startups Archives - Page 23 of 75

Tampa Bay Startup: MamaBear Giving Parents A Piece Of Mind

Monitoring your kids on the internet and on their mobile phone can be a sticky issue. Every parent wants to know that their children are being safe and that they are safe, everywhere they go and no matter what they are doing. Parents in this day and age have a lot more to watch out for than even 10 years ago. Child predators, cyber-bullying, texting and driving are all real problems facing parents and kids but privacy can be almost as sensitive.

Tampa Bay startup MamaBear has come up a mobile app that allows parents to monitor as much or as little as they want to on their child’s mobile phone. The first step though is the acknowledgement the app gets from the monitored phone (the child’s). Parents download the MamaBear app to their smartphone and then on their child’s phone. The child then checks in, both acknowledging the app is on their phone and letting their parents know where they are.

MamaBear from Mamabear App on Vimeo.

Parents can monitor locations, texts, social media, and more. In fact, MamaBear app also provides a list of words that could indicate the child is doing something that’s at risk or that they’re being cyber bullied.

MamaBear evolved out of a location based company that was working on providing businesses with location based business intelligence. One of the co-founders, Stuart Kime got into a conversation with a parent who had told him that her full time job was monitoring her kids’ social media pages. Kime along with his co-founders were able to come up with an app that gave parents a piece of mind all the way around.

We got a chance to interview Robyn Spoto, co-founder and company President. Check out the interview with her below:

Iowa Startup BidOnMyJob Harnesses SMS To Take On Craigslist

A new Iowa Startup called BidOnMyJob is ready to talk on the likes of Craigslist and AngiesList. The startup, founded by Derrick Hans and Nathan Gibson takes the, gigs and service offered sections out of Craigslist and has made a targeted platform for job matching, social discovery, and referrals.

The concept behind BidOnMyJob is that there are contractors and people who can do work for other folks just about anywhere.

” You have a huge network out there at your fingertips. Chances are there is someone that knows someone who can and wants to fix it for you” Hans said.

Contractors, workers and neighborhood handymen can sign up for an account at BidOnMyJob. From there, when there is a job posted that meets their criteria they will be alerted through the website and via text message.

We talked to Bruce Matheson, a carpenter and contractor in Maryland who said that the SMS integration would give BidOnMyJob a leg up on competitive sites he already uses for jobs. “I can only check Craigslist and Angie’s List in the morning before I go out for a Job and then at lunch. The jobs are gone by then. Having a system that texts me jobs would keep me more competitive.”

In addition to SMS alerts BidOnMyJob has a great social component that allows every job to easily be shared across multiple social networks like Twitter and Facebook, by email or even by text message.

Hans and Gibson have launched the company in the Des Moines metro area and will stay local for now, but do plan on a nationwide roll out.

Linkage:

Check out BidOnMyJob here

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Israeli Startup: tawkon Is Like A Geiger Counter For Your Smart Phone

Depending on who you talk to the verdict on the radiation generated from cell phones is still out. However it is a legitimate concern to many. An Israeli startup called tawkon wants to help smartphone users be aware when radiation levels emitted from their smartphone, become troublesome.

tawkon insists they aren’t trying to make people afraid of using their phones, in fact they tell us it’s quite the opposite.

“The goal of tawkon is not to have people fear using their phones, quite the opposite. In fact, 90% of the time phones are operating at low radiation, but the level of exposure someone gets from a phone at high radiation for one minute is the same as they would get for five hours at low radiation. It’s that 10% that we want to help you avoid.

When radiation levels from your phone spike tawkon will alert you and provide you with suggestions on how to lessen your exposure (such as using a headset or speakerphone). The app tracks your weekly radiation exposure and gives you valuable data on how many minutes of “high radiation” you have been exposed to.” Mark Lerner, New Media & Marketing Manager for Tawkon told us in an interview.

tawkon wants to give their users piece of mind to be able to use their smartphones whenever they want, knowing that if the radiation emitted from their phones ever becomes a concern Tawkon will alert them.

We got a chance to interview Lerner in depth about Tawkon check out the interview below.

Temecula California Startup: Sightly Inks $5.6M In Venture Round

Sightly, a startup based in Temecula California has just announced a venture raise of $5.6 million dollars. The company specializes in connecting and engaging local businesses with customers through video.

The companies innovative platform utilizes video across the web and where it matters most in this decade, on their mobile device. Sightly helps businesses develop and manage interactive video campaigns through a real time dashboard that allows businesses to monitor their own success.

The company started out as a business focused video production company however John McIntyre the founder and CEO of Sightly has abandoned the production house business for the current model where the opportunity really exists.

