Comments Off on Top 10 Reasons To Pick The STL Over SF For Your Next Startup0LikeLike 1,989
This is a repost from a Tech.li article with their permission with a link a bottom of article.
1.St. Louis is Cool
If you like sports, St. Louis is your kind of town. If you like eating, restaurants abound and if Mardi Gras is your type of thing, try checking out the nation’s biggest Mardi Gras celebration outside of New Orleans in the French District. In a city dripping with history, there is plenty of culture to keep anyone satiated, if/when you ever take a day off from growing the business, of course.
Comments Off on Kansas City’s Hallmark Acquires L.A. Startup Spirit Clips0LikeLike 3,949
U.S.greeting card giant Hallmark has acquired Los Angeles based video startup SpiritClips.
SpiritClips was founded in 2007 by Academy Award winning producer and studio executive Rob Fried who’s credits include the hit movies “Hoosiers” and “Rudy”. The company makes heartwarming short films and movies that will compliment Hallmark’s similar offerings and give Hallmark customers access to a variety of video content.
Fried said in a statement:
“It’s a dream come true for SpiritClips to be part of the digital future of so esteemed an organization as Hallmark.”
Hallmark CEO Donald Hall Jr said “It is a superb brand fit for Hallmark, with each story delivering compelling emotional content, positive family values and meaningful life lessons,”
Comments Off on Chattanooga Startup Retickr Filters Out The Noise From News And Social Media.0LikeLike 1,850
Most of us are too busy to sift through the noise of news sites and social streams to get exactly what we want. Many times the important information is lost in the shuffle. That’s where Chattanooga based startup ReTickr comes in.
ReTickr was created by three young entrepreneurs and University of Tennessee graduates; Travis Truett, Brian Trautschold and Jared Houghton.
The threesome has seen enormous growth after being featured in the Mac App Store for three weeks back in October 2011, but it wasn’t always that easy.
Comments Off on DC TechEd Startup Grade Ninja Revolutionizes Grading With ScanTron0LikeLike 2,126
Grade Ninja was born when Daniel Kleinman noticed that his sisters were spending their nice weekend days not going outside, jogging, shopping or even relaxing. His sisters are school teachers and they were constantly using up their free time grading Scantron sheets, something that ideally was supposed to be a fast process because it’s Scantron. That wasn’t the case and Kleinman wanted to do something about it.
Kleinman created an iPad app that uses the iPad’s camera to take a picture of the Scantron sheet and check it against a master. Kleinman, a self-taught Objective C programmer was able to refine the app so it has a margin of error of, at best, 1%. Things like how fast the sheet is fed and if the sheet is still perfectly in tact can swing the margin of error far greater when using a Scantron machine to grade.
I noticed it first with my sisters and my mom. Why are dedicated teachers spending so much time outside of school grading? Teachers spend about a day a week grading, roughly 8 hours. What if we could give this time back? This is why I created Grade Ninja. Kleinman told Carl Pierce of InTheCapital.com
In addition to freeing up teacher’s valuable free time Kleinman’s app will link back to gradebook apps making the grading process seemless and far more accurate than having to transpose anything. From their website:
GradeNinja can cut grading and recording time down to a fraction of what you spend now. Instantly scan multiple choice tests and input scores directly into your gradebook. Use the ultra fast grid to enter all your scores in a flash for any assignment types.
Kleinmann is sneakerstrapping this startup but we’re sure it’s going to become a hot commodity as TechEd continues its nationwide explosion. As for ScanTron grading, there are so many other issues our public schools need to work out before they make a move away from traditional ScanTron machine.
We’re in the midst of the Rawporter Roadshow visiting with startups and checking out tech everywhere. While in DC we stopped at the Fort accelerator where we met with Next Game. NextGame thrives off the fact that nothing is more social than pick up sports. With Spring in full swing millions of people will be flocking to the local park, open fields, and gyms to participate in pickup sports and other activities, this is where Next Game fits in.
