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Boston TechStars Fall Session Kicks Off With 13 Startups

Fresh off the heels of a top 10 finish in the annual Kellogg accelerator rankings, TechStars Boston fall program is underway. TechStars Katie Rae made the official announcement via the TechStars blog yesterday.

This is the first time they’ve run a second class in the same year at their Boston location. Competition is tough in the north east for both the startups and the accelerators. Although they didn’t make it in the top 15 rankings startups in the north east also look to the MassChallenge program to hone their entrepreneurial skills.

We were actually very pleased that two startups we’ve covered here at nibletz.com made the TechStars cut. Boston based athlete to private coach connection platform, CoachUp has made it into the fall class. Michigan based FetchNotes , an incredibly easy to use, feature packed note taking app has also made it into this fall class.

TechStars is credited with just about writing the program for most of the cohort based startup accelerators across the country. Many of the other cohort based accelerators like Cincinnati’s Brandery , Greenville’s Iron Yard Labs , and even Nashville’s Jumpstart Foundry are part of the Global Accelerator Network. The Global Accelerator Network is an offshoot of TechStars, that for a short period of time, was called the TechStars Network.

Here is the entire list of all 13 startups from TechStars.com

BetterFit Technologies provides personalized medicine for everyone. betterfit.com

BookingMarkets lets small and large web sites connect travelers with unique places to stay around the world. bookingmarkets.com

CoachUp helps athletes achieve their full potential by connecting them with private coaches. coachup.com

At Fashion Project you can shop daily designer deals and clean out your closet for your favorite cause. fashionproject.com

Fetchnotes makes it easy to stay on top of what’s going on in your life and communicate with the people that matter to you. fetchnotes.com

ImpulseSave makes saving your money as easy and gratifying as spending it. impulsesave.com

Med2Bed connects hospitals and post-acute care facilities to improve patient outcomes. med-2-bed.com

NBD uses unique surface chemistry to harvest water from humidity. nbdnano.com

Ovuline helps couples conceive faster. ovuline.com

Saverr helps consumers save together. Connecting online and offline shopping. saverrapp.com

Wymsee is operating in stealth. wymsee.com

Zepppelin helps small businesses see what’s happening in their company by connecting their cloud applications and team in one place. zepppelin.com

Linkage:

Check out TechStars here

Source

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else”

Nashville Startup: PhotoRankr Captures The Essence Of Jumpstart Foundry

Now in their third year the cohort based startup accelerator Jumpstart Foundry, in Nashville Tennessee has ironed out a lot of kinks. We got a chance to spend some time with Marcus Whitney a co-founder at Jumstart Foundry, who also serves as the accelerator’s Managing Director. Through each of the last three cohorts Whitney has spent the most day to day time with all of the classes.

Throughout the Jumpstart Foundry demo day the theme surrounding Whitney’s role was consistent. Whitney, while a great and likable guy, means business. He’s a serial entrepreneur himself who’s founded a handful of his own successful startups. That also means he knows the struggles first hand at what a founder and a founding team at a startup goes through. That’s why he’s one of the best possible people in Nashville to serve as Jumpstart Foundry’s Managing Director.

While a three month boot-camp style accelerator can be a fun and life enriching experience, Whitney is known for telling teams like it is and establishing the ground rules on day one. He’s also known for pushing entrepreneurs to their limit. As far as the program goes there’s no bs in the selection process. Whitney told us that they don’t take teams without a technologist. We’ve seen teams at accelerators all over the country who come with an idea guy, a business development guy and no developer or coder. Often these teams blow most of their seed money on outsourcing and barely have a product ready for demo day. One of the biggest things we noticed at Jumpstart Foundry’s demo day is that all seven teams had a product up and running. No wireframes, no mock ups, no business plans, every team had a working product you could go out on the internet and try right now.

We asked Whitney along with Baker Donelson’s Emerging Business Practice Chair, Chris Sloan, what team at the Jumpstart Foundry this year, was the most improved. They both unanimously and at the same exact time said PhotoRankr. In fact they both agreed that PhotoRankr captured the essence of what a cohort style accelerator program was all about.

Whitney talked about PhotoRankr’s day one pitch. Sloan, who is a pro-amateur photographer in his s

pare time recalled thatPhotoRankr’s pitch on day one included a slide show with no photos. Who does that? A photo platform slide show with no photos.

When Sloan introduced the PhotoRankr team on Thursday he spoke very proudly letting the audience know that not only was their pitch deck filled with photos, every photo in their slide show was procured from PhotoRankr.

So what is PhotoRankr, it’s an online community for photographers. It allows photographers to chat with one another, get advice, vote pictures up and down and the biggest part, it provides a platform to sell photos. As PhotoRankr co-founder Tyler Sniff pointed out in the presentation, the stock photo resources on the internet right now are relatively weak, most have had the same images for years and the ones with great photos are way too costly.

Now, someone looking for a photo for their website, book, magazine, movie or any other use can peruse the pages of PhotoRankr and find what they need. The photographers themselves set the prices for the photos, along with the licensing terms which typically means they will be fairly priced.

Sloan recently joined PhotoRankr and wasn’t sure what to expect. He had tried most of the other photo sharing services out there, but he was excited when he started receiving emails notifying him that people had liked his photos.

As for the team itself, they work and operate like a family. That could possibly be attributed to the fact that three of the four members of the founding team are actually brothers. Tyler serves as the company’s Head of Business Development. Their CEO is Jacob Sniff who will be graduating from Princeton this year. Their third brother Matthew Sniff serves as the company’s CEO. Noah Willard, a family friend, serves as the Creative Director.

Whitney said that one of the teams keys to success throughout the program was their reaction to criticism. Rather than being head strong and ego driven, the PhotoRankr team took every piece of criticism in stride, often asked questions about what their mentors were telling them, and then sought advice immediately after making changes.

From where we stand the biggest challenge for PhotoRankr is going to be exposing the features to the market place and what sets them apart from Flickr, Photo Bucket and that product formerly known as Picassa.

When you watch the pitch video below you’ll see what a great job PhotoRankr did during the Jumpstart Foundry program:

Linkage:

Check out Photorankr here

Check out Jumpstart Foundry Here

Nibletz is the voice of startups in the southeast and everywhere else

Nashville Startup: OurVinyl’s Final Pitch From Jumpstart Foundry Demo Day VIDEO

Demo Day at Jumpstart Foundry was amazing. The class was great and miraculously every single team that presented had a working product. Of course that’s the goal behind every accelerator but we’ve been to quite a few accelerator demo days where that wasn’t the case.

So what is OurVinyl, no it’s not an online record shop for vinyl buffs. OurVinyl is actually a music video platform that encompasses the user and allows the user to curate their own channels, playlists and discovery new music. Where most music discovery startups focus on just the audio, OurVinyl is all about video.

OurVinyl has started with indie artists and other video content that you won’t find anywhere else on the web. The founders have backgrounds in video and it shows with the intuitive user experience created within OurVinyl.

The OurVinyl team has equated most of their best practices to Spotify rather than Pandora. Of course neither Spotify nor Pandora actually do video, they are both just audio only. OurVinyl is changing that by offering a streaming video platform accessible by Google TV, Apple TV, Xbox and Roku.

They have an easy to understand subscription model which guarantees you access to all of your favorite videos on the platform and customization features for your specific tastes. Many don’t realize that YouTube is one of the top places people go to source not just videos, or music videos but music itself. OurVinyl is capitalizing on that fact with their unique new platform.

In their pitch video from Jumpstart Foundry’s Demo Day, they explain exactly how the platform works and how they plan on monetizing it through advertising and subscription plans.

Another feature that’s rather new and baked into OurVinyl is not just the ability to like or not like songs and music videos themselves, but the advertising as well. After an ad unit plays you can tell OurVinyl whether you like ads like that or not. If you say “no” you won’t have to see the same ad again.

Check out their pitch video below:

Linkage:

Check out OurVinyl here at ourvinyl.tv

Here’s more Demo Day coverage

Nibletz is the voice of startups in the southeast and “everywhere else”

Canadian Startup: SWVLE Talent Discovery Tournament Style INTERVIEW

Talent discovery is a tough nut to crack. How can you judge whether someone is truly talented or not. There are a few startups in the talent discovery space and most of them are based on recommendations. Now of course recommendations are great, especially if you can get top shelf people in your industry to recommend you, but how can you tell your personal story?

You can make as many self YouTube videos as you would like, and those are great, but the next question then is how much talent do you have over the next guy?

SWVLE, a new startup brewing in Nova Scotia, is tackling that problem in a head to head, video to video bracket system. It’s like an all out talent tournament.

In terms of talent you can be talking about the next marketing rockstar or the next actual rockstar. When you use SWVLE it doesn’t matter what kind of talent you have you can put yourself up against someone else in your space, and let SWVLE work it’s magic.

What magic is that you ask? Well we needed to find out so we went right to the source and we interviewed SWVLE co-founder Sam Doyle. Check out the interview below:

Say It Forward With This Connecticut Startup INTERVIEW

By now everyone has seen the startups pop up that let you put all of your Instagram photos on just about every product under the sun. We’ve even reported on a startup that prints your tweets onto toilet paper. Connecticut startup Say It Forward, curates meaningful and inspiring social media content and puts them on greeting cards, with other products soon to follow.

Say It Forward says they do this to promote positivity and inspire people. Their goal is to inspire, share and connect. Surely the founders at Say It Forward know what the real world is like, which is precisely why they’ve created Say It Forward. Now rather than turning to the inspirational minds at Hallmark, Say It Forward uses messages from the public at large for their inspirational products. Think of it as crowd-sourced inspiration.

The Connecticut startup’s founders are two sisters Steph Centorino(22) and Allie Centorino (18) they’ve also enlisted the help of their mother as the chief ideas officer. Step and Allie are no strangers to the world of good. Their previous startup, which is still in operation today, is called CUREchiefs which are funky and soft bandanas designed for people with cancer who’ve lost their hair due to chemo-therapy.

We got a chance to interview mom, the Chief Ideas Officer, Sandra Centorino. Check out the interview below:

Nashville Startup: The Skillery Pitches At Jumpstart Foundry Demo Day VIDEO

The Skillery CEO Matt Dudley pitching at Jumpstart Foundry demo day (photo nibletz llc)

Jumpstart Foundry demo day continues with the team from The Skillery. When their mentor introduced the team she talked about how CEO Matt Dudley started his entrepreneurial roots when he was just 7 years old and put up signs in his neighborhood advertising his services as a GhostBuster.

The Skillery in it’s simplest description is a platform to sell tickets to workshops. They are in the same space as Dabble and Skilshare but with a twist. Dudley and his team are specifically targeting small business owners who want to teach classes.

For instance, the local woman who owns a shop selling hemp and weaved products could start a class on The Skillery. Here in Nashville they’ve had teachers come out of the community that did whiskey tastings and even classes on the value of cotton diapering as opposed to disposable diapers. In fact the woman with the disposable diaper business saw 25-30 people come to her workshops that were listed and promoted on TheSkillery, and she was able to convert students to customers.

Dudley is charismatic and explained his pitch in a way that everyone in the room understood exactly what he was talking about but with the passion that would come with the next Instagram and not a learning platform. As for a learning platform, Dudley is quick to point out that The Skillery is not about online classes, it’s one of those startups that bridging the online world back with the real world, something that will be vital to the next wave a startups, according to the New York Times.

Check out Dudley’s pitch below:

Check out The Skillery here

Here’s more demo day coverage

Nibletz is the voice of startups in the southeast and everywhere else

Nashville Startup Evermind Pitches At Jumpstart Foundry Demo Day VIDEO

Today marks the end of Tennessee demo day month with demo and investor day for Jumpstart Foundry in Nashville. Jumpstart Foundry is a nationally known startup accelerator currently based at the Entrepreneur Center in Nashville. They were recently recognized with an honorable mention in the 2012 national accelerator rankings, reported by TechCocktail just yesterday. This is the second year in a row Jumpstart Foundry has appeared as an honorable mention.

Evermind is a very unique new, “ambient monitoring” solution geared towards family members that care or are worried about the care of their elderly family members and loved ones.

Evermind is not nearly has obtrusive as many of their competing products. The founding team, who was part of the founding team at Griffin Technologies in Nashville, has approached this product with care and with always keeping both the end user and the consumer in mind, never losing site of that.

To that end, some of the things that immediately stood out to me with Evermind included:

– The non obtrusive design. The Evermind product looks sleek and it doesn’t look like a medical device
– The pricing is at $199 for three Evermind units
– easy to use website
– non obtrusive monitoring.

As for the way the system itself works, it’s simple. You plug an appliance that your elderly loved one uses everyday into an Evermind remote unit and every time your loved one uses that appliance it sends a message to the Evermind cloud and then to the loved ones phone. For instance if your grandpa John makes a cup of coffee at 7:30am every morning, you would plug the coffee maker into the Evermind unit and when he made his cup of coffee it would signal you. If he misses the cup of coffee you’re alerted, maybe there is something wrong. These remote plug devices can be set up on any small appliance, can openers, tvs, bedside lamps etc.

There is no need to worry about a life alert pendant or security cameras, it gives the elderly person privacy and the care giver, piece of mind.

Check out their pitch video at JumpStart Foundry video below:

Linkage:

Check out more Demo Day coverage here

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more startup stories from “everywhere else”

Check out Jumpstart Foundry at jumpstartfoundry.com

Iron Yard Demo Day Preview: Greenville Startup: MoonClerk

Iron Yard Labs is a 13 week accelerator program in Greenville South Carolina. It’s part of the Global Accelerator Network which was founded by Boulder Colorado based TechStars. The Global Accelerator Network affiliation gives the startup teams participating in the Iron Yard Labs session access to top shelf business benefits like free hosting, legal services, accounting services and more.

The inaugural class at Iron Yard will graduate next week on August 29th with a demo day in Greenville. In the week leading up to demo day we will have interviews with some of the exciting startups accelerating in the program.

We got to kick off this special section with Greenville ride sharing startup Ridepost you can read that interview here. You can also see our interview with Spent here.

Next up is: MoonClerk.

Sure it has a cute name but MoonClerk is a powerful platform making it easy for anyone to immediately and inexpensively set up branded, embeddable, and linkable recurring online payment forms with no technical skills required. It’s easier than creating PayPal payment forms and is perfect for anyone with any kind of service, product, digital product or even recurring donations.

While MoonClerk is a cute sounding name, Dodd Caldwell, co-founder of MoonClerk says in our interview below that there is a real meaning behind the name. First off they wanted to use the word clerk because it dealt with payments without having to say payment. Then, the team went with moon because it’s a satellite on a recurring orbit. Pretty smart huh?

Check out the rest of our interview with Caldwell, below:

Facebook Is What I Like, NY Startup Mirror is What I’m Like INTERVIEW

Mirror, a startup in New York’s bustling flat iron district, has created something innovative and different bridging parts in a few different spaces. Mirror says that Facebook is what I like, and Mirror is what I’m like. With Facebook you talk about the things you do and like. With mirror, other people talk about what you’re actually like. It’s in essence bridging online personals, online dating, and people recommendation engines in a unique way.

Where California startup Recmnd.me is about people recommendation at a professional level, mirror is more personal, and more free flowing. For instance if you’re a really nice guy, and a great romanticist, people on Mirror can vouch for you or as the Mirror team calls it, people can give their “take” on you. If you’re a passionate entrepreneur that’s helped a bunch of folks, one of your takes can say that. Or to borrow an example from their website, if you’re a really great DJ, people can add that to their take on you.

Mirror bills themselves as real recommendations by real people. The platform can be used for dating, to find new business colleagues and to make new friends. They leverage real contacts and real opinions of someone rather than trying to build around a social graph or recommend people based on whether or not you like Mark Zuckerberg’s dog. The Mirror platform has real potential.

We got a chance to interview Dan Mattio, check out the interview below:

Cincinnati’s Brandery & 9 More Accelerators From Everywhere Else Make Top 15 List

(graphic techcocktail.com)

The top 15 accelerators in the US has just been published by TechCocktail. They were the official media partner for the startup accelerator ranking project now in it’s second year. The ranking project was spearheaded by Aziz Gilani from DFJ Mercury and executed in partnership with Kristen Kamath a second year MBA candidate at the Kellogg School of Management at NorthWestern University.

After pitching a fit for coming in second place last year, Paul Graham’s Y-Combinator is again placed at the top of the top 15 accelerator list. An additional four accelerators from Silicon Valley rounded placed in the top 10; KickLabs (#3), i/o Ventures (#4), AngelPad (#6) and Mountain View based 500 startups at number 10.

To rank on the top 15 list of accelerators, the accelerator programs had to meet a certain criteria. The criteria factored in follow on capital, qualified financing activity and qualified exits. You’ll notice that four of the TechStars programs made it into the top 15 list, as did the most visible accelerators out there.

The best ranking for a startup accelerator “everywhere else” was Chicago’s Excelerate Labs which came in fifth. TechStars New York and Boston came in seventh and eighth place respectively. LaunchPad in Los Angeles placed ninth. Dreamit Ventures in Philadelphia came in eleventh place, TechStars Seattle, NYC SeedStart, Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator New York, and The Brandery in Cincinnati rounded out the top fifteen.

There were a lot of other accelerators across the country that were used in the research. The editorial team at TechCocktail came up with a great 22 page report called “Best Accelerator For Your Tech Startup” that can be downloaded for free at TechCocktail’s site here.

