Startup Weekend Asheville August 24th-26th

Startup Weekend is coming to Asheville North Carolina in less than two weeks. The festivities will kick off on Friday August 24th at 6:30pm at the A-B Tech Community College Enka Campus.

The Startup Weekend Asheville team describes the three day hackathon as “the 48-Hour Film Fest for techies, marketers & entrepreneurs”, making reference to an annual film fest in North Carolina’s mountainous cultural hub.

Asheville has a thriving startup scene, in fact a startup from Asheville called Corpora, just completed the GigTank startup accelerator in Chattanooga Tennessee (check out their pitch video here). In fact we met quite a few people from the Asheville area who had come to Chattanooga to check out their startup scene.

If you’re not familiar with Startup Weekend (and you should be if you read nibletz.com regularly) It’s a 54 hour hackathon style event where marketers, entrepreneurs, developers, and coders work together to develop ideas presented on Friday evening into companies come Sunday evening.

Friday starts off with registration, dinner and then Friday pitches. This is when everyone who has registered for the event and has an idea, can pitch that idea in sixty seconds or less. After the initial Friday pitches those who pitched are scattered throughout the room and the audience votes on the ideas to be developed by placing a sticker on a poster board with the idea on it. At the end of the voting period those ideas with the most stickers are developed.

After the Friday winners are selected, teams are formed. From there the teams spend the next 50 hours working on developing a product, testing their idea with consumers (consumer validation), and putting together a minimum viable product (MVP), mock up, working demo or actual product.

Saturday the teams reconvene early in the morning and continue to work on their startups. Throughout the day the event’s mentors (coaches) provide valuable advice to each and every team. The coaches for Startup Weekend Asheville are:

Rob Zazueta, Partner and Integration Manager at Vertical Respons; Denise Gaskin, Chief Operating Officer at Van Winkle Law Firm; and Traci Sigler COO at WallStCheatSheet.

On Sunday evening the teams will pitch before the judges and then go through a grueling Q&A session. After all the teams have finished their pitches and Q&A’s the judges disappear off to judge land and decide on the top teams of the weekend. Most Startup Weekend winners win valuable business related prizes and some Startup Weekend’s even have cash prizes.

Startup Weekend Asheville’s judges are: Jonathan Lawrie, PhD. Executive Director of the Western Office of the North Carolina Biotechnology Center; John Stainer, Managing Director at Carolina Financial Group; Joe Emison VP Research and Development at BuildFax.

It looks like Startup Weekend Asheville is going to be a great time in a beautiful city. If you’re in Asheville or surrounding areas it may be the perfect weekend event to get your entrepreneurial juices flowing. To register and for more information, visit the link below.

Linkage:

Startup Weekend Asheville

Nibletz coverage of Startup Weekends

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Atlanta Startups Get More Resources In Startup Atlanta Organization

On Tuesday, the city of Atlanta Georgia’s economic development agency, Invest Atlanta, will announce a new startup resource for Atlanta’s growing entrepreneur and startup eco-system. The new startup program, designed to promote and increase entrepreneurship is called “Startup Atlanta”.

Startup Atlanta itself is not part of the Startup America Partnership, however a spokesperson from Startup America’s headquarters in Washington DC told nibletz on Friday that many of the same people involved with Startup Atlanta are also involved with the soon to launch StartupGA partnership region.

One of the backbones to the new Startup Atlanta initiative will be a website with an interactive platform that maps out the startup resources in the region including incubators, co-working spaces, accelerators and other valuable resources. The idea behind the site is to connect entrepreneurs and startups with the resources that they need as well as each other.

Atlanta has had some great startup news in recent weeks. Over 1300 entrepreneurs, founders, startups and venture capitalists poured into the Sweet Watery Brewery for a TechCrunch meet up.

Not less than a week later Atlanta startup Bad.gy announced a $600,000 round of funding led by Dallas Maverick’s owner and ABC Shark Tank Shark, Mark Cuban. Just yesterday Atlanta played host to the Art Of Launch, an event that saw 13 area startups compete in a 5 minute pitch contest for thousands of dollars in cash and prizes.

