Interview With Los Angeles Startup: Teachmeo Learn & Teach Anything, And Everything

Teachmeo is a new startup in Los Angeles, “Silicon Beach”, their mission and purpose is to allow anyone who wants to teach anything, to teach it and allow anyone who needs to learn anything, learn it. They will facilitate this with a community of teachers and learners.

They describe it like this:

Say your son needs help finishing his math homework, it’s 9pm there’s no one around that can help locally, you wouldn’t think of calling his teacher and there’s nowhere else to go. He can go to teachmeo.com and find in just about real time, answers to his math questions.

The same thing goes for Brian who wants to teach guitar to someone, he can teach it via teachmeo.  Really with the platform that teachmeo is building you can learn and teach just about anything, as their Rockstar CEO Natalie Novoa tells us in the interview below.

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Win! Alcohol Discovery From New York Startup Drynk.me

This story doesn’t really need any fancy dressing up. You go out. You like to drink occasionally or perhaps more than occasionally. You try great drinks, but maybe you’re too tired (read drunk) to remember what drink it was you tried, or what was in it.

New York startup Drynk.me is here to help.

Whether you’re a beer connoisseur (or beer snob), or a purveyor of fine wines, or you just like a great new cocktail, you want to remember it right? Drynk.me allows you to do all that, share it with friends, crowdsource new drink ideas, take pictures of your favorite drinks all on your smartphone. You can even geo-tag your drink so you can remember where you were when you had that wonderful concoction. Yes, drinkers, this is your app!

Who has made such a great idea a reality? Well the co-founders behind Drynk.me are Fernando Garza, Chevon Christie and Preston Hall. They took a break from their extensive customer validation and market research to talk to nibletz.com, check out the interview below:

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Cincy Serial Entrepreneur Comes In 2nd Place At Startup Weekend With 3DLT

Pablo Arellano Jr is a busy man. He is currently working on a startup in stealth mode that was just accepted into the Ark Challenge accelerator in Fayetteville Arkansas. We can’t tell you much about it but Arellano is excited about Ark Challenge, especially with it’s proximity to Bentonville.

This past weekend though he wanted to develop another idea, that’s equally as good. His startup 3DLT will be launching soon as a platform to buy and sell 3D printer templates online. Think of it as an iStock Photo or 99 Designs, except for 3D printer templates.

With companies like Makerbot thrusting onto the scene this last year, 3D Printing is starting to rise in popularity. Within the next few years it may become a household concept. In our video interview with Arellano he points out that most major college institutions already have a 3D Printer, the same way that they used to be the only place to find a good laser printer or a big computer.

While 3D printers will probably never fall as cheap as a Lexmark ink jet printer that you can buy at Walmart for under $30, they could start popping up in pro-sumer homes in the next few years.

The biggest pain point for 3D printers is the actual programming and design work. In his Sunday pitch Arellano showed a video of TV late night host and car enthusiast Jay Leno who uses a 3D printer in his garage to make prototypes for parts that are no longer available for purchase. After he and his 3D printer guy, make the plastic prototype they can take the mold to a machine shop and have the same part made of metal.


Architecture is another industry that has embraced the 3D printer concept. Now instead of paying someone to skillfully make models for buildings and neighborhoods out of little pieces of wood and plastic, these buildings, houses and even trees can be cut from a 3D printer. Heck there’s even a 3D printer out there now that prints chocolate bars.

Arellano is hopeful that by providing a template resource for 3D Printer users, he can help drive sales and the price of 3D printers down, while still making between 30-60% commission off the sales of the templates.

Check out our video interview with Arellano below:

Linkage:

Here’s more of our coverage of Startup Weekend

Check out Ark Challenge here

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So What Does Brandery Startup CrowdHall Do On Startup Weekend?

CrowdHall is definitely one of the Brandery stand out startups. They are developing a unique and innovative platform for celebrities, politicians and popular bloggers, journalists and other people to effectively communicate with their crowd,fans and constituents. As you may imagine it’s in a town hall/crowd hall setting.

The premise for the idea is great and they’ve been testing out the platform and in fact last week they did a public test with “Bachelorette” winner Jef Holm. Holm sent out one tweet the day before the test saying that he would be taking questions on CrowdHall. He didn’t include a link to the site or the secret page that would hold his CrowdHall forum, but his fans were relentless, they went to the CrowdHall site, and founder the private page. The end result was that when Holm logged in for his CrowdHall session during the test he already had 29 questions waiting for him. Phenomenal.

All in all the results were a great success, you can see them here.

As we told you in our interview with Brandery co-founder Rob McDonald and their General Manager Mike Bott, the CrowdHall companies are very active participants in the Cincinnati tech scene. Bott explained in our video interview that all of the Brandery class was given free access to Startup Weekend and they came, helped mentor and build teams.

What does CrowdHall CEO Austin Hackett do on Startup Weekend? Well he starts another startup. His Startup Weekend startup was called “SportsGamr” it’s a fun virtual sports betting site. It gives those die-hard sports gamblers the ability to bet in a friendly manner with no actual money changing hands.


Players get virtual currency which they can use to bet against their friends or others on the website. Once they deplete that virtual currency, or just to make more virtual currency they can watch and engage in premium content video advertising. This video advertising is of course a great monetization strategy. It’s also great to know that if you come and have a bad day on the site you can still continue to play.

Hackett’s CrowdHall team worked all weekend, and even Hackett split his time between Startup Weekend and working on CrowdHall. He said he is definitely full speed ahead with CrowdHall which might mean his SportsGamr startup will have to wait. But it’s a great idea with an even better presentation.

Check out his pitch video from Sunday below:

Check out Hackett’s day job here

Here’s more of our coverage from Startup Weekend

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Boston Startup: Prospective Plus Wants To Give You More Prospective On Your Job Applicants INTERVIEW

Finding the best job applicants seems to be getting harder and harder every year. The applicant pool gets bigger every year and normal application/resume hiring practices aren’t providing enough background to possible employers in just about every situation. This is the pain point that Phoebe Farber and her team at Prospective Plus are hoping to solve.

Through their SaaS platform which targets entry level candidates, Prospective Plus is carving out a niche in the employment world by providing more robust feedback for candidates.

Prospective Plus calls their approach “Culture Fit” and it’s a holistic approach to applicant screening that provides recruiters and HR professionals with more well rounded information about prospective employees (hence the name).

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

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Track Job Applicants Easier With London Startup Pleekant INTERVIEW

There are a ton of startups these days entering the hiring and recruitment space. Most of them have to do with the actual hiring and recruitment process. There are startups like Houston Texas’s Job Plotter which helps applicants plot jobs on a map to know if they are close enough to their homes to apply. Another great startup in the job’s space is PitchPick an Austin based company that helps the pre-screening process with a video platform.

Pleekant is equally as useful to HR folks and recruiters. The London based startup provides a platform to better track job applicants. If you are running a good sized HR department you may have 20 positions open and hundreds of applicants to track. That’s where Pleekant comes in.

With Pleekant, companies can keep tabs on applicants,resumes, applications, notes and what position the applicant is applying for. Pleekant also makes it easier for recruiters within an organization to collaborate with each other. If your company has a multi interview process Pleekant makes it easy for each interviewer to keep their notes and records from the interview in one easy to find record, accessible to everyone in the hiring chain.

Pleekant’s founder Ramario Depass describes his startup as “A content management system for hiring employees, making life easier for recruiters. He’s identified Resumator as one of his key competitors but feels that Resumator is clunky, and has an early 2000s feel to it.

Depass’ description of Pleekant is rather fitting. It feels like a content management system where the assets are the job applicants.

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

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Startup Weekend Cincinnati: And The Winner Is Project Blue Collar

Startup Weekend Cincinnati came to a close on Sunday evening with 9 great pitches in front of the judged who were: Dave Knox, CMO at RockFish and Co-Founder at The Brandery (we love the Brandery); Tarek Kamil, Executive Director at InfoMotion Sports Technologies; Dov Rosenberg, Director at Allos Ventures; Rahul Bawa, Director of Digital and Software at CincyTech; and Jeff Weedman CEO at Centrifuse and VP of Global Business Development at this little company called Proctor & Gamble.  In addition Kamil’s daughter helped judge as did Dave Knox’s dog.

The nine teams that were selected:

SportsGamr- an online platform for virtual sports betting which provides a venue for sports fans to bet on their favorite sports and a venue for advertisers to clear premium content ads.

ProBakery- Is a startup similar to pro-flowers or ftd.com that provides an online portal to traditional bakeries that may or may not have access to e-commerce and also provides a conduit for taking delivery orders for premium baked goods.

Homework Hustlers- is an online platform for college students to outsource their homework. During their pitch they said that 61% of college students admit to cheating and that 80% of the people they surveyed when doing customer validation, revealed that they would most likely share the idea with a friend, whether they used it or not.

3DLT is a template market place for 3D printer templates. Their revenue model was solid, they said they could take between 30 and 60% commission off each template.

Revolent is a new idea to provide better reviews of products by matching product reviews up to the reader.  They called it the match.com for reviews.

Email Diet was probably the idea I liked the least. It’s an email analytics startup that will provide information to employers on how much wasteful email there actually is.  I didn’t like it because truth be told email is an integral part of my work day. While the founder was pitching how wasteful email is, I still believe phone calls can lead to a much more wasteful use of time.

ArtsSeen was an arts event aggregator that provided the end user with information about the arts scene in Cincinnati right now along with reviews, recommendations and a social aspect that allow users to connect over these kinds of events. In essence it was Impulcity for the arts.

BringSomeFood: I really liked this one even though it wasn’t picked as a winner. The idea is great its like a potluck party event organization app. The judges had asked them if it could be incorporated into an e-vite or eventbrite and the answer was no. This particular platform allows you to pick your party theme, suggests a menu, lets you invite attendees, organize attendees and assign food items for the attendees to bring. I’m hoping they continue this project.

The overall winner was Project Blue Collar

This startup is a for profit that is looking to spread the word about dogs coming from rescues and shelters. Their motto “support the underdog”.

the idea is great and there may be a profit mechanism built in somewhere. One things for sure and that’s that dog owners and animal lovers will love the mission behind the idea.

Project Blue Collar is about raising awareness for dogs and animals that are adopted out of shelters to make sure resources are provided for those dog owners and to let potential animal owners know that shelters are a great way to get a new family companion for life.  It all focuses on the blue collar which is similar to the yellow “live strong” bracelets. Dog owners with rescue dogs will buy the collars to promote that their dog is a rescue. Blue Collar Project is also considering a companion bracelet in the same blue to show that the wearer is a proud owner of a rescue dog.

Here’s our interview with the founder of the winning team Project Blue Collar.


Linkage:

Here’s the future site for Project Blue Collar

Here’s more of our Startup Weekend coverage

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The Brandery’s Rob McDonald & Mike Bott Explain Why Their Program Works VIDEO

The Brandery, an incubator founded in 2010 in Cincinnati is uniquely different from most of the incubator’s across the country. A blanket description of what an incubator does for startups wouldn’t justify what co-founder; Rob McDonald, Dave Knox and JB Kropp  have put together at 1411 Vine Street in Cincinnati’s Over-The-Rhine neighborhood (Voted Cincinnati’s best neighborhood in 2011 and 2012)

First off The Brandery is in what appears to be a traditional older storefront in a building dating back to the 1860’s. The building the Brandery is in as well as the surrounding buildings typically housed a storefront on the bottom floor and then residential units above. In the case of the Brandery, the first floor has been converted to bull pen style desk space where each of the 11 startups in this session can collaborate, bounce ideas off of each other and inspire each other through competition.

The second floor houses a group classroom like area and the third floor is what Brandery GM Mike Bott says they’re informally calling the “alumni penthouse”.

We got the chance to have an in-depth interview with Bott and McDonald who are very proud of what they’ve built so far. While the Brandery runs a familiar model, which most of the Global Accelerator Network accelerators utilize, there are things about the Brandery which are inherently different, that make it a special place to grow a business.

First off the Brandery is a non-profit organization. Yes the companies selected for the program give up six percent equity for a $20,000 seed investment. However, that investment is coming from the Brandery, and not the founders, or investors. In other words, as Bott confirmed, when Brandery alumni start to make big exits, the money goes back to the Brandery directly to run the program and invest in more worthwile startups.

Next, the Brandery keeps the class size small. This year there are only 11 companies. Companies move in at the start of the session. They have three months of vigorous boot camp style work, training, seminars and business education, but after Demo Day they don’t move out, in fact they are encouraged to stay around where they still get the benefits of the mentors who show up to the Brandery for basketball, beer pong and the latest new and interesting lecture.

Even after the first year, alumni companies can pay very minimal rent and move up to the alumni penthouse.


The Brandery companies are also encouraged to play a big role in the Cincinnati entrepreneur and startup community. For instance, just after arriving in Cincinnati this year, all of the Brandery companies participated in the BunBerry TechBurry Pitch Wars, which 2012 Brandery company Crowd Hall actually won. But what’s great about that event was that all three Brandery classes were represented there.

Also at Startup Weekend Cincinnati all of the Brandery companies have been given a free pass to help Startup Weekend teams, and were even encouraged to pitch. In fact, CrowdHall’s Austin Hackett pitched one of the ideas that’s being built this weekend. While there was a lot of banter on Impulcity about Hackett and his Startup Weekend venture, he assured us that his team is 100% committed to Crowd Hall and we’re working on that all weekend too. Even Brandery co-founder Rob McDonald was an official mentor for Startup Weekend as well.

The involvement with the community works both ways though as Bott explained later on. For instance 11 different local advertising agencies in Cincinnati have donated time to work with each of the Brandery companies. There are also a lot of area mentors who work closely with each Brandery company.

Check out our indepth video interview with Rob McDonald and Mike Bott here:

Linkage:

The Brandery’s Website

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

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Scottish Startup: Tummy With Mummy A Great Product For Tummy Time INTERVIEW

The first thing I thought when I heard the name of this Scottish startup is, what in the world is a Tummy With Mummy and what is Tummy Time. Well Tummy Time is the activity where babies essentially lay face down on the floor and scoot around on their tummy’s or play with toys in this position.

It turns out that Tummy Time is an essential part of the development of a baby’s motor skills and the most critical time for this to occur is between zero to 6 months.

Well sometimes Tummy Time doesn’t work out. Parents are often scared that the baby will hurt themselves on a hard wood floor and sometimes it doesn’t really look comfortable to see a new-born facedown, you worry if they are ok.

Tummy With Mummy is a patented product made by Scotish startup called TWM Productions.  Tummy with Mummy is a baby seat that allows baby’s to play in the Tummy position with a parent or loved one or by themselves. It keeps the baby’s in the best position for Tummy Time and then it folds completely flat for storage and to fit in the trunk of a car.

TWM Productions is actually part of the Entrepreneurial Spark program which provides resources to growing startups in the UK. Tummy With Mummy’s co-founder Dave Abrahams says that Entrepreneurial Spark actually instills North American values in some of the UK startups.

Check out our interview Abrahams below. He tells us all about this new startup that was actually followed by his mum and is now a family business.

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Startup Weekend Cincinnati: 3D Printer Template Platform Chosen To Present On Sunday

3D printing has really surged into popularity lately. There are 3D printers now printing everything from models for architects to toys and even chocolate.

Some industry experts are expecting the cost of 3D printers to come down enough that they will still be pricey but somewhat attainable by consumers and small businesses. The problem with that is, that designing for the 3D printer still requires a lot of skill and it’s not skills that are easy to learn.

One of the ideas pitched on Friday was to make printing in 3D as easy as using 99designs to rebrand your image. The idea is to make a platform where 3D printer templates are bought, sold and exchanged, much the way that you can buy logo templates, website templates and even Word Press templates.

This startup could easily make it out of Startup Weekend Cincinnati. The only caveat is that it has to come out fast because we’re sure with the rise in 3D printing over the last year and a half or so, someone else is working in their basement or at their development house on this exact same idea.

Check out the pitch video below:

Linkage: Here’s more of our coverage of Startup Weekend

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Startup Weekend Cincinnati: A Platform For Buying Your Homework Being Built

If you’re an entrepreneur or a startup founder chances are you were the guy or gal, that sold their homework, or maybe even made a few bucks doing someone else’s homework. Whether it was in high school or college, there is always a market for homework. Parents and teachers don’t want to admit it but it’s there. It may borderline on plagiarism but heck they’re hoping to build a startup that’s out in the open.

One of the Friday pitches that was chosen to build is a startup that is a platform for people to outsource their homework to somebody else. It’s a fairly simple idea and regardless of what it is on the surface, if implemented correctly there is a market for it and they’ll have no problem cornering the market.

When the idea was pitched it was brought up that we currently outsource every kind of work there is except homework, so why not outsource homework.

Check out the pitch video below and stay tuned to nibletz.com Sunday evening to see who wins Startup Weekend Cincinnati.

Here’s the video:

Check out more Startup Weekend coverage here

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Louisville Startup: Impulcity Smooth As Butter Event Discovery Now In Beta

Impulcity is one of the standout startups at The Brandery in Cincinnati. We finally got a chance to talk with Hunter Hammonds and Austin Cameron face to face about the disruptive mobile app they’re building.

When someone who does what I do hears the words “location” and “discovery’ we automatically think FourSquare, Google Places, and checking in. We think the space is crowded. We think “sure you’ve got something different”. Well with Impulcity, Hammonds and Cameron have something different. As soon as we arrived at the Brandery Hammonds immediately set up the private beta on my phone and for the rest of the evening I got a guided tour on Impulcity right from the co-founders.

After a night on the town, Hammonds challenged me and our co-founder Cameron Wright to name one event discovery mobile app, that served up local events, allows you to check into them, invite friends, and had a great UI. We couldn’t even name one, not like this.

As you can see they have a great visual user experience. From the main screen you see a highlighted event in visual form and then a grid of similar pictures promoting events around you. The top featured event can be swiped from left to right so that you can see all the highlighted events.

Once you’re in the event you can do a number of things which are all explained in easy detail. There are big inviting buttons for sharing, and what network you want to share with. There is a timeline feature for each event where people can chime in on their experience at the event and share pictures and text.

While Impulcity is from Louisville and building at the Brandery in Cincinnati they’ve already got over a million events in their database that will populate in the same beautiful visual way.

Impulcity says they help you discover, attend and interact with events around you and that’s certainly true. But you can bet on our road trip that we will continue to test and use Impulcity.

Linkage:

Sign up for early access to Impulcity here

Find out more about The Brandery here

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Startup Weekend Cincinnati: Blue Collar Project, Selected To Build

Here’s a great Friday pitch video from Startup Weekend Cincinnati.  Blue Collar Dog is an idea we haven’t seen before. It borderlines on non-profit which are typically hard to win when it comes to Sunday pitches because the investors can’t get a return on a non-profit, it’s more of a donation.

Nonetheless the idea is great and there may be a profit mechanism built in somewhere. One things for sure and that’s that dog owners and animal lovers will love the mission behind the idea.

Blue Collar Dog is about raising awareness for dogs and animals that are adopted out of shelters to make sure resources are provided for those dog owners and to let potential animal owners know that shelters are a great way to get a new family companion for life.

What do you think of this idea, let us know in the comments. Watch the video below:

Linkage:

Here’s more startup weekend coverage from nibletz.com

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Startup Weekend Cincinnati Kicks Off With 28 Pitches

Startup Weekend Cincinnati kicked off tonight at the Startup Mall in downtown Cincinnati. Yes they’ve turned a mall into startup space. As traditional retailers exit their hoping to fill the space with startups. The main festivities kicked off in the offices of Black Book HR which looks coincidentally like a Banana Republic because that is who was in the space before them.

Chris Ostorich the founder of Black Book HR is the person who is organizing and pushing startups to move into the mall space. The mall is in one of the oldest buildings in Cincinnati and Ostorich is hoping to spur innovation and low rent to support Cincinnati’s thriving startup and entrepreneurial ecosystem.

After the pitches were selected for the weekend the startups were able to work on their ideas in the Black Book space along with a vacant Victoria’s Secret and another retail space on the third floor of the mall to build out the startups.

28 total pitches were made on Friday night to a full house of developers, founders, and entrepreneurs.  Here are the startups that were picked to build:

Pro Bakery
Bring Some Food
Life Miner
Sports Addict Nation Party
Art Loyalty
Revelant
Project Blue Collar
Do My Homework
3D Printing
We’ll have video and more later today as Startup Weekend Cincinnati continues.
Linkage:
Here’s the Cincinnati Startup Weekend page
Follow Startup Weekend Cincinnati on twitter here
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