. Becker and May were experienced at startups but Brightkite, a location based discovery app, was a little too early on the scene. The fear with Forkly was that it may have been too late. That didn’t prove to be the case.

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St.Louis: New Venture Capital Group Cultivation Capital Announces First Three Investments

Yesterday we brought you the story of the exciting St.Louis startup LockerDome. LockerDome, the first social network for athletes (that’s been done right) has attracted the investment of Jim McKelvey, one of the co-founders of Square. LockerDome has so much going for it right now, that yesterday we asked is LockerDome the Groupon of St.Louis. Many folks from St.Louis chimed in on Twitter suggesting that LockerDome was even better than that.

Today we’re reporting on a new St. Louis venture capital group. Cultivation Capital has announced it’s first three investments. Not surprising, LockerDome is one of those investments.

Cultivation Capital announced a $250,000 investment into LockerDome, which co-founder Gabe Lozano told us was a new investment for the company, complimenting the $750,000 they raised at the end of last year.

“Cultivation Capital brings much needed financial resources to the rapidly growing number of early stage tech startups in the St. Louis area. We decided to work with Cultivation Capital because they’re run by a solid team of local entrepreneurs that have collectively built some of the area’s most successful startups. I have a lot of respect for the individuals behind the fund and look forward to seeing these guys positively contribute to evolving the local landscape.” Lozano told nibletz.com

Cultivation Capital’s second investment was also $250,000 which went to JBara Software. JBara Software provides deep customer intelligence analysis for enterprises to manage customer success and minimize churn. JBara is a leader in supporting the executive in charge of customer satisfaction by providing actionable insights into the customer experience and key customer metrics.

They also made a strategic investment into Capital Innovators. Capital Innovators is a St.Louis based technology accelerator which provides mentorship and seed funding into select companies.

“These three companies mark an exciting entrance for Cultivation Capital into the Missouri startup market,” says Peter Esparrago. “Their innovative approaches to business set a strong precedent for future investments in the Midwest.”

The Cultivation Capital team is led by General Partners and experienced entrepreneurs Brian Matthews, Peter Esparrago, Jim McKelvey and Rick Holton, Jr., who have a combined track record of more than 25 companies started, over $200 million raised and multiple exits. The team includes Associate Partners Kyle Welborn and Israel Vicars.

Linkage:

If you’re a St.Louis area entrepreneur you can apply to Cultivation Capital here

Nibletz is the voice of startups “Everywhere Else” here are some current stories

We’re sneaker strapping a nationwide startup roadtrip, please consider supporting us getting on the bus

Toronto Startup: Quimby Technolgies Creates Self Destructing Mobile Messaging

Have you ever been in a relationship and maybe sent a naughty message or two, possibly with a picture? Did you live to regret that message when you broke up with that person? Now we’re not talking about kids or teenagers and sexting here, real adults do this kind of thing, especially those that travel a lot. Maybe you had a really rip roaring night at the club and sent a bunch of photos to your posse, perhaps you wanted them to live the moment with you, but not on Monday morning back at the office. What about this, have you ever had an idea you may have wanted to share with some somewhat trusted colleagues, but just enough so they could grasp the idea, not steal it down the road?

If you’ve ever found yourself in one of those scenarios or millions of other similar types of situations than you’d be happy to know that Heather Burns and her Quimby Technologies, a Toronto Startup, has created a self destructing messaging platform. Burns teamed up with Alkarrim (Alex) Nasser of BNotions, to create Quimby Technologies and Quimby the self destructing messenger app.

Now Burns is pretty sharp, she is well aware that there are some people who are going to shout out at the rooftops why this is a bad idea. The same kind of people that can’t get over the fact that Craigslist or Zaarly exist, and in our exclusive interview we asked her about just those types.