Startup Atlanta has attracted the attention of local dignitaries including Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, Director of the United States Patent and Trade Mark Office Dave Kappos and Georgia Tech President G.P. “Bud” Peterson. All of whom will be on hand for the Tuesday announcement.

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Source: Atlanta Business Chronicle

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Wisconsin Elected Official: Romney/Ryan Bad For Startups

Just hours ago Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney announced that seven time Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan would be his Vice Presidential running mate in 2012. While we stay out of politics for the most part here at nibletz.com, this presidential election is important to startups, founders and entrepreneurs.

Of course we are all familiar with big government bailouts that some may not necessarily agree with. However, we are also well aware of the work that the current administration has done in terms of advancing startups and entrepreneurism across the country. Most notable were the formation of the Startup America Partnership and the passing of the JOBS act.

Congressman Paul Ryan is in his seventh term as the US Representative for Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District. Ryan is the chairman of the House Budget committee and is often cited for his views on economic policy.

We reached out to Madison WI Alderman, Scott Resnick who is also very active in the startup and entrepreneurial community across the state of Wisconsin, for his comment on the Ryan appointment. Resnick told nibletz.com:”

“The Paul Ryan budget is highlighted by de-funding higher education, decreasing government grants for cutting-edge research, and increasing student loan rates. The Romney/Ryan ticket will weaken the talent pool of high quality engineers and put the US further behind other nations in adopting innovation technologies.”

We will stand alongside the bi-partisan Startup America Partnership and Startup RockOn at both the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention in support of Startups as a whole.

But in going to the polls this year it’s important to see where entrepreneur and startups will be effected most.

To opine for just a moment:

Many of the entrepreneurs and founders we talk to (and we talk with hundreds per week), were almost forced into entrepreneurship as the country tries to recover from the economic crisis that was left after the previous administration. Some of these entrepreneurs have faired very well, some have been able to create stable businesses. None of them just sat around waiting for a government check.To make things harder for startups and entrepreneurs when it’s already hard enough to get a “job” would be mind boggling.

To this issue only it should be pretty clear where I will vote.

Linkage:

Check out our interview with Scott Resnick on Open Data

French Startup: Azendoo To Take On Asana? INTERVIEW

Google Wave was a great idea and a great product. For whatever reason though it didn’t survive. The ability to collaborate on tasks and allow each team member to contribute to the overall task. It was an end to superfluously long email threads with 15 people interjecting. Google Wave organized everything in easy to read and easy to understand “waves” where you could just as easily identify who said what and who made what change.

Google ended up shutting down Google Wave and it was eventually turned into a project in the Apache Foundation’s incubator program under the name Apache Wave. Google originally cited user adoption as the reason they pulled the plug on Wave.

Earlier this year Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz unveiled Asana which they’re touting as the solution to email. Tasks can be collaborated on across multiple people, edits are maintained and credited to the editor and overall it functions as a superior product to Wave.

Now, a French startup called Azendoo is looking to shake up the collaborative work space. Azendoo simplifies project management and planning and integrates to do lists, messaging, documents, document sharing, editing and teamwork synchronization.

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

Los Angeles Startup: OffBeatr Is The Kickstarter For Porn INTERVIEW

Crowdfunding is a hot startup space. So hot in fact that Ben Tao and Eric Lai, two entrepreneurs in the adult business, have started Offbeatr.com which is a crowdfunding source for adult projects.

If you’re looking to create a new adult website, adult mobile app, adult movie, or other creative adult project, funding is usually a big obstacle. Lai and Tao are hoping that fans of these kinds of adult projects will kick in to help entrepreneurs develop them. Sure there will be projects that some may find unappealing or even sleazy but even artists and sculptors who dabble in erotic art, the kind you would find at museums in NY and Miami, can get their projects funded on Offbeatr as well.

OffBeatr is using the all or nothing Kickstarter model which means that entrepreneurs and artists that use Offbeatr would need to successfully raise all of the funds in their goal in order to receive funding.

