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DreamIt Ventures Expands South To Austin Texas

DreamIt Ventures, the Philadelphia based accelerator, that was recently ranked one of the top the incubators in the country by Forbes magazine, has announced that they’re expanding into Austin Texas.

DreamIt is Philadelphia based, which is where they set up their initial accelerator program. They then expanded to New York City. Last year they also opened up shop in Israel with a program that currently feeds into New York but could feed into their Philadelphia program next year.

Kerry Rupp, a Philadelphia transplant from Austin Texas was overseeing the DreamIt program in Philadelphia. They recently announced the appointment of Karen Griffith Gryga as national director based in Philadelphian which frees Rupp up to return to Austin and launch their Austin program.

Austin is a great place to expand for DreamIt. There is a lot of innovation happening in Austin and the other DreamIt locations will be able to leverage their Austin based program to show off other DreamIt startup graduates at South By Southwest Interactive next year.

“We’ll be able to use it to showcase all of the other DreamIt companies that are out fundraising” when SXSW is held, Rupp said to the Austin Business Journal

As of April 2012 65 companies have successfully gone through the DreamIt program. DreamIt also has a program targeted towards minorities called DreamIt Access, that first class has 15 startup participants.

DreamIt Ventures New York program finishes with a Demo Day on August 8th. Philadelphia’s program kicks off the weekend of September 6th and 7th. The Philadelphia class will hold Demo Day December 5th. Austin’s program will start on December 14th which times the ending right up against SXSWi 2013.

Linkage:

Check out DreamIt Ventures here

Source: Austin Business Journal

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Miami Startup: Sumpto It’s Like Klout For College Students, But Better INTERVIEW

Klout is still a big mystery to most, how do you get those crazy Klout scores. If you know how it’s really calculated feel free to send me an email. Klout Perks is a great program that puts manufacturers products into peoples hands. They presumably want the cream of the crop when it comes to Klout, but we have no idea who that really is.

Sumpto is looking to do something along those lines when they launch next week. They’re going to match products to college students with influential social graphs. Sumpto will rank a college students social clout (with a c not a k) and then link manufacturers with college brand ambassadors who can presumably get the word about those products out to the masses.

Manufacturers love it when they can get exposed to people with real influence. Ranking that influence can be a challenge but Sumpto’s Founder and President Ben Kosinski seems to have figured out the magic formula. Yes, Sumpto’s partners will most likely reach the hands of the right people.

The college demographic is a hard one to crack, with free stuff though it may be easier. When you add the free stuff to an exclusive layer of folks, your destined to gain exposure down the lines to the masses. That’s exactly what Sumpto is going to do.

We got a chance to interview Kosinski check out the interview below:

Interview With Romanian Startup: MonitorBacklinks

Don’t you just love it when a startup comes up with an idea and the name of the startup directly reflects that idea. Such is the case with Romanian startup MonitorBacklinks. Founder Razvan Girmacea has created MonitorBacklinks to make it easier for any publisher, webmaster, or blogger to monitor their backlinks.

Girmacea’s software checks all of a websites backlinks and then sends a notification when the status of a backlink changes, for example if it disappears, reappears or moves.

When vying for pagerank backlinks play a big part into the SEO of any website.

In the interview below Girmacea talks about MonitorBacklinks and how easy he has made it for the end user. He also sheds some light on the budding entrepreneurship and startup scene in Romania.

Startup Weekend Cincinnati Is This Weekend

Baby if you’ve ever wondered, wondered whatever became of me, I’m building a company in Cincinnati, at Startup Weekend Cincinnati

A little background on the altered quote up there. If you’ve been reading nibletz.com for a while and you’ve been watching our videos you may have noticed that while we’re on the road trip we like to use “old school” hip hop from the city we’re in for our video intro. Like in Memphis we use Tennessee by Arrested Development and Twerk by Three Six Mafia. In New Orleans we use any vintage Cash Money Millionaires. In St. Louis we’ve got Nelly. Sorry Cincinnati but we can’t find a decent song by Hi-Tek and don’t want to embarrass anyone by using 98 degrees.

I can tell you first hand that Cincinnati’s startup scene is umpteen million times more innovative than their history with popular hip hop and pop music. That’s why we’re really excited that Startup Weekend is back in Cincinnati this weekend.

The 54 hour hackathon style startup building contest puts people from all over the place together to build startups and compete in a nice little pitch fest on Sunday evening. Startup Weekend’s are exciting, innovative, and usually bursting at the seams with good food.

The event kicks off on Friday when all those signed up for Startup Weekend will pitch their ideas in a 60 second quick pitch contest. After the pitches the crowd will vote on the startups that will be built over the next 53 hours.

Mentor’s from Cincinnati’s thriving tech and business scene will be on hand throughout the weekend to help the teams in just about every aspect of building a business. Cincinnati’s mentors for this weekend include: Robert W. McDonald, an attorney at Taft and co-founder of The Brandery (we love the Brandery); Bob Gilbreath, Entrepreneur in Residence at CincyTech; Bill Cunningham, Co-Founder at OneMorePallet.com; James J Cunningham, Executive Director of C-Cap.net and Ryan Walker, Founder at Engagement.iO. Of course nibletz.com will be around most of the weekend too and we typically get roped into helping out (no really we love to help).

A couple of gut checks later, gallons of caffeine and typically as much pizza as you can eat later, the teams assemble on Sunday evening to pitch their final projects to the judges. It’s best to have a great pitch deck, minimum viable product, mock up and make sure you’ve tested the viability of your concept.

Cincinnati’s judges are: 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.

Entrepreneurs, developers, founders, as you can see you’ve got your work cut out for you. If you haven’t signed up yet you better head here now. The event takes place at the Startup Mall (Carew Tower). Registration is at 6:30pm. Good Luck.

Linkage

Here’s the Cincinnati Startup Weekend site

Here’s The Brandery site (We love The Brandery)

Here are some stories about Super Nick

and here’s our pitch to crowdfund our road trip

Interview With Canadian Startup Hashcaster

Back in June we brought you this story about Canadian startup Hashcaster. Hashcaster provides a curation, and measurement (analytics) platform for event coordinators to manage their social media graph. It really comes in handy when gauging the effect of marketing, press and media efforts on behalf of an event just about any size.

At Social Media Camp in June not only was Hashcaster used by the event organizers but they also received a “Coastie” for “Most Innovative Social Media Product or Technology”.

Event organizers everywhere are counting on social marketing efforts more and more everyday as traditional marketing has fallen to the wayside. Organizers need to be able to capture tweets, likes, and mentions and then aggregate them, and analyze them to make sure the cohesive message is getting across. They also want to know who their top influencers are and what kind of impact any paid social marketing may have had.

All of these things are why Geoff Clendenning and Paul Vet created Hashcaster.

Now social media dashboards are nothing new but this particular use case is. Hashcaster also takes into consideration that the social graph of a particular event is going to swell as the event draws closer. When you’re at a popular event, especially one with a social media focus, tweets, likes and mentions can come in a matter of seconds.

We got a chance to interview Clendenning about Hashcaster, check out the interview below:

Los Angeles Startup: Smarter Stand Sees 10x Goal On Kickstarter

Dotan Saguy, a Los Angeles entrepreneur figured out that if you add two little clips to either side of an iPad’s Smart Cover or Smart Case you can add several different viewing angles and positions to your iPad which make it more convenient and equally as sturdy.

The magnetic Smart Cover and Smart Case for the iPad currently offer two positions for resting your iPad. One of the positions makes the iPad sit up too straight andouille the other one lays it down too flat. As you an see from the graphic above, Saguy’s Smarter Stand clips allow for several more positions. Most of the positions could be achieved with an additional $40 stand.

Saguy was hoping to raise $10,000 with a Kickstarter campaign. With that money Saguy planned on doing a limited production run for those who were interested in the product. Saguy hit the $10,000 mark on the first day of his campaign and now has 7,120 people interested in the product.

“I can’t thank my Kickstarter supporters enough for their kind words, encouragement, and pledges to make this dream a reality,” says Saguy. “The outpouring of support simply justifies that sometimes the simplest ideas are the most useful, and having forums like Kickstarter is an incredible way to get the word out.”

The Smarter Stand clips can be mixed and matched with 10 different, iPad matching colors available. The clips live on the smart cover or smart case so you always have a stand one stand by.

The Smarter Stand clips will retail for $20 per pair or you can preorder them with a discount by pledging on KickStarter.

Linkage:
Check out the Smarter Stand Kickstarter Page Here

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South Carolina Startups Get New Innovista Center For Product Realization

South Carolina startups now have another new exciting resource to tap into. The University of South Carolina has announced it’s plans to open the Innovista Center for Product Realization or ICPR. The main funding for the new center is coming from a $645,000 five year federal grant. The main purpose is to help startups with product development.

The center will be available to students, alumni and residents who are working on a startup based in South Carolina.

One of the major constraints facing firms outside of regions like Silicon Valley is access to sufficient capital and talent to achieve critical mass and scalability for their product offerings,” said Don Herriott, director of Innovista. “ICPR will provide the infrastructure, resources and collaborative relationships that capital-starved startups require to take their idea or technology to the next level.” reports the SC-Israel collaboration.

Startups that utilize the center and it’s resources will be able to tap into the expertise of USC faculty at the College of Engineering and Computing, the Darla Moore School of Business and the university’s Office of Technology Commercialization.

“The product realization center is yet another example of the university’s commitment to cultivating innovation, entrepreneurship and technology commercialization,” Herriott said. “It furthers Innovista’s mission of attracting and growing new high-tech businesses to our community and across the state.”

We’ve recently reported on two exciting startup ideas brewing in and around the University of South Carolina. The first was a report on two engineers working on developing a t-shirt material that could charge phones directly from the shirt itself. The other 52 apps, is an innovative app development startup that will release 52 apps a year by vote (we reported on them 4 weeks before mainstream media).

Individuals and startups looking for more information on ICPR should reach out to Lauren Edwards at (803)777-9796 or by email at laurene@mailbox.sc.edu

Linkage:

Source: SC-Israeli collobaration

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Interview With Portland Oregon Startup: Hively, Easy Engagement Feedback Platform

Businesses, retail establishments and restaurants have been using the internet for surveys for the past fifteen years. Lot’s of restaurants still resort to printing a phone number to call or a website to go to to enter a code, do a survey and get some kind of discount. The problem with this method of surveying is, despite the reward, there is still extremely low engagement.

Even customer service surveys at the end of a call to a cell phone carrier or cable provider go unanswered, and that’s after you’ve said yes you’ll answer the quick two minute survey. Most travel related surveys that I get in my personal in box go straight to a spam folder and never get completed. In fact the only time I typically fill out a survey is if the customer experience was bad, and there are a lot of people in the same boat as me.

An Oregon startup called Hively is looking to change that for business. They are hoping their platform will have a better engagement rate for two primary reasons. It takes just nanoseconds to complete and they make it happy and fun. Hively just asks one simple question, please provide feedback and with that simple question customers can quickly hit one smiley face, like the ones above, and that’s it.

On the side of the employee, employees who receive good feedback are awarded points that they can accrue for a prize.

We got the chance to interview Hively’s co-founder Jason Lander, check out the interview below:

North Carolina Is So Bad Ass They’re Having Two Startup North Carolina Launch Parties August 20th

North Carolina is a great state with three thriving areas for startups, business and commerce as a whole. They are “The Triangle” in Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, “The Triad” Greensboro/Winston Salem/High Point and Charlotte “The Queen City”. The Triangle has a thriving startup community anchored by their biotech corridor and Research Park. The Triad is an area built on old money and Tobacco and has seen a recent up-tick in startups and entrepreneurship. Charlotte is booming thanks to mainstays like Bank Of America and Wells Fargo (previously Wachovia). Charlotte has great startups, like our friends at RawPorter.

So if you’ve been wondering, like I have, what’s taking them so long to sync up with Startup America, well that wait is over.

Startup North Carolina, the Startup America Partnership region for NC, will officially fire up on August 20th with not one but two launch parties. The Triangle region will be spearheaded by Triangle Startup Weekend’s founder Mital Patel. Patel was actually referred to Startup America by ExitEvent’s Joe Procipio. Procipio had been interested in developing the Startup North Carolina region but timing constraints made it impossible to give as much as he wanted to. Procipio explains how he helped lay the groundwork for Startup North Carolin and for Patel in this blog post.

The Charlotte are will kick off on August 20th with their own launch party. That area will be led by Adam Hill of Packard Place.

According to Procipio, both Hill and Patel will run the Startup North Carolina region similar to the way Startup DC is run.

Startup America lets each regional partnership run itself and each partnership gets out of it what they put into it. Startup North Carolina will take an approach much like Ignite and Startup Weekend. We’re sure that it will be a very active regional partnership. In fact Procipio reports that Patel is already setting up a Uservoice automated system so that participants from across the state can help vote for things that Startup North Carolina will focus on.

While we’re sure that their will be some competition between both sides of the chapter (by design most likely) together they will solidify North Carolina’s position in the startup eco-system in the US. As they say when the tide rises, all the ships sale.

Startup America offers great benefits to their member base across the country. They focus on growth potential startups that will eventually lead to more job creation, commerce and a positive contribution to the American economy. Did we mention it’s free to join?

Linkage:

Check out Procipio’s post here

Here’s a link to Startup America

Did you know Startup America and American Airlines are holding a contest for 80 free flights?

Did you know we’re on a nationwide, sneaker-strapped startup road trip?

Interview With Atlanta Slacktivist Startup: SocialVest

Before we dive into a great interview with an awesome Atlanta based startup, I get applause and a lot of flack from the term slacktivist. It’s definitely not a bad thing, and actually I’m hoping the term gets picked up. As busy as people are in 2012 “slacktivist” are the things that people can do without any additional, trying to actually contribute back to the community. Tom’s shoes for instance is a great example of slacktivism. Pubslush is also another great example of slacktivism.

I certainly don’t have the time to get out there and participate in relay for life races anymore or bake sales, although I am looking forward to selling girl scout cookies with my daughter. In the meantime though I am definitely a proud slacktivist and I love platforms like SocialVest. I’m that guy that always rounds up at GoDaddy and at Petco, why because it’s super easy and it helps. So check out this awesome Atlanta startup.

SocialVest is probably the easiest platform for a slacktivist or ok you don’t want to be a slacktivist, how about it’s the easiest platform for anyone who wants to make sizable contributions to a cause through shopping. After all you can only buy so many Live Strong bracelets at Radio Shack (are people still doing that these days?).

Once you register for an account at Slacktivist you accrue cash back awards from the 100s of retailers that are partnered with SocialVest. Then you take that reward money and select one or as many causes as you would like, out of over 1.5 million causes, to receive that bonus. Socialvest calls it “Purchase On Purpose” and it’s really really easy.

As they explain in the interview below, partner retailers give back up to 35% of a purchase (based on the retailer and their agreement with Socialvest) that money than goes into your reward account and is given to the causes of your choice at the intervals and amounts you choose. The more you shop online the more you contribute to the causes that matter most to you. Without doing an extra thing, period.

Pretty awesome right?

Check out the interview below and don’t kid yourself if you don’t have time to get out and do the volunteer things you want or write that check to the cause you love, sign up for Socialvest. It’s easy.

Interview With New Jersey Startup: Clipix, Pinterest For Everything

Bookmarklets are nothing new, however Pinterest turned the concept of bookmarkletting into a world wide phenomenon. Pinterest has turned itself into a company with an astronomical valuation and no direct revenue, by simply bookmarkletting “Pinning” photos on interest boards. Heck even President Obama and Mitt Romney are doing it.

But what if you wanted to go beyond just pictures. What if you wanted to pin websites, articles, heck even word documents and pdfs? Well you would turn to Fort Lee, NJ based startup Clipix. The company, founded earlier this year has already attracted the attention of both TechCrunch and Mashable and now we’ve had the chance to interview them.

For starters they’re very very feature rich and the features don’t just sound great they work great. One of their most popular features is “Price Drop”. Clipix knows when you’ve clipped something that’s from a retail website and notifies you at set variables when they price either drops by percentage or to a certain dollar amount. Sure there are other services that do this but it’s all in one.

The other big feature is the ability to clip things from documents and pdf’s which can come in handy later on. Then you can view the items you’ve clipped via mobile device. It’s actually rather amazing.

You’ll see in the interview below, why Clipix is considered the “Pinterest for the real world”.

Interview With Turkish Startup: Count.ly

New Turkish startup Count.ly has introduced a new analytics platform for mobile apps. Count.ly offers simple easy to understand analytics for game studios, marketeers, agencies, operators and anyone with a mobile app trying to track engagement and loyalty.

Countl.y is a real-time, open source mobile analytics application. It collects data from mobile phones, and visualizes this information to analyse mobile application usage and end-user behaviour. We opened up shop with a deep belief that even boring-looking analytics can be fun to learn, use and experience, without compromising great features.

Count.ly’s dashboard is easy to read but robust and provides a lot of information to any sized mobile app developer.

They’re entering into a crowded space but Count.ly seems to know what they’re doing and ready to take on the big boys. Check out the interview below:

California Startup: nfinitu.de Helping Legacies Live On Through Social Media

Back in March we were the first site in the world to report on UK startup Deadsoci.al. This unique startup allows people to let their social media channels live on after death. After someone passes away, messages that they set up in advance can continue to inspire (or haunt) those they knew through social media and in real life. Mortality is an issue that more and more people are facing and that was actually the motivation behind deadsoci.al. As we found out at South By Southwest, the founder of deadsoci.al is dead serious about the startup.

Many don’t like to bring up tragedies but if you take a look back at the tragic incident at Columbine high school in 1999 and compare it to the recent tragedy in Aurora Colorado this past week, you may have noticed how much technology has changed in the previous 12 years. While social networks were just blossoming in the late 90’s today through social media many of the Aurora victims have Facebook tribute pages set up, walls with thousands of pages of comments, Twitter feeds with thousands of Tweets and more. In fact some of the survivors of the Columbine massacre have reached out to the victims of the Aurora tragedy via, you guessed it social media.

Combine things like that, with the tragedies surrounding mortality that we face all the time and it’s no wonder that Mario Horvath the founder of SplashHead LLC has created nfinitu.de.

While Hovarth is simultaneously launching nfinitu.de and another startup called Mindbl.am at the same time, nfinitu.de is what he focuses on in our interview.

Taking mortality into consideration and the way that people cope with tragedy nfinitu.de actually makes a lot of sense. A few years ago some may think the concept is morbid but not anymore.

With nfinitu.de people can create social media pages for those recently deceased in a tribute fashion. Often reminiscing, even if it’s just in the online context, can help people cope with the loss of a friend or loved one, whether they died of natural causes, fighting an illness or some other tragedy.

People sometimes don’t know what to do to cope with the feelings that come up after someone passes away and nfinitu.de actually helps them harness those feelings.

Check out our interview with Hovarth, below:

Miami Startup: CleanTie Makes Laundry A Cinch

A new startup in Miami is looking to take the pain away from laundry. Forget making time in your busy schedule to take your laundry to the laundromat, and forget having to fold baskets of clothes. CleanTie, a new startup in Miami has taken laundry referral to the web.

That’s not all though, CleanTie will help you find a laundry service that picks up and delivers from your home. That means you can make your laundry appointment wearing that last clean pair of boxers, from your iPad or laptop. CleanTie is adding to the growing list of services that have been able to generate business via the internet.

CleanTie is all about convenience for the customer. The search engine part of the site matches you with your closest laundry service and then you can drill down to the one you want to use from the available laundry services that pick up and deliver from either your home or office. Some of the laundry services even offer same day service.

“This is a great way for brick and mortar laundry services to reach an untapped market of busy people searching the internet for help with their laundry. Better yet, they can take advantage of the CleanTie marketing platform, without spending money or time on internet marketing themselves.” said Blair Nastasi PR Director at CleanTie.

The new startup reports that they plan on running tv commercials in their first market, of course Miami. They are also working on an official mobile app which will allow you to easily schedule your laundry pick up and delivery from your smartphone.

Linkage:

Check out CleanTie here

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