When you’re in grade school, high school and even college sports are a way of life for most people. They’re also a given all school levels have sanctioned sports, intramural sports and pick up games. When you’re living on a college campus you can look at your dorm room window and find a soccer game, frisbee golf, hacky sack, pickup basketball and more. Once you get out of college the drive and want to participate in pickup sports is still there but finding pick up sports or men’s or women’s leagues is for lack of a better word, a pain in the ass.
Often times, unless it’s a real established adult league, participating in sports is contingent on organization and follow through and no one seems to communicate well. NextGame handles that for you.
Comments Off on Rawporter Roadtrip: Fose 2012 Check Out What SF Based Startup Nixle Is Doing For Communities Everywhere0LikeLike 1,973
On our Rawporter Roadtrip stop at the FOSE 2012 show in Washington DC we bumped into the guys from Nixle. Nixle is a new platform that allows municipal agencies like the police, elected officials, and county governments to quickly communicate with their residents in emergency situations, for community announcements and to keep people informed.
When Nixle started in 2009 they had just one local government agency using the service today they have over 5,000 local police and other public safety services using Nixle to communicate with their residents through SMS and mobile applications.
“Nixle provides communities throughout the country with news and information that is both proximate and personally relevant. Our technology is critical in creating new communication paths that have never existed before. We’ve set out to enable highly granular, location-specific information to be immediately available to users, depending on their physical location at any given time. Nixle makes this information instantly available over, SMS, mobile application, email, and web. Nixle’s executive team has in-depth experience and a deep understanding of internal processes at local police departments, emergency service agencies, city and municipal governmental agencies and community outreach organizations. This allows Nixle’s technology to be “best of breed” for these authorized users and ensures credibility of information delivered to residents and community visitors. Given the success of Nixle’s Municipal Wire Service, Nixle is currently releasing new and exciting paid-for services into the marketplace. “
People are beginning to take notice of how fast information can spread by mobile application and text (SMS) messaging. For instance when school campuses get locked down texts go into an all time frenzy. Now with Nixle, those folks living in a city or town that is in some kind of emergency they can rest assured knowing that their police, fire department or other agency may be using the Nixle system giving them an easy way to determine the validity of a message.
Nixle can come in handy in spontaneous natural disasters like Tornados where there is often not enough lead time before the actual damage sets in. Now with a click of a few buttons municipal leaders can quickly dispatch a massive message to their residents.
Nixle was the 2011 winner of the Government Service News: Best Mass Notification System award. Other accolades include the “Outstanding Product of 2012” by Law Officer.
You can see if your city or town is covered by simply texting your cell phone number to 888777.
Comments Off on L.A. Startup Spotlight: Thindish Eat Out, Stay Thin!0LikeLike 2,087
A new L.A. based startup has emerged out of a young businessman’s need to stay thin. Jason Lewis, founder of Thindish, says that while he was an advertising executive with worldwide firm TBWA/Chiat-Day he traveled so much he noticed he was putting on some weight. His wife noticed too. Lewis told startupfounder.info his wife said: “I’ll always love you… but it would be nice if you started to take care of yourself.”
So he went on a conquest to find out how he could continue his rigorous travel schedule, take clients out, and maintain his weight line. He and his wife combed through the menus of most of the places he liked to eat out and found the nutritional values of the dishes those restaurants served. From there Lewis sought out dishes that were less than 600 calories.
He stuck to those 600 calorie or less dishes and was able to drop 70 pounds. Well if it worked for him he knew it would help for others as well, and Thindish was born.
Comments Off on When Hollywood And A Tech Incubator Have A Baby They Called It io/LA0LikeLike 1,665
Just steps away from the famed Hollywood and Highland intersection is LA’s newest Startup Incubator io/la. Mixing Hollywood and Tech like never before, io/LA tries to infuse old Hollywood with new Tech in a way we’ve never seen. In an attempt to break the stigma that the Bay is where you want to be io/LA invites those with a Hollywood aspirations and a Tech way of thinking. The newly launched Incubator is the brain child of former MySpace CTO Aber Whitcomb, Donovan Leitch and Chris Gartin.