While it’s still too early to give funding or “ownership” away in the crowdfunding space, some may find it intriguing to help get the latest erotic art or full blown porn movie off the ground.

OffBeatr has projects vetted by the community before they go on to raise funds. Offbeatr requires a non-refundable deposit to start raising funds for your project on their platform. The “voting” process before a project goes live for funding, can help the project creator determine whether or not the project will be worth persuing on the platform. There’s no fee for the voting process. Once the project receives the required votes OffBeatr has final say on the projects, and only after that do you have to pay the listing fee/deposit.

Tao tells us in the interview below, that neither he nor his partner Lai set out to become adult industry entrepreneurs at first. Tao has a degree in Industrial Engineering but he’s never done any industrial engineering. He’s been a teacher, a circuit breaker salesman and a web designer. Lai has a real computer science degree (not the Scott Thompson kind), and has done work on top secret projects including some for Boeing.

This is their third venture in the adult industry and their are hoping that the community of adult entertainment and erotic art fans can come together to breathe new life into the industry. Check out the interview below:

Interview with South Carolina Startup: Ridepost

There are a lot of startups out there trying to challenge everyday corporate models like the hotel and the car with peer to peer sharing services. Ridepost, a South Carolina startup incubating at Iron Yard, is looking to enter the world of peer to peer vehicle sharing. Sure there are other startups tackling the same issue, but it’s going to come down to scalability, go to market strategy and execution.

Ridepost will eliminate the need for a taxicab and other for hire vehicle services by connecting passengers and drivers in a safe and social setting.

Ridesharing in this setting isn’t new around the world, just in the US. In fact it was traveling abroad where Ridepost co-founder Marty Bauer, first experienced ride sharing and wanted to bring this money saving way to travel back to the U.S. Bauer realized that ride sharing wasn’t about getting in the car with strangers it was about traveling.

We got a chance to talk with Blair Deckard, Ridepost co-founder and head of marketing, about their startup. Check out the interview below:

Tampa Startup Banyan Wins Entrepreneur Track At Chattanooga’s Gig Tank

Over 500 people came from across Tennessee and across the USA to Chattanooga TN Wednesday and Thursday for GigTank’s Demo Day.

GigTank is a 90 day accelerator program based in Chattanooga with an emphasis on using Chattanoga’s 1GBPS internet. Chattanooga was the first city in the United States (edging out Kansas City and Google by a year), to implement 1gbps internet. Every resident and business in a 600 square mile radius has 1gbps fiber optic line straight to their home or business.

Chattanooga was able to set up the 1gb fiber by rolling out a smart grid that provides communications from utility meters at every home and business back to a central location. Citizens of Chattanooga can elect to get data and tv services from the 1gb fiber pipe in their homes on a monthly subscription based model.

Chattanooga’s GigTank accelerator featured two separate tracks. The entrepreneur track was a traditional 3 month accelerator model with a seed investment, and access to services, mentors, office space and other resources. The student track was similar to the entrepreneur track but without the seed investment. Students participated in a pitch contest in Chattanooga Thursday where they competed for a $50,000 prize.

The winner of the entrepreneur track was a Tampa Florida startup called Banyan. The Banyan team was Toni Gamayel, Travis Staton and TJ Weigel.

Banyan is a cloud based collaborative research system. This allows researchers who are working on the same project to keep their research together. It also solves major pains for those managing the research.

During Gamayel’s pitch he brought up an instance where two students at the University of Kentucky were working on the same exact research one floor above each other and didn’t even know it. With Banyan the research manager would have easily been able to identify this duplicate research.

In another instance a Stanford professor had been working on some research. The need arose to validate that the particular research he was working on was being performed at the school rather than at home or another lab. With Banyan they could have easily identified the source of the actual research.

Banyan took a $100,000 check back to Tampa where they plan on using it to beef up their development and marketing. Gamayel is very active in the Tampa startup community. He was a judge for a recent Startup Weekend in Florida and is well known as a resource and mentor in the region. In fact he has provided mentorship to Feathr a Gainesville based startup that is working on eliminating the paper business card.