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Nibletz “They’re All Over The Place” The Best Compliment Ever

Word got back to the Nibletz headquarters that a colleague of ours based in Silicon Valley told another colleague of ours “Nibletz, They’re all over the place”. That has to be the best compliment about nibletz.com

If this is one of your first trips here, here’s a little bit about is. This is our second new media startup. We soft launched it in June of 2011 basically at Disrupt. Our mobile focused site was doing very well and two of our writers Brent Fishman and Cameron Wright, and I wanted to write about other things outside of mobile operating systems. When Cameron and I went to Disrut in NY we soft launched Nibletz with a lot of that content.

We’ve actually pivoted twice and at South By Southwest our mission became very clear. We were becoming the Voice of startups everywhere else. Our traffic grew over 500% and continues to grow every day/week. After South By Southwest we decided we immediately needed to get in the trenches and live and breathe this thing like a startup, and we are.

We piled into Wright’s Toyota prius with 5 kilos of Mate, peanut butter and jelly, Ramen for the hotels and stay between the car, the rest stops and Red Roof Inns (you know they’ve upgraded a lot of their hotels). We’ve made some awesome friends in our travels and will continue to do so. We plan on staying pretty much on the road through the summer of 2013 (taking 4 or 5 days every 3 weeks to see our families).

We’ve discovered some truly awesome startup clusters in Washington DC, Philly, Richmond, Chattanooga, Birmingham Alabama and many more places. We’ve covered startups all over the place. One thing about this great country, and the world is that there are great ideas EVERYWHERE. Maybe next year we’ll go overseas too.

Now we’ve got the opportunity of a lifetime. A friend of ours, from our first site, has agreed to donate to us, the use of his 37′ bus for the rest of the trip. This means we can stop sleeping in the car and at Red Roofs. We can write more often and stay at stops longer to get even more of the great stories. We plan on going back and forth across the country and into Canada.

We’re turning to our fellow startups, incubators, accelerators, VC’s, angels and everyone in the startup community to help support our efforts. The downside to the bus is that it has a 75 gallon gas tank and goes about 8 miles per gallon. That’s roughly $400 per tank.

We’ve set up an indiegogo page at http://indiegogo.com/nibletz we’ve got some awesome sponsorship packages out there for what well be a legendary trek through America highlighting the best startups in little towns, medium cities and “Everywhere Else”

Our good friend Caleb who has co-woring spaces throughout the country kicked us off last week. Our new friends at LockerDome in St.Louis have also contributed.

Please take a look and support us if you can. We even give hugs and share Mate.

Here’s that link again at Indiegogo

Canadian Startup: Wantser Is the Canadian Version Of Pinterest For Wants

Pinterest has caught on like wild fire. We’ve run several stories about Pinterest and it’s crazy valuations. We’ve heard lately that their active users have gone down however it’s still extremely hot. With Pinterest you can “pin” pictures on the internet. It’s been highly adopted by women who pin everything from the latest fashions, to art projects, home interior decorating ideas and even fashion.

Imagine if you will, pinning the things you want and then having access to the ways to get those things. If you see a fancy new purse on Pinterest instead of pinning it, you “want” it. Well that’s the idea behind Canadian startup Wantster.

CEO Ky Joseph and Chris Edelman a Canadian radio sales executive, started Wantster to do just that. You can simply download the Wantster “want” button to your browser, the same way some do with Pinterest, and when you see something you want, “want it”. With Wantster’s mobile app you can take a picture of something you want for later and put it in your “want” list.

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Columbus OH Startup: Flymuch Launches New VenueSeen Photo Monitoring

Sure most business owners probably have a Google Alert set up for their business. They may also use some kind of clipping/monitoring service and then of course, a smart business owner (startup or not) is using some sort of social media monitoring to see what people are saying and doing about their business. Well now, Columbus OH based startup FlyMuch has launched a new photo monitoring tool for brands.

Did you just have a really great burger from CheeBurger Cheeburger and share it with the world? Did you have a bad experience at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse and post a photo of your server? Well whatever it is, business owners, whether they like it or not, are constantly having photos take in their business.

Perhaps there was a great 21st birthday party with a lot of smiling faces at TGIFridays or your 5 year old hit a hole in one at a local miniature golf spot. Businesses want to see it all, the good, the bad, and with VenueSeen, the ugly.

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Is LockerDome St. Louis’ Groupon?

LockerDome is one hot startup coming out of St.Louis. It’s the first ever dedicated sports social network for youth and amateur sports. LockerDome has been likened to the Facebook or LinkedIn for athletes.

LockerDome allows individual sports organizations to develop their own sports networks, and most of the well known sports programs in the country have already joined and have thriving networks. The Dallas Texans, one of the top ranked soccer teams in the country has a LockerDome network, as does the East Coat Pro Showcase, a well known east coast event that’s made up of more than 100 of the 2011 Major League Baseball draft picks.

LockerDome and CEO Gabe Lozano aren’t just making a big name for themselves in the sports world, they’ve already chalked up a lot of funding. In December of 2011 they raised $750,000 in an angel round. Participants in the round include serial entrepreneurs Brian and Carol Matthews, co-founders of Primary Network and CDM Fantasy Sports; Capital Innovators, a St. Louis-based technology accelerator fund; Moosylvania Marketing, a nationally-recognized marketing agency; and Hal Gentry, co-founder of Capital Innovators and GridLogix, among more than a dozen other angel investors.

LockerDome also caught the eye of Square’s co-founder Jim McKelvey who invested and also took a seat on the company’s board of directors. But McKelvey wasn’t easily sold at first. He’s not the kind of investor that looks to pump money into a “flavor of the week” just to catch a big windfall he has three businesses that he’s started and still runs today, including Square which he founded with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

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Chicago Lean Startup Challenge Taking Applications For Summer Session

The Chicago Lean Startup Challenge, like other similarly named challenges across the country is based on Eric Reis’ “Lean Startup” methodology, customer development by Steve Blank and the business canvass model by Alexander Osterwalder. Ultimately the challenge is to take startups and hone them in on the most efficient way to succeed.

“Unlike business plan competitions, the Lean Startup Challenge focuses on real, meaningful results for the participants. The final presentations provided insights into the area where so many startups fail – understanding their customer!” -Nik Rokop, Director at Knapp Entrepreneurship Center IIT.

The 14 week startup program is designed to get startups on the path to success. The program, in it’s second year, will hold lean startup classes, give participants access to mentors and the community, connect startups with the tools they need and they have over $75,000 in cash and prizes.

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New Mexico Startup: Whiteman Technology Unveils Windows Set Top Box At DEMO

A Clovis New Mexico startup, Whiteman Technology, is hoping to take advantage of a hole in consumer entertainment that’s been caused by the delayed release of next generation gaming systems by both Microsoft and Sony. While the world awaits the two gaming giant systems, Whiteman has unveiled a monster of a set top box.

There are a lot of choices in set top boxes these days. You’ve got Boxee, Roku, Google TV boxes, Netgear Neo boxes and many more all competing for the same space. However Whiteman has packed their box with a ton of features.

Whiteman Technology’s set top box features:

– The ability to display cable tv programming (not found on most boxes)
– Playing 3D games for the PC
– Recording 6 channels at the same time (DVR)
– 1 terabyte hard drive to store everything in your collection
– voice control and gesture recognition

“We’ve taken people off guard with a hardware startup,” Ryan Whiteman said at DEMO. “We have gotten a lot of attention, and we intend to build this in the U.S.”

Whiteman and his co-founders Blake Jordan and Shaffin Baldwin have not announced pricing or availability for the new set top box but did say it would be on par with TiVo’s set top boxes which tend to run a little more than the Roku, Boxee or Google TV variety. But, you’re getting a ton more features.

Whiteman Technology was one of 80 companies chosen to participate in IDG’s Demo Conference in Santa Clara, CA this past week.

source and photo: VB