The report outlines some of the other accelerators across the country and pays close attention to some of the specialty accelerators that may be more inline with your accelerator goals. Actually after reviewing the entire 22 pages, the report will be a big help to any startup that is considering an any accelerator around the country.

Linkage:

Check out the complete review and report at here at techcocktail.com

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more startup stories from “everywhere else”

We’re on a sneaker-strapped nationwide startup road trip, here’s more info

German Startup: Carpooling.com Plans For US Expansion, INTERVIEW

Ridesharing is big overseas. There are a few standout startups working on ridesharing in the United States, including Iron Yard Labs startup RidePost. Established German ride sharing startup Carpooling.com is preparing for a big expansion in the US.

Carpooling.com has grown from 41,000 riders in it’s first year to well over 4 million today. They currently operate in 40 countries with their app available in 7 languages. Carpooling.com allows the rider to select someone to share a ride with based on vehicle, comfort, location and cost. This feature set insures that every rider gets to where they want to go, and how they want to get there. If you need to go 70 miles down the countryside you may want to ride with someone with a comfortable. If you’re just trying to get 15 miles to work you may be ok in a minivan. With carpooling.com the choice is yours.

Carpooling.com sees huge growth potential in the United States market. In their research they found that there’s an average of 3.75 seats available per car (not sure about that .75 part but ok) and over 3 trillion miles traveled per year. Now that startups like couchsurfing.com and airbnb.com have made it normal to share space with complete strangers, hopefully ridesharing startups can do the same for cars.

In our interview below carpooling.com tells us about their ridesharing startup, building a startup in Munich Germany and how they went from mitfahrgelegenheit.de to carpooling.com. Check out the interview below.

Interview With Chattanooga Feel Good Startup LifeKraze

While we were in Chattanooga Tennessee two weeks ago covering Gig Tank we got to meet some of the guys behind LifeKraze. LifeKraze is a social community built around encouraging other community members to reach their accomplishments. Whether you’re climbing mountains, preparing for a marathon, training for the Olympics or learning to eat right, with the support of the LifeKraze community you get the encouragement you need to do anything.

LifeKraz also has a rewards component where community members can encourage community members to reach their goals and accomplishments by giving them points for real world rewards for active lifestyle products or you can convert those points into charitable donations.

We got a chance to interview the LifeKraze team. Check out the interview below:

Seattle Startup: Hark Is The World’s Repository For Pop Culture Sound Bytes

Do you remember back in the day, the plethora of .wav based geocities sound bite repositories. We’re talking low budget, bad wav file audio from a handful of movies. No? Good because that’s not Hark.

Hark is the world’s repository for pop culture soundbytes. The best movies in the world, and even the hard to find treasures, have sound bites on Hark’s platform at hark.com. Everyone loves a great movie quote from “You can’t handle the truth” to the recent “You didn’t build that” quote from Obama, to “Do you want to play a game” the War Games sound bite that started it all. Hark is the one place to go to hear those soundbytes, embed those sound bites and download those sound bites.

All of this is legal as well. Rather than trying to dodge the movie studios, producers, and tv producers, Hark went with their best foot forward and showed how their website can promote movies, tv shows and other places where great sound bites originate. Through Hark, some of the best sound bites in pop culture and current events have quickly been able to go viral, and what movie studio doesn’t want a viral movie quote.

Hark has partnered with 5 major film studios including Paramount, Universal,Lionsgate and Warner Brothers, to offer over 3 million sound bites from popular movies, tv shows,video games, sporting events,and political speeches.

We got a chance to interview Hark. Check out the interview below:

Iron Yard Demo Day Preview: Greenville Startup Spent

We got to kick off this special section with Greenville ride sharing startup Ridepost you can read that interview here.

Next up is Spent.

Spent is an ad platform that targets traditional brick and mortar grocery stores. Co-Founder Andria Trivisonno equates Spent to taking the recommendation engine found in Amazon.com shopping and applying it to traditional grocery stores. Spent is able to achieve this by leveraging a customers buying habits and purchase history.

We got a chance to interview Trivisonno who clearly shows the Global Accelerator Network’s influence in Iron Yards, by referencing “mentor whiplash” a phrase coined by Brad Feld at Foundry.

They don’t get too much into the nuts and bolts of the app itself but from what we’ve heard Spent may actually make some headway in a space that’s being tackled on many fronts. We’ll have more details about Spent after they debut on the Demo Day stage. They are working on their seed round to continue forward with their progress. Check out our interview with Trivisonno below.