Check out Banyan’s complete pitch below:

Linkage:

Check out Banyan’s website here

Here’s more of our GigTank coverage

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Chattanooga GigTank Mentors Log Over 600 Hours

One of the biggest things that’s struck me about the Gig Tank and Gig Tank’s demo day is how the entire city has come out to show their support. Last night we talked about how various businesses throughout downtown Chattanooga participated in the event by holding events.

We went to a reception at co.lab as well as CraftWorks headquarters. There were other events earlier in the day that we unfortunately missed.

This morning there was a bike ride organized, a tour of the Hunter Museum and a tour of the world famous aquarium here in Chattanooga. Chattanooga as a whole seems invested in the success of the entrepreneurs and students who’ve been hard at work the past three months in anticipation of the big day today.

Chattanooga is also invested in the gig itself. It’s exciting that 1 gb fiber is available everywhere in a 600 square mile radius. This morning we had the opportunity to have breakfast with Hamilton County Mayor Jim Coppinger who admittedly isn’t a big “tech” guy but certainly understands the opportunities that come with the smart grid and the 1gb fiber.

The entire “gig” is part of his county. There are 340,000 folks in Hamilton County and of course the biggest part of that is the approx 170,000 people living in Chattanooga.

Coppinger is excited about where the “gig” goes for infrastructure, beyond running communications for power and water for residents and businesses. Coppinger is excited about what the gig will do for education in his county. Currently he has high schools with 500 students and on the other end of the spectrum, schools with 1500. Using remote teaching, relying on the back bone of the gig would mean that students county wide would have a consistent quality of education.

Mayor Coppinger, who served as Fire Chief before being elected Mayor, is also excited about what “The Gig” can do for public safety and first responders.

On the entrepreneurship side Mayor Coppinger is ecstatic about what’s happening with the Gig Tank along with the 60 companies being grown at a small business incubator on the north shore. That incubator has held 60 companies at a time and generally employs 300 per session.

Chattanooga’s support came out this morning when Four Bridges Capital and co.lab’s Charlie Brock pointed out this morning that the mentors for the GigTank entrepreneur’s track offered up a cumulative total of over 600 hours of mentorship during the three month session.

Mentor’s really got engaged with the entrepreneurs and the students as well and have provided more guidance than one would expect, which all lends itself to the buzz going on in Chattanooga surrounded by “the gig”

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Sarah Ware And Her DC Startup Markerly Are Making Their Mark INTERVIEW

Sarah Ware is the founder of new social bookmarking platform Markerly. She was working at the DC office of LivingSocial before branching out on her own to found this unique tool, that’s intuitive, fun and useful.

Markerly is a social bookmarking tool that sits in your browser like a bookmarklet for when you need it. When you need it or you want to use it you simply click on the Markerly button, highlight text and then you can save that text for later, save it as a bookmark or share it via Twitter or Facebook with your highlighted text and the entire article so others can see what you highlighted and the context around it.

Ware, a New Jersey native, is getting her name out in the DC tech and startup circles. One of the key points to Markerly is sharing and that shines through in Ware’s own personality, reaching out to other DC area startups and helping where she can and soaking up information when she can.

We got the chance to talk to this rock star founder about Markerly, in the interview below:

Interview With Atlanta Startup: B2CGrid Crowdsourcing To Build Bigger Brands

Branding is a difficult task. Once you decide on a concept, build it out, and test it’s viability, it’s time to turn to branding. Branding is very important. When you consider that most startups are competing in a similar space with another startup, the strength of your brand is vital to your survival.

The problem most startups face, is regardless of whether they’re bootstrapping or funded, branding is something they don’t typically have enough money left over to make a significant impact.

An Atlanta based startup B2CGrid is looking to help crowdsource branding and bridge together a community of likeminded people that can help create and boost brands. B2CGrid looks to connect companies and creatives globally to build strong brands and ultimately sell more stuff.

In short B2CGrid is a market place for freelancers, designers, creatives and even agencies to connect to the companies, small, large and startups, that need their services.

We got a chance to talk with founder and CEO Michael B Moore in the interview below about this exciting new way to help get companies that wouldn’t think they could afford good branding, afford to take their brands to the next level.