Moscow based Bright Capital Digital also sees the great opportunity with Sightly. They led this $5.6 million dollar round. The company also attracted new investor Foresight Ventures.

Existing investors, Floodgate, Tomorrow Ventures, Bullpen Capital, Mack Capital and 500 Startups also participated in the round.

“We believe that video – particularly on mobile devices – is going to drive how consumers find and choose local businesses,” McIntyre said “This funding from both new and current investors not only validates this vision but supports its realization.”

“Local is exploding,” said Mike Maples of Floodgate. “Sightly not only has a compelling vision of where the market is heading for consumers and local businesses, but they have a breakthrough approach on how to make that vision a reality and create a game changer in local advertising.”

Linkage:

Check out Sightly here

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Startup Weekend To Ring Opening Bell Friday

Startup Weekend was founded in Boulder Colorado in 2007, by Andrew Hyde. What we now know as the 54 hour hackathon style, team startup weekend event started out with a different model. When Hyde created Startup Weekend the goal was to bring a group together to work on one idea or concept all weekend.

That model evolved into what we know today as Startup Weekend and the thousands of clones out there. In 2009 Marc Nager and Clint Nelsen acquired Startup Weekend and made it an official 501c3 non-profit organization.

The following year they received major backing from the Kauffman Foundation.

Today Startup weekend has hosted events across 100 countries and 400 cities. Startup Weekend events are serious business for their hacker, entrepreneur and founder participants. In fact missile attacks couldn’t even thwart this Israeli Startup Weekend (at first).

Startup Weekend has also hosted global contests pitting participants in several cities and countries against each other. The Global Startup Battle is in its second year and took place last month as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week. Mega Startup Weekend is also another event that highlights the collective efforts of entrepreneurs at Startup Weekend events.

Startup Weekend will celebrate the creation of 100,000 entrepreneurs in their 3 years of existence in the current format. To mark the occasion Nager and Nelsen will ring the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday morning.

According to GeekWire Startup Weekend has raised $75 million dollars for entrepreneurship and created thousands of jobs.

Linkage

Startup Weekend can be found here

Here’s nibletz coverage of Startup Weekend

Check out this giant startup event

Barcelona Startup: Groupiest, Create Your Own Social Networks

When you scale down social networks to their core, you’ll quickly realize that they’ve been around a lot longer than Facebook. MMC groups on AOL, bulletin boards on Prodigy and even dial in BBS’ back in the 80’s would equate to what has evolved into the current social network. Albeit today’s social networks have many more features, users and points of entry.

While Facebook continues to grow, and currently tops over 1 billion users, siloed or vertical social networks are starting to pop up all over the place. You have your one big public network and than you have your “clubs”. So what if there is no network for your interest yet? You could opt to be entrepreneurial and create a startup for it, with a practical likeliness of failing. Or you can find a startup that lets you create your own mini social networks.

That platform is Barcelona startup Groupiest.

Groupiest allows users to create their own community of interest for free (read mini-social network). Using Groupiest users can share what their passionate about and build their own personal brand in their own network of like minded folks. Think Yahoo Groups or even Usenet on steroids.

We got a chance to talk with the founders of Groupiest. Check out the interview below:

Chicago Startup: Rentalutions, Helping Landlords New & Old

The downturn in the economy over the last few years has forced several people, into becoming landlords. People who had a great deal on a house before the economy went down, were forced to start renting property. They wanted to hold onto their property and at the same time make money to pay their mortgages down so these new properties weren’t a total write off.

A Chicago Startup, incubating at 1871, called Rentalutions is there to help those landlords and then tens of thousands more who’ve been renting out property for years.

Rentalutions is a complete landlord tenant system. Tenants can set up recurring rental payments using the system. They can also turn in maintenance requests around the clock and communicate with their landlords directly.

For landlords, Rentalutions is one centralized system that keeps up with just about every aspect of renting property. The platform even allows landlords to list a vacant property and screen for potential tenants within the system. Once they take on a new tenant they can convert that record to a tenant record without having to re-input data over and over again.

Rentalutions, founded by two long time friends Ryan Coon and Laurence Jankeow, hopes to become the complete turn key system for the over 6 million do it yourself landlords across the country. The company provides do it yourself landlords with similar resources that some of the top property management companies are using.

We got a chance to interview Coon. Check out our interview below.

Indian Startup: EduBuzzer Makes It Simple For Schools To Communicate With Students & Parents

Although the fundamentals of communication are often taught in schools, sometimes schools, colleges and universities have the hardest time communicating with students and even parents. That’s the problem that Indian startup EduBuzzer is fixing with their simple and easy to use application.