Comments Off on Israeli Startup Story About QT Recruit A Bad April Fool’s Joke0LikeLike 1,896
An Israeli startup called QTRecruit is looking to put job recruiters out of business, or at least obsolete. QTRecruit was founded by Nir Atsman and Yaron Cohen and evolved from a military project they implemented as part of the Israeli Defense Forces, 8200 unit.
The military project that was the backbone for QTRecruit was designed to automatically decide where in the Israeli army they should place new recruits.
“but the system spiders the Internet, like Google, gathering information about relevant candidates for a client’s open positions. In parallel, the client continuously feeds criteria into the system about the best kinds of candidates. Using some soon-to-be-patented artificial intelligence technologies and machine learning algorithms that we developed, the system learns over time how to find better candidates.” Yaron told website jobmob.co.il about how QTRecruit works.
Australian based startup Annex products launched in 2011 with a product designed by mates Rob Ward and Chris Peters. Their first product, the Opena case, is an iPhone case with a bottle opener built into it very similar to beaheadcase.com’s cases for opening beer bottles. They launched the Opena case on Kickstarter the popular crowd-funding site for new products.
The new case called the “Playa” provides protection,not only for your beloved iPhone but from STD’s, and unwanted pregnancies as well. How does it do this? It’s the first case designed to hold your phone and a condom.
The condom is secured in a sliding compartment that is flush with the case and no one can tell what’s in there. It holds two condoms easily. As the company says “no condoms falling on the red carpet for the playa case owner”.
Comments Off on South African Startup Whenpages Converges Just About Every Event Web Tool0LikeLike 1,524
When you’re organizing an event in 2012 you want to make sure you have everything covered where the web is concerned. You want to make sure people can find the event, stream the event, upload content from the event, reach the event from all social media channels, live blog the event, and see who’s at the event.
There are some great tools out there for each one of these different services but now one company, operating out of an apartment in Pretoria South Africa, is working on doing just that. Whenpages.com is the brain child of Twitter celeb Tendai Joe who’s social media savvy has garnered clients Telkom, Vodacom and the Nelson Mandela Foundation.
With his background in events and social media Tendai Joe had embarked on a mission. He originally only set out to buy the domain name when.com to do an event based website however, when.com was already in use. Tenda Joe then set out to develop a website that was the ultimate one stop destination for everything that has to do with events.
Comments Off on Infographic Suggests Just 5% Of Startups Founded By Women0LikeLike 1,742
We’ve featured some really great women led startups lately here at nibletz. We brought you the story of KlutchClub in Chicago and it’s founder Julia Bashkin. We also recently featured Y-Combinator startup 99dresses and their Aussie woman founder Nikki Durkin and more.
According to the infographic below, published by IT Manager Daily, 56% of professional jobs in the U.S are held by women. However in IT just 25% of jobs are held by women. Then there’s the startups. According to the infographic only 5% of startups are currently founded by women. This may be in dispute though as women seem to be more and more involved in starting their own businesses. In ABC’s “The Shark Tank” it seems that a lot more than 5% of those startups presented are founded by women.
We’ll be featuring more and more of the best startups from around the country and we’re sure we’ll see more than 5% are led by women.
Comments Off on Flud The “Instagram For News” Raising $8 Million Dollars Heads To Android0LikeLike 1,828
San Diego based startup Flud, a social news reader app for iPhone is does a great job of differentiating itself from other news readers like Taptu and Pulse.
They do this by allowing users to create profiles join the platform and share their news with others in their network. The UI is very polished and some in tech circles are calling Flud, the Instagram for news.
Sure everyone has access to the same internet and the same news stories but the way people curate the news is what makes some blogs and most news aggregates so popular.
Pinterest is one of the hottest social networks around. Most sites and analysis are suggesting that the pinboarding network is geared towards women. We reported earlier this week that America’s top man President Barack Obama has started using it.
Now Mayland’s Democratic Governor Martin O’Malley is using it as well. While Potus promises photos of the first family, including first dog BO, and Obama family recipes, O’Malley has something different.
Governor O’Malley is going to use his Pinterest page to promote homegrown startups. O’Malley is embarking on the first ever startup showcase pitch contest.
Nick Tippmann
Kyle