Tennessee’s Venture Community Is All Eyes On Chattanooga’s Gig Tank

Entrepreneurship and startups are a hot bed of activity this month in the great state of Tennessee. As we reported earlier, there are three different accelerators graduating this month, all with their own demo day. Possibly because it’s the first of the three graduations, or possibly because they have a unique program, Chattanooga’s Gig Tank has attracted a lot of attention from the entire state.

The City of Chattanooga along with the Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce have organized an entire press junket tied to various events throughout the city that are celebrating the graduation of the first Gig Tank class of entrepreneurs and students.

A little background.

Chattanooga was actually the first city in the United States to offer gigabit ethernet to the household, not just the node within a 600 mile radius. Every house and every business within Chattanooga’s gig footprint have the fiber piped to their home. The backbone of what is referred to here are “The Gig City”, is a smart grid. The City of Chattanooga has deployed a smart grid to communicate information from electric meters and other utilities for all residents and business’ within the footprint.

Now, it’s the decision of the resident or the business, if they want to also utilize that same fiber line for data services, tv and telephone. The “Gig” was deployed last year, a year ahead of Kansas City and Google. The gigabit ethernet in Kansas City functions more like a traditional cable company. The gigabit ethernet goes to the node, or the street, then Google signs customers up to bring the service down to the home. Of course one of the big things to consider in all of this is there aren’t wireless routers that can support wireless transmission of a full gigabit data stream, wirelessly to the device. Most traditional computers also can’t function at the gigabit speed. Right now, end users will experience speeds from 30-100mbps which is of course a huge feat in itself.

The GigTank is a traditional accelerator program that was designed for startups to utilize that huge bandwidth to develop startups. Unlike most traditional accelerators the GigTank had two classes, an entrepreneur class which received a $15,000 seed investment and a chance to win $100,000 in additional funding Thursday morning. The other class is a class of student led startups that received free room and board, but did not receive a seed investment. The students are competing for a $50,000 prize.

Also unlike most traditional accelerators, all of the startups will pitch the judges in a closed door session Thursday morning ahead of the actual pitch presentations on stage tomorrow.

Needless to say all of this excitement in Chattanooga has attracted a lot of attention. When commenting to a local reporter StartupTN President and President of Nashville’s Entrepreneur Center, Michael Burcham said “There will be 500 people here tomorrow who’ve either started companies, or invested in companies, and most of them are coming from out of town”. If the buses the city are running specifically for the event from the area hotels are any indication, there are definitely a lot of people from out of town here.

Jared Nixon, a partner in Daymond John’s Shark Branding, is one of those out of town guests. He’s here in Chattanooga to scope out the startups that are participating in the event, but he’s also intrigued by the infrastructure around the gig itself.

There are folks in town from Warner Brothers, Mozilla, US Ignite and other nationally known companies and ecosystem partners.

Even the Nashville centric Burcham, who happily announced that 70% of the investors and 90% of the venture capital is in Nashville, is eager to see the ideas that come out of the GigTank which is equally important to Burcham in his role as StartupTN President. Burcham says he looks for two main components in deals he does, the “idea” and the competition. If there’s no competition in the space, he stays away from that idea because there’s no market. One of Burcham’s strongest suits is nurturing good ideas. He does this on a daily basis through the Entrepreneur Center and Jumpstart Foundry, Nashville’s GigTank counterpart.

While there are a lot of startups presenting at Gig Tank’s demo day with similar ideas happening all over the country, these startups had a huge internet pipe to work on, and hopefully these ideas will win far more than the $150,000 available from the GigTank itself. Hopefully there are some multi-million dollar ideas in the bunch.

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Startup America Partnership Regions To Send 8 Startups To Demo

The Startup America partnership and their 26 regional partnerships have announced a contest to send 8 lucky, and good, startups to the DEMO conference in Santa Clara CA this fall. All 8 winning startups will receive free travel and free entry into the conference, which as one of the premiere startup events in the country, is a pretty expensive ticket.

