startup Archives - Page 81 of 87

Interview: California Startup: Workers Count Giving Workers Everywhere A Voice

So I’m pretty sure everyone’s been there, you saw a cool job listed in the paper or maybe heard about some cool place to work right? Well then you start working and you realize that everyone is bitching about bad hours, cuts in pay, the boss is a jerk, or maybe you find the exact opposite and everything is great. Well a new California startup called WorkersCount is a resource that allows you to check that kind of thing out.

Co-Founder Myles Suer is in San Diego, he and co-founder Matt Weeks created WorkersCount which is a new mobile check in app that measures worker sentiment (how they feel about work) in the workplace. Weeks tells nibletz.com “It’s fun, safe, anonymous and empowering for workers at all levels. “. It’s a direct to consumer service.

Now let’s get something straight real quick this isn’t just a “bitching” service. They want users of WorkersCount to talk about the good and the bad. There are plenty of people out there who love their jobs and their perks. WorkersCount can be used to gauge a great employer and a not so great employer.

We got a chance to interview Weeks to find out all about WorkersCount and take a break from customer reward, loyalty and engagement startups, for at least a few minutes.

How did you come up with the idea?

We pivoted on this idea from another, more complicated idea we were working on. It hit us one day that the one pain workers have is that there is no real-time, consumer-provided information about what it’s like to work somewhere. It’s all monolithic by brand, yet today’s workers are hyper-connected via twitter, Facebook and LinkedIin… tons of information flies around, but it’s hard to sort the signal from the noise.

Briefly describe what you hope the end user will get out of the app/platform

By checking-in daily and engaging in the WorkersCount community, workers will be able to see where people just like them are thriving or struggling. They will be able to validate when their current role or company, warts and all, is the right place for them, or whether they need to start using the WorkersCount system to quietly start to sift and sort, compare and set alerts. All along the way they can see where their friends work and how those companies are comparing. The service is a fun and safe way to give “voice” to workers at all levels, and through the tweets, charts, indices and rankings we produce, they will be able to have real impact in driving accountability and a better workplace for themselves and others.

This is important to understand about our brand and our positioning: we work directly for consumers. This is not something that comes “down” to them from their employers. Thus we are accountable directly to users, not companies.

More after the break
Read More…

Interview: Austin Transplant Startup Sprockster Is A Great Place For Kids And Families

After getting my start in media at the age of 12 for Radio Aahs (the precursor to Radio Disney), naturally kid focused startups occasionally catch my eye, especially when their done well, and with a little TLC.

Sprockster is one of those great kid and family focused startup. Sprockster is a gateway to family friendly entertainment. They have a collection of over 1,000 kid friendly songs, hundreds of music videos and they’ve promoted over 600+ family friendly events. Sprockster is reminiscent of the newest version of MySpace (post Justin Timberlake) except guaranteed family friendly.

Co-founder Jesse Atwell tells nibletz.com:

“Sprockster is an online community dedicated to the discovery and promotion of new and emerging family entertainment. Initially focused on kids’ music and kids’ music videos, the site features 1000+ streaming songs, 500+ original music videos, and has promoted 600+ family-friendly events. Sprockster’s users include parents, educators, artists, brands, educators, video producers, etc. Our artist members have profiles that typically include streaming songs, videos, upcoming tour dates, pictures, current news, and more. Any user can create an account and contribute and engage with artists and other users. If you’re looking to explore, discover, and talk about new family-friendly entertainment, Sprockster is the place!”

There’s definitely a hole in aggregation services for family friendly entertainment.

“…If you visit iTunes and search “Kids Music” the first song you get is “Kids” by MGMT. I LOVE iTunes and “Kids” by MGMT is a great, GREAT song. One of my favorites. But it’s not very helpful if you’re looking to sample, explore, and discover the next Laurie Berkner or Dan Zanes. That’s not necessarily a perfect example, but ‘Family Music’ is a special case and definitely deserves its own neighborhood in the musical townscape . . . the main point being that not everything you find on traditional platforms is family-friendly and there’s a need to kind of clear the clutter. This is what inspired Sprockster and – ultimately – what we are trying to solve” Atwell said.

Atwells co-founder is his wife. She has a background in child development while he has an extensive background in entertainment marketing and digital production development. Before founding Sprockster Atwell held positions at Sony Music and Hallmark Cards. While there are already sites dedicated to the discovery of music like iTunes, MySpace, and Pandora, the Atwells couldn’t find a solution dedicated to just family entertainment.”

More after the break
Read More…

Denver Startup ShortTermHousing.com Holding Habitat For Humanity Campaign

The team at shorttermhousing.com is happy about donating to Habitat For Humanity this month

Denver startup shorttermhousing.com kicked off a campaign to help Habitat For Humanity of metro Denver at the beginning of the month. Through the end of April for anyone who lists their home for rent, vacation rental or corporate suite shorttermhousing.com will donate $1 to Habitat Humanity. Listing your property on shorttermhousing.com is free.

“We believe people deserve options where they lay their head down at night–whether it’s for someone in need, like those that benefit from the Habitat for Humanity, or for an individual who wants to find their home away from home.”shorttermhousing.com’s founder Elia Wallen said in a statement.

shorttermhousing.com challenges already established sites like AirBnB or VRBO without charging fees and no fees or markups to travelers or property owners.

People are paying for online rental listings and I wondered, why? Would you pay to create a Facebook profile? Probably not. So, why are people paying to create a profile of their home on a property website? Because it’s the only option. So, I created an alternative, ShortTermHousing.com, and we live by three rules:

100% free for property listings and reservations. No hidden or back end fees.
Open communication for everyone. Let visitors communicate on their terms.
Adapt if a visitor suggests a change to the site, listen, and if it makes sense change.

Wallen hasn’t said anything about how they plan on monetizing their business. Wallen also owns traverlershaven.com which is a corporate focused website which finds employee’s their next temporary home. The site boasts corporate apartment housing opportunities in all 50 states and in 5,000 cities.

source: prnewswire

Where’s The Beef? New Kansas Startup AgLocal Will Help You Find It

I’m going to break the code of hipster bloggers by publicly announcing that I am an omnivore there is nothing I enjoy more than a nice big steak complimented by some kind of exotic potato side dish, some asparagus and a beer. Yup that’s me. Sorry vegetarian and vegan bloggers. That’s why I’m really thrilled to hear about a new startup called AgLocal.

I heard some murmur about the startup and it’s founder Naithan Jones who left his job as director of Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundations aspiring entrepreneur FastTrac program to undertake his own startup.

So here’s how this AgLocal works. Farmer’s markets are actually growing. If you’ve been to a farmer’s market in a decent sized community you’ll probably be inundated by fruits, vegetables, locally raised grass fed cattle, a few food trucks and cupcakes. You typically know where the farmer’s markets are or your local Whole Foods, but what if you don’t. AgLocal connects meat sellers to meat buyers.

Now you can order you meat straight from a local farmer and even cut out the grocery store. Jones and his co-founder Jacob McDaniel have been visiting locally owned farms across the midwest and have signed up over 100 farms already. The strategy is to connect local people to local farms.

More after the break
Read More…

Portland Clean Tech Startup LucidEnergy Has Found A Way To Create Green Power In A Water Pipe

A CleanTech startup in Portland Oregon called LucidEnergy has announced that they’ve found a way to create clean energy in a segment of water pipe. Lucid’s method involves pipes that have been fitted with a simple 5 turbine system. These special pipes could be installed when a utility replaces a segment of pipe.

How effective is it?

Gregg Semler, LucidEnergy’s President and CEO says that a stretch of pipe carrying water downhill might be able to produce enough electricity to power 100 homes. Impressive. Not only that but all around it’s cheaper. Semler says that without any government subsidies the cost of installing his pipe method is three to four times better than solar or wind systems.

LucidEnergy’s first public test of this technology will start next week on April 26th. That’s when the project opens at Riverside Public Utilities in Southern California. Riverside has tested four generations of the system over the last two years. This last test has gone flawlessly according to cities assistant general manager for water Kevin Milligan.

“I think it’s great technology,” Milligan told the Portland Tribune. “It could be widely adopted by water utilities and result in some significant cost savings. And it’s green.” The power generated from the Riverside test site is said to be enough to power 14 miles of street lights. Milligan says that after labor and capital construction, energy is his third highest expense. At his water fields in San Bernadino, CA he pays $.13 to $.25 per kilowatt hour. The Lucid system produces energy at a cost of $.05 to $.09 per kilowatt hour which is a significant savings.

Riverside will be the first city to publicly test the service however there has already been interst from San Antonio and New York as well as Israel and Zambia.

source: PortlandTribune

Chicago Startup: MentorMob Teams Up With Girl Scouts & Motorola For Online Badge System

Chicago Startup MentorMob Is Taking Girlscout Badges Online (photo Jose M. Osario/Chicago Tribune)

One things for sure, these aren’t your momma’s brownies.

The Girl Scouts of America are going high tech with the help of Chicago startup MentorMob and technology/financial partner Motorola Mobility Foundation.

Last month MentorMob was the recipient of a $150,000 prize as part of the Digital Media and Learning Competition, a contest sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation and others. MentorMob aggregates web based learning content into playlists. Mentor Mob CEO Kris Chinosorn describes what they do at MentorMob as crowd sourced learning.

MentorMob was originally set up to do learning content and that infrastructure is already in place. With the grant money from the Digital Media and Learning Competition they are building the framework for a certification and badge system. While the badge system is being designed for the Girl Scouts, Chinosorn is going to scale the technology to fit in any kind of setting. The certification system they are building will also be able to implement tests and quizzes to assess the level at which someone has learned the content.

More after the break
Read More…

Exclusive: Italian Startup 20lin.es Prepares To Disrupt Social Collaborative Writing At International Book Fair

A team of 10 relatively young entrepreneurs in Italy have teamed up to create something quite disruptive in the collaborative writing space. The four founders and six collaborators are all between the ages of 24 and 26. Their startup called 20lin.es is set to debut on May 10th during the International Book Fair in Turin.

So how does it work? Writers collaborate with each other in what co-founder Alessandro Biggi calls a 20×6 format. The writers collaborate on what 20lin.es calls a “pill”. A pill is a short story made up of 6 sections with 20 lines each, hence the name 20lin.es.

Biggi took some time to explain to Nibletz how this new innovative collaboration works:

“At any moment, 20lin.es selected users can start a new story by writing a (max) 20lines input that will stay active for 20 days. If other users like such input, they can decide to contribute to the story by writing a second section of max 20lines. More users can then decide to either continue the story by adding a new section or to re-write the previous one. In such a way, every input can be developed in a large/endless number of possibilities. Every story can have max 6 sections while each section can be voted, commented and shared by any user. At the end of the 20 days of activity of the input, there will be a 6-sections story with the highest approval. It has finally became a Pill and it will be digitally published. 20lin.es publications will collect 20 different Pills originated from 20 different inputs or the 20 most liked stories started from the same input. 20lin.es publications will be sold on: iTunes, Amazon and directly on 20lin.es

More after the break
Read More…

Seattle: Google Backed CleanTech Startup AltaRock To Start Drilling In Oregon

In 2008 Google invested in a new CleanTech startup called AltaRock. AltaRock plans on building engineered geothermal systems in places where natural resources aren’t already available for such systems. AltaRock will create geothermal reservoirs in areas without natural flowing streams.

AltaRock had embarked on a demonstration project of this technology in California in 2007 however the project ran into technical difficulties and ended in 2009. AltaRock applied to work on a similar project in Oregon in May of 2010 which was just recently approved. Oregon’s Bureau of Land Management said they find no big environmental impact to the project.

For this project to work AltaRock needs to use special tools to drill wells that are a few miles deep. They will then inject cold water to fracture hot rocks. Electricity is produced by pumping water into the well where it will “flow along fissures of hot rocks and extend them” reports GigaOm. AltraRock needs to predict the paths of the expanded fissures to insure the production wells will intercept them. Each well typically costs a few million dollars. For the Oregon site AltaRock needs to build two new wells which they will use in conjunction with a well that’s 10,060 feet deep and already in place. The existing well will be used for injecting the water while the two new wells will be used to pump out the hot water.

AltaRock raised $26 million dollars earlier on in a round led by Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures and Vulcan Capital. They have also received a $21.4 million dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.

An MIT study has said that the enhanced geothermal system could create 100gw of electricity by 2050.

Source: GigaOM

Kansas City Startup: Rare Wire Takes The Wraps Off Their Native Mobile App Building Platform

The do it yourself app space is getting crowded, however most of the DIY app building platforms are based on HTML 5 or just wrappers for mobile sites. What Matt Angell and Kirk Hasenzahl, the co-founders of Rare Wire have built is a platform for non-developers to build their own native apps.

If you’re not familiar with the term native apps, that’s an app that you download to your smartphone or other mobile device, that for the most part functions on it’s own on the hardware side. Non native apps require the backbone of the internet to operate on and HTML 5 in most cases. The advantage to native apps is that they are popular and give the developer and user a sense that the app is created specifically for what it was downloaded to do. The advantage to HTML 5 is that it’s truly multi-platform enabled.

Rare Wire is an app development firm that builds white label apps for clients like the United States Military Academy at West Point, Ebony Magazine and the Atlantic, so they have a bunch of credibility backing them. They’ve been using their platform, called The Wire, to build apps for their clients, but are now unleashing it to other developers. According Hasenzahl the platform that they’ve developed allows developers with just web development experience to design truly native apps.

More after the break
Read More…

St. Louis Arch Angels Invest $3 Million In 2011

We love angel funds with great names like Arch Angels (get it St.Louis, Arch, Arch Angels?). The group of investors that has been around since 2005 announced their biggest year in funding was 2011 with $3 million in investments in a variety of early stage sectors. Their investments range from health technology, to beverages and even backing a downtown St. Louis accelerator fund.

The angel group has 47 members and have invested $26 million in 28 companies since their founding in 2005.

Their leading investments in 2011 were $500,000 to Pulse Technologies. The health care company is working on developing a medical device to boost the effectiveness in clot dissolving drugs.

The groups second largest investment was $173,000 in a beverage company developed by Robert Paul, a neuropsychologist who after hearing about brain drinks decided if it was going to be done right he would do it himself. Arch Angels investment was part of a $900,000 round that also included former executives of Anheiser Busch.

Arch Angels other investments were in two more medical companies, Katalyst Surgical which received $123,000 for opthalmic instruments and $220,000 in Venti a medical device company focused on diseases of the veins.

They also contributed $375,000 to Capital Innovators the downtown accelerator fund. Capital Innovators has backed 12 startups that showed off their projects at a demo day held in the beginning of the month.

source: Stltoday.com

NY Startup GiddyUp Launches Social Mobile App For Short Term Planning

GiddyUp Co-Founder Elliott Goldwater asks a very relevant question these days, of the last 10 social apps that you downloaded how many do you still use right now. So I did an inventory. I’ve downloaded 36 apps that fit in the social mobile space. Here are the ones that I still use, at least in some kind of moderation: Hootsuite (all the time), Facebook (all the time), Instagram (quite frequently), Path (moderately), Pinterest (minimally), Sonar (moderately), Glancee (moderately), Trover (a little more than moderately). I’ve dumped countless others including Highlight.

So why bother with another social mobile app. Well as Goldwater points out, Giddy Up is a social mobile app in the truest form. The app allows you to plan and attend events and then communicate through the app using your actual friends regular contact info, novel huh.

Event hosts must sign up for Giddy Up however their friends don’t have to. While Giddy Up has integration with Facebook, and Twitter (with Privacy Controls) the foundation for the event is built upon actual contacts in your contact list. The user creates an RSVPable event.

More after the break
Read More…

New York Startup: Wendr Wins $25,000 Partnership With AB InBev For Mobile App Idea

(photo: adage.com)

Wendr is a new mobile social app that launched in February at the onset of Social Media week in New York. It has many of the same characteristics of the Ft.Lauderdale startup we profiled yesterday called MyNyte. In trying out both apps MyNyte has a more personal feeling to it. However Wendr is hoping to lend their technology to AB InBev (Anheiser Busch) the makers of Budweiser.

The two month old startup won a $25,000 partnership with the beverage giant in Manhattan Wednesday as part of Ad Age’s Digital Conference. The hackathon was called “Brand Hack” and the wet behind the ears CEO Sam Zises blew away the competition, not necessarily with the app itself but with his total package.

Ad Age’s Jason DelRay report that not only did Zises bring his customized app called “Buds By Budweiser” but he engaged the crowd at one point doing a wardrobe change on stage from his Wendr hat to a hat that was already emblazoned with a “Buds By Budweiser” logo. This is the kind of thing that gets investors and contest judges engaged with the people presenting as much as the idea itself. A point echoed by Fubu founder and ABC Shark Tank Shark Daymond John in a recent Google+ Hangout Townhall meeting with high school students studying business.

More after the break
Read More…

Interview: Chicago Startup Toodalu Has It All Figured Out, Reward With Cash, Donate To Charity

Great things happen in Chicago, despite what anybody else says. Toodalu is one of those great things. Founded by three friends that met in (dare I say) Chicago’s thriving tech scene, Todd O’Hara, Ravi Singh and Chris Lubinski, they set out to provide another mobile startup that caters to the reward/engagement/loyalty space but they’ve hit something on the head with greatness, and that is CASH IS KING.

With the new Toodalu app when you shop at a participating merchant you get 5% cash back on your credit card and another 5% donated to charity. Which charity? Whichever one you want. We know that Target lets you donate to a ton of charities but with Toodalu you don’t need to have your charity on a list, it just needs to be a real charity.

“The user can choose ANY non-profit to give to! That’s the key element that excites our users and merchants. In addition, a user can select up to one hundred different charitable organizations to support and select how, exactly, they wish to distribute the giving by allocating percentages.” O’Hara told us in an interview.

Not only is Toodalu of epic greatness because they’ve already figured out the reward and the charity but it’s simple. We got a chance to catch up with O’Hara, who by the way Trevor was up at 10pm answering questions for us, way past the 5pm Pando curfew. The first thing we wanted to know is how did you stumble upon such a great idea:

Toodalu is a new breed of loyalty rewards. Just link any credit or debit card to your Toodalu account and when you use that card any partner location, 5% of every purchase is donated to the charity of your choice. We are proud to help charities raise boat loads of money while attaching purpose to the purchases of our users. The idea was born from the question,”how can we increase participation rates for charitable giving?”

More after the break
Read More…

Boca Raton Book Swapping Startup Wins FAU Business Plan Competition

A Boca Raton software entrepreneur putting two kids through college just won $15,000 in the Florida Atlantic University business plan competition. Mark Fredericks and his son David, a junior at FAU, pitched SwitchMyBooks which won the competition and the money to go along with it. They also won $80,000 in business services for the startup.

The contest was open to South Florida entrepreneurs and not just students at FAU.

SwitchMyBooks was born out of necessity. Fredericks quickly realized that spending $1000 or more per year on textbooks for college was a reality.

“The average student spends well over $1,000 a year for books,” Fredericks told the palmbeachpost. “That’s a huge burden.”

Sure there are other ways to get used textbooks online, however SwitchMyBooks has a more innovative approach on a local level. Students who want to sell their books using SwitchMyBooks simply list the book on the site. When they have a buyer the buyer pays a $.99 fee to SwitchMyBooksand then negotiates the actual sale of the book with the seller individually. They can then meet up, presumably on the same campus or nearby to actually do the exchange. The reservation fee lets the seller know they have a serious buyer and the buyer know they have the book.

FAU is the first campus to use SwitchMyBooks they implemented the site on campus last month. Fredericks has his sites on a nationwide rollout though. If he can get one million students using the site he could easily generate $5M in revenue.

Unlike other used book sites SwitchMyBooks users deal locally and don’t have to worry about shipping heavy books through the mail. They can also of course use cash versus Paypal or another form of online payment.

source: Palmbeachpost