EdBuzzer makes it easy for any school teacher, or administrator at any level of education to communicate quickly with one set of students, a single student or the entire student body. EdBuzzer makes it easy to send out assignments, grades, and even newsletters without the cumbersome nature of bulk and mass emails.

The startup based in Chandigarh India, prides itself on absolute simplicity. They want busy teachers and even secretaries to be able to help communicate important messages at anytime.

EduBuzzer is actually a product from educational startup Chalkpad which bills themselves as “Educational Technology Specialists”.

We got to talk with Abhiraj Malhorta a trailblazer at Chalkpad and one of the co-founders of EduBuzzer. Check out the interview below.

Chicago Startup: ParkWhiz Raises $2 Million, Parking Startups Are Hot In Chicago

Monday we reported that Chicago parking startup SpotHero had raised $2.5 million in funding. That was big news for the ExcelerateLabs alumni that’s currently working out of 1871. Now, we’ve heard that another Chicago parking startup called ParkWhiz has raised $2 million dollars.

ParkWhiz’ funding round was led by Hyde Park Venture Partners. Hyde Park Angels, Amicus Capital, Alexis Ohanian, Garry Tan, Henry J Feinberg, and Amreesh Modi also participated in the investment, according to builtinchicago.com. Ohanian is the co-founder of Reddit and Tan is a partner at Y Combinator.

ParkWhiz has been around a little longer than Chicago rival SpotHero. They originally came on the scene in 2006 and in the past 6 years have generated over $10 million in parking revenue to operators. They also have access to over 3 million parking spaces.

One of ParkWhiz’ major success stories is the partnerships they’ve formed with organizations that are key in the big event space. ParkWhiz is partnered with StubHub, Ticketsnow, several NFL and NCAA teams and other sports and entertainment venues.

“This financing allows us to realize our next stage of growth, beginning with the hiring of 20 additional employees,” said Aashish Dalal, CEO and co-founder of ParkWhiz said in a statement. “The wealth of knowledge and experience of our new board members will help us aggressively deliver unique capabilities to our customers and further solidify our position as the market leader.”

More than 1 million people have used ParkWhiz.com, the largest, fastest growing, online parking reservation company in the U.S. ParkWhiz allows users to compare price, location and amenities. Drivers may reserve special event parking and purchase discounted downtown parking at up to 80% off drive-up rates. The company works with over 2,000 parking lots nationwide, giving customers access to over 3 million parking spaces. ParkWhiz’s national footprint has enabled them to provide parking spot inventory that far exceeds their closest competition.

Joining co-founder Aashish Dalal on the company’s board will be Ira Weiss of Hyde Park Venture Partners and Henry J. Feinberg, former partner at Technology Crossover Ventures, the world’s largest technology oriented Venture Capital firm. Mr. Feinberg is currently the Chairman of Maxim Revenue Management Solutions.

“ParkWhiz offers a transformational service for finding optimal automobile parking,” said Henry J. Feinberg. “ParkWhiz will change how consumers and parking lot owners and operators do business similar to how Expedia changed travel, Netflix changed entertainment and Zillow changed real estate.”

Linkage:

Find ParkWhiz Here

BuiltinChicago Here

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California Startup: SportsBoard Brings The Coaches Clipboard Mobile & To The Cloud

About 8 years ago software entrepreneur Gregg Jacobs was watching his youngest son try out for club lacrosse and soccer teams in California. What he noticed back then was that coaches for both sports were feverishly keeping notes on clip boards, turning pages, and scribbling things down wherever they could. Jacobs knew from his software background that there had to be a better way, however smartphones were just on the cusp and tablets hadn’t even been invented.

FastForward to 2011. With smartphones growing increasingly fast and iPads taking a firm place in the home and in enterprise, Jacobs decided to revisit that idea, and started California startup SportsBoard.

SportsBoard, in it’s simplest form is a player relationship management system for coaches. Think SalesForce or ACT for coaches to manage players. The platform has a cloud based component and a mobile component which allows coaches to quickly make entries for later analysis from their iPhones or iPads. When they get home, back to the office, or the gym they can quickly sync to the cloud and manage their teams on a desktop or laptop computer.

SportsBoard is now optimized for ten different sports; Soccer, Basketball, Baseball, Lacrosse, Football, Ice Hockey, Field Hockey, Tennis, Volleyball and Rugby. Jacobs tells us that Softball is in the pipeline as well.

Over the last eight months over 100 Division I through Division 3 colleges have adopted SportsBoard as their player management system.

We got a chance to interview Jacobs about SportsBoard and growing his startup just far enough outside the valley, to be considered “everywhere else”

Orlando Startup: ASPIREDU Is Helping College Students Stay In School

A group of educators based in Florida has teamed together to help prevent attrition and improve the dropout rate of college students. It’s a pretty big goal for Orlando startup ASPIREDU.

They’re not offering incentives, rewards or a cute little app to manage the school day better. The team behind ASPIREDU is taking their decades of experience in education and using an analytics tool to help identify at risk students enrolled in online courses so that they can help these schools better manage student retention.

While they’ve been working on ASPIREDU for quite some time they just launched their public facing product after months of testing, yesterday.

The combine a simple overview of at risk students with easy access to details about each student, which helps colleges and universities have a better overall picture of students that could drop out.

ASPIREDU was formed after one of the cofounders, who had been in higher education for ten years, found that she was spending over half her day working on student retention. When she went searching for a software tool to help identify and manage at risk students there wasn’t one.

The bootstrapped startup received a little seed money in the form of a grant from Startup Weekend EDU.

We got a chance to talk with one of the founders Kevin Kopas, about ASPIREDU, because the other two cofounders are still working on ASPIREDU while employed full time they’ve withheld their names for this interview. Check out the interview below.

Charlotte Startup: Womadz Is A Crowdsourced Video Advertising Platform

Have you ever watched tv and thought that you could create a better commercial for something than the one you just watched? Well that’s exactly what Diek Minkhorst and Sam Reitman were thinking one night while they were just chilling in college. Most advertising is boring and while advertisers want to attract buyers with hot models, and beautiful pictures, these ads don’t resonate well because they aren’t the actual users.

That’s why Minkhorst and Reitman created Charlotte startup Womadz (they have a presence in New York as well).

Womadz hosts online video contests for their brand partners encouraging film makers and those people that just make silly videos for fun, to make videos about products and advertisers. The video makers have an opportunity to win prizes and the advertisers have the option to have great content provided to them by a variety of people. That’s where the crowdsourced part comes in.

Once the video contest is initiated Womadz encourages the general public to check out the videos and vote on the ones they like the best. That’s where the winning and the prizes come in.

We got a chance to talk with Minkhorst about Womadz. Check out our interview below.

Helsinki Startup: Playmysong The Social, Mobile & Physical Jukebox

Last May we brought you the story about Austin startup BeDj that brings turntable.fm into real life. When bars and restaurants use the platform you can control the audio in the establishment with your smartphone, in essence bringing being the dj from turntable.fm into a brick and mortar establishment.

We love innovative startups that bridge clicks and mortar. A Helskink startup is doing something similar. The startup, called Playmysong. Playmysong is the mobile, social jukebox. Basically in restaurants equipped with a Playmysong enabled jukebox, give up control of the jukebox from the traditional person with quarters to fill it up all night, to those with smartphones.

Playmysong has two main functionality partners in Spotify and Winamp. A user can create their own social jukebox for their own party, powered by Spotify. The in venue mechanism is powered by Winamp.

We got a chance to talk with the team behind Playmysong. Check out the interview below.

DreamIt Ventures Philadelphia Graduates 15, Here’s A Song About it

Earlier this month DreamIt Ventures graduated their fall Philadelphia class. DreamIt Ventures holds accelerator programs in their hometown of Philadelphia, New York, Israel and a new program that started this year in Austin Texas. The fall Philadelphia class was their 7th class to graduate the program.

Here’s a list of all 15 startups that pitched at Investor Day:

Altair Prep: An SAT tutoring service that remotely connects students with leading tutors.
Applique: A drag-and-drop tool for creating mobile apps.
Betterific: Helps you share and find ideas to improve product development.
Brideside: An online boutique that helps brides build up their wedding experience together with their wedding party.
CallGrader: Lets companies collect marketing data and analytics from phone calls.
Charlie: Prepares you with information about a contact before you meet up with them.
Cloudamize: Offers tools to help companies manage and optimize their cloud services.
FlagTap: Helps websites increase user engagement, and tells them exactly what their visitors are doing.
Mor.sl: A combined recipe and grocery delivery service.
NinjaThat: An online marketplace that lets businesses outsource tasks to students.
PeerActive: Brings together game dynamics with e-commerce.
Spruceling: An online marketplace for parents to sell their kids’ used clothes.
TrendBent: A personal style engine for men.
Vizy: Lets you record and store virtual memories in physical places.
ZenKars: Offers a peaceful online marketplace for buying used cars.

Philadelphia’s class ended demo day with a song. Check out this awesome video below courtesy of TechnicallyPhilly’s YouTube Channel.

Linkage:

Check out DreamIt Ventures here

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