Four of the Startups will receive showcase space in the DEMO pavilions the other four Startups will get to pitch on the DEMO main stage. Companies that have become household names like E*Trade and TiVO have presented on the DEMO main stage. Even our good friends at Rawporter have experienced the DEMO stage.

Startup evangelist, and our good friend Nick Tippmann provided some of the official video coverage at DEMO’s spring event this year.

“We’re incredibly excited to collaborate with DEMO and our regions to send startups to launch at this renowned event,” said Scott Case, CEO, Startup America Partnership. “You only need to look at a list of DEMO alumni to see what a game-changer it is for any startup focused on growth.”

“The Startup America Regional contest will allow incredible companies that may not have had DEMO on their radar to compete with the most plugged-in Silicon Valley startups out there,” said Neal Silverman, EVP and general manager at DEMO. “We can’t wait to review the submissions from startups headquartered in places like Tennessee, Texas and Iowa, all of which have robust startup ecosystems that people may not be aware of.”

The contest is only open to registered Startup America members. At DEMO Spring 2012, Startup America members TourWrist, ZBoard, and Jumala all won DEMO God Awards, with TourWrist winning the grand prize: the People’s Choice Award.

“TourWrist’s DEMO experience really highlights the best of our progressive, supportive society,” said Charles Armstrong, founder and CEO of TourWrist. “From a DEMO presenting scholarship and support from Startup America to the audience–bestowed People’s Choice honor and IDG’s $1M media award, our humble startup has been given an incredible chance at success. All startups out there thinking about launching at DEMO should enter this contest immediately!”

Linkage:

To sign up for the contest click here

To enter you need to be a member of Startup America

Nibletz is the voice of Startups “everywhere else”

Video Interview With Indiana Startup Squad, Collaborative Code Editing

Imagine if Google Docs (or Drive whatever you want to call it) was all about developers and coding. Imagine if you could work on code projects easily and together from around the world. Then imagine if you could upload those projects to DropBox. Well with Indiana startup SquadEdit.com you can.

SquadEdit is like Google Docs for developers, except instead of working on papers, spreadsheets or presentations, you work on coding projects together.

With Squad you can have your coding project on several different “work spaces” and they have a plan for individuals and small groups, all the way up to 50 users. Everyone involved on the same Squad project can see everything updated and in real time. You can also create sub projects of projects. If one part of the team is working on one function and the other part of the team is working on a different function, each team member can see the task they’re working on and the entire community project.

This is one of those startups that is a great resource for other startups. Now you don’t have to have your developers in one room and you don’t have to take different conference calls, skype sessions and Google+ hangouts to make sure everyone is on the same page. As Squad CEO Hillary Cage explains in the video interview, it’s an all in one collaborative experience.

Oh and as for DropBox, you can save your Squad projects in DropBox and share them with others. Our West Coast editor Junaid Kalmadi got a chance to interview Cage at the The Innovation ShowCase in Indianapolis last month. Here’s that interview:

Linkage:

Check out Squad here at their website

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Could Social Discovery Get Any Easier? Boston Startup Tagzidy Says Yes INTERVIEW

If you’re a long time reader of nibletz.com the voice of startups “everywhere else” then you are well aware of how we feel about social discovery startups. To get coverage here on nibletz, you need to “bring it” if you’re in the social discovery space. SXSWi 2012 was all about social discovery, and since then, hundreds have tried to do something in the space.

Tagzidy, a New York startup, has created a social discovery platform that is extremely easy. In fact, if you allow it to, Tagzidy will help you discover people with like interests, wherever you are, and you don’t even need to take your phone out of your pocket.

Tagzidy has a couple of unique components. You can tag and be tagged by people you don’t even know when you’re in close proximity to them (again with your permission). If you’re already linked up with that person your experience is gamified with trophies, points and other nifty stuff.

One of the really exciting features about Tagzidy is it may even be the replacement for business cards that Florida startup Fethr is hoping to be, without any button pushing, or taking out your phone.

We got a chance to interview Daniel McCarthy the co-founder of Tagzidy, who does an exceptional job of describing his startup in